Oregon, My Oregon

At the Gates of Vienna, Oregon Drags its Feet on Greater Idaho

For the past two and a half years, I’ve been covering the Greater Idaho Movement, which aims to detach certain counties from eastern Oregon and annex them to Idaho, with which they have a great cultural affinity. Despite votes in the affected counties, the Oregon state legislature has so far failed to respond to the wishes of its eastern residents. One might be tempted to assume that those eastern counties deliver more tax money to the central government than they extract from it, and are therefore too lucrative to let go of.

The account below was sent out as a press release today by Greater Oregon:

LaPine, OR — Proponents of the Greater Idaho Movement released the following statement regarding the close of the Oregon Legislative Session.

“The failure of the Oregon Legislature to move either of the Greater Idaho bills in this session is an affront to the people of Eastern Oregon, as well as the democratic process in general. For five years the people of Eastern Oregon have been making their wishes known at the ballot box. Those wishes are to have elected leaders investigate letting our counties separate and join Idaho. Eastern Oregon representatives sponsored bills in this session to do just that, but were completely ignored by the Democrat majority in Salem. This failure to listen to the people of Eastern Oregon or our elected representatives only reinforces why Eastern Oregon counties need the governance of Idaho, a state far more in line with our values and way of life. After five years of hearing from voters and advocating with legislators to respect voter wishes, it is clear to our organization that Oregon leadership is intent on holding Eastern Oregon counties captive as part of a state we no longer wish to be part of and that federal engagement is necessary to achieve self-determination for the people Eastern Oregon.”

The Greater Idaho Movement seeks to convince Oregon to relocate the Oregon/Idaho state line westward so that the traditionally conservative eastern counties would join the state of Idaho, which the movement says better matches eastern Oregonian values. Since 2020, thirteen counties have passed their measures. The movement believes that moving the border would create a win-win situation for both Oregon and Idaho by better matching voters to state governance and would lower political tension across the state. State lines can be moved through a process called an interstate compact. In January, Greater Idaho bills were introduced in both the Oregon House and Senate requesting border talks or study. Neither of those bills received hearings despite the co-sponsorship of numerous eastern Oregon legislators and a joint letter requesting a hearing from all three state senators whose districts are affected by the proposal.

In 2023 the Idaho House of Representatives passed a resolution inviting the state of Oregon to begin border talks, and the Governor of Idaho has publicly supported border talks as well. The movement has previously reached out to the Governor of Oregon, as well as President Trump asking for support in getting border talks between the two states started.

The Greater Idaho statement may be found here.

I've always thought that that as long as you're going to ask for the politically impossible, you might as well simply seek secession from the remainder of Oregon. Call yourselves Right Oregon, maybe they'll take the hint and become Left Oregon.  

Oregon, My Oregon

At Legal Insurrection, Eastern Oregon County Sets Vote to Secede, Becoming 12th to Join of “Greater Idaho” Movement

The last time I reported on the Greater Idaho movement—whose goal is to obtain enough signatures and election success to persuade Oregon, Idaho, and the federal government to allow 15 counties to leave a blue state for a red one without having to move—two counties were slated to vote on the issue Nov. 8th.

The votes were tallied, and the Greater Idaho movement has expanded.

Two more eastern Oregon counties have reportedly voted in favor of the Greater Idaho movement.

Its purpose is to convince state legislatures to move the Oregon-Idaho border, turning conservative counties of Oregon into counties of Idaho.

In a Wednesday news release, the movement said it had seen victory in Morrow and Wheeler counties, clinching 60% and 58% of the votes as of that morning, respectively.

At the present time, 11 counties have officially approved the measure. Now, a 12th is poised to take a vote on the issue.

Earlier this week, the Greater Idaho movement submitted a petition that could potentially add its ballot initiative onto Wallowa County’s ballot in May 2023.

Greater Idaho advocates are pushing for the states of Oregon and Idaho to move their borders so that Oregonians who live in more conservative counties can be a part of Idaho, which has historically been dominated by Republican voters.

According to Oregon’s Election Division, new measures are placed on ballots as long as the petition received enough valid signatures.

If Greater Idaho’s petition is successful and makes it onto the ballot, Wallowa County could be the 12th Oregon county — out of the 15 included in the proposal — to vote in favor of moving the state lines. Wheeler, Klamath, Harney and Malheur counties are among the counties who have supported the movement in past elections.

It appears the separation could be amicable.

The movement’s volunteers are asking Oregon Senate president nominee Rob Wagner to allow a hearing on their bill in January. The bill would invite Idaho to begin talks with Oregon on the potential of moving the border. A January 2022 SurveyUSA poll showed that 68% of northwestern Oregon voters thought that the Oregon Legislature should hold hearings on the idea, and only 20% opposed.

The poll also found that a mere three percent of such voters think keeping eastern and southern Oregon in the state is worth the cost. The movement estimates the cost at $500 per northwestern Oregonian wage earner annually.

In related news, Oregon joins the long list of blue states that have seen their populations decline. Interestingly, the last census showed that the state lost people for the first time in over 30 years.

Good luck, but I think they're missing a trick by not demanding secession to form a new state, call it Roregon, and get two senators.

San Berdoo Sunburn - Votes to Secede from California

 AP, cited at Haut Hair, Exodus: San Bernardino to leave California as well?

