Isaac Laquedem

Isaac's 2023 Tax Day reading from A.P. Herbert

Each year at tax time we divert from our support of democratic socialism to think of Sir Alan Patrick Herbert (1890-1971), the British social reformer, member of Parliament from Oxford University (there really was such a post, elected by the alumni), lover of the Thames, playwright, and under the name of A.P. Herbert, a frequent perpetrator of light verse.  Some years, this one included, the tax bite is severe enough to quote from his work.  This month's assortment of impositions is painful not so much because of the amount but by the sheer number of the incoming mosquitos, each looking to take its little bite from the Laquedem thousands under the guise of making work for the post office and the Loyal Accountant.  The outgoing checks and the upcoming ballot measure to add another tax to the menagerie have put me in mind today of this early Herbert verse: 

Well, fancy giving money to the Government!
Might as well have put it down the drain.
Fancy giving money to the Government!
Nobody will see the stuff again.
Well, they've no idea what money's for --
Ten to one they'll start another war.
I've heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor'!
Fancy giving money to the Government!

Our genial support of the social welfare system will return on Tuesday.

Endorsements V - that famous ballot measure to rejigger the Portland City Council

Back in a bygone era of tech, someone had the bright idea to combine a television with a video cassette recorder, figuring that viewers would want to both record shows directly from their television, and play back videotapes through their television.  The idea was sound; the execution was not.  The manufacturers combined not-very-good screens with not-very-good VCRs.  They ended up with not-very-good appliances. 

Portland's measure 26-228, proposed by the Portland Charter Commission that was appointed for this purpose, would increase the city council from 5 to 12 and divide the city into districts, with three councilors elected from each district.  Under the proposal the mayor would have the right to introduce ordinances and break tie votes, but would not be a member of the city council.  The mayor's primary function would be to supervise the City Administrator, a new position.

Measure 26-228 would also change how the city counts votes.  The mayor and city auditor would be elected by ranked-choice voting, a system used in some other American cities that allows a candidate in a crowded race who is no one's first choice but everyone's second or third choice a shot at being elected.  The city councilors, however, would be chosen by a sort of hybrid method (think TV plus VCR here) in which voters would rank their candidates by preference, as with ranked-choice voting.  The difference comes in how the ballots are counted.  Let us suppose that 90,000 ballots are marked in a particular council district, with three persons to be elected.  The three persons would each need 30,000 votes to be elected.  Now imagine that the race has attracted seven candidates (call them A through G, like notes on a scale).  If 42,000 people mark A as their first choice, then A will keep 30,000 of those votes and be elected.  The other 12,000 votes of A will be reallocated to the second choices of those voters.  After the excess A ballots are allocated, the lowest of the remaining 6 candidates, let's say it's candidate G, will be eliminated, and G's votes will be reallocated to the voter's second choice, if the second choice is not A, who has already been elected, or  G because it's a transferred vote of someone who ranked A first and G second.  I think those ballots get reallocated to the voters' third choices.

Then the process starts anew with the candidates B, C, D, E, and F.  If one of them now (let's say it's B) has more than 30,000 votes then B is elected and the excess votes of B are now allocated among C, D, E, and F, who may have been ranked second, third, or fourth on those ballots.  The lowest finisher, let's say it's now F, is eliminated, and F's votes are allocated among C, D, and E.  The process may continue for one or two more rounds, depending on how the votes are cast. 

One problem with devising a vote-counting method for a race with more than two candidates is that in 1951 Kenneth Arrow proved that it is impossible to design a vote-counting system that is assured to yield a winner and that satisfies five basic requirements of fairness: first, that it not produce a cyclical result in which the voters prefer A to B, B to C, C to D, and D to A; second, that the result does not always match the preferences of any particular individual (i.e., no dictatorship); third, that it can handle any possible combination of voting alternatives (e.g., people who vote for fewer than the maximum number of candidates, or who have odd orders of preference); fourth, that it respect head-to-head alternatives (e.g., if more than half of the voters rank A above B, then A will finish the count ahead of B); and fifth, that the system respects unanimous individual preferences (e.g., if everyone ranks A above B, then under no circumstances can B win and A lose).   One person of the many who submitted public comments, James Kahan, mentioned Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.  I don't know if the Charter Commission discussed it, and ranked-choice voting survived for the mayor's and auditor's seats but not for the city council.

