The merger

I see that there's somebody else besides me who thinks we ought to scrap the Multnomah County government and fold it into the City of Portland. The governing boards of the two jurisdictions, each pretty useless in its own right, are burning through billions and getting no results on important issues. They're especially bad when they're supposed to be collaborating. Can you say "Central Library"? "Tent handouts"? "Deflection Center"?

So let's do it like the big boys do in California. The City and County of Portland. We'll figure out what to do with Gresham; maybe Hood River County wants them.

The guy spearheading the merger effort is named Mattt (not a typo) Zmuda. He needs 22,000 valid signatures over the next six months to get the idea on the ballot. He'll surely have my John Hancock.

Zmuda, a Pittsburgh native who moved to Portland in 2014, says urban blight drove him to start the effort. “Every time you go out, you’re rolling the dice on whether it’s going to be a traumatic event or not,” he says.

But getting the ball rolling on a merger would be just the beginning of a herculean effort. We'd have to make sure that the idea isn't handed over to a charter commission as disastrous as the one that produced the hideous new version of the Portland City Council. Thirteen months in, all those birds have achieved is a consensus that half of them hate the other half.

With luck, a merger could rejigger the City Council setup. But even if it didn't help there, it would at least free us of the likes of Chevy Vega and the current seat-warmers on the Multnomah County commission. They are an absolute mess.