An advisory ballot proposal approved in San Bernardino County — home to 2.2 million people — directs local officials to study the possibility of secession. The razor-thin margin of victory is the latest sign of political unrest and economic distress in California.

This attempt to create a new state — which would be the first since Hawaii in 1959 — is a longshot proposition for the county just east of Los Angeles that has suffered from sharp increases in cost of living. It would hinge on approval by the California Legislature and Congress, both of which are highly unlikely.

Still, it’s significant that the vote came from a racially and ethnically diverse county that is politically mixed, as well as the fifth-most populous in the state and the largest in the nation by area. San Bernardino’s 20,000 square miles (51,800 square kilometers) is composed of more land than nine states.

The votes speaks to the alienation that some voters feel from a statehouse long dominated by Democrats who have made little progress on the growing homeless crisis, soaring housing costs and rising crime rates while residents pay among the highest taxes in the country.

Capt. Ed snarks  "Won’t happen, and Congress wouldn’t approve it even if California allowed it. The water issue alone would be a deal-breaker. " Yeah, but we can dream can't we? 

At Reason, California's Landmark Environmental Law Finally Comes for the Legislature Itself, Golden State lawmakers have refused to fix the California Environmental Quality Act. Now it could cost them a brand new office building.

California's landmark environmental law has helped thwart state lawmakers' many, many plans for society. They're now thwarting lawmakers' plans for themselves too.

Last week, a California appeals court brought legislators' plans for a new office annex on the state Capitol grounds to a screeching halt when it ruled the $1.3 billion project had been greenlit without the requisite analysis of its environmental effects.

That ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by Save Our Capitol!—a motley coalition of small business groups, taxpayer advocates, preservationists, and environmentalists—arguing that the public had not been given adequate opportunity to comment on the final design of the office complex and that the state hadn't put enough thought into less environmentally impactful designs.

Giving the unincorporated group the right to sue is the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

The 1970 law requires that government agencies study the environmental impacts of their projects and, where possible, mitigate those impacts. That sounds simple enough. The original intent was to force the government to stop and listen to public feedback before paving over wetlands with a new highway project.

But the "citizen-enforced" law gives anyone the ability to file administrative appeals and lawsuits arguing that any of a long list of a project's impacts on natural, physical, cultural, and/or historic resources had not been adequately studied.

Over the decades, court decisions also extended the scope of CEQA to cover even privately sponsored projects (like a new single-family home or apartment building) that government bureaucrats had a minimal level of discretion over.

Today, the law effectively gives anyone with a few hundred dollars to spare the ability to hold up massive projects, public and private, for years or even decades with arguments that this or that impact hasn't been exhaustively examined in reports hundreds of pages long.

By delaying new homes for years (or some cases, decades), CEQA has become a major contributor to the state's housing crisis.

Hoist on their own petard! BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone).

Hey, Don't Leave Us Behind!

Western Maryland secessionists seek to sever ties with the liberal Free State

West Virginia was the last state to break off from another. Now, 150 years later, a 49-year-old information technology consultant wants to apply the knife to Maryland’s five western counties. “The people are the sovereign,” says Scott Strzelczyk, leader of the fledgling Western Maryland Initiative, and the western sovereigns are fed up with Annapolis’s liberal majority, elected by the state’s other sovereigns.

I might be a little sensitive, but I think I'm detecting a touch of "STFU and take it, we won" in that last sentence.

“If you think you have a long list of grievances and it’s been going on for decades, and you can’t get it resolved, ultimately this is what you have to do,” says Strzelczyk, who lives in New Windsor, a historic town of 1,400 people in Carroll County. “Otherwise you are trapped.”
...
What’s different now is how the secession efforts illuminate a hard truth about the country: The rural-urban divide is increasingly a point of political conflict. The population boom in urban areas such as Baltimore and the Maryland suburbs near the District, the Boulder-Denver areas in Colorado, and in Detroit have filled state legislatures with liberal policymakers pushing progressive agendas out of sync with rural residents, who feel increasingly isolated and marginalized.

In Maryland, the five western counties — Garrett, Allegany, Washington, Frederick and Carroll — represent just 11 percent of Maryland’s population, according to 2010 Census figures. They earn less than the people who live in more urban areas. They vote overwhelmingly for Republicans in a deeply Democratic state. Nearly 90 percent of the residents are white, compared with 51 percent elsewhere. About 60 percent were born in Maryland vs. 46 percent in other parts of the state.

Obama (blue) vs Romeny (red) in Maryland 2012 election by county

As noted in the article, such rural/urban secessionist movements crop up periodically all over the county.  I remember being regaled by a proponent of Northern California and Southern Oregon rebelling from their urban masters while trying to grab a hamburger in a joint in Shasta, California sometime in the 60s (or maybe the early 70s?), who proposed to form the new state of Jeffersonia. They never succeed (or secede?), or at least not since West By Virginia in the throes of the Civil War.  But they do tend to indicate intensity of resistance to the tyranny of the majority.

I just wish that the boys out west would look at the electoral map of Maryland and realize that it's not a case of east versus west, it is the city versus the countryside.   Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and the D.C. suburb counties of Montgomery, Prince Georges and Charles went heavily for Obama.  In addition to the 5 counties who wish to secede, the three western shore counties, and virtually all the rural northeastern and eastern shore counties voted for Romney.  Perhaps if they broadened their appeal to the other less counties out of the urban core their concerns would get more respect.