Isaac Laquedem

Paul Allen updates the definition of chutzpah

The classic definition of the Yiddish word "chutzpah," meaning something like having the brass to say the unsayable, is that it's the character trait possessed by the man who shot and killed his parents and then pleaded for mercy on the ground that he was an orphan.

Mr. Allen chose to put the Rose Garden arena into bankruptcy, and as a result of his decision, had to give it to the arena's creditors.  Now he wants mercy (in the form of financial assistance) from the government for the Trail Blazers because (he says) the team doesn't have the revenue from the arena's advertising, concessions, and premium seats.  It's nice of Mr. Allen to provide a modern example of this ancient Yiddish word.

The Laquedem Publicly Owned Trail Blazer Elections Plan

Paul Allen has asked the City of Portland and other local governments to chip in to help keep his Trail Blazer basketball team in town.  His minions say that the team will lost $100 million in the next three years if something doesn't change, and one cause of this (I think they're saying) is that Mr. Allen no longer controls the Rose Garden arena, which he took into bankruptcy two years ago and has had to give back to its creditors.  (The Rose Garden creditors now control the courtside and club seating and the skyboxes, and the concessions in the arena, and that revenue doesn't go to the Blazer organization any more.)

It's unsporting for Mr. Allen to blame the financial fall of the Trail Blazers on losing control of the arena without admitting that he lost the arena because he didn't want to pay for it, but he does have a point about the Blazers being in some way a community asset.  Portland is a major league city only by reason of the Blazers being here.  The area has a large pressure group who want the City to seek out (and build an expensive stadium for) a major league baseball team, but it makes more sense to spend our energy to keep the team that's already here.  (There's an analogy to our economic development efforts that I could have drawn at this point.)

But what kind of effort should we put forth?  The City doesn't have any spare money to chip in -- even cancelling the Tram wouldn't cover Mr. Allen's losses -- but we do have some other resources that we can contribute.  I'm thinking in particular of Commissioner Sten's "voter-owned elections" campaign.

One gripe of the diehard Blazer fans is that the Blazer organization makes what to them are incomprehensible personnel decisions, stacking the team with problem cases ranging from the unmotivated to the unsafe.  "I could do much better than the Blazers' personnel department," many of them say.

So let them.

As a first step, in exchange for some sort of subsidy (reduced license fees?  free transit with game tickets?), require the Blazers to install those little instant-feedback gadgets in the club seats and six or eight of the regular arena sections.  As the game progresses, the names of the players will be flashed on the scoreboard, below the words "VOTE NOW!"  The fans in the seats with the gadgets (think of them as the Blazers' version of the Electoral College) set the dials on the 1-to-10 scale for how they think the player's doing.  The team would promise to bench, trade or cut any player who scores below (say) 3 for five games straight.  Or, in the fourth quarter, the fans could select the starting five for the next home game.  (Leave the away games to the coaches.) 

What of the fans who don't get to sit in the lucky seats, or who don't go at all?  That's where the voter-owned elections campaign comes in.  Provide that if (say) 1000 Metro-area voters sign a petition and raise $100,000 to defray the cost of the election, a player of their choice will be put on the ballot for an up-or-down vote.  "Yes" wins?  He stays on the roster.  "No" prevails?  Then he's to be traded or cut.  It's delightfully reminiscent of the ancient Romans pointing their thumbs up or down as the condemned gladiators are brought before them.  And it's sure to pack the arena with hopeful voters.

The Blazers used to be fond of saying that their cadre of loyal fans were their sixth man on the team.  The fans don't want to be the sixth man on the team, but they should have a chance to be the second man in the personnel office. 

Paul Allen takes advantage of Jack's "nice week"

Though I fancy myself as a satirist, I could not have come up with the Oregonian's delightful gag story this morning, about how Paul Allen (reputed to be one of the nation's richest men) is asking the City of Portland (which struggles to balance its budget) for financial help to support the Trail Blazer basketball team.

It is a gag story, isn't it?  Hmmm . . . it's not April 1.  And if it isn't a gag story, you just know there's a pair of itchy hands in Northeast Portland awaiting a Sunday morning date with their owner's keyboard.

Why the City of Portland should admit all its errors by tomorrow

Do you think that the reason the City's releasing more bad news about the South Waterfront cost overruns ($50 million and counting, including $15 million for the tram overrun) is that Professor Bogdanski vowed to write nothing but nice things this week?

