november
2025
special
election

portland, or

As if anointed, I feel goosebumps creep up my temples to reach my scalp. I keep walking. 


I’m not opposed to crying at work; if anything, I encourage it. I know I’m welling up, and that is fine. Holding the tears back is reflexive. The feeling reminds me of trying to catch a sneeze. The hairs on my arm raise. I’m almost back to my office.  


Another set of parents has been detained by la migra in our neighborhood. This week — late October — it’s coming in waves. Not just my school’s community in deep East Portland, but all over our town and its suburbs. Pulled out of trucks, dragged from apartments, ambushed at immigrant services nonprofits, pushed around at immigration court.     


I call the PIRC hotline (1-888-622-1510). They are excellent. They dispatch a bilingual volunteer immediately, who routes to the apartment complex, talking to the one or two shy eyewitnesses who open their doors. Though many are wary in this eerie aftermath quiet, the mom who reported the kidnapping told me that before, “The whole block was out there filming, fighting, trying to get ICE to stop.”


The volunteer and I trade calls for the next three hours, triangulating the names and addresses of the people detained, trying to ensure that the kid will not come home to an empty apartment.


Besides such goose chases, we offer what little we can: temporary rental support if we can find it, a food box drop-off so a scared parent doesn’t have to leave the apartment for groceries, a 38-page resource document with hit-the-ground-running insights like Oregon immigration law networks (page 8) and a template for giving power-of-attorney to someone else in case you get deported and your kids stay (page 11). When families are afraid to send their kids to school, I don’t promise that they’ll be safe here. How can we promise them that? I tell them that we keep our doors locked to ICE, per school and local government policies and our own ethics. I tell them that I support whatever choice they have to make. 

 

I propose to you that this is all connected — that the erosion of social safety nets, public works, and unions all contributed to the perilous right-wing abuse of power we face today. I propose to you that even if you don’t typically vote, you might consider voting in this local election, with just one levy on the ballot: to continue funding Portland Parks and Rec. In this psychotic economy, it asks for an increase in property tax, and is therefore an underdog’s ballot measure. I ask you to have class solidarity with workers, unionized and not, and with our neighbors and kids who need summer meals and safe, clean parks. I ask you to keep a tight grip on ANY and ALL public infrastructure that benefits THE PEOPLE and THE NATURAL WORLD. 

Housekeeping  ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

  • Election Day is Tuesday, November 4th. Polls close at 8pm. Find your nearest ballot drop-box. It’s okay to drop your unstamped ballot into your mailbox or any USPS drop-box all the way until last pickup on Tuesday. Your public library is a drop-site, and they will give you an “I Voted” sticker. 

  • You can pick up a replacement ballot at the county Elections Office all the way until 8pm. You can track your ballot here. It’s worth it to double-check in case they think your signature doesn’t match or something. I know you get freaky with your signature sometimes. 

  • I am just a dumb bitch, and I hope you use this voter guide as one of many sources before you come to your own conclusions. I don’t work in politics. I work in mental health and public ed. I am not an expert. I am a mixed Korean dyke who grew up in a low-income immigrant family, and I have a middle-class job and stable housing now. The foundation of my entire heart and ethics and belief in a better world comes from being my mother’s daughter. With incalculable gratitude, I owe my perspective to my mother, my family, the families and kids I serve, my friends and community members who share their lives, their feedback, and their struggles with me — and so many others before me and alongside me. My perspective is also very limited and very fallible. 

Measure 26-260: Maintain safe parks, nature, affordable recreation through 5-year levy: YES 

The Portland Parks levy seeks renewal to continue funding jobs, daily upkeep like gardening, landscaping, bathroom cleaning, trash pickup, major maintenance improvements, and accessible income-based pricing for community centers through a property tax rate of $1.40 per assessed value of $1000. There are strict spending categories associated with the levy — most of it will go toward daily maintenance, staffing, and programming, with 2% dedicated for major maintenance. 


