Posted inCity Council City of Salem

I urge Salem City Council to rule on Betsy Vega’s qualification to be a Ward 6 city councilor

Here's my open letter, which will become an open email, to the nine members of Salem's City Council. My subject is whether Betsy Vega meets the requirements in the city charter to be a city councilor. *************************************************************** Dear Mayor Hoy and councilors Paul Tigan, Linda Nishioka, Shane Matthews, Deanna Gwyn, Irvin Brown, Mai Vang, Vanessa Nordyke, and Micki Varney: As you're aware, the City of Salem has issued a statement regarding Betsy Vega's eligibility to be on the November 2026 General Election ballot after she was certified as the winner of the Ward 6 city council race in the May…
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Posted inCity of Salem Environment

Data center proposed for Salem has both potential benefits and problems

Like most things in life of this sort, a data center proposed to be built on 75 acres in Salem's Mill Creek Corporate Center is more complex than avid proponents and opponents are willing to admit. Depending on who is speaking for or against the project, Oakline at Mill Creek would either be a boon to Salem's economy and tax base, or a giveaway to a giant corporation that will wreak havoc on its neighborhood and the environment. (Caption under image above says Digital rendering shown for illustrative purposes only – subject to change.) According to a Salem Reporter story…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem

Here’s what ChatGPT says about whether Betsy Vega is qualified to be a Salem city councilor

In my previous post I criticized the legal opinion by Eugene attorney Truman Stone of whether Betsy Vega meets the qualifications to be a Salem city councilor following her victory over Ward 6 incumbent Mai Vang in the May 19 primary election. My main concern was that Stone downplayed the language in Section 25 of the city charter that says: A councilor shall have resided in the ward the councilor represents during the 12 months immediately before being elected or appointed to the office. Stone considered that domicile was the correct term for judging whether Vega met that residency requirement,…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem

City officials ignored Salem charter in wrongly qualifying Betsy Vega as Ward 6 city councilor

When I learned today that the City of Salem had issued a public statement about a decision that Betsy Vega was qualified to serve as the Ward 6 city councilor despite a challenge by Paige Barton, the campaign manager for incumbent councilor Mai Vang, who Vega defeated, I was surprised. After all, Barton had presented evidence that Vega (photo above)  hadn't lived in Ward 6 for the twelve months prior to the election -- regardless of whether "election" means the May 19, 2026 primary election at which Vega got over 50% of the votes, or the November 3, 2026 general…
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Posted in2026 election City Council City of Salem

Betsy Vega’s election as Ward 6 city councilor may hinge on definition of “qualified elector”

Betsy Vega has been certified by Marion County Elections as the winner of the May 19 election for the Ward 6 city council seat, as she got 44 more votes than Mai Vang, the incumbent. But Paige Barton, Vang's campaign manager, has filed a complaint with the City of Salem that asserts Vega may not be qualified to be a city councilor, according to the City Charter. Section 25. Qualifications. (1) An elective city officer shall be a qualified elector under the state constitution and shall have resided in the city during the 12 months immediately before being elected or…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem

City of Salem agrees to investigate Betsy Vega’s qualification to be a city councilor

Excellent news. Today the City of Salem issued a statement (copied in below) saying that city staff will investigate a complaint challenging Betsy Vega's qualification to be a candidate for the Ward 6 city council seat. Though the statement doesn't mention Vega by name, it's clear that she is the subject of the complaint. It's pleasing that City Manager Namburi reversed the ill-considered decision by City Attorney Dan Atchison to not investigate the complaint. As I said in "Salem city officials are refusing to enforce the city's own requirement to be a city councilor," that was a screwy move by…
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Posted inCity of Salem Julie Hoy

More evidence that Mayor Julie Hoy wanted previous city manager gone for no good reason

Salem Mayor Julie Hoy is a habitual liar. In "Mayor Julie Hoy lied about not wanting City Manager Stahley gone. That's her third lie about Stahley.,"I wrote about three lies Hoy spouted on a single subject, how she orchestrated an illegal scheme to get rid of Keith Stahley, the city manager at the time, that got Hoy in trouble with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission. I described Hoy's third lie. Lie #3: Hoy claimed that her motivation in talking with city councilors about Stahley’s employment status was his performance audit that showed some deficiencies in his management style. But this…
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Posted inCity of Salem Salem Police Department

Salem officials say police can’t help people being attacked by ICE. That isn’t true.

