Insult to injury

If you own a retail business in Portland, it's just a matter of time before your windows and glass doors get broken. When the cops quiet-quit a few years ago, the anarchists, the mentally ill, and the burglars were granted a broad license to break glass at will.

But that's just the start of your troubles. To get your place boarded up, there's a whole city bureaucratic process, with a cozy contractor, and the money flow is more than a little loosey-goosey. The city auditor's been looking for a while now at how that system works (or doesn't), and she's not real pleased with what she found. The not-so-glowing findings are here.

Our 2023 report found that the contractor, Stanley C. Kennedy Enterprises, Inc. (doing business as 1-800 BOARDUP) directly billed and overcharged community members MM for City-initiated emergency board-up requests, in violation of its City contract, and the City did not provide sufficient oversight of the contract.

Community Safety Division Director Mike Myers and other City officials expressed agreement with the recommendations when our report was published last July. However, in the 10 months since, they have not undertaken recommended actions such as notifying the contractor that it was in breach of contract or hiring a firm to audit contractor records. The City has taken some steps to strengthen oversight, such as instituting a process to check that invoices to the City are in line with prices in the contract, but these steps are insufficient to ensure that problems we identified do not persist. As a result of the lack of action, neither the City nor contractor have accounted for past harm done to community members who were wrongfully charged.

Meanwhile, the kook or crook who busted your window will never face any consequences for what they did. Tomorrow night, they'll do it to somebody else. It's The Portland Way™.