The “average homeowner” with an assessed property value of $221,600 would pay $310 per year, or $26 per month, which is an $11/month increase from the 2020 levy ($0.80 per $1000/assessed value). Parks says that they increased the proposed rate because major maintenance audits in 2020 revealed astronomically worse problems than they knew about previously, and because inflation nationwide has gone completely fucking off the rails. Live laugh love! 


Seattle passed a very similar Parks levy in August 2025 — theirs was also a renewal with an increase, proposing a property tax of $1.50 per $100,000 of assessed value. In their local voters pamphlet, there were no statements in opposition filed, which made me laugh out loud. It passed by a buoyant 68.61%. 


Though our 2020 levy passed with a landslide 64% in 2020, I do not think Portland will have such an easy time again. Oregon always leans a little more libertarian (soOOoo humiliating) about tax increases. And frankly, the country feels worse now compared to August — tensions are higher, the economy is worse, and life feels dreadful. And it’s raining again. A LOT. 


Sure, we can see that the tax rate proposed is comparable — lower, even! — to our close neighbor city. But in our rapidly disappearing middle class, even a little extra property tax is felt by families. I am not one to say “Think of the homeowners!!!” because even our poorest homeowners have so much privilege relative to renters. But there are poor homeowners in Portland — elders or working families who are lucky to own their homes, but who live in tough conditions because they can’t afford safety improvements, and who are at risk of foreclosure because of rising costs, limited incomes, and cuts to the social services they rely on. Foreclosed or evicted: you’re at risk of homelessness either way.   


It’s embarrassing and insane that our country funds things like education and public parks through desperate levies and bonds that expire every few years, leaving the institutions that do the most tangible good for our everyday citizens to beg for funding every few years from individual taxpayers. A SENSIBLE CORPORATE TAX, IF WE COULD PASS ONE IN THIS GODFORSAKEN CITY, STATE, AND COUNTRY, WOULD BE A MUCH BETTER SOURCE OF REVENUE. I’d even prefer something like a graduated tax, where perhaps homes worth over $750,000 or $1 million are taxed at a different rate than homes under that. The Seattle ballot measure included a provision that exempted senior citizens and disabled folks from the tax. I’d love for Portland to build in a clause like that for the future. 


Don’t vote No on this levy just because you’d rather it be less, or because you’d rather someone else fund it. The levy will expire in five years, and in that time, if it’s your passion project, join an advisory committee to design an elders exemption, or work on campaigns to TAX CORPORATIONS THEIR FAIR SHARE. Reform can come. Let us not lose ground because we want reform to have already been done by now, a famous delusional leftist pothole to fall into. HAVE SOME VISION, PLEASE!!!! HAVE SOME STAMINA, PLEASE!!!!! 


If the ballot measure doesn’t pass, Portland Parks will have a multi-million dollar budget shortfall. Two-fifths of their budget is funded by this levy. Parks themselves will suffer, buildings and equipment in need of repair will continue to get worse, requiring even more expensive fixes in the future. Kids who rely on Parks and Rec for safe, affordable activities and free summertime lunches will suffer — all while SNAP is more precarious than ever. Our aunties who do Tai Chi at the community center would lose their favorite classes, with the teachers who know their names and provide community and belonging to our elders in the neighborhood. We’d lose the fabulous and visionary Access Discount Program, which provides year-round access to Community Centers at a reduced rate for low-income residents. Around a hundred jobs would likely be lost — good union jobs and their accompanying institutional memory. 


I have critiques for certain members of Portland Parks upper management and their plans to allocate funds, and perhaps if I went through the budget with a red pen, I could find places where my unqualified ass would suggest cost-saving measures. But in general, I trust that this ballot measure is asking for what is reasonably needed. 


Portland Parks infrastructure already exists. It lives in the rhythms and memories of the everyday workers. Effort is precious, proofed, and carried forward by individual people. Once lost, that infrastructure takes time, effort, and resources to rebuild. 


