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King County approves sales tax increase without voter input, high mortgage rates slow down housing market, Oregon political groups hint at Wealth Tax for 2028, 100 person tram service near Glacier National Park under federal review, Salem school district proposes six elementary school closures, Amazon cuts more jobs.

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Salem-Keizer proposes closure of 6 elementary schools, boundary changes (OPB)

“Salem-Keizer Public Schools leaders are recommending six elementary schools for closure due to declining enrollment in Oregon’s second-largest school district.

The district published the list of schools Friday afternoon and will present its plan to the school board Tuesday. The board is expected to make a decision on the school closures at its Dec. 8 meeting.

The schools proposed for closure are: Brush College, Candalaria, Cummings, Englewood, Liberty, and Richmond. The district’s plan proposes closing the schools in fall 2027, with coinciding boundary adjustments across the district. Those boundary adjustments will not be finalized until February 2027. District officials say changes, including the boundary adjustments, will affect five percent of students in the district. The district says 250 staff members will be “impacted” through the closure proposal.

“We just see no path to avoiding it because the context around us is bigger than any of us.”

That context includes declining birth rates and families choosing options other than public school for their children. Castañeda acknowledged the reality facing not just her district, but districts across the country.

“We would actually have to reverse declining birth rate in order to change this,” she said.

“Sometimes institutions have to respond to the reality around them and do it with as much care and empathy as possible.”

Fewer workers commute from out of state, another sign of Oregon’s soft labor market (ORL)

“Of the 120,000 people who commute to Oregon jobs from other states, three-quarters come from Washington.

Oregon ranks No. 4 in the nation in terms of earnings paid to workers who live in other states, according to an analysis by the Oregon Employment Department. That’s been a marker of economic strength in prior years, a sign of a robust job market.

Not anymore. The number of out-of-state workers in Oregon has declined since the pandemic, falling by about 3% through 2023.

The drop has been especially severe in the Portland area. The latest data shows that the number of Clark County residents filing Oregon income taxes fell below 70,000 in 2024 for the first time since 2016, an 11% decline from 2019.

Oregon hasn’t added jobs since 2023, held back by weak hiring in construction, manufacturing and other key sectors. That translates into fewer Oregonians working, and fewer people commuting from Clark County or elsewhere.

You might expect that a decline in workers from out of state would mean less income tax revenue. But over the past five years, incomes have risen faster than the number of commuters has been falling.

The state collected an estimated $268 million in income taxes from Clark County commuters in 2024, according to Chris Allanach with Oregon’s Legislative Revenue Office. That’s up about 7% from 2019.

Even so, the numbers suggest Oregon would have collected $33 million more if the number of workers from Clark County had remained constant instead of declining.”

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