What did survive for the city council is a kludge - a collection of ill-fit parts without a coherent design.  The Charter Commission had a good idea when it proposed to remove the "commissioner" part of the city council's duties and to make them simply councilors to establish policy that the mayor, through the city administrator, would then implement.  I'll agree that we are ready to elect councilors from districts to ensure that each part of the city is known to someone on the council, which is rarely the case.  (The Laquedem memory goes back to a time when four of the five councilors lived in Irvington or Alameda.)  I'm not persuaded that the council has any systemic problem that we can solve by tripling its size and converting the governing body from a council to a jury-sized debating forum.  I recommend a NO vote on Measure 26-228.  I look forward to the proposal that Commissioner Mapps intends to bring forth in the spring.

 

Endorsements IV - A Clackamas County race and the Portland City Council

Isaac briefly diverts from the Rose City to look southward to Clackamas County and its most important race on the 2022 ballot, which is neither of the races for the county commission, but the campaign for county clerk, in which Catherine McMullen, a Multnomah County elections administrator, is challenging longtime incumbent Sherry Hall.  The most visible function of the county clerk is to supervise the county's elections.  Ms. Hall has racked up an impressive number of unforced election errors since she was first elected in 2002, amassing enough mistakes and bad conduct to fill a Willamette Week article in 2012.  In the ten years since then she's continued to fumble county elections, which WW helpfully compiled into another article this summer.  Voters in Clackamas County should give the office an upgrade that's long overdue, and replace Ms. Hall with Catherine McMullen.

One position on the Portland City Council is on next week's ballot.  Incumbent Jo Ann Hardesty and businessman Rene Gonzalez are in a runoff for a council seat.  Mr. Gonzalez has made street crime and homelessness centers of his campaign.  Commissioner Hardesty responds that she led the push to improve Portland Street Response, a non-police response to persons having crises of mental health, and has supported funding increases for permanent housing.  Underlying their debate is the City's interpretation of a Ninth Circuit case from 2018, Martin v, City of Boise, which some believe bars Portland from prohibiting the homeless from camping outdoors.

Before I turn to the Martin case, let's start with some data.  Since at least 2009 Multnomah County has conducted biennial censuses of homeless persons, though the census scheduled for 2021 was postponed to January 2022.  Homeless persons are counted in three categories: the unsheltered (people living outdoors, in tents, and in cars), people in shelters, and people in transitional housing.  From 2009 to 2019 the number of homeless persons counted in Multnomah County was fairly constant, ranging from 3801 in 2015 to 4655 in 2011.  The unsheltered population was also fairly constant, ranging between 1,591 in 2009 and 2,037 in 2019, with a typical number being about 1,800.

Something changed between 2019 and 2022, because the 2022 census found 5,228 homeless people in Multnomah County (up 30% from 2019), of whom 3,057 were unsheltered, living in tents or cars - up an astonishing 50% from 2019 and unique in the tri-county area.  (Over the same three-year period Clackamas County's count of the unsheltered fell from 371 to 327, a 9% drop, and Washington County's count of the unsheltered went from 232 to 227, essentially flat.) 

What has changed since 2019?  Isaac suggests these four factors, one of which is unique to Portland and another to Multnomah County.  The first is that in 2020 Oregon voters approved Measure 110, which decriminalized possession of many ordinary street drugs for personal use.  Measure 110 was billed as replacing drug policing with drug treatment.  The drug policing has stopped; the drug treatment has not started.  (Read what OPB said about Measure 110 last year.)  Consequently demand for street drugs has increased, and with it the customers' search for funds with which to buy drugs.  Glass repair shops and street-level retailers have become the involuntary funders.

Second is that even as Portland worked to get people off the street and into shelter, Multnomah County happily handed out tents and tarps to enable homeless persons to continue to live outside.  Last year Multnomah County distributed 6,550 tents to the homeless in the county, meaning mainly to people living on Portland streets and in Portland parks, which is somewhere between two and three tents for each unsheltered person in the county.