A different complaint about the Post Office

Yesterday I received a postcard from the United States Postal Service, addressed to "Postal Customer" at the address of Laquedem Manor, telling me how to buy stamps online.  Though the postcard didn't say how USPS would deliver to me the stamps that I might buy online, I imagine that it would send the stamps through the mail, to the mailbox of "Postal Customer."

I'd be a lot more confident about the ability of USPS to deliver the stamps to me if I hadn't received two other copies of the same postcard, one bearing the address of the Good Doctor next door and the other with an address five streets away.  It astounds me that the Post Office delivers so much of the nation's mail to the right address (though as with everyone else I'm irritated when it delivers mail to the wrong address), but in some schadenfreudish way I'm delighted to see that it misdelivers not just my mail, but its own mail too.

Lawrence Summers exits Harvard, pursued by the tenured faculty

Now and then I think about leaving the frenetic thicket of the business world to pursue a career in the peaceful groves of academe, and invariably a story such as this one will come along to change my mind.  Harvard University announced today that Lawrence Summers, its controversial president for the last five years, will leave is post at the end of this school year.  After taking a year off, he will return to the faculty as a professor.  The University's official announcement lists some of his accomplishments (he has "spurred attention to renewing the undergraduate experience, guided the launch of innovative interdisciplinary initiatives. . ., and strongly expanded Harvard's international agenda.")  The University's statement hints, in polite language, at Dr. Summers's possible reason for stepping down, admitting that the past year "has been a difficult and sometimes wrenching one in the life of the University."  The official statement doesn't say what made the past year "difficult" and "sometimes wrenching."

Unlike Harvard's press office, Reuters is happy to say what made the past year difficult and sometimes wrenching, and does so here.  (Reuters actually says that all five years of Dr. Summers's presidency were turbulent.)  Last year, for example, Dr. Summers said that the reason so few women are academic scientists may be because of innate differences between men and women.  (His actual statement was widely misinterpreted by people who didn't share his knowledge of mathematical statistics.)  A firestorm of criticism broke out.  The faculty, in parliamentary style, took a vote of no confidence in Dr. Summers just under a year ago and was due to take a second vote of no confidence next week.

"I have sought for the last five years to prod and challenge the university to reach for the most ambitious goals in creative ways," Dr. Summers said, one of which was perhaps to push out the well-liked William Kirby, who on January 27 resigned as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences.  Another was to do battle with the senior professors of the African-American Studies department several years ago, which led to many of the professors leaving for other colleges. 

Harvard had a lively five years with Lawrence Summers at its helm.  I predict that it will choose as its next president someone who doesn't give press conferences.

Measure 37 upheld; Oregon supreme court reverses trial court

This morning the Oregon Supreme Court released its opinion on the Measure 37 case, Oregon's property rights initiative from the 2004 election.  Judge Mary Mertens James of the Marion County circuit court had ruled it unconstitutional last year.  The Supreme Court reversed Judge James on all grounds -- it rejected every argument Judge James had used to hold Measure 37 unconstitutional -- and upheld Measure 37 against the challenges of 1000 Friends of Oregon and others.  (I had figured that the supreme court would uphold part of Measure 37, but not that the court would uphold all of Measure 37, let alone without any justice filing a dissenting opinion.)

This was what lawyers call a facial challenge to Measure 37, meaning that the opponents were arguing that Measure 37 violates the Oregon and United States constitutions in how it works generally.  The court soundly and unanimously rejected this challenge.  The court left a little room for people to mount an "as-applied" challenge, meaning to argue that though the measure may be constitutional in general, when applied to their property or their neighbor's property, the measure operates in an unconstitutional manner that's specific to their property.

What are the consequences of this?  I see at least two immediate ones.  First, local governments are going to be slow to adopt new land use regulations, because a government that adopts a new regulation must be prepared either not to enforce it or to pay compensation if it does enforce it.  Second, the Stafford area (the area along Stafford Road between Lake Oswego, West Linn, and Interstate 205) is now effectively inside the urban growth boundary, because it includes some large tracts of land owned by people who bought before Clackamas County adopted a zoning code.  I'm sure there will be other consequences, which I'll go into in another post.

It's time to raise property taxes

The Multnomah County personal income tax is coming to an end, and Portland Public Schools (Multnomah County School District No. 1) reports that it will face a shortfall of $57 million in the next year, meaning (I think) that the County would have contributed about $57 million of income tax revenue to PPS if the tax had remained in force.

The Whimperer today says (1) that schools must be funded, (2) in part through a new tax on cell phones, but (3) the voters are unlikely to adopt any new taxes.  The editorial includes no math, so as a public service I thought I should supply some.