Last Thursday Maria, a citizen of the United States, was dragged from her car in NE Salem and assaulted by ICE agents. She did nothing wrong. Her "crime" appears to have been driving while brown. You can read her highly disturbing story in "Salem woman (a citizen) assaulted by ICE in traffic stop. There's a GoFundMe for her." Today the City Manager, Krishna Namburi (shown above), and the City Attorney, Dan Atchison, issued a statement about the use of force by federal agents that was mostly true, yet partly false. It was the false parts that rubbed me the wrong…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem Vanessa Nordyke

Creation of REACH makes Vanessa Nordyke’s dream of a Salem mental health crisis team a reality

For quite a few years Councilor Vanessa Nordyke has been working to bring a mental health crisis team to Salem. I've written about her ups and downs in various blog posts: "Setback for Salem mental health crisis response team" (September 24, 2021) Led by Vanessa Nordyke, last June the Salem City Council appropriated $135,000 for a mental health crisis response team similar to the CAHOOTS program that has been a big success in Eugene — where a medic and crisis worker handle about 17% of the police department's call volume, saving about $12 million a year at a cost of…
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Posted inCity Club City of Salem Julie Hoy

City Manager Namburi and Mayor Hoy said nothing interesting at Salem City Club

Disappointing. Boring. Uninteresting. I could add more negative adjectives, but those do a good job of describing my reaction to what City Manager Krishna Namburi and Mayor Julie Hoy had to say at last Friday's City Club program. In short, not much of anything. The first line of the email I got from the City Club plugging the program captured my attention. So I decided to attend. Salem City Club is pleased to have Mayor Julie Hoy and City Manager Krishna Namburi address the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for the city as we move forward in interesting times. In…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem Julie Hoy

Salem Mayor Julie Hoy lied about a majority of the city council wanting the City Manager to resign. Actually, only Hoy did.

A recently concluded ethics investigation found that the Mayor of Salem, Julie Hoy, violated our state's Public Meetings Law in February 2025 when she orchestrated a private series of individual conversations with city councilors about whether the City Manager at the time, Keith Stahley, should resign. That was bad. But this is worse: Julie Hoy lied when she told the city council president, Linda Nishioka, that her conversations revealed that a majority of the city council (at least five of the eight members; one seat was vacant at the time) wanted Stahley to resign. At the request of Mayor Hoy,…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem

Why the $32.5 million economic benefit from Avelo Airlines is a screwy figure

Let's get this clear right off the bat. I'm not an economist. Heck, I've never even had a college economics class. But I've got a pretty good sense of when an economic sales job appears to be B.S., or to put it more delicately, taken with a grain of salt -- meaning, skeptically.  That's the feeling I have whenever I hear boosters of the Salem airport having commercial air service speak of the economic benefit to our city from having an airline fly in and out. Salem hasn't had any success in keeping an airline for more than a few…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem

City Council needs to forget about commercial air service in Salem

Wow. Travel Salem and other Chamber of Commerce types really have memory problems. It's only been a few weeks since Avelo Airlines announced it is pulling out of the Salem Airport as of August 10 after just a couple of years of sucking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of subsidies provided to the airline, along with benefiting from $2.4 million in airport improvements that came out of the same general fund that city officials claim is going broke, which is why voters were asked to approve a property tax increase to fund city services, which they did. Yet even…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem

City leaders wrongly preventing councilors from attending neighborhood association meetings

