I propose to you that this is all connected

Editor’s Note: The original "bitchtucci voter guide" is authored by Marissa Yang Bertucci, a Portlander who works in mental health and public education. She self-describes as a non-expert whose perspective is deeply informed by her background, family, and community work. She says, "I am a mixed Korean dyke who grew up in a low-income immigrant family...The foundation of my entire heart and ethics and belief in a better world comes from being my mother’s daughter." This section is an edited version of her endorsement for the Portland Parks Levy, the only measure on the ballot for the November special election. The measure passed on November 4th, 2025.

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As if anointed, I feel goosebumps creep up my temples to reach my scalp. I keep walking.

I’m not opposed to crying at work; if anything, I encourage it. I know I’m welling up, and that is fine. Holding the tears back is reflexive. The feeling reminds me of trying to catch a sneeze. The hairs on my arm raise. I’m almost back to my office.

Another set of parents has been detained by la migra in our neighborhood. This week—late October—it’s coming in waves, not just in my school’s community in deep East Portland, but all over our town and its suburbs. Pulled out of trucks, dragged from apartments, ambushed at nonprofits, pushed around at immigration court.

I call the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition. They dispatch a bilingual volunteer immediately, who routes to the apartment complex, talking to the shy eyewitnesses who open their doors. Though many are wary in this eerie aftermath quiet, the mom who reported the kidnapping told me that before, “The whole block was out there filming, fighting, trying to get ICE to stop.”

The volunteer and I trade calls for the next three hours, trying to triangulate the names and addresses of the people detained and ensure that the kid will not come home to an empty apartment. When families are afraid to send their kids to school, I don’t promise that they’ll be safe here. How can we promise them that? I tell them that we keep our doors locked to ICE, per school and local government policies and our own ethics. I tell them that I support whatever choice they have to make.

I propose to you that this is all connected—that the erosion of social safety nets, public works, and unions all contributed to the perilous right-wing abuse of power we face today. I propose to you that even if you don’t typically vote, you might consider voting in this local election, with just one levy on the ballot: to continue funding Portland Parks and Rec. In this psychotic economy, it asks for an increase in property tax, and is therefore an underdog’s ballot measure. I ask you to have class solidarity with workers, unionized and not, and with our neighbors and kids who need summer meals and safe, clean parks. I ask you to keep a tight grip on ANY and ALL public infrastructure that benefits THE PEOPLE and THE NATURAL WORLD.

The Portland Parks levy seeks renewal to continue funding jobs, daily upkeep like gardening, landscaping, bathroom cleaning, trash pickup, major maintenance improvements, and accessible income-based pricing for community centers through a property tax rate of $1.40 per assessed value of $1000. There are strict spending categories associated with the levy—most of it will go toward daily maintenance, staffing, and programming.

It’s embarrassing and insane that our country funds things like education and public parks through desperate levies and bonds that expire every few years, leaving the institutions that do the most tangible good for our everyday citizens to beg for funding. A SENSIBLE CORPORATE TAX, IF WE COULD PASS ONE, WOULD BE A MUCH BETTER SOURCE OF REVENUE. I’d even prefer something like a graduated tax, where perhaps homes worth over $750,000 or $1 million are taxed at a different rate than homes under that.

Don’t vote No on this levy just because you’d rather it be less, or because you’d rather someone else fund it. The levy will expire in five years, and in that time, reform can come. Let us not lose ground because we want reform to have already been done by now. HAVE SOME VISION, PLEASE! HAVE SOME STAMINA, PLEASE!

If the ballot measure doesn’t pass, Portland Parks will have a multi-million-dollar budget shortfall. Two-fifths of their budget is funded by this levy. Parks themselves will suffer, and buildings and equipment in need of repair will continue to get worse, requiring even more expensive fixes in the future. We’d lose classes for our elders, a program that provides year-round reduced-rate access to Community Centers for low-income residents, and we’d lose around a hundred jobs—good union jobs and their accompanying institutional memory.

Portland Parks infrastructure already exists. It lives in the rhythms and memories of the everyday workers. Effort is precious, proofed, and carried forward by individual people. Once lost, that infrastructure takes time, effort, and resources to rebuild.

Once lost, nothing is guaranteed to come back as it was. A friend who is a maintenance worker for Portland Parks gave the example of lawnmowing. It seems a simple enough cost-saving measure to reduce lawnmowing from once a week to once a month, but in doing so, you not only increase the time and difficulty of the mow, but more weeds proliferate, overtaking the grass altogether. More clippings are left behind, more fields are played upon without staff to adequately reseed or fertilize, so we get more bald patches that can’t be repaired. Issues compound. My friend assures me that staffing is already stretched thin trying to maintain the status quo, and that there is already understaffing in the poorer neighborhoods in East Portland.