And once lost, nothing is guaranteed to come back as it was. A friend who is a maintenance worker for Portland Parks gave the example of lawnmowing: it seems a simple enough cost-saving measure to reduce lawnmowing from once a week to once a month, but in doing so, you not only increase the time and difficulty of the mow, but more weeds proliferate, overtaking the grass altogether. More clippings are left behind, more fields are played upon without staff to adequately reseed or fertilize, so we get more bald patches that can’t be repaired. Issues compound. My friend assures me that staffing is already stretched thin trying to maintain the status quo, and that there is already understaffing in the poorer neighborhoods in East Portland.  


These jobs tangibly serve people, nature, and the public good. We need to hold onto these sorts of jobs at all costs — jobs that aren’t imaginary tech positions which seek to extract resources exponentially from people and planet until implosion.   


If this levy fails, haters (tell me why it’s always three white guys — peep the voters pamphlet if you don’t believe me) say that they can just try again next year with a more conservative budget proposal. One opposition statement says, “We love our parks! That’s why we’re voting no!” which is…truly twisted, and classic toxic white dad logic. “Come back next time with a smaller ask,” they say. But if the ballot measure fails, the two-fifths funding shortfall will occur, and we’d have to wait for a subsequent election to bring an amended levy back to the ballot.  


In the meantime, people will be laid off. Some lucky ones may qualify for unemployment (our tax dollars, mind you), and then they’ll have to find some other job in this bitch-ass MAGA recession with no coherent government assistance structure — cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, unemployment, and so forth. They will likely not be available to hire back by the time we pass a replacement levy. 


The historical and relational knowledge they possess will be lost. It is INCREDIBLY inefficient to rehire and retrain for positions that are already competently staffed. It makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE to pass even an imperfect levy and reform over time without huge cuts and reinventing the wheel. Who will be left to reinvent that wheel, and with what materials? 


I CANNOT OVERSTATE the importance of preserving ANY and ALL union jobs as key antifascist infrastructure. Not all Portland Parks employees belong to a union (the super part-timers and seasonal hires, for example), but tons of full-time staff belong to a few different unions — mostly Laborers Local (LiUNA) 483 and City of Portland Professional Workers (CPPW). 


Unions are made up of imperfect people and their competing interests. Saucy stories of labor unions throughout history include co-optation, corruption, shielding incompetence and eluding accountability, full-on Mafia takeovers, self-interestedness, passivity, and more fallible human bullshit. Further, fuck every police union. :-) Unions are not inherently perfect, and I make no claims about LiUNA and CPPW being perfect. 


Still, unions house some of our most effective coalitional spaces in this skinned-knee modern world, with some of our best available framework for organizing, solidarity, and undermining gross abuses of power. 


If you belong to a union, you are potentially MUCH CLOSER to accessing a framework for solidarity with fellow workers across broad differences than the average American worker. Most Americans find it unfathomable to pull off a general strike or a rent strike — there is so little historical, institutional memory of successful strike action. This is by design. This is why, after seeing the massive organizing power of unions in the 1930s, there was a wave of anti-labor laws and massive anti-union campaigns in the 1950s. In the 1930s, about ⅓ of the US workforce belonged to a workers union; the number as of 2024 is 9.9%. In 2018, Portland Parks laid off ⅓ of their LiUNA unionized workers due to budget cuts — and these workers were overwhelmingly the public-facing workers who cleaned and maintained facilities and welcomed guests to community centers.   


Inshallah, in a labor union, you have some schema for collective bargaining and standing together to disrupt and bargain for changes from rich bosses or the government. There are people in unions who know what it means to strike — to decide together that bargaining has become stagnant or hostile to workers, and to remove YOUR LABOR, THE MOST VALUABLE THING IN THE ECONOMY. If you’re in a union and you yourself have not struck, you likely know someone older than you who has. 


