A billboard that appeared this week in downtown Portland urges voters not to reelect City Councilor Mitch Green, one of the three Democratic Socialist councilors up for reelection this fall. The money behind that billboard can be traced in part to the Portland Metro Chamber, the city’s chamber of commerce—and the message shows how eager the city’s business lobby is to unseat him.
“Politician Mitch Green voted to use your taxes. Didn’t pay his own taxes,” the billboard reads, which emerges as drivers are deposited off of the Morrison Bridge into downtown.
Green is running for reelection in District 4, which covers all of the westside and a sliver of Southeast. He made headlines this summer for three distinct missteps: He failed to pay a $7,328 property tax bill until The Oregonian pointed it out to him; he lit a brush fire in his backyard at the height of wildfire season and told WW he was unaware of the many burn bans in place; and, most recently, a pundit posted a sampling of Green’s tweets from 2020 and 2021 in which he made fun of business owners seeking graffiti abatement and called police officers “absolute monsters,” among other pejoratives that Green has since described as “spicy.”…