Portland, ORE– Between the crisis in funding at the DOT to plow roads, the addiction and drug crisis, schools, housing the homeless, and now the Oregon Department of Forestry’s inability to fight fires, there is a common theme across the state of Oregon, everyone needs more money.
This week the DOT announced that we needed to prepare to be stranded due to budgetary shortfalls in the gas tax thanks to electric cars. Today Forestry announced they need more consistent funding to fight wildfires.
The Health Justice Recovery Alliance, a group that supports funding additional services under Measure 110 said that hundreds of people are getting turned away from detox and addiction treatment services and People who do manage to get services are being released back into homelessness due to funding shortages.
Both school districts and teachers have perennially hammered the Legislature saying that funding K-12 schools is insufficient.
But with seemingly every state department lowering expectations for services daily and decrying the level of funding they receive from the state, one has to wonder- where are our taxes going and what does this mean for the future with the latest news that population counts across Oregon are dropping?
