Toss-ups

When you're talking about the local government in Portland, you have to be careful about using superlatives. Just when you think you've encountered the worst, along comes another outrage to rival the first.

This week's news stories illustrate my point. For example, which idea is stupider?

1. Covering the Rose Quarter section of the I-5 freeway, which the state can't even afford to maintain properly, to make room for more unwanted high-rise apartment bunkers, all in the name of the extremely vague promise of somehow restoring the Black neighborhood of single-family homes and low-rise businesses that were run out of that location around 60 years ago.

- or -

2. Building a new civic auditorium in partnership with Portland State University, when the university is so broke that it's laying off tenured professors and eliminating majors, and when the drain on public funds will mean that the Keller Auditorium and its adjacent landmark fountain will inevitably be left to rot?

And it isn't just dumbness that sparks the neck-and-neck competitions. There's also hubris. For example which of these two incidents better shows off the arrogance of the current occupants of City Hall?

1.  Holding a "public conversation" about changes to the Lincoln statue on the South Park Blocks, where the public is given no meaningful chance to have its say and the bureaucrats waste everyone's time pontificating about their own opinions and their own virtue.

- or -

2.  Completely ignoring long-established processes and rules surrounding street renaming, so that the ridiculously named "Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard" can now be called the even more absurd "Campesinos Boulevard," a moniker devised by the civic mastermind that is Loretta Smith.

Hard to pick winners, isn't it? All you can ever conclude is "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard (or those are biggest jerks I've ever seen)... until tomorrow."