Westlund for State Treasurer

Ben Westlund will make a great governor. Which is why we should elect him State Treasurer.

Oh, Westlund will do a great job as treasurer, too. He knows the numbers. He likes the numbers. The fact that he is not a CPA is not a handicap. The job is a policy position, after all.

What does this have to do with Westlund as governor? In many ways Westlund is far more qualified for that role than any other, and more qualified than anyone else in state politics. He has been a state representative. He has been a state senator. And now, if we elect him, he will have been state treasurer.

To that training we add the man himself: Westlund has vision. He has heart. He had cancer and rather than retreat, he lived life even more fully: that life he chose to lead was one of public service, not sitting on an island somewhere playing golf.

While he can tell you more than you want to know about anything in government, he can also crystalize in 30 seconds the essence of complicated policy. He also has the knowledge of the game inside of the capitol building that can get things done that seem beyond reach.

Which will, when Kulongoski stops warming the chair in the governor’s office in two years, make Ben Westlund the most highly trained and qualified candidate for governor we have had in the state in a long, long time.

Adding State Troopers is a waste

Republicans and Democrats, in the House and the Senate as well as the governor, are on the band wagon for more State Troopers on the road.

That's too bad, because it will cost millions of dollars. And so far, we have not seen one shred of hard evidence that there will be ANY benefit to Oregonians.

Nor have we seen the OSP budget opened up as part of this debate, a budget that has ranged from $250 million to more than $400 million over the last several biennium's.

How much do those troopers earn, on average? What is the salary range for troopers driving Mustangs down Interstate 5? What does a Lane County deputy make for the same work? How many teachers could we hire for the same amount?

Kulongoski torpedoed a study that would have provided answers to some of these questions. We think he did so because facts would have made it inconvenient to do what he wanted to do. He prefers hand-wringing and anecdote.

The police union organized a rally in Salem on Tuesday (is it just me, or do rallies, be they of cops or of students, seem like mob politics?).

Edward Walsh of "The Oregonian" reports that the Oregon State Police Officers' Association organized the rally because "Oregon today has fewer than half the state troopers it did 20 years ago but double the population ... about 310 troopers now patrol the state's major highways instead of the 665 troopers who handled that task in the 1980s."

So what?

During the same time, the number of accidents per mile driven has declined, as has the number of fatalities per mile. Using the twisted logic used elsewhere by the OSP that we won’t go into today, this would appear to prove that fewer cops means fewer wrecks.

Of course that's not true, but it does balance the non-argument of the "fewer troopers today" canard. Repeat: there is no evidence that more troopers handing out speeding tickets makes Oregon safer. To that end, cell phones have done more than cops.

There is a role for the OSP. We need more state crime labs, OSP should be investigating other police departments for corruption, they should be running a tougher standards and training program (that appears to have been tucked into another budget). And yes, they need to guard the governor and capitol.

This they could probably do with last year’s budget. They just need to take a few more troopers off Interstate 5. Putting more troopers on the road is a waste of money better spent putting more teachers in the classroom.