U.S. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Oregon, listens to Portland business owner Ann Naughton while Portland Police Sgt. Aaron Schmautz looks on. (Julia Shumway/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
OREGON CITY — Crime, drugs and homelessness are wreaking havoc on small businesses in Portland and Clackamas County, a small group of business owners told U.S. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Oregon, on Wednesday.
The event in an Oregon City wedding venue followed the same script Chavez-DeRemer used at the handful of other discussions she allowed reporters to attend this year: She asked the five business owners and Portland Police Sgt. Aaron Schmautz — president of the Oregon Coalition of Police and Sheriffs, which has endorsed her in her reelection bid — to share their stories so she could repeat those accounts to other members of Congress.
“One of the reasons I ran for Congress was the disconnect between the federal level and the local level, not to mention what goes on between the state level and beyond. But every policy and every law that we make, it affects at the local level,” she said.
Many of the business owners’ complaints focused around state or local policies, including minimum wage increases, bottle deposits and the size of Portland’s police force. While Congress doesn’t have jurisdiction over those issues, Chavez-DeRemer said she would use her platform as a congresswoman to weigh in on local issues and advocate for more federal funding for law enforcement.
“We can get them the funding dollars they need, the tools that they need, the resources that they need to do their job,” she said. “It’s those kinds of things that I think can assist in dealing with the maybe unintended consequences of laws the state of Oregon has put in place.”
The roundtable wasn’t a campaign event, but Chavez-DeRemer, whose district includes parts of Multnomah and Marion counties, Linn County and most of Clackamas and Deschutes counties, addressed the election with reporters after, saying that her opponent, Democratic state Rep. Janelle Bynum, hasn’t fixed any of the problems.
“We’re in a one-party state here,” Chavez-DeRemer said. “My opponent, who’s running in this seat, she’s had the wind at her back. They’ve got all three houses at the state level, and in the 10 years, in a decade, she couldn’t fix these. …We can’t give somebody a promotion who couldn’t fix the problems here.”
Bynum campaign manager Blakely Wall said Bynum has delivered nearly a decade’s worth of legislative wins for Oregon since she first beat Chavez-DeRemer in a state House race in 2016.
“Coming from a ‘representative’ whose tenure in Congress has been rated the least productive in modern history — beyond her efforts to restrict reproductive rights for service members — maybe Lori Chavez-DeRemer isn’t one to be talking about what it means to actually deliver for Oregonians,” Wall said.
Teresa Sasse, who owns Puddin’ River Chocolates in Canby and participated in the roundtable, said she worries for the future of her business depending on election results.
“Nov. 5 scares the crap out of me. I don’t know if my business will survive depending on the outcome of Nov. 5,” she said.
Sasse said she only stays in business because she’s passionate about it, but she keeps paying more in taxes. She said she often has people who can’t legally work in the U.S. apply to work at her chocolate factory, where she doesn’t provide benefits and said she can’t afford the increased minimum wage, which rose to $15.95 in the Portland area in July. She tries to hire retired people, saying that millennials – the youngest of whom are in their late 20s – don’t want to work.
La Donna Cox, who owns the board game store Geeks and Games and a firearm training company, said she felt fortunate to live in Oregon City and not Multnomah County after listening to other business owners’ complaints about Portland, but that problems she associates with Multnomah County are coming to Oregon City.
“It’s headed our way,” she said. “It’s overwhelming the amount of crime that’s increased.”
She no longer feels safe sending her children down the block to a jiu jitsu studio on their own after a homeless man exposed himself to her son, and she spends time cleaning up used drug needles and feces outside of her store, Cox said. It’s near what she calls the “trifecta of awfulness”: People buy or steal cases of water from a Fred Meyer, take the carts as far as they’ll go until the wheels lock up, then dump the water and take bottles to a bottle drop. Then they take the 10-cents-per-bottle to Dotty’s, a slot machine parlor, and try to make enough money to buy drugs, she said
Jessie Burke, who owns a boutique hotel in Portland and came in third place in a primary for a Multnomah County Commission race this spring, said her industry was hit hardest by the pandemic because hotels didn’t qualify for some of the same grants restaurants received and no one was traveling.
“As much as we can do to repair Portland’s and Oregon’s reputation would be really helpful to encourage business to come back,” she said.
Dan Miner, owner of the Hollywood Beverage liquor stores in northeast Portland and Gladstone, said he struggles with state taxes and liquor prices set by the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission that prevent him from raising prices to cover higher expenses. He’s also losing money to insurance premiums that keep increasing because of property crimes.
“I went 10 or 12 years with only having shoplifting,” he said. “Starting in 2020, five burglaries. Since then, I’ve had three armed robberies, additional burglaries, and the concern I have is not necessarily lack of investigation, but lack of prosecution.”
Miner told the Capital Chronicle he’s planning to vote for Chavez-DeRemer in November, saying there was a clear contrast between her support for business owners and positions of Bynum, her Clackamas-based opponent, but he declined to elaborate.
Ann Naughton, who owns Naughton Dental in northeast Portland with her husband, said the practice is in the “epicenter” of problems in Portland because it’s near safe rest villages, low-income housing, the MAX light rail line, a drug treatment center and grocery stores that accept bottle returns.
She asked Chavez-DeRemer to send more funding to Portland Police, to advocate for removing bottle returns from grocery stores and to work with Gov. Tina Kotek on public service announcements to “keep Oregon green.”
“She’s in triage mode like we are,” Naughton said. “The whole city’s in triage mode.”
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