Postcards from the Rogue Valley

January 30, 2024

Canvassing is not for the faint of heart, especially if you are allergic to rejection like me. 

A few weeks ago, I belatedly signed up to gather the last round of signatures for a local petition called “Jackson County for All,” a citizen’s initiative to reconstitute Jackson County’s Board of Commissioners, a personal nemesis in my four-year fight to hold the pig farm Uproot Meats accountable.

This Saturday, I found myself going door-to-door in a medium-sized development west of downtown Medford, 17 miles north of Ashland. Maps in hand, my partner and I split  our “beat” and set out.

As we suspected, more often than not, no one came to the door. But those who did were more than polite. Their initial cautiousness gave way to an eagerness to talk that surprised me.

The first person to answer my knock, a gentleman in his 60’s, was dressed in a camouflage vest, dark khakis, and boots and enveloped in cigarette smoke.  When he invited me in, I thought about deferring, but I didn’t. We sat at his kitchen table and he said, “tell me what you got.” 

I explained that the Board of Commissioners in Jackson County had been established in 1853 to govern the County and various service districts, councils, and committees. Little had changed since then other than their pay, which currently topped the Governor’s salary by $45K and, some would say, their commitment to good government. 

The Jackson County for All proposal would increase the number of Commissioners from three to five, securing (in theory) more representation; it would make the position non-partisan, allowing independent voters (40 percent of the County’s registered voters) to participate; and it would reduce the salary to make it more in line with Commissioner pay in other Oregon counties. 

“Jesus, this is long overdue,” he said. 

Before signing, though, he asked me about myself and why I was doing this. “I know you don’t get paid.” For his part, he told me: “I’m one of those people that the government used and discarded. I fought in the Gulf War and have lived with PTSD ever since.”

The older woman next door — with dark sunglasses protecting the cataract surgery she’d had the day before — answered my ring, quickly announcing that she was a life-long Republican.  “But I’ve lost faith in my party and all parties,” she continued, and listed some of her grievances, including the deep partisanship “that has become a disease.”

When I said that one of the three elements in the petition addressed the issue of partisanship, she reached for my clipboard.

Five houses down, an 82-year-old great grandfather, a “Democrat by birth,” talked about his fears for the world that his grandchildren are inheriting. As he signed the petition —“what you are proposing is sheer common sense” — he paused for a second to remember one of the digits in his address. “Today’s headlines shaming Biden’s memory loss make me furious,” he said. “There is forgetting and Forgetting with a capital F.”

I’d just knocked on my last door and, failing to rouse an occupant, had turned to leave when a woman with oxygen tubes and a walker signaled to me through a crack in the door. 

“Don’t go,” she whispered. Her hunched torso was almost parallel to the floor and I struggled to see her.

“Well, good morning,” I said surprised. “Are you a registered voter?” I continued, the place I always started these encounters to be sure we weren’t wasting each other’s time.

She said yes and I asked if she had a minute.

“Certainly” she said, adding that her body was slow but her mind was not. She must have sensed my discomfort over possibly dis-comforting her.

I bent down so that we were face-to-face and gave my stump speech.

“This sounds serious,” she said. She asked if I could come back in five minutes while she sat down and signed the petition. She encouraged me to go, while I waited, to the apartment on the second floor, behind the house, where a young woman lived. “I’m sure she’d be interested.”

She was. “You’re the first stranger to come up these stairs in two years other than Door Dash.”

When I returned to retrieve the signed petition, the woman reached for my hand. “My name is Francine. Thank the Lord you are doing this. Bless you!”

I added up the number of signatures I had collected in two hours: eight. 

The “Oregon System”

Gathering signatures for citizen-initiated ballot measures has a long history in Oregon, it turns out. In the first state to approve marijuana and physician-assisted suicide, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Here are some tidbits.

In 1902, the Oregon Constitution was amended to allow for direct citizen involvement. Four years later, the “privilege” was extended to voters over county matters. For Oregon blacksmith turned lawyer William Simon U-Ren, known as early as 1898 as “Referendum U’Ren,” direct citizen involvement was a consuming cause.

