Measure 62
Jeff Alworth
Title: Allocates 15% of lottery proceeds to public saftey fund for crime prevention, investigation, prosecution
Sponsor: Kevin Mannix, Duane Fletchall, Steve Beck
Type: Constitutional
What it Does: Re-allocates lottery money into a newly-created catch-all fund for police-related services
What it Costs: Nothing; re-allocates funds
Discussion
If you could sit down with the state budget and re-allocate over $100 million to projects you like, wouldn't that be neat? Even better--write it into the Constitution! In a nutshell, that's what Kevin Mannix wants to do here. He proposes to create a "public safety fund" that will draw on lottery proceeds to the "Oregon State Police for (already well-funded)
criminal investigations and forensics" as well as operational funds for district attorneys and sheriffs offices. Does it go without saying that the proposal is backed by Loren Parks? Well, I'll say it anyway: Mannix's personal banker banked this turkey, too. Does it further go without saying that almost no one's for M62, and almost everyone's against it? Nevermind, I'll say that, as well: they are.
Leave aside the worthiness of the services Mannix would fund. Is this any way to make spending decisions, by just letting people write them into the Constitution? I mean, it's not as if he's trying to build a castle or anything--police are important services--but that's beside the point. We have a legislature entrusted to make these decisions because they balance the needs of many agencies and weigh the relative costs against the revenues. Mannix, who for some reason has a "CSI" fetish this year, wants to sink $1.3 billion into a pet project via Measure 57, and reallocate another $100 million, mostly from from K-12 education, to fund pet projects in Measure 62. His priorities would radically redistribute the way the state spends its money.
Even if you agree with Mannix's spending priorities, you should oppose this measure. No one person should have this much influence over the way we spend state revenue. After all, we have a perfectly serviceable system for allocating funds. It's called the Oregon legislature.
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connect with blueoregon
Oct 19, '08
Good piece, Jeff. One point you make that I want to expand on a little further is that the bite from M62 will come entirely from K-12 education and economic development. The other current uses of lottery funds, for salmon restoration and the educational stability fund, are locked into the constitution. We may need to spend more on certain areas of our public safety system, but this isn't the way to do it. Or to be a little more direct, when I did a brief presentation on M62 at the Lincoln County Democratic Central Committee meeting last month, I began by saying: "I have two words for you. Kevin Mannix." Someone laughed and said "next speaker," but I went on to summarize the arguments you've presented here.
Oct 19, '08
Bill Hall is a good guy likely to be re-elected Lincoln County Commissioner but he and Jeff are just plain wrong.
Measure 62 is supported by almost every elected law enforcement leader in Oregon - Democratic and Republican -because we see it as a small but rare opportunity to actually dedicate some funding to law enforcement in a state that spends almost no state money helping counties fight crime. State support for DA's office has gone from 30% in 1976 to virtually none today (they pay the DA's base salary and benefits..period). Support for Sheriffs is even less.
To call the Oregon State Police "already well-funded" is ridiculous. In 1981 there were almost 1000 troopers. There are now barely a third of that. The guy Sarah Palin fired for not canning her ex-brother-in-law presided over a state police force larger than Oregon's despite the fact our state's population is SIX TIMES that of Alaska.
Lottery money is not tax money and when the lottery started education got zip...it all went to economic development. In Lincoln County the DA-elect beat the incumbent in large part by claiming Lincoln County (Bill's county) had the highest crime rate in Oregon. How exactly is that going to dealt with when the timber $$$ Ron Wyden managed to restore will decrease and fade away completely in 4 years? (I'm in a county that gets exactly ZERO federal timber dollars).
You can hate Kevin Mannix all you like. But to say your against something simply because Mannix is for it is Pavlovian.
I've endorsed the Democrats who ran against Mannix in every statewide race since 1996 (when he ran for AG in the Democratic primary against Hardy Myers).
This hatred towards anything pro-law enforcement - "radically redistribute the way the state spends money" is just plain silly.
Look at who got elected in the Democratic primary and what the results of anti-crime measures have been over the last decade in a Blue state if you doubt that many progressives would also like to see decently-funded law enforcement.
Oct 19, '08
Bill Hall is a good guy likely to be re-elected Lincoln County Commissioner but he and Jeff are just plain wrong.
