Axios Portland

September 17, 2025
🧠 It's Wednesday. Take some of the tension out of your brain. When's the last time you did that?
Today's weather: Sunny and clear. High around 80, low near 57.
🎸 Sounds like: "Now I'm In It" by HAIM, who play Edgefield tonight. Find tickets.
Today's newsletter is 789 words — a 3-minute read.
1 big thing: 🍽️ Restaurants rally for recovery
For National Recovery Month, roughly three dozen Portland-area restaurants will donate a portion of their sales to support a local nonprofit providing low-barrier addiction treatment and support services.
Why it matters: The service industry's long-held "work hard, play hard" ethos is changing.
- "Ten years ago it was unheard of to finish your shift and choose a bottle of water. You'd be laughed at," Gabriel Rucker, chef-owner of Canard and Le Pigeon, told Axios. "These days it's like, 'Hell yeah.'"
The big picture: The Alano Club's Restaurants for Recovery initiative, now in its fourth year, aims to raise awareness for overdose prevention and recovery efforts in Oregon.
- Research shows that hospitality workers are the most at risk for illicit drug use compared with those in other industries.
How it works: Participating restaurants — including the Sports Bra, Yaowarat, Sousòl, JoJo and Estes — are featuring one menu item each throughout September, with a portion of the dish's sales going to the Alano Club.
- The nonprofit hosts 12-step meetings, sobriety-focused social events, fitness and meditation classes and financial workshops, and it provides treatment, mental health and peer support.
- It also is one of the largest suppliers of cost-free naloxone in the state.
- "Our work is always to identify where people are falling through the cracks and then build support around that," Kasey Anderson, the nonprofit's executive director, told Axios.

What they're saying: As a former service worker in recovery himself, Anderson saw the industry changing — through restaurant run clubs, late-night yoga and non-alcoholic drinks. He wanted to couple that shift with awareness for accessible support systems.
- "As much as this is about highlighting recovery, it's also about highlighting community," he said.
- Since launching Restaurants for Recovery in 2021, the number of participating restaurants has grown from four to 34.
The bottom line: "Things are shifting in a major, major way," said Rucker, who is approaching 12 years of sobriety next month. "Not good for my business, but good holistically for us as a culture."
2. Rose City Rundown
🎤 Rapper Cardi B will perform at the Moda Center this February as part of her "Am I the Drama?" album tour. (Axios)
🌳 The City of Portland is teaming up with Friends of Trees again to plant 15,000 new trees over the next three years thanks to $40 million from the clean energy fund. (The Oregonian)
- Let's just hope they remember to water them this time around.
✍️ Former mayor Ted Wheeler wrote in a new op-ed that President Trump's recent threats to send federal troops to Portland is just a repeat of 2020, which "caused lasting damage to our citizens' livelihoods and our city's reputation." (Newsweek)
🏥 Providence will close its pediatric intensive care unit at St. Vincent's in November as the health system works to stem a $100 million operating loss. (OPB)
🚶 Plans to build a pedestrian bridge connecting Chimney Park north of the St. Johns Prairie over Columbia Boulevard is in the works. (Portland Business Journal)
🏫 The projected cost to modernize, and seismically retrofit, three Portland high schools — Ida B. Wells, Cleveland and Jefferson — has ballooned to $1.4 billion, despite design reductions. (The Oregonian)
3. ↘️ Proficiency scores continue to slide

Graduating high school seniors are less adept at reading and math than before the pandemic, according to a new national education report.
Why it matters: The data is the latest evidence students are still struggling to recover from COVID-era learning loss and comes as the Trump administration wants to dismantle the Education Department.
- These are the first post-pandemic National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for each category. The exams were administered between January and March 2024.
- Declines in academic performance began before the COVID-19 pandemic.
What they found: About 35% of twelfth graders were academically prepared for college reading in 2024, down from 37% in 2019.
Behind the scenes: 31% of twelfth graders reported missing three or more days of school in the month before taking the assessment in 2024, compared to 25% in 2019.
Threat level: Average eighth grade science scores also fell in 2024 for the first time since the assessment started in 2009.
Zoom in: In a move to address Oregon's near-bottom-of-the-barrel test scores, Gov. Tina Kotek signed a law in June tying new accountability metrics — like proficiency, attendance and graduation rates — to school district funding.
📽️ Meira is remembering Robert Redford by rewatching "Barefoot in the Park."
😌 Kale is on vacation.
This newsletter was edited by Hadley Malcolm.
Sign up for Axios Portland