Blacksmithing was my trade and it has always given color to my view of things. I wanted to fix the evils in the conditions of life. I couldn’t. There were no tools. We had tools to do almost anything with in the blacksmith shop; wonderful tools. So in other trades, arts and professions … in everything but government. 

In government, the common trade of all men and the basis of social life, men worked still with old tools, with old laws, with institutions and charters which hindered progress more than they helped it. Men suffered from this. There were enough lawyers: many of our ablest men were lawyers. Why didn’t some of them invent legislative implements to help people govern themselves: Why had we no tool makers for democracy? (Ballotpedia.org)

During the next two decades, U’Ren (a staunch Republican) sponsored dozens of initiatives from banning the practice of giving free railroad passes to politicians to making Oregon the first state with popular election of U.S. senators. In 1910, Oregonians passed an initiative to establish the first presidential primary election system in the nation. The margin was small (43,353 to 41,624), but two dozen other states copied it within six years.

This bottom-up legislating came to be called the “Oregon System.” Today, 26 states provide for comparable citizen-initiated ballot measures, almost all west of the Mississippi. (Ballotpedia.org)

The Jackson County for All petition joins this tradition. Denise Krause — who was my partner in attempting to get the County Commissioners to hold our neighborhood pig farm liable, then ran and lost her bid to replace a retiring Commissioner — launched the initiative last spring. Over 140“circulators” (signature gatherers) like me have joined this movement for representation and accountability. 

(Did I tell you that the three current Commissioners are all Republican and that their decisions are always unanimous?)

Superbowl Sunday

Sunday morning I was back in the car, heading to Jacksonville (population 3,000), a historic Gold Rush town now known for a thriving cultural and epicurean scene. The drive from Ashland to Jacksonville, after leaving the interstate, winds through vineyards framed by hills, and today a brilliant early morning sun replaced the more typical winter fog. 

In addition to canvassing neighborhoods, our Jackson County for All team has an agreement with a handful of grocery stores to stand outside and solicit customers. My beat this Sunday was Ray’s Food Place off the main street in Jacksonville. We figured that preparing the fixings for Superbowl parties would bring out extra customers.

We were right, but the earliest customers seemed in a hurry to grab the jalapenos or barbecue sauce they needed to finish off their Superbowl fixings. One shopper, though, was looking for a lemon for hollandaise sauce.

When I asked a cheerful middle-aged man who’d run to Ray’s to pick up cilantro if he had a moment, he said sure. After I described the petition’s three elements — increasing the Commissioners from three to five, making their election non-partisan, and redistributing their combined salaries — he said, ”this sounds more important than the Superbowl.”

A young man in a cowboy hat listened to my pitch but walked on. “I believe in liberty, not government,” he said.

A woman gathering primroses and pansies and putting them in her cart signed happily. “I feel spring coming,” she said.

A retired firefighter told me about his career working standby for the federal government, deploying on 24-hour’s notice to fight wildfires or help with natural disasters anywhere in the country. When he handed me back the signed petition, he said, “I know how valuable good government can be.”

A flushed 30-something guy told me he wasn’t sure if he was a registered voter. He’d been pretty much spaced out since his wife left him, with their baby, he said. While he didn’t sign the petition, he shared a lot about his life. “I’m unemployed, I been looking for a job for two years. I’m a person nobody wants. Got a record and a lot more. Keep on going, I tell myself, keep going.”

Toward the end of my stint, my Jackson County for All partner from the day before joined me and we were rushed by a handful of women who had heard we were at Ray’s collecting signatures. After learning about the petition on the local news, they had been longing to sign, they told us. 

“Thank you so, so, so much for doing this,” one of them said. “Put a star in the democracy column.”

Countdown

The deadline to make the May ballot is February 18^th. By our estimate, we have exceeded the 10,000 signatures required for each of the three measures, with a healthy cushion for signatures that may end up being disqualified.

“Democracy is not a noun but a verb,” we hear a lot today. “It only exists if we do it.”

In truth, I think I got much more out of my brief foray into citizen action — and democracy — than I contributed. I resonated with the hunger to be heard from both those who signed our petition and those who did not. I talked, however briefly, with people I’d never meet otherwise, a gift in our silo-ed world. As a person who is habitually shy about introducing myself to strangers, I grew some courage.

Bless you back, Francine!

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