“He should have had decades ahead of him,” Nastassia Betcher wrote on GoFundMe. “Instead, everything he had worked so hard for was taken away in a single, preventable moment.”
In Memory of Connor Navarro
The Hillsboro Herald often posts memorial stories for the members of our Community who we have lost. Please email any stories you want told and held in the record here online which now holds over 1,000 stories of the people and events happening here in Hillsboro, Washington County, and our Communities beyond. Our email address is hillsboroherald@gmail.com and you can submit directly through our Contact Us form right here: https://hillsboroherald.com/contact-us/
The Hillsboro Herald: A Note to Our Readers on Corporate Power & Transparency
The Hillsboro Herald is a formally organized LLC under Oregon law. Over the past six years, we have produced nearly 1,000 original news stories. We are a paying member in good standing of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the Online News Association (ONA). Syndicated and amplified via Google News and Newsbreak, our reporting is closing in on 10 million reads.
Despite these undisputed facts, the Hillsboro City Attorney and City Manager continue to block the Herald from attending Executive Sessions, hiding behind the claim that we are “not a news source.”
The City’s Official Stance: “The City has considered your request to attend executive sessions as a representative of the news media… [A] representative of the news media is a news gatherer who has a formal affiliation with an institutional news medium… We do not believe that the Hillsboro Herald currently meets this standard.” The City claims a true news medium must possess attributes like a large paid staff and a specific corporate advertising structure.
The facts say otherwise. The Herald has thousands of dedicated subscribers and consistently provides more localized, hard-hitting Hillsboro news than any traditional “institutional” outlet in the region.
We have been offered pro-bono legal assistance to sue the City of Hillsboro to force access. We choose not to pursue a lawsuit at this time because city resources are already strained, and we prefer to focus our energy on reporting. However, we are confident the Herald meets every legal standard required to pierce the City’s bureaucratic blockade.
We want you, our readers, to know how deeply committed we are to uncovering the stories no one else will touch. It is for you that we exist.
Furthermore, City Manager Hammond recently took it upon himself to email the Hillsboro and Beaverton School Districts and their respective school boards to claim the Herald is merely a “personal website.”
Here is a screenshot from a public email sent by Mr. Hammond to local school boards that was provided to us by one of the Board members. We have raised serious, documented concerns about placing massive industrial data centers directly adjacent to our public schools. This email appears designed to minimize those valid community concerns and undermine our reporting.
The work continues.
It’s interesting that the City of Hillsboro wants to arbitrate who is and isn’t a member of the press at this point. With the city getting plenty of national “real press” coverage for reasons it doesn’t seem altogether comfortable with, would it be happier if a few calls were made to newsrooms in New York and D.C. and outlets with broader readership and viewership were suddenly asking the questions?
Considering that someone had to kick their own career into lower gear after not being able to hack civic HR in Alamoland, I question the wisdom of them checking credentials when their biggest contribution to date is “putting disco lights on overpass.” Stay in your lane, Bobby.
It’s too bad the city is swamped with unnecessary drama from Council. If we could refocus, maybe we could work toward addressing real issues like traffic safety. Nobody should have to lose their life because they chose to travel outside of a car.