Third is that Portland took Martin v. City of Boise as barring the city from removing tents and prohibiting public camping unless the city could provide shelter to every unsheltered person in the city.  On this point I believe the city erred.  This short piece in the Harvard Law Review explains the ins and outs of the Martin decision in detail.  My take is that the decision prohibits cities from prosecuting the homeless for sleeping in public at night if shelter beds are available.  If not enough shelter beds are available on a particular night to accommodate all unsheltered persons in the city, then the city may not criminalize those who sleep without shelter.  It may, however, restrict sleeping and camping to designated areas; it may prohibit camping in other areas; it may continue to prosecute the unsheltered who take and dismantle cars.

That brings me to the fourth factor, and back to the city's election.  The fourth factor is that the city council and the Multnomah County district attorney have sent a clear message to the Police Bureau to stop enforcing minor laws, in particular property crimes.  Commissioner Hardesty led that message, both by securing a $15 million cut in the police budget and in pushing to cut another $18 million and 42 vacant police positions, a move that failed in 2020 and is one of the causes of downtown Portland's pandemic of broken windows.

The happy day when county prosecutors will revise their priorities must await the election of 2024.  Portland voters can take one small step toward refreshing the city by giving Rene Gonzalez the chance to argue his policies as a city councilor.

 

The Port of Portland is still bigger than it thinks

Back in 2008, I wrote this post about how The Port of Portland (the "The" is part of its official name) was bigger than it thought.  When the legislature first established the Port nearly 60 years ago to absorb the Portland Dock Commission and run as a state agency, the legislature defined "Portland metropolitan area" in ORS 778.005 to be "the Oregon portion of a standard metropolitan statistical area as designated and published by the United States Bureau of the Budget with an Oregon population of more than 750,000.  The area that qualified consisted of Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas Counties.  ORS 778.010 then defined the Port district to be the Portland metropolitan area, resulting in the Port district being those three counties.

A funny thing happened in the 1980s.  The federal government did away with the term "standard metropolitan statistical area," replacing it with "metropolitan statistical area."  The federal government also redefined the Portland MSA to include Columbia and Yamhill Counties.

The Port took no notice that the federal government had given it two additional counties, and in 2008 continued to believe that its district included only three counties.  It believes that even today, saying on its website that "at least two commissioners must each live in one of the three counties in the Port district."  Could the federal government add two counties to the Port district by changing the SMSA/MSA definition?  Perhaps not - a Port lawyer might argue that the definition of "Portland metropolitan area" must be read as it was in the 1960s when the legislature created the Port.

However, in 2009 the legislature amended ORS 778.005 to say that "Portland metropolitan area" means "the Oregon portion of a metropolitan statistical area as designated by the United States Office of Management and Budget with an Oregon population of more than 750,000."  In 2009 that sentence described Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas Counties -- and Columbia and Yamhill Counties also, all of which were in the only metropolitan statistical area with more than 750,000 Oregon residents. 

Whether or not Columbia and Yamhill Counties were in the Port district before the 2009 amendment, the legislature unambiguously brought them into the Port district in 2009.  The legislature may have meant to leave the boundaries unchanged, but when legislation is plain and clear, the intent of the legislators isn't relevant.  As A.P. Herbert famously said about another legislature, "If Parliament does not mean what it says then it should say so."

Is this odd fact significant?  Maybe.  ORS 778.210(1) requires the Governor to appoint two Port commissioners from each county in the district.  Neither the  current governor nor any prior governor has ever appointed the required two commissioners from Columbia County and Yamhill County.  Someone in a battle with the Port might argue that as the Port's commission has not been properly constituted since 2009, perhaps the commission doesn't have the authority to do anything. 

I have no dog in that prospective fight, but if I lived in Yamhill County I might write to the Governor and ask to be appointed to the Port board.

