OPB Audio

North Powder public works director says their office ‘looked like a bomb went off’ due to decades of disorganization.

For most artists, Portland isn’t the place to relocate amid the heights of their career. But for iLoveMakonnen, relocating to Portland from Atlanta offered a space away from the pressure and attention of the music industry, and the opportunity to explore himself. Makonnen joins us to share more about his upcoming performance at the Pride in Demand Queer Takeover and what has kept him in Portland n...

Oregon school districts rely on the state for funds they need to educate students in their schools, but some educators and advocates say the formula they use to allocate those funds is outdated and inequitable. In-depth reporting by The Oregonian/OregonLive describes the way that students in poverty are undercounted, their schools underfunded and details how the resulting cuts are affecting some o...

July 17 is the deadline for Washington counties to mail out ballots to voters. And it’s the first day voters can submit ballots. In the state’s top two primary, an unusual number of state supreme court judicial candidates appear on the ballot. And five of the nine seats will be decided in November. We talk with Sarah Mizes-Tan, state government reporter for KUOW and KNKX, about this unusual turn o...

Despite wildfires becoming more frequent and intense, little is known about how wildlife responds to the threats they present. Researchers at Oregon State University are attempting to shed some light on the issue. A recent study looked at how wildfire smoke affected the behavior of robins. Instead of simply fleeing the smoky conditions, the birds often reduced their activity and shortened their fl...

A new report found that Portland Police Bureau response times for high-priority calls is on average more than 20 minutes. And as reported in Willamette Week, some neighborhoods in Portland can wait as much as 40 minutes. The reports of these delays come as a new city budget is adopted that will lead to cuts to public safety. A PPB-backed proposed measure aims to direct Portland Clean Energy Fund d...

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read recently called for the United States Postal Service to look at its policies around mail pick up on Election Day, after officials in Benton county found some voters’ ballots were left in mailboxes. The postal service has said they prioritize package delivery when staffing is short. Read has also pushed back against the Trump administration’s threats to electio...

When ESPN feature writer Roberto Jose Andrade Franco spent two weeks in Woodburn, Oregon, he met and spoke with a host of community members, from business owners to coaches to artists. Those conversations informed a new piece Franco wrote about the ways the community came alive and together during the World Cup. Franco joins us to discuss his reporting and what he found during his time in Woodburn...

In Oregon’s rural, coastal communities, volunteers are coming together to reimagine what end of life care can look like for aging residents outside of medical settings. Three years ago, Margo Lalich co-founded the North Coast End of Life Collective. She’s a nurse and public health professional who says the COVID-19 pandemic was a “wake-up call” that helped her identify a lack of intentional, commu...

Five years ago, the Oregon legislature declared that racism is a public health crisis. A year later, lawmakers told the Oregon Advocacy Commission’s office to come up with recommendations for how to respond to the crisis. The final report detailing that work was just released. It has information about the status of 100 recommendations, ranging from community safety and social services to education...

Every bus stop, route and schedule is a series of trade-offs. We spent some time ‘At Work With’ TriMet planner Tom Mills to see how Oregon’s largest transit agency decides which buses go where.

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Former congressional candidate Jonathan Lockwood depicted political rivals in a series of outlandish videos.

In the 1920s, Mahjong took the U.S. by storm, rapidly becoming a popular game to play and a household name. More than a century later, Mahjong’s popularity seems to be on the rise again, as Yelp data shows a nearly 4,500% increase in searches for Mahjong in the last year. Annelise Heinz is an associate professor of history at the University of Oregon’s College of Arts and Sciences. She is also the...

Proponents for growing native plants, especially in gardening, argue that because native species adapted and evolved in their surroundings, they are best suited for the climate, habitats and mutually beneficial relationships with species in the area. But does this still ring true as our planet continues to change? Can someone have a garden that mixes both introduced and native species that still b...

It’s been five years since the Portland Clean Energy Fund, or PCEF, gave out its first grants. The fund has grown much more than expected, and various interests have proposed using some of it for non-climate goals. The Community Energy Project is among the local groups that helped create PCEF after voters passed the ballot measure in 2018. The Fund was designed to reduce carbon emissions to help g...

Amid the many return-to-analog trends in the U.S., vinyl records have held their footing as a popular medium since the early 2000s. In 2025, vinyl sales in the U.S. had its best year since the 1980s, and surpassed $1 billion for the first time ever. However, most vinyl record pressing is done overseas, with just over 40 record pressing plants currently manufacturing in the U.S. Object Permanence r...

While Portland is not hosting any World Cup matches, residents of "Soccer City, USA" have been showing up at local sports bars in hoards to view games. Away Days and GOL PDX are both located in Southeast Portland, and have been hubs for World Cup viewing since the matches kicked off on June 11. Co-owners of Away Days, Niki Diamond and Pete Hoppins, and co-owner of GOL PDX Peter Ma hr join us to di...

Prediction market platforms allow people to place bets on a staggering array of outcomes - from the US-Iran conflict to the winner of the World Cup to who Taylor Swift’s bridesmaids will be. Add to that list betting on wildfires. High Country News recently reported that Polymarket, the world’s biggest prediction market platform, accepted bets on the Palisades Fire as it broke out in January 2025 i...

The cuts are just the beginning. The hole in the state’s budget will double as federal funding phases out over time.

Marisa Anderson has been dubbed as one of “this era’s most powerful players,” for her deep and varied interpretations of American music. Her latest album, “The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music,” takes inspiration from folk music from around the world. From Vietnam and Syria, to Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, the album is shaped by songs from countries that have been in conflict with the U.S....

“Death of a Drag Queen” opens on the 60th birthday of fictional queen Cram Brulee. Her water is shut off, an eviction notice is on the door and the friends who are supposed to take her out to celebrate keep pushing back their arrival. Inspired by “Death of a Salesman,” the play follows Cram as she grapples with her own fading relevance and mortality. The play opened at Portland’s Echo theater in D...

Nearly 5 million acres of forest and grasslands in Oregon could be seeing drastic changes under the federal government's new draft plan for the Blue Mountain Forests. The draft, which was recently released to the public, proposes tripling the logging happening across three national forests in the state’s Blue Mountain region. While some are hopeful this could boost timber jobs that have declined i...

The public university that received $3.3 million in public funds to build a daycare center that doubled as a workforce training pipeline closed after just 11 months.

Several days a week, Quinn Brown will head to Goodwill stores in the Portland area to spend hours at a time sifting through blue bins to look for clothes to resell on the secondhand clothing site Depop. Brown launched his business reselling vintage clothes in 2023, when he was a junior at Lincoln High School. He says his items sell on average for $13 and the biggest sale he’s netted to date was $2...