Measure 62 is supported by almost every elected law enforcement leader in Oregon - Democratic and Republican -because we see it as a small but rare opportunity to actually dedicate some funding to law enforcement in a state that spends almost no state money helping counties fight crime. State support for DA's office has gone from 30% in 1976 to virtually none today (they pay the DA's base salary and benefits..period). Support for Sheriffs is even less.
To call the Oregon State Police "already well-funded" is ridiculous. In 1981 there were almost 1000 troopers. There are now barely a third of that. The guy Sarah Palin fired for not canning her ex-brother-in-law presided over a state police force larger than Oregon's despite the fact our state's population is SIX TIMES that of Alaska.
Lottery money is not tax money and when the lottery started education got zip...it all went to economic development. In Lincoln County the DA-elect beat the incumbent in large part by claiming Lincoln County (Bill's county) had the highest crime rate in Oregon. How exactly is that going to dealt with when the timber $$$ Ron Wyden managed to restore will decrease and fade away completely in 4 years? (I'm in a county that gets exactly ZERO federal timber dollars).
You can hate Kevin Mannix all you like. But to say your against something simply because Mannix is for it is Pavlovian.
I've endorsed the Democrats who ran against Mannix in every statewide race since 1996 (when he ran for AG in the Democratic primary against Hardy Myers).
This hatred towards anything pro-law enforcement - "radically redistribute the way the state spends money" is just plain silly.
Look at the results of anti-crime measures over the last decade in a Blue state if you doubt that many progressives would also like to see decently-funded law enforcement.
1:38 p.m.
Oct 19, '08
Josh,
Reducing and caricaturing it as "hatred toward anything pro-law enforcement" is inaccurate and not worthy of the rest of what you write as well as frankly being stupid politics in this venue.
Part of the problem is the restriction of revenue created by the same forces. It's not that I had law enforcement at all, but I do sure as hell hate being put in a box that forces me to choose between law enforcement and education and health support for disabled elderly people because of someone's knee-jerk ideology about taxes.
This is made worse because Mannix has written this not even to dedicate the funds to "law enforcement" in some way that would put it in the hands of knowledgeable parties to distribute (say a commission composed of professionals plus legislators on relevant committees plus people involved in citizen oversight) that could vary with needs, but specifying things according to K.M.'s idiosyncratic preferences. If it were straight funding to increase the size of the state police I'd be more interested -- something like paying for new crime labs seems to me like it's a capital expense that should be funded with a bond measure. (As a public health person, I wonder a little about whether we need more money for crime labs or public health labs, btw.)
The fact that the salmon preservation is in the constitution is interesting. If people supporting Jeff's opposition to dedicating funds are serious they/we should look to undedicating that part -- the schools may be a slightly different matter because they were involved in the foundational arguments about establishing the lottery in the first place.
I'm not sure I agree with Jeff about the principle of dedicating funds, exactly, but I'd be more willing to think about it in the context of a revenue situation that allowed greater savings of "windfall" revenues in good times to compensate for downward ratchets in bad times, such as we are facing in the coming year.
The Alaska comparison is not so great IMO because the geographical area is much larger. On the other hand, Oregon is a pretty damn big state itself and one of the issues with the state police I think is that constriction forces them to focus on high population areas leading to various kinds of problems in low-density areas that need special kinds of policing.
What is the relative importance of that vs. the crime labs? I don't know. I'm skeptical that that level of decision belongs either in the constitution or the statutes.
The constitution issue is kind of a joke to me anyway, though, because the Sizemore-Mannix-McIntyre circus has made it so that constitutional amendments are easier than funding measures.
Because I think the state police issue is important I will be at least thinking about this a little, but Bill Hall's point about trade-offs is a good one and now I'm going to have in the back of my mind a false accusation that if I choose to vote no it's because I "hate law enforcement," which puts my back up and makes me that much more inclined to vote no just to reject the canard. Not an entirely irrational response, I know, and I'll try to master the impulse -- but it's not a rational accusation either.
1:42 p.m.
Oct 19, '08
Should be "not that I hate law enforcement (not "had") at the beginning, and "not an entirely rational response (not "irrational" at the end.
Oct 19, '08
"The constitution issue is kind of a joke to me anyway, though, because the Sizemore-Mannix-McIntyre circus has made it so that constitutional amendments are easier"
All the more reason to vote NO.
NO on Mannix, NO on 62.
I just did and it's in the mail.