Unions often push for social change through organizing and education among rank-and-file members about BROADER national and global systems of oppression. They help members understand that ALL threats to the working class are intertwined and require solidarity. United Faculty of Florida’s Paul Ortiz explains, “In my union chapter, one thing we’ve tried to follow is this principle of being there for other people and other causes. If there’s an affordable housing struggle, an environmental justice struggle, a refugee crisis in Florida — and there always is — we need to step up and be there as best as we can.” Our best unions link worker struggles to international liberation struggles: just this month, Italian dockworkers in Genoa, then Levorno, refusing to load or unload ships bound for Israel. 


The well-trod path from union organizing to organized solidarity among citizenry is why, in the 1930s, fascist entities in Europe tried to enfeeble organized labor unions who were calling for unity and resistance. (For deeper dives into the material changes that have come from striking and unionizing, I recommend Strike!, A History of America in Ten Strikes, and many other dope treasures in the Industrial Workers of America bookstore. Read short article from writer and trade unionist Bill Fletcher, Jr. about modern unions as an anti-fascist force here.)  


I’m not saying that every unionized Portland Parks employee is automatically a comrade. But hear me on their role in the greater conversation. One of the unions that represents Portland Parks employees, LiUNA, provides scholarships to its members, and organizes rank-and-file members to elect progressive candidates in the region. Over 600 members went on strike for three days back in 2023, winning a 13% wage increase, better rest periods, and more. Another union with Portland Parks members, CPPW,  just went on strike in May of 2025. They also joined together with other Portland unions to say: CUT FROM THE TOP, NOT FROM THE BOTTOM, a refrain I love to see. If cuts must happen, upper management should not be spared while workers on the ground lose out.  


I PROPOSE TO YOU that losing ANY public-serving union jobs as a result of not passing the Portland Parks levy is HORRIBLE TIMING in our CREEPING FASCIST WHITE NATIONALIST BITCH-ASS COUNTRY. 


FURTHERMORE, I PROPOSE TO YOU THAT WE NEED OUR PARKS MORE THAN EVER. WE HAVE SOME OF THE BEST CITY PARKS IN THE COUNTRY. We need well-maintained natural spaces in urban areas for climate change resilience, and for our wellbeing. Technocrats benefit immensely from keeping us inside, isolated, and on our devices. We need free and low-cost places to walk, to play, to be outside. Many of our community’s iPad kids have dopamine intakes that sizzle like bacon fat in a pan by age four. They need opportunities to practice social skills and increase their distress tolerance for long or non-preferred tasks. In the summertime, I see gaggles of kids being led in scavenger hunts and soccer games and friendship bracelet making by teenagers and college students in my neighborhood park. I see the camp counselors flirt with each other while campers cause light mischief. This is VERY IMPORTANT SHIT and supports the NATURAL ORDER OF THE WORLD.  


In these Easy Bake Oven-Ass summers when it’s too hot to walk in the neighborhood, I throw my dog in the car and take his dainty paws to our neighborhood park, where the ancient Douglas Firs provide cover and a 20 degree temperature difference. They predate me and I hope will long outlive me. I see my neighbors, housed and unhoused, drinking from the water fountains. I see families of crows in the trees cawing urgently to the fledglings who fall into the flower beds. I see the fledglings stumble awkwardly, looking drunk or ill, sometimes for one or two full days before, finally, on the third day, they take flight. 


*ੈ༺

  • If you or someone you love is worried about finding food, look here for free food near you.

  • If you are looking for ways to support Portland’s immigrant community right now, in addition to any individual family fundraisers you come across, I recommend and uplift the work of PIRC, who provide hotline support, as well as tangible legal and living resources. 

  • I know you haven’t forgotten about Gaza — consider eSims for Gaza, Tamara’s family fundraiser, any of the families listed by Operation Olive Branch.  

  • If you’ve had a chance to share resources with folks in need and would like to treat me to a little coffee or something, I’m @marissayangbertucci on venmo, cash app, and paypal.

    ✿ 

I want our people to be protected and free. I want our people to survive what pains them and find the beauty and meaning they seek. I am wishing you well at all times. I hope you can feel it. 


xoxo,

bitchtucci * ੈ♡‧₊˚