Chaos theory, Portland style
The NW Examiner has a new interview up with Sharon Meieran, a candidate for chair of the Multnomah County Commission. It's softball, to be sure, because Alan Classen, the guy behind the NWE, is smart enough to know that Meieran is by far the best candidate for the job.
I'm with him. One of Meieran's opponents, Shannon Singleton, would continue the dysfunction in county government, or even make it worse, if that's possible. The other candidate, Julia Brim-Edwards, looks to me like mediocrity. For one thing, she's been a prominent Portland school board member for a long time, and the last time I looked, the public schools have become a badly managed money pit. The fact that the county workers' union is gushing over her doesn't exactly inspire confidence, either.
Meieran keeps saying "I'm the only candidate with a plan," and that's right, but I hope she doesn't think that that message alone is going to get her to the finish line. Four years ago, she started off her campaign slowly and almost caught up to the hideous Chevy Vega, but ran out of time. Tomorrow is a new month, and Meieran should start diversifying her talking points.
One thing I love so far is her organizational chart of the county and City of Portland's response to the "homelessness" crisis. It would be hilarious if it weren't so accurate.
She's also demanding accountability on the part of the many nonprofits to whom the county hands money and then stops paying attention.
“They don’t hold any of the nonprofits they contract with to account,” she said. “The county contracts with hundreds of nonprofits, and what I found out as I worked at the county—one of my biggest frustrations—I could never get just a list or itemized description of what they do. What are the goals? How do they tie into the bigger picture?”
The only reliable thing is the steady flow of funding.
“They would just roll over the county’s budget, fund these organizations, maybe tweak a little bit depending on how much money they had or didn’t have,” she said. “And that was how they did business.”
A platform plank of nonprofit accountability is going to cost her some votes – county moolah pays a lot of nonprofit directors' mortgages – but it will win her more than she'll lose, if she'll lead with it. One easy improvement would be to require that every nonprofit receiving grants from the county be in compliance with their financial reporting responsibilities with the IRS. I'll bet many of them aren't. Send the county a copy of your timely filed 990, or no check.
Anyhow, let's hope that by hook or crook, Meieran wins the race and starts kicking butt and taking names at the county. She might even listen to a proposal to merge the county and the city and stop with all the foolishness.
Naming the fools with receipts and transparency would be a really good idea. The hard part would be having the major local media publish it without their usual slant.
ReplyDeleteShe held a rally at one of my watering holes on Friday- I told her she has my vote. You'd think accountability would be an easy sell, but I guess there is a whole class of loafers and grifters that aren't too keen on that.
ReplyDeleteThe Examiner just put up another sneaky chart showing how the fake liberal cry babies have set up a series of shadow groups to hide their nefarious method to gain and keep power. Grifting cockroaches, apologies to cockroaches...
So, she was on the Commission for several years (2017 - 2025), but now she's running on how-irresponsible the Commission is with the non-profits, referring to the people who built the systems that enabled this behavior as "they"-?!
ReplyDeleteDid she try to fix it while she was in a position to do so-?
Hard to see her as some kind of change-agent (but I get the point you're making about the other two).
She’s certainly better than the other two and will get my vote. However, I was really disappointed when she sat on her hands during the Pre-School For All campaign. She didn’t have the courage to speak out against it, as did no other politician that I can think of. Why is it impossible for anyone in this city or county (or state, for that matter) to run on reducing our very high tax burden? Rising costs is the big issue nationally but it doesn’t seem to register here on a local level.
DeleteFrom The O: Meieran served on the board from 2017 to 2024. She ran against Vega Pederson for the powerful post of county chair in 2022, but was ultimately defeated in a runoff election. In the years that followed, she became a stalwart faultfinder of Vega Pederson and her policies. While her go-it-alone style frequently failed to gain her allies or policy wins, she often reframed important conversations and sometimes prompted the board to consider tough questions. But her feud with Vega Pederson at times turned ugly.
DeleteMeieran consistently challenged the feckless chair and did everything one commissioner could do to restore rationality to county government. Unfortunately one or two sane votes on the board is not enough.
DeleteEveryone forgets that this will be a rank-choice election, a
ReplyDelete...and everyone know what kind of aberrations that produces. If AFSCME and the nonprofits can get their membership motivated, they'll sink Meieran with a "don't rank" campaign. I'd put money on their favorite gal, Brim-Edwards, to continue failing upwards.
DeleteThe IRS form 990 for all of those non-profits should be available on line. This form tells, among other things, how much non-profit executives get paid. She should make a list of executives and their annual pay. That would get a lot of people mad enough to vote for her.
ReplyDeleteThey're available on ProPublica, Charity Navigator, the IRS & other sites.
DeleteHave some fun with it! - https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/