Oct 19, '08
Josh, I appreciate the kind words, but I don't think it's a hatred of law enforcement that's driving the opposition to this one. I think you know from your days as a prosecutor in Lincoln County and my time as a reporter here that I've been very supportive of law enforcement. My frustration with the Mannix approach, as exemplified by Measures 61 and 62, is the refusual to acknowledge that trade-offs are involved. The pie for the three basic services of state government--public safety, human services and education--is finite. Any reallocation of resources in this economic climate inevitably involves boosting one at the expense of the other. We may, as a people, decide these trade-offs are justified. But we can only make that decision if we are presented the entire picture and take the time to consider all the facts.
Oct 19, '08
While I’m not normally a fan of Kevin Mannix while also being a moderate republican this measure actually is going to help provide a stable source of funding to public safety. (As long as lottery funding holds out) I agree that having to do it through the initiative process is a cop out for the legislature remember back to why measure 11 had to be brought before the voters to hold people accountable for their actions. Having held Lisa Marie Doell in my arms when she was an infant and I was just a child and later learning she was run down "because I felt like it" and the Judge letting the offender off because he didn’t really mean it made me a believer that mandatory minimums were a necessary process to be brought forward by the citizenry because the legislature, both sides of the aisle, were too concerned with re-election to pass anything that might cause controversy.
Oct 20, '08
You're mistaken when you say Kevin Mannix "wants to sink $1.3 billion into a pet project via Measure 57" -- Mannix is not a sponsor or author of 57. Measure 57 was drafted in the Oregon Legislature by Greg MacPherson (and many others) and is an alternative to Mannix's Measure 61 -- specifically if both pass, and 57 gets more votes than 61, then 57 takes effect and 61 does not.
Details at http://www.betterwaytofightcrime.com/.
Oct 20, '08
I did not mean to attribute the "hatred of law enforcement" remark to Bill Hall. It was reflective of the more anon comments in Blue Oregon that seem to imply that ANYTHING that would provide more money for cops, prosecutors, jails, or prisons, was cooked up by Bill Sizemore and Satan personally. BTW, Sizemore has absolutely NOTHING to do with 62. Jeff's comments about the State Police are revealing in their misunderstanding of how the State Police is best used. Yes, with so few troopers it is often used as a supplement to patrol the freeways around the metro area but the real value to all of us who live in the hinterlands (having worked in Eugene, Bend, Newport, and Astoria) is their expertise and professionalism in more rural area like eastern Oregon where they are often the ONLY law enforcement. The point being in many places in Oregon no trooper, no police response at all. I'd really appreciate Bill, as a county commissioner in a semi-rural Oregon county faced with diminishing resources, discussing how they hope to avoid happening what is going on in southern Oregon...sheriff's offices that stop doing anything but running the jail, DAs who give up prosecuting all misdemeanors. These are quality of life issues just as much as education and public health and I appreciate that a couple of the posters above seem to grasp that public safety actually does neeed funding. I'm just asking you all to avoid the Pavlovian, "Mannis had something to do with this...I hate it." I'm reminded of the 1995 legislative session when I was lobbying for a law toughening up penalties for really aggravated cruelty to animals. A Democrartic legislator (since left that particular venue) asked if the Oregon Humane Association (OHA) supported the bill. When I said they did, he wadded it up and literally threw it at me, angry because OHA had support Measure 18, which banned certain kinds of bear and cougar hunting.
Oct 20, '08
"I'm just asking you all to avoid the Pavlovian, "Mannix had something to do with this...I hate it."
Sorry...that's just the way it is now for a lot of people. If you want people like me not to do this, then I would encourage you to find a willing lawyer and create an initiative that would prohibit such "pavlovian" ways.
NO on everything.
Oct 20, '08
Josh, we're fairly lucky in Lincoln County because we are the smallest of the 18 "O and C" counties (the land that once belonged to the O and C railroad). The money from those lands, managed by the BLM, went into our general fund. The end of timber payments meant a hit of $350,000 a year to our $40 million general fund budget, and growth of revenues has left us in good shape in our general fund. (It's a different story for the road fund; loss of the money from the Forest Service lands wiped out half of our road budget). This has meant we've been able to maintain and even augment public safety services. The past few years have seen us add a couple of positions in our DA's office, a couple of patrol deputies for our sheriff's office, and we've actually been able to increase the capacity of our jail from a low of 101 shortly after I took office to 161 today.
<h2>I will also agree that a pavlovian response to a Mannix measure is probably over the top. But I remain frustrated that Kevin doesn't seem to want to discuss the trade-offs involved in making his proposals work.</h2>