Three stories on transparency in government become clearer if you read them together

Three stories in today's Oregonian deserve to be linked together.  First is this piece by Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, appearing on page A6.  He reports that the Portland City Council has agreed to pay $250,000 to attorney Jeff Merrick and the Dunn Carney law firm for the attorney fees they incurred to challenge the city's refusal to comply with Mr. Merrick's request for public records of telephone and e-mail complaints about homeless camps.  When the district attorney ruled in 2018 that the records Mr. Merrick wanted were indeed public, he asked for $52,000 to cover his attorney fees incurred in pursuing the request.  The city objected, and the trial court denied his request.  Last year the court of appeals reversed the trial court and directed that the city pay his fees, which had by then mounted to $375,000.  They settled on the city paying $250,000. 

Almost as stunning as the news that the city council's commitment to secrecy had dug a $250,000 hole for the city was the reaction of Commissioners Jo Ann Hardesty and Mingus Mapps.  Mr. Kavanaugh reported that Commissioner Hardesty "praised city attorneys for their 'steadfast commitment' [her words] to withholding information that could place 'public servants in harm's way' and said the city should lobby state lawmakers to add new public disclosure exemptions."  Nothing in the story, however, suggests that Mr. Merrick sought the home addresses of any city employees.  Commissioner Mapps's stance was more nuanced than Commissioner Hardesty's pro-secrecy view; the article quoted him as saying "I understand the need for transparency and I value transparency.  But, at the same time, I also feel like this rule that the courts have imposed on us is a violation of the public trust."  

The second story, on page A9, is by Noelle Crombie, who reports that Governor Brown's office "demanded the Oregon Department of Corrections find out if an employee revealed the governor's controversial plan to commute the sentences of hundreds of juveniles serving time for violent crimes."  Governor Brown herself confirmed to the newspaper that her office wanted to know how the Oregonian got a copy of her September 28 letter to the Director of Corrections that laid out the governor's plan.  The Director of Corrections, Colette Peters, then had staff go through the e-mail accounts of "about two dozen employees" to find the leaker.  Nothing turned up.  The irony is that the governor's letter was a public record.  Amber Campbell, speaking for the Department of Corrections, said "this document being referenced is a public record, so even if the search concluded that an employee distributed from a DOC server to the Oregonian, we would not and could not discipline that employee."

I don't know Noelle Crombie.  I suspect that she has an engaging sense of humor, for four paragraphs later she cheekily writes, "Brown campaigned on transparency and criticized her predecessor, Gov. John Kitzhaber, for failing to make it a priority."  Ms. Crombie also mentions that a paralegal at the Oregon Justice Resource Center also wanted information about the letter, because he "suspected it was intended to undermine the governor's 'internal communications' with the agency."

That brings me to the third story, written by Maxine Bernstein and printed on page A12.  You may have read a few weeks back that the Department of Corrections put Mark Wilson, a state prisoner convicted of murder, into 120 days of solitary confinement because a prison librarian (a state employee) as a joke had put a toy telephone on the library desk where Mr. Wilson often worked, which the department considered to be contraband.  (Never mind that a state employee put it in front of him.)  He is suing the state for damages.  The state's defense?  The state asserts that Mr. Wilson was collaborating with the Oregon Justice Resource Center (see previous story!) to give OJRC "access to prison affairs," and Mr. Wilson's lawsuit is a put-up job with OJRC.  Ms. Bernstein also reports that the Director of Corrections, Colette Peters (see previous story again!) "staunchly defended her department's actions [in putting Mr. Wilson into solitary confinement] before a legislative committee earlier this month.  'While bringing in a [toy] phone might seem like child's play, it is something that's very serious, and both the employee and the AIC (adult in custody) must be held responsible."

A cynic (who, me?) might say that the city council should be spending money to make records public, not to hide them; that in her final year in office our governor should be honoring her pledge to keep government open, instead of emulating Richard Nixon's plumbers; and that instead of inventing a silly reason to throw an inmate into solitary confinement for four months to cut off contact with an outside watchdog, the Department of Corrections should be fixing the problems that the watchdog has been barking about.  I am not that cynic; I'm merely a taxpayer who's bemused by how open our elected officials are about their efforts to keep government secret.