Officials at the City of Salem -- city attorney, mayor, city manager, maybe others -- really need to take the story of Goldilocks to heart. Or the Buddhist middle way.  Because they've jumped from one extreme that got city officials in hot water (an ethics complaint that I filed, which currently is being investigated by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission), to the other extreme where those officials are putting on ice the ability of a city councilor to attend neighborhood association meetings in their ward. So because Mayor Julie Hoy and other members of the city council engaged in a…
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Posted inChamber of Commerce City Council City of Salem

Avelo Airlines leaving Salem in August. My reaction: “I told you so”

To nobody's surprise except the City Council, Chamber of Commerce, and Travel Salem -- who assured citizens in 2023 that this time, really, you can count on it, an airline offering commercial service will remain at the Salem airport -- Avelo Airlines has announced that as of August 10 it will no longer have flights to and from our once-again airline'less city. Here's an excerpt from today's Salem Reporter story by Rachel Alexander and Mirandah Davis-Powell, "Avelo pulls out of Salem." Avelo Airlines is ending flights out of Salem in August, leaving the community again without a commercial operator after…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem Julie Hoy

Ethics Commission approves investigation of my complaint against Mayor Hoy

Really satisfying. Today the Oregon Government Ethics Commission agreed to open an investigation into my complaint against Salem Mayor Julie Hoy that alleged she engaged in prohibited serial communications with members of the City Council that resulted in the forced resignation of City Manager Keith Stahley.  You can read my complaint that's in the form of a blog post: "Here's my Oregon Government Ethics Commission complaint about Keith Stahley's forced resignation." Another person, Elliott Lapinel, also filed a complaint about the same allegation. Both the Salem Reporter and Statesman Journal have stories about the investigation. Here's excerpts from the Salem…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem Salem-Keizer school district

Salem area special election results looking good, especially to liberals

With Oregon allowing mailed ballots to be counted as long as they're postmarked on or before election day, more ballots will be received in the next few days. But the current results for key races in the Salem area likely will hold up, given the margin of victory (or defeat) in each of them. The biggest news is the 56-44 passage of Measure 24-514, also known as the Livability Levy. Given that there was no organized opposition to an increase in Salem property taxes to fund the library, parks, and Center 50+, it wasn't a surprise that the measure passed.…
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Posted inCity of Salem Donald Trump Julie Hoy

One thing that Salem Mayor Julie Hoy and President Trump have in common

Understand: I'm not equating Julie Hoy, the Mayor of Salem, Oregon, with Donald Trump, the President of the United States. Though they're each conservative, fortunately Hoy isn't nearly as obnoxious and dangerous as Trump. But they do have this in common. Both Hoy and Trump benefit from the fact that doing something illegal or unethical can be done quickly, while holding someone to account for such an action can take months or years. This relates to the adage, "Justice delayed is justice denied." Wikipedia explains: "Justice delayed is justice denied" is a legal maxim. It means that if legal redress…
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Posted inCity Club City Council City of Salem

Vanessa Nordyke makes closing argument for Salem’s livability levy

City Councilor Vanessa Nordyke is an attorney. Today she made a presentation to the Salem City Club that she called a closing argument for Measure 24-514 on the May ballot -- which is unofficially called the livability levy, being a property tax increase to fund the library, parks, and Center 50+. Nordyke said that she chose her black suit because it's what she likes to wear to a closing argument. "Closing," because ballots need to be postmarked on or before May 20, or put in a drop box before 8 pm on the 20th. That's just eleven days away. Here's…
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Posted inCity of Salem

Vote Yes on Measure 24-514, the livability levy

It's got a nice alliterative ring to it... livability levy. The official name for what Salem voters will consider on the May 20, 2025 ballot is Measure 24-514.  The measure increases property taxes to pay for the library, parks, and Center 50+. If it doesn't pass, drastic cuts will have to be made to these important components of our city's livability. What kind of city would Salem be without them? Not one most people would be proud of. These are difficult times. Our national politics are a divisive mess. Prospects for the economy don't look great. Inflation is moderating a…
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