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Oregon is one of only 2 states that still has a 50’s era laws banning customers from pumping their own gas. This has been changing though. Several counties in sparsely populated areas of eastern Oregon have been allow you to pump your own gas for the last few years. During recent heat waves, snow storms, and COVID – residents have been increasingly able to pump their own gas.

That might become permanent as a repeal on the ban just passed the Oregon house. It now only has to pass the Oregon senate.

What will that day be like? Some have suggesting Oregonians are utterly doomed like this:

Or maybe this:

If you’ve driven much of Portland, you’ll see strange, unfinished ghost ramp branches like this one off the right of the connector ramp between I-5 to I-84.

Peter Dibble does a fantastic job of talking about these interesting historical artifacts from the sometimes bizarre history of Portland road building.

If you think this kind of poor planning is a new problem for Portland, a desperately needed improved and seismically safe I-5 bridge across the Columbia has been worked on for over 17 years. It has absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars, produced dozens of plans, yet not a single shovel of dirt has been moved in all that time.

In 2019, Walmart’s local Portland tech hub was about to hire dozens of new employees. Fast forward to 2023, and Walmart Labs is closing it’s Portland office. Employees can either move to their California or Arkansas offices – or take severance. Along with the move, employees will be expected to be in office at least 2 days a week.

Portland’s ballot measures have resulted in the second highest tax rates in the country as of this year – a tax rate only second to New York City:

Starting in 2017, Multnomah County voters passed several tax measures aimed at improving life in their burgeoning city. After Metro and the county levied taxes to combat homelessness and provide preschool for all, Portland now has the second-highest total state and local income tax rate in the nation—14.69%—exceeded only by New York City at 14.78%, according to a report from Ernst & Young commissioned by Oregon Business & Industry.
That’s the top marginal tax rate, meaning you pay it only on income above $125,000 for individuals and $250,000 for married couples filing together. By comparison, the only New Yorkers paying the top rate there are those making $25 million or more, single or married. That means plenty of nonplutocrat Oregonians are paying taxes rivaled only by those levied on Gotham millionaires.”

https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/02/01/they-left-portland-is-losing-some-of-its-biggest-fans/

We also have had an over-zealous city sending tax penalties and threats of IRS actions to anyone that wasn’t paying – even though thousands of taxpayers and their companies didn’t know how to file payments for the new taxes.

Get out

Another option is to get out of Portland, Multnomah county, and the Metro area. Before you move, you need to make sure you’re really out. Portland, Multnomah, and Metro have continually gerrymandered their boundaries to absorb as much of the tax base as possible. This is important because the most recent tactic is to levee taxes against residents of the county and ever-expanding metro area to even further spread the boundaries.

How do you know if you’re in those jurisdictions? There’s a tool for that from the tax notices they sent out:

1. Go to portlandmaps.com, enter your address, then check the ‘Jurisdiction’ info box on the right. If it says ‘Portland/Multnomah’ or any combination that has either ‘Portland’ or ‘Multnomah’ – you’re still stuck with at least some of the new Portland and Multnomah county taxes.
2. Go to Metro boundary address lookup. Enter your address. If the Within Metro Boundary column says “Yes” – then you’re still going to have to pay the new Metro taxes.
3. Double-check your address against the global Metro boundary map – and watch for areas it is likely to expand and absorb you. It’s been growing a lot recently.

Just down the street from me is an old firehouse. It was retired years ago and now serves as a private residence. This last year for Halloween, they actually partly converted it to a Ghostbuster themed Vacasa complete with props and even a really cool replica ghostbuster ambulance. How’s that for cool?

Here’s an article and pictures of it renovated into a home:

Links:

• https://www.oregonlive.com/life-and-culture/g66l-2019/10/7ad6f9b9fa2126/old-portland-firehouse-built-to-hold-horsedrawn-trucks-is-now-a-home.html
• https://www.vacasa.com/discover/book-a-stay-at-a-ghostbusters-firehouse-in-portland

A 28 year old worker from Tacoma who worked at Zulily was just busted by skimming shipping fees charged on the site. He claimed he was inspired by the movie Office Space (and Richard Pryor in 1983’s Superman III), and stole about $260,000 in shipping fees by redirecting the payments into his own account. He also manipulated prices using his developer permissions to buy $41,000 in merchandise on the website for pennies on the dollar.

He wasn’t subtle though and took ALL the shipping fees – so he was easily caught. I guess thieves in 1983 were at least smarter by taking fractions of a cent. Still, the idea of ‘salami slicing’ (as the skimming method has been known) has been around a long time.