Where City Hall should stick the South Park Blocks

Portland Parks & Recreation (what old-timers call the "Parks Bureau") has proposed a master plan for the twelve South Park Blocks, the strip of greenery that stretches from Jackson Street north to Salmon Street, where the Mausoleum Club stops further northward progress.  The plan calls for replacing the stately elm trees that now define the Park Blocks with a mix of other trees. 

Critics (and there are many, including former Parks Commissioner Mike Lindberg, and Professor Bogdanski) differ on whether the Bureau wants to replace the elms over the next several decades as they age out, or intends to cut them down in short order and then replant.  The Bureau says that "many of them are reaching the end of their designed lifespans" (Master Plan, page 9), and it proposes a new design for the Park Blocks that it says "improves the park's resiliency to impacts of climate change; adds art, design elements, and planting treatments that reflect more diverse cultural histories and identities; addresses existing accessibility challenges; creates more flexible, safe, and inclusive spaces; and converts underused street space for park users."  (Master Plan, page 11).

The plan has drawn most of its fire for its proposal to remove many of the elms, whether by normal aging or with mechanical assistance.  The plan has two other failings, either of which will justify the City Council in sending the plan back to the Parks Bureau with an earnest plea to do better.  

The first failing is that under the guise of addressing "existing accessibility challenges" to what is, after all, a collection of flat and nearly level parks (the average grade from north to south is only 3%), all wheelchair-accessible, the Bureau proposes to add hardscape and reduce the earthen area.  The second failing, related to the first, is that the Bureau proposes to add clutter to the blocks.  I'm using "clutter" broadly to mean things that aren't related to any function of a greenspace park.  For example, the Bureau wants to add an interpretive display about Vanport (the temporary wartime city that occupied a site near Delta Park until the Vanport Flood of 1948) to the Park Blocks because Portland State University began in 1946 as the Vanport Extension Center in Vanport, moving to the former Lincoln High School building in 1952.  It's history worth commemorating, and Portland State University has done so on campus, but it doesn't have anything to do with the Park Blocks.

The Bureau estimates the project to cost $2 million to $4 million per block.  Consider whether the Bureau could do more to make greenery accessible to Portland, and resolve some equity issues that have festered for decades, if it devoted the money for even one block to adding street trees in the least-shaded and most neglected areas of Portland, for example, in St. Johns and outer Northeast.  If the Parks Bureau wants to be woke, it should start in the areas that need its help the most.

Endorsements 2: NO on the Metro transportation tax

Who has not had the temptation at an all-you-can-eat buffet (remember them?  They're a pre-Covid thing) to take some of everything, on the reasonable ground that once you've agreed to pay the fixed price for the meal, all the food is free.  The food is even more delicious when someone else has to pay for it.

A long time ago Metro's transportation wage tax proposal, Measure 26-218, started life with good intentions, and then its planners discovered the buffet line.  Metro proposes to tax private employers with more than 25 employees up to 0.75% of their payroll.  Metro put the measure on the ballot without committing to a specific tax rate.  At the maximum allowed rate, an employer with 26 employees who are paid an average of $50,000 each would pay $9,750/year in additional taxes.

Metro has designed its proposal to appeal to the voters as much as possible:  first, by scattering the gravy far and wide across the region, promising not just light rail to Tigard (the main consumer of the future revenues) but also to highway, bike, and sidewalk projects from Cornelius on the west to the near edge of Gresham on the east, and second, by designing the tax in the spirit of that old verse from the 1930s:  "Congress, Congress, don't tax me; tax that fellow behind the tree."  (Senator Russell Long later popularized a slightly different version of the idea.)

The measure's proponents boast about that feature, pointing with pride to the fact that "91% of our region's businesses are exempt from the tax."  What is not to like about a tax that provides goodies for nearly everyone and puts the bite on hardly anyone?

Well, for starters: 

1.    The tax marks Metro's entry into the field of big-ticket transportation, a new venture for the agency.  The field is already occupied by many other jurisdictions, including cities, counties, the Oregon Department of Transportation, and TriMet.  On a deep level Metro's request tacitly acknowledges that those units of government are failing at dealing with transportation issues, or that they have simply decided that issues other than transportation are more important to their citizens.

