Tuesday, City Councilors discussed how they can “engage in an organizing project” with union members to move Governor Kotek to use stability funds to stop the worst cuts in Portland State history. By power mapping from City Council to congressional races, PSU-AAUP members and Councilors discussed ways political expressions of their worker power win funding and thereby end the decade of austerity for Oregon’s leading access institution.
See a full recording of the panel here.
“We’re here to ask about the future of the relationship: this university and this city. At times it has been a profound partnership,” said PSU-AAUP President Bill Knight. “At the moment, we confront a decade of enrollment loss, and we’ve found ourselves shifting from being the largest university in the state to a decade of depopulation-- a loss of 10,000 students-- leading to this crossroads, where the president at the winter Admin Briefing has told us our deficit and the cuts total over $40 million”. This has grown from a $35 million deficit identified in the fall-- a shocking change in the middle of an unnerving crisis… We can do better than those cuts and that enrollment collapse. We can do better than a death spiral that will create even further disaster for the Portland economy and for downtown… The real story here is that we have not developed the kinds of partnerships with the city and the metro that would generate success in all directions.”
“I know the Governor is moved by our voice. What we can do as Councilors who are organizers first is engage in an organizing project with you. We’re very loud together,” said City Councilor Mitch Green.
“With relation to the state legislature, we have to talk about kicker reform and that’s important, we have to talk about property tax reform, we have to talk about decoupling, but big picture it’s ensuring that our state legislators have both a system that enables them to do the right thing and the political courage to tax the rich and just be done with these arguments about competing over a pie that shrinks over and over again and talk about growing the pie, said City Councilor Sameer Kanal.”
“When we talk about development dollars, when we create tax increment financing districts, we’re also starving our jurisdictions of property tax revenue,” said City Councilor Mitch Green. “There are short-term crises that we need to deal with; that’s why we need to tap into the education stability fund right now, to avoid these cuts to University Studies, which will only precipitate the decline of enrollment, which will become a death spiral.”