Beat Check with The Oregonian

The senior vice president at DHM Research decodes his firm's recent polling on the Portland mayor's race, voter attitudes about downtown and more.

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At the end of September, when the federal government canceled Oregon’s first-ever offshore wind lease sale, many people were left with questions about why and what’s next.

The announcement from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management came after Gov. Tina Kotek sent a letter to the agency asking it to stop the Oct. 15 auction. Kotek cited tribal opposition and a tribal lawsuit among the reasons for halting the lease sale.

That lawsuit was filed by the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, which has emerged over the past two years as one of the most vocal opponents of offshore wind, demanding the bureau conduct in-depth reviews of the impacts of floating turbines on marine life and fishing areas.

Despite the lawsuit and the canceled auction, the tribal confederation has continued talks with the federal agency. Because the reality is that the turbines are badly needed to generate clean electricity and help achieve state and federal climate goals. The questions remain: how and where should these projects be built?

Brad Kneaper, Tribal Council chair with the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians and Rick Eichstaedt, the tribes’ attorney, talked on Beat Check about why his tribes decided to sue to halt the auction and what the path forward for Oregon’s offshore wind is.

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On the latest Beat Check, Oregonian/OregonLive reporters Shane Dixon Kavanaugh and Julia Silverman discuss the prospects of Portland mayoral hopefuls Rene Gonzalez, Carmen Rubio and Keith Wilson.

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The general election is fast approaching and Oregon journalists are working hard to inform voters. The Oregonian/OregonLive’s politics team is tackling everything from congressional races to local measures. A particular focus this fall is Portland’s new ranked-choice voting system.

Jamie Goldberg, who with Betsy Hammond leads the newsroom’s politics team, joined Editor Therese Bottomly for a conversation about all of the information we’re providing prospective voters as we approach the date when ballots go out.

--We cover key dates to watch for

--We talk about recent concerns regarding ineligible voters

--We highlight various tools on OregonLive for readers to find out more

Find all of our general election 2024 coverage at oregonlive.com/election-preview

All of our coverage on Portland’s new system is at oregonlive.com/topic/portland-government

The Oregonian/OregonLive’s interactive map for Portland voters is here.

Our video explainer is at here, using donuts to explain the new system.

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Connie Chung is an icon. It’s been almost 20 years since she was regularly on air, but she’s still a household name and a namesake for a generation of Asian American women.

Americans remember her as one of the faces of the news, from the 1970s through the early 2000s. She interviewed Nixon and Oregon’s one-time Olympic darling-turned-national villain, Tonya Harding and covered the events that rocked the country from the O.J. Simpson trial to the Oklahoma City bombing.

In “Connie: A Memoir” released Tuesday from Grand Central Publishing, Chung, now 78, tells her own story.

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School is back in session, but September has been warmer than usual. Thousands of students in the Portland area were let out of school early or had classes canceled earlier this month as temperatures reached triple digits and dirty air from wildfires in the region triggered air quality alerts.

With extreme weather events on the rise both during summers and winters, schools are being forced to adjust to the impacts of a warming climate, including by upgrading their buildings, swapping gas-gurgling buses for electric ones and writing new climate-focused curriculums, among others.

Julia Silverman, The Oregonian’s education reporter, talked on Beat Check about how schools are hoping to fund new HVAC systems and other climate-related changes, what approaches rural schools are taking and why climate-related learning disruptions can significantly hamper student success.

Read more about schools’ response to climate change on The Oregonian/OregonLive.com:

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Portland City Hall is on the verge of some truly monumental changes, ranging from the radical transformation of how the city’s government operates to an historic election in November that will usher in a new mayor and expanded 12-member City Council.

The work to get here has now been years in the making. Few have followed the twists and turns of this civic saga as closely as Maja Viklands Harris.

A longtime journalist and local government watcher, Harris is the founder of Rose City Reform, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news and research site that’s become a must-read for reporters, political insiders and many of the people seeking local elected office this fall.

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 new wave energy test site is nearly complete off the Oregon coast. The site, overseen by Oregon State University, will allow private developers to test devices that can harness the power of ocean waves, a technology that’s still in its infancy. The hope is that wave energy can become another major source of clean, renewable electricity akin to solar or wind power and can help power the world’s clean energy transition. Burke Hales, a professor at Oregon State University and the chief scientist at the test site, talked on Beat Check about why Oregon is at the forefront of this new technology and what the challenges are going forward.

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Last month, watchdog reporter Ted Sickinger published an in-depth article examining a loophole in the Oregon Lottery’s rules. In Oregon, it is perfectly legal to re-sell your winning lottery ticket at a discount, allowing the buyer to claim the prize.

Why would anyone do this? Well, if they wanted to avoid having the state seize part of their winnings for taxes or back child support, for example.

And why would the state allow this? Lottery officials told Sickinger they were aware of the practice of “discounting” and despite the fact other states have moved to close down similar schemes elsewhere nothing had been done in Oregon to prohibit the workaround.

Sickinger joined Editor Therese Bottomly on “Beat Check with The Oregonian” to talk about how he got onto the story and how he tracked down participants willing to talk with him. He also talked about reaction to his piece.

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The 2024 fire season so far hasn’t encroached on as many highly populated areas or forced as many mass evacuations as some recent years.

But it’s been historic nonetheless. More acres have burned across the state than in any year since at least 1992, when officials started keeping a reliable tally.

Sujena Soumyanath and Fedor Zarkin, public safety reporters for The Oregonian/OregonLive, discussed fire damage to date, dispatches from the front lines and the outlook for the rest of the season on Beat Check with The Oregonian.

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