Whatchamacolumn: Career criminals play a role in budget deficits

McMinnville’s huge city budget deficit was on display this week, with officials trying to figure out why it evolved while grappling with how to respond.

“I’m failing to understand,” said one local business owner, “why the question has not been answered as to how the city of McMinnville ended up in this situation … We are talking not only about making up years of failed budgets, but also absorbing current increased operating costs.”

Oops, that wasn’t this week — that was testimony before the council in April 2022. It just took four years for city officials to start answering that question. Meanwhile, there are myriad suggestions for reducing costs, and here are two more:

Make it less comfortable for transients to migrate here, and make it easier to send career criminals away. Since suggestion No. 1 is complex and controversial, let’s focus on suggestion No. 2, starting with this week’s newspaper listing of recent arrests.

Many of those arrests involved local career criminals, representing the too-well-oiled revolving door of Oregon’s justice system. Just to mention a few:

Bobby Joe Stark, 32, of Sheridan is a rare career criminal whose record lacks an array of drug charges. His 14-year record of dangerous driving and endangering others escalated this year to a 10-count indictment, including attempted kidnapping, felony coercion and various misdemeanor menacing, harassment and assault charges.

Joshua David Womack, 38, of Yamhill has a mile-long record of drug-driven charges ranging from alcohol to marijuana to heroin to methamphetamine, with sprinklings of forgery, identity theft and reckless driving.

Shane William Cooper, 35, of Newberg (more recently McMinnville) has a multi-faceted criminal record since 2006 in driving, theft and sexual crimes.

Damian Zackary Johnson, 32, of McMinnville went from failure to use safety belts to delivery of heroin in 2012, and never looked back. The most recent of his serial drug offenses charged involves methamphetamine, fentanyl and a young woman from Newberg, Noelle Terese McCall, who is rapidly building her own career-criminal resume of drug crimes.

Law enforcement brings them in, the courts set them free. It all costs a great deal of money and causes a lot of damage and grief to others. There are limitations on sentencings, tempered by second, third, fourth chances, but too-tempered when dozens of charges span double-digit years.

McMinnville, of course, cannot balance its budget with implementation of career-criminal laws that could send people to prison for long stretches of community relief from their local presence. But our safety-conscious society needs to find solutions to the high local costs of policing, prosecuting, sentencing and incarcerating the same people over and over and over again.

Oregonians tried decriminalizing drugs and expanding treatment options with Measure 110, but it didn’t work as hoped. Drug-driven career criminals, perhaps, need higher-quality, longer-duration incarceration services.

As just one related warning, in Oregon, seizure of 102,000 fentanyl pills in 2019 jumped to 3,456,000 pills in 2023, plus 390 pounds of fentanyl powder. Resulting deaths are costly, too.

News-Register Publisher Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.