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| Congratulations Governor
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| Now, let’s see if he can get Oregon on the right track
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If Governor Ted Kulongoski had been smart, he would have conceded the election and let Ron Saxton become the next Governor of Oregon.
Why? Because the person who sits in the Governor's chair has a bigger task ahead of him than we think most of the voters realized.
The State of Oregon still has no stable funding for schools.
The Oregon State Police continue to operate on a shoestring.
Governor Kulongoski continues to support the Oregon Health Plan, which would be fine, except for the fact that nobody still knows how to pay for it. A health plan for Oregonians is a great idea, but someone has to find out a way to pay for it.
We continue to be troubled by the fact that Gov. Kulongoski has supported some of the highest minimum wage increases in the nation, at the expense of small business owners.
There continues to be a level of partisanship in the Oregon State Legislature, which has led to a whole lot of nothing getting done. We continue to hope that the Governor could be a leading force for change in that arena, but thus far, it has been a fleeting hope.
As challenger Ron Saxton pointed out, there is an incredible amount of monetary waste at the state level. We had hoped Saxton would have provided more details about how he could find more "efficiencies" in state government instead of speaking in generalities. Running for the top office in the state requires specifics from candidates. We don't think that this waste in state spending came as "news" to anybody, and we have our doubts about Saxton's promise to cut state spending by 30 percent, but he did illustrate the point that the state has money, it is just used poorly.
Oregon is a wonderful state. Leaders produced the Bottle Bill, land-use planning and the state has been a leader in environmental protection. But in many ways, Oregon has become the laughingstock of the nation when it comes to how the state operates.
Congratulations Governor. Now your real work begins.
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