Falling down
Sophie, Flower Child of the Weed, has a looooong article up today about a simple story: The City of Portland has let its vehicle maintenance garage over by Emanuel Hospital rot to the point that it's not worth saving.
It's classic Portland politician stuff. Nobody wants to maintain anything. They want to build shiny new projects so that they can have their picture taken cutting the ribbon.
And it's classic City Hall car hater, too. We've got bottomless pots of money for bike toys, "road diets," and Sunday Parkways, but we can't fix a leaky roof or a gaping pothole without new taxes.
The light poles in the parks are falling over, hurting people. The soccer fields are so bad the high school kids can't play on them. There's no money to clean up graffiti. It goes on and on.
But "Albina Vision," people! Cover the freeways for the developers! They're always Priority 1.
Anyway, I kind of drifted off about halfway through the piece in the Weed. I'm sure Sophie was getting wound up to really Stick It To The Man™, and I just couldn't bear to read the whole precious thing. She's right about the neglect, but the rest of the screed is for some other reader.
The lack of maintenance by all government entities can be traced to 1990's Ballot measure 5. Budgets for maintenance started to decline, to the point of disappearing completely. (Disclosure - I worked in the public sector in the 90s, and prepared many a budget.) The end game now is big, billion dollar bonds, which fit kind of around and between Measure 5 limits. The reality is, no government can live on a 3% increase per year, so maintenance cuts, and the real reason for the city (and now statewide) "sustainability" infill, revenue from the increased property value. I would also bet the city will propose a billion dollar bond to fix streets, in the next two years.
ReplyDeleteGovernment can live on 3% a year if it stops spending money on crap.
DeleteMeasure 5 is blamed every time the public sector and big spending supporters want to spend more money .
DeleteIf you think property taxes are too high now, for the services provided, before measure 5 property taxes were around 30 dollars a thousand and growing.
It is time for big spending politicians and agencies to learn to live within their growing budgets and new programs.
It strikes me that there's a straight forward accounting problem: large capital projects to create new projects with no underlying operational expenses to maintain them. Since there's no mandate to maintain buildings, the operational expenses shifted from maintenance to payroll. This is how we've added tons of head count, tons of buildings/projects. If we fired a lot of these useless bureaucrats there'd be plenty of money for maintenance.
DeleteMost of the “management”bureaucrats on the city payroll don’t manage. It’s naive to think that’ll change until someone with a backbone gets elected.
ReplyDeleteI have long felt that we need a citizen's initiative that provides that no government jurisdiction can build anything new unless an outside independent auditor (a real one) certifies that all property owned by the jurisdiction is currently properly maintained.
ReplyDelete"We've got bottomless pots of money for bike toys, "road diets," and Sunday Parkways, but we can't fix a leaky roof or a gaping pothole without new taxes. "
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome
you should see our navy
ReplyDeleteIt's a really great article, and toward the end the case is made that the city is incompetent to manage assets like that, and they should just lease buildings instead. Not wrong, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteHey I got an idea (that will NEVER see the light of day). How about do a real survey about what type of services and projects the tax payers are willing to pay for? Then cut every thing else from the budget. There should be tons of money.
ReplyDeletePoliticians like ribbons, not brooms.
ReplyDelete"Everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
ReplyDeleteThere is a pot hole on S Taylors Ferry Rd. on the down hill lane next to the cemetery that is a severe hazard. Makes people tend to cross into oncoming traffic to avoid it. It's so big I wonder how can this be ok?
ReplyDelete