Could we fund PPS's shortfall entirely through a tax on cell phones?   The Whimperer says that a one-year 5% tax on cell phones would raise about $12 million.  That implies that Portlanders pay about $240 million per year for cell phone service.  If the typical user pays $40 per month, or $480 per year, for cell phone service, then to raise $12 million the City would need to include about 500,000 cell phone users.  That number seems high to me, given that the City has only about 475,000 residents, but there may be cell phones billed to City addresses whose users live outside the City, or the average monthly bill may be much larger than $40. 

I don't think the schools will find their answer by tapping cell phones for money.

How about that old standby, the property tax?  Multnomah County publishes some interesting data on property taxes, here.  The link goes to a chart showing the value of assessed property in each of the taxing districts in the county, the tax rate of each district, and the dollars raised by each district.  PPS is raising $148 million from the property tax this year, at a rate of $4.77 per $1000 of assessed value.  (The maximum rate is $5 per $1000, set by state law.)  The shortfall is about 40% of what PPS raises through property taxes.  If PPS could levy a rate 40% higher, that is, about $6.67 per $1000 of assessed value, the property tax revenues would cover the entire shortfall.

What would this mean for the homeowner?  The owner of a $300,000 home is likely assessed and taxed on about $220,000 of property value.  The additional tax of about $1.90 per $1000 of assessed value increases the homeowner's property tax by about $420 per year.  And if the homeowner itemizes deductions without crossing into the despised AMT, Uncle Sam and Uncle Ted pay about $120 of that in the form of reduced income taxes to the homeowner.

The more important fact, from the viewpoint of the individual taxpayer, is how the tax is allocated between people and businesses.  The Multnomah County personal income tax was charged entirely to people and continued the shift of the tax burden from businesses to individuals that's been going on for 15 years.  The property tax affects both residences and income property; the owner of the $300,000 house does pay $420 more in property tax if the school tax can be raised to about $6.60, but the owner of the $30,000,000 shopping center, assessed at about $22,000,000, pays $42,000 more in property tax.

Measures 5 and 50 overshot the mark when they set school taxes at $5 per $1000.  It's time to change that limit to (say) $7.50 per $1000, and to allow any school district, by vote of the people, to levy a tax between $5 and $7.50 per $1000.

The Home Depot takes up where the National Guard left off

I had not known until a few days ago that the Winter Olympics include a ski-shoot biathlon, in which the contestants ski cross-country to a designated point and then shoot at targets.  (Can Vice President Cheney ski?)  The Wall Street Journal reported today that many American biathletes had been in the National Guard, which trains biathletes at the Army Mountain Warfare School in Jericho, Vermont, but that this year's delegation to Torino includes only one National Guardsman among the 10 American biathletes.  Some of the Guardsmen who might have competed are in Iraq, where opportunities to ski are limited, and other top biathletes have left the Guard.  The article contained the intriguing fact that it takes eight years to train a skier to shoot well.

If the biathletes aren't coming from the Army, where are they and the other United States Olympians coming from?  Apparently from the hardware superstore:  the February 6 issue of SCT Xtra, a nesletter from the International Council of Shopping Centers, says that since the 1992 Games about 11% of the American Olympic medalists -- one out of every nine -- have been employees of The Home Depot, and the United States team in Torino includes 33 Home Depot employees.  I didn't find anything on how many Olympians are from Wal-Mart.

More on the two PATIs

Mike Lindberg, chairman of the non-profit corporation that's been pushing the tram, says that the organization has served its purpose and should dissolve.  So says the Tribune, anyway, in today's issue. 

But here's how the Tribune put it:  "Mike Lindberg, chairman of the board of Portland Aerial Tram Inc., said he will recommend dissolving the organization when the group meets Monday afternoon. According to Lindberg, PATI has completed its primary goal of coordinating a design competition for the tram and is not set up to meet the project’s most pressing needs — raising the $15 million needed to complete it or managing the day-to-day construction requirements." 

There's one problem:  Mr. Lindberg's well-done PATI isn't Portland Aerial Tram, Inc.; it's Portland Aerial Transportation, Inc., which is the non-prpfit that coordinated the design competition.  The other PATI, Portland Aerial Tram, Inc., is a for-profit corporation of unknown purpose, formed and apparently headed by Jim Davis.  I wrote about the two PATIs here.  The organizers of the second PATI may have chosen its name to confuse the public, and it's apparently confused either the Tribune or Mr. Lindberg.