These jobs tangibly serve people, nature, and the public good. We need to hold onto these sorts of jobs at all costs—jobs that aren’t imaginary tech positions which seek to extract resources exponentially from people and planet until implosion.

If this levy fails, the two-fifths funding shortfall will occur immediately, and we’d have to wait for a subsequent election to bring an amended levy back to the ballot. In the meantime, people will be laid off. They will likely not be available to hire back by the time we pass a replacement levy. The historical and relational knowledge they possess will be lost. It is INCREDIBLY inefficient to rehire and retrain for positions that are already competently staffed.

I CANNOT OVERSTATE the importance of preserving ANY and ALL union jobs as key antifascist infrastructure. Not all Portland Parks employees belong to a union (the super part-timers and seasonal hires, for example), but tons of full-time staff belong to a few different unions—mostly Laborers Local (LiUNA) 483 and City of Portland Professional Workers (CPPW).

Unions are made up of imperfect people and their competing interests. Saucy stories of labor unions throughout history include co-optation, corruption, and other fallible human bullshit. Further, fuck every police union. Unions are not inherently perfect, and I make no claims about LiUNA and CPPW being perfect.

Still, unions house some of our most effective coalitional spaces in this skinned-knee modern world, with some of our best available framework for organizing, solidarity, and undermining gross abuses of power.

If you belong to a union, you are potentially MUCH CLOSER to accessing a framework for solidarity with fellow workers across broad differences than the average American worker. Most Americans find it unfathomable to pull off a general strike or a rent strike—there is so little historical, institutional memory of successful strike action. This is by design.

After seeing the massive organizing power of unions in the 1930s (when about 1/3 of the US workforce belonged to a union, compared to 9.9% in 2024), there was a wave of anti-labor laws and massive anti-union campaigns in the 1950s. In 2018, Portland Parks laid off 1/3 of their LiUNA unionized workers due to budget cuts—and these workers were overwhelmingly the public-facing workers who cleaned and maintained facilities and welcomed guests to community centers. Inshallah, in a labor union, you have some schema for collective bargaining and standing together to disrupt and bargain for changes from rich bosses or the government. There are people in unions who know what it means to strike—to decide together that bargaining has become stagnant or hostile to workers, and to remove YOUR LABOR, THE MOST VALUABLE THING IN THE ECONOMY. We are a storytelling species: things become realer and more possible to us the closer we are to the story.

Unions often push for social change through organizing and education among rank-and-file members about BROADER national and global systems of oppression. They help members understand that ALL threats to the working class are intertwined and require solidarity.

The well-trod path from union organizing to organized solidarity among citizenry is why, in the 1930s, fascist entities in Europe tried to enfeeble organized labor unions who were calling for unity and resistance. I’m not saying that every unionized Portland Parks employee is automatically a comrade. But hear me on their role in the greater conversation.

One of the unions that represents Portland Parks employees, LiUNA, provides scholarships to its members and organizes rank-and-file members to elect progressive candidates in the region. Over 600 members went on strike for three days back in 2023, winning a 13% wage increase, better rest periods, and more.

Another union with Portland Parks members, CPPW, just went on strike in May of 2025. They also joined together with other Portland unions to say, CUT FROM THE TOP, NOT FROM THE BOTTOM, a refrain I love to see. If cuts must happen, upper management should not be spared while workers on the ground lose out.

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FURTHERMORE, I PROPOSE TO YOU THAT WE NEED OUR PARKS MORE THAN EVER. WE HAVE SOME OF THE BEST CITY PARKS IN THE COUNTRY. We need well-maintained natural spaces in urban areas for climate change resilience, and for our wellbeing. Technocrats benefit immensely from keeping us inside, isolated, and on our devices. We need free and low-cost places to walk, to play, to be outside. Many of our community’s kids need opportunities to practice social skills and increase their distress tolerance. In the summertime, I see gaggles of kids being led in scavenger hunts and soccer games and friendship bracelet making by teenagers and college students in my neighborhood park. This is VERY IMPORTANT SHIT and supports the NATURAL ORDER OF THE WORLD.

In these Easy Bake Oven-Ass summers when it’s too hot to walk in the neighborhood, I take my dog to our neighborhood park, where the ancient Douglas Firs provide cover and a 20-degree temperature difference. I see my neighbors, housed and unhoused, drinking from the water fountains. I see families of crows in the trees. I see the fledglings stumble awkwardly, looking drunk or ill, sometimes for one or two full days before, finally, on the third day, they take flight.

I want our people to be protected and free. I want our people to survive what pains them and find the beauty and meaning they seek. I am wishing you well at all times. I hope you can feel it. ✿

xoxo,

bitchtucci * ੈ♡‧₊˚