On the Bus: Brewhaha
Carla Axtman
Last night I schlepped myself down to Backspace in Portland to take in Brewhaha, the latest quirky and fun Bus Project voter education program.
The event featured a series of throw down debates between folks representing a variety of Oregon budget issues that may see the ax fall their way. An NCAA Basketball Championship-style bracket was given to facilitate audience participation...so we Carnaced the outcomes as best we could.
The venerable Steve Novick was on hand to emcee, crack jokes and provide knowledgable tidbits about the Oregon budget.
The debates pitted individuals representing various sectors of the Oregon budget against one another, with the crowd declaring the victor. (In the photo below from left to right: Tiffani McCoy of OSEA, Corie Wiren of Mult Co Commish Diane McKeel's office, Joe Baessler of AFSCME and Meghan Moyer of SEIU). Other debators included Tony Fuentes owner of Milagros Boutique, Michael Anderson of the Housing Alliance and Oregon Opportunity Network and uber good sport Seth Moore from The Healthy Climate Partnership. Moore was peer pressured on to the stage when the enviro debater didn't show up--and he kinda kicked ass.
The best part of the evening for me was Joe Baessler's tax chart. Note the little stick boys and girls in black who now pay taxes. On the other side of the chart were the red ink stick boys and girls who could no longer pay taxes if their jobs as childcare workers were slashed from the budget. Visual aids! Awesome!
So last night I spent my evening hanging out with people half my age--learning about the Oregon budget in a quirky, fun way. And fyi, K-12 education was the big winner of the night....Tiffani represented OSEA proudly!
I only felt like an ancient specimen about 2/3 of the time.
And I still made it home in time for Lost. Heh.
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6:55 p.m.
Mar 5, '09
I can't believe my visual aid did NOTHING for me. I spent like a whole 15 minutes on it. Damn you direct democracy.
7:17 p.m.
Mar 5, '09
K-12 always seems to win the budget battles. I believe they have the biggest piece of the budget pie.
9:32 p.m.
Mar 5, '09
If you call getting the biggest share of 11% of the budget pie getting the most than I guess so.
11:06 p.m.
Mar 5, '09
Joe, your visual aid should have made you realize the need to practice talking about your visual aid out loud to hear what the terminology sounded like. "little red people" was fine, but the other... not so much.
i wish i could pick an NCAA bracket as well as i picked last night's bracket. perfect score, along with Greg A & a few others. thanks to Seth for coming in off the bench & considerately losing the finals.
12:34 p.m.
Mar 6, '09
sorry I meant education as a whole. When you look at where money goes from Oregon's general fund, just over half goes to education somewhere near 55% of it is spent on K-12 and the Higher ed.
Budgets show us our priorities as a people and clearly in Oregon education is number one.
Mar 8, '09
Yet another great example of the inverse relationship between the number of responses and substance of the original post. Maybe one reason is that people are reticent to simply post to say, "Yeah, right on!". Maybe it's kind of like evolution. You only get to build higher if you get something wrong. Get it right the first time and you remain as the lowly mollusk, without embellishments.
Anyway, yeah, right on!