2.    Related to point 1, Metro plans to spend a significant part of the funds to remedy the deficiencies of those other units of government, for example, by building sidewalks for students that the City of Portland has not seen as a priority, by improving pedestrian crossings on state highways that ODOT has messed up, and by stepping into the minefield of reducing gentrification in Portland's Albina district.

3.    Metro won't say what the actual tax rate will be, nor how long it will keep the tax in effect.

A cynic (who, me?) might surmise that Metro included the other suburban projects in the measure as inducements to voters to make their bosses chip in to pay for a light rail line to serve a corridor that already has two major arterials, Interstate 5 and Barbur Boulevard.  The more fundamental reason that I'm voting against Measure 26-218 is that until Metro demonstrates a compelling reason for the voters to let it enter the field of big-concrete transportation, it should focus on improving its current services.

Vote NO on 26-218.

Endorsements 1 (The Portland City Council): Wheeler and Mapps

A wise man I knew used to say that it's good to know a senator, but it's much more useful to know the mayor.  With that in mind, I'm starting endorsement season with the Portland city council. 

The Mayor's race is not about whom to vote for so much as it is about whom to vote against.   Mayor Wheeler came to the position with a record of accomplishment as a county commissioner (think of the Sellwood Bridge) and as state treasurer.  Unfortunately for his reputation he then took on the mayoralty of Portland.  His four years in office reminds me of Warren Buffett's famous line, "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."

Portland's City Hall has fairly earned a reputation for the civic equivalent of bad economics, as a government that can barely govern itself.  Mr. Wheeler's record met City Hall's reputation, and at the end of his term it is the reputation of City Hall that has remained intact.  Against a candidate with a modicum of business and political experience it would be an easy call to give someone else a chance to try and fail and to endorse the challenger.

And yet this year's challenger, Sarah Iannarone, falls short of the mark.  She proposes platefuls of ideas, some good, some unusual, and some simply out of the city's realm.  She identifies the pressing need to bring the police department back under city control, and then wanders off into creating standards for the lockdowns of public buildings, including schools, which are not under city control.  She proposes to "get big money out of politics" (a quotation from her website) but also to establish a public bank, an instrument for patronage politics.  If Mr. Wheeler has done too little in facing the challenges of 2020, Ms. Iannarone's agenda is too much.  I reluctantly favor giving the Mayor another term.

By contrast, the other City Council race is an easy call.  Incumbent Chloe Eudaly faces a strong challenge from the hypertalented Mingus Mapps.  Commissioner Eudaly's signature accomplishment of her term has been to impose local rent and eviction control and levy annual registration fees on landlords, a measure on its face designed to protect tenants that has had the predictable effect of encouraging owners of rental houses to sell rental houses to homeowners and get out of the rental business.  It's also had the effect of steering apartment builders to friendlier cities.  (One prominent apartment developer has shut down its Portland operation entirely.)  Construction is still continuing, but in a different form -- in the past two years nearly half of the new condominium projects in Multnomah County have four or fewer units.  Instead of building rental duplexes and fourplexes, developers are replacing rental houses with owner-occupied plexes.

Commissioner Eudaly's other major misstep was to propose sweeping changes to reduce the voices of neighborhood associations in land use planning decisions.  Although after the fact she said that she intended her proposal to bring more voices to the table, her proposal was directed at reducing neighborhood voices - most egregiously in providing that neighborhood associations would not have to abide by open-meeting laws.  The strident voices of neighborhood associations are why a freeway doesn't run next to Division Street.  Portlanders may confidently vote to replace Commissioner Eudaly with Dr. Mapps.

Endorsements Zero: a general thought on taxation

If one of the three main selling points of a request that you approve a new tax is that you won't have to pay the tax -- it's a tax entirely on other people, or on businesses, or on sales of things that you don't buy -- then the promoters are tacitly admitting that the cause isn't good enough to spend your own money on -- or theirs either, if the promoters are all exempt from the tax themselves.  I'll be elaborating on this thought later in endorsement season.

If people moving to Portland are causing our housing crisis, the city should take one simple step

... which is to instruct Prosper Portland to cease at once all efforts to attract new employers to Portland, and instead encourage job growth (if at all) only in Clark County.