Beat Check with The Oregonian

But will it be a home run?

The Portland Diamond Project has so far struck out on its years-long efforts to bring Major League Baseball to Portland.

But now they’ve got a new site on the South Waterfront, fresh energy from city leaders and a pitch to the Oregon Legislature, not to mention swoon-y renderings of a new stadium along the Willamette.

Sports columnist Bill Oram and ECONorthwest economist Mike Wilkerson join Beat Check with The Oregonian to make sense of the numbers behind the proposal, the unknowns (who is behind that ownership group?) and what comes next. Wilkerson, a consultant to the Portland Diamond Project, says building a new stadium downtown could be a game-changer for Portland, the city that he recently and regretfully said was on the verge of a “doom loop” thanks to downward trends in population growth, the commercial real estate market and more.

Stay tuned until the end of the episode to hear Oram and Wilkerson make it very clear where their own personal baseball allegiances land.

Related coverage:

Is a picture worth almost a billion dollars?OHSU responds to South Waterfront ballpark proposalEconomist warns of Portland ‘doom loop’

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Preliminary results from a new state survey on wood combustion show more people are using fireplaces and woodstoves in urban areas in Oregon, despite efforts by state and local governments to decrease their use.

Why the increase? And just how dangerous are wood stoves and wood-burning fireplaces to our health and the health of the planet?

John Wasiutynski, the director for Multnomah County’s Office of Sustainability, talked on the Beat Check podcast about the pollution impacts of wood combustion and about why it’s so difficult to get people to stop using wood burning devices. 

READ MORE:

Budget cuts jeopardize program providing heat pumps for low-income Oregonians

Oregon attorney general’s office joins lawsuit against the EPA over wood-burning stove standards

Limiting winter fires helps Portland’s toxic air, and it’s the law

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It’s undeniably good news that deadly violence in Portland continued to tick downward last year.

The city recorded 71 homicides in 2024. That’s six fewer than the year prior and a 30% drop from the record-shattering 101 killings Oregon’s most populous city saw in 2022.

Reported shootings, meanwhile, fell below 1,000 for the first time since 2020.

Despite these positive trends, annual Portland homicides are still more than double what they were pre-pandemic. And other large, more populous west coast cities like Seattle and San Francisco continue to see far fewer killings than here.

So what gives?

On The latest Beat Check, Oregonian/OregonLive reporters Shane Dixon Kavanaugh and Zaeem Shaikh discuss Portland’s stubbornly high homicide numbers — and why there are signs of continued of improvement.

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The second Trump administration has barely begun, but an avalanche of policy changes and executive orders have already had repercussions in Oregon.

Editor Therese Bottomly is joined by politics co-editor Jamie Goldberg and watchdog editor Brad Schmidt to discuss local coverage of the Trump effect in Oregon.

They discuss the many lawsuits already filed by Oregon and other states over Trump’s orders. 

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When Oregon became the third state in the United States to legalize recreational marijuana use, proponents envisioned a double dose of green. Residents were given a chance to light up legally, finally bringing the state’s underground cannabis culture out of the shadows.

Nowadays, Oregon boasts twice as many cannabis shops as Starbucks coffeehouses. But a decade into Oregon’s grand, green experiment, the business of marijuana has reached a crisis. 

On the latest episode of Beat Check, Mike Rogoway, who covers Oregon technology and the state economy for The Oregonian/OregonLive, details the highs and lows of one of Oregon’s most unique industries.

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It’s no secret that Oregon has an affordable housing problem. Gov. Tina Kotek has set an ambitious goal of building 36,000 units of housing a year, but so far, the state is nowhere close to hitting that target.

Housing and real estate reporter Jonathan Bach recently went to Bend to spotlight a small but meaningful piece of the affordable housing puzzle: Community land trusts. He dissects them on this week’s episode of Beat Check with The Oregonian, and also checks in on other strategies the state is using to chip away at its housing backlog.

And don’t miss the end of the episode, where Bach discusses the commercial real estate projects that are set to break big in 2025, including the new James Beard Public Market in Portland. Pike Place, Portland’s coming for you.

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Oregon’s residential electricity rates have gone up nearly 50% in the Portland area in just the past four years. Those increases have primarily been driven by the rising costs to buy power from the open energy market. But there’s growing concern that the rapid expansion of power-hungry data centers could significantly drive up residential power bills in the coming years.

Already, data centers consume more than 10% of all Oregon’s electricity. Power planners expect tech companies’ power use will double by the end of the decade, or perhaps quadruple.

Mike Rogoway, who reports on data centers for The Oregonian/OregonLive, talked on Beat Check podcast about a new proposal state lawmakers are crafting for the new legislative session that would give Oregon regulators authority to insulate residential customers from the costs associated with supplying data centers.

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A housing, homelessness and behavioral health crisis. Flagging student test scores. Billions of dollars needed for road and bridge repairs.Oregon legislative leaders will kick off their 2025 session this week at the Capitol with no shortage of significant challenges to tackle and tame.

And while Democrats and Republicans say right now that they share a focus on other key areas of concern — such as making life more affordable for Oregonians and greater accountability of state government — the finer details around those common goals could prove divisive in the coming months.

On the latest Beat Check, reporters Sami Edge and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh offer a Salem legislative preview.

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Business reporter Matthew Kish just completed a three-part series on one of Oregon’s signature companies, Nike. He took a deep dive into the so-called “Starfish” surveys, a clandestine effort to document problems employees had with harassment and discrimination.

The surveys are at the heart of a court case set to be argued this winter at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Kish joined Editor Therese Bottomly to talk about his reporting, the court case, and how The Oregonian/OregonLive became entwined in court proceedings.

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Large solar farms are on the rise in Oregon, in a push to fulfill the state’s ambitious clean energy mandates. But their rapid rise is leading to worries about how they could reshape the state’s agricultural economy and rural vistas.

In November, the Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council, a board that oversees the siting of large energy facilities, approved the state’s largest solar farm – and one of the country’s largest – on about 10,000 acres of active farmland in Morrow County. It’s one of several multi-thousand acre solar farms poised to be built in Oregon.

Most of the projects will cover cultivable agricultural land, taking thousands of acres out of production and reshaping the rural landscape. This has brought questions about the potential impacts to farmers, ranchers, tourists and wildlife.

Sarah Esterson, a senior policy advisor on the state’s Energy facility siting team, talked on Beat Check about how the state approves large solar farms and what it requires of developers to offset impacts to rural economies and landscapes.

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