The Oregon Legislature is facing dire times, with a worst-case scenario $4.4 billion projected deficit, and potentially 20 percent cuts across essential services including education, human services, public safety and the judiciary.
The Oregon Legislature’s Joint Committee on Ways and Means, a committee formed to include the public in dialogue on which services can handle bigger cuts, stopped in at Portland Community College Cascades campus to hear from the community on Tuesday, April 21.
Portland State student leaders and representatives had the strongest showing of any single organization attending.
Students testified on behalf of the thousands of college students in Oregon, as well as other groups threatened by the proposed budget cuts for the next biennium.
Hundreds of community leaders, nurses, caretakers, parents, teachers and concerned citizens showed to testify in front of representatives of the Oregon legislature.
In an attempt to persuade lawmakers not to cut their organizations’ budgets too severely, advocates for “the most vulnerable citizens” gave their two-minute pleas.
ASPSU President Hannah Fisher spoke as a representative of students faced with the prospect of crippling student loans or the alternative—dropping out—and emphasized the importance of affordable higher education in the state of Oregon.
“We cannot afford to disinvest in our students,” Fisher said.
The hundreds of onlookers in the auditorium at PCC Cascade Campus, as well as watching on close-circuit television elsewhere in the classroom, heard heart wrenching stories from advocates for Oregonians who will have to be dropped from care centers, drug and addiction counseling, scholarship programs, free day-care, among other programs.
While competition for funds is tough, a vast majority of those who testified agreed that there is one place Oregon should cut funds: its prisons.
Portland State graduate student Jeff Kerr, who studies in the criminology and criminal justice program, received massive applause from the community when he demanded lawmakers abandon plans for a new prison in Junction City.
He asked legislators to “invest in the children.”
He claimed, with much approval, that Oregon was on a prison binge, stating adamantly, “mass incarceration has no place in a just society,” he said.
Another Portland State student, Monique Peterson, the chief of staff at ASPSU, spoke on behalf of the thousands of students being denied the Oregon Opportunity Grant, the only need-based scholarship in Oregon, because the funds were being cut.
She cited the grant as a “catalyst to finishing a degree for many students.”
Kelly Herald, also a Portland State student, was not representing Oregon students or ASPSU, but instead used her voice for the Department of Human Services’ adoption programs.
Jeremiah Zimmerman, who studies engineering at Portland State, made his case for the Engineering and Technology Industry Council.
The state-funded program “attracted working people like me to pursue graduate degrees,” he said.
Rep. Peter Buckley, who sat as chair of the hearing, commented on the tough decisions ahead.
“Our state’s in a lot of hurt, it’s going to be tremendously challenging to find a way to hold Oregon together,” he said.