Isaac Laquedem

No Peloton for Christmas? Those two contentious jobs at the Port of Portland cast a long shadow

Readers with long memories will recall that in 2014 the ILWU and the electricians' union fought over two jobs at Terminal 6, the Port of Portland's container facility on the Columbia River (pictured).  The question was whether the task of plugging power cords into refrigerated containers was properly allocated to the ILWU (because the containers were sitting on docks) or to the electricians (because the task involved wiring).  The fight between the unions turned into a general slowdown that drove container shipping away from Portland in 2017.  One freight line tenuously returned (one ship a week) in early 2020, just before the pandemic struck. 

The idled union workers might ask their leadership to read this story about the Port of Los Angeles, the busiest port on the west coast.  Shipping times from China to Los Angeles have ballooned from 2 weeks to 7 or 8 weeks.  The ships still chug across the Pacific Ocean at the same speed -- until they get to Los Angeles, where they sit and wait offshore for weeks with their cargoes of Pelotons and other Christmas gifts (now Twelfth Night gifts?) before they can dock and unload.  Everyone involved justly blames the Covid-19 pandemic.  The delays in unloading in Los Angeles are so great that many importers paid extra - a lot extra - to have their goods flown to the United States instead of taking their chances on being marooned offshore.

Consider the Port of Portland's nearly idle Terminal 6, its facility for handling shipping containers.  Certainly the warring unions couldn't have predicted in 2014 that a worldwide pandemic would strike in 2020.  But they might have considered that anything that caused a slowdown at a larger west coast port might encourage freight companies to divert their ships to Terminal 6, and keep their members employed.

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 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.

Maybe it's time to move Tubman Middle School farther from the freeway

I've been amused watching the conniptions of our local politicos about the two most significant obsolete portions of our local freeway system: the Interstate Bridges and the Rose Quarter section of Interstate 5. I sense there's a lot of overlap between those who are pushing to replace the two three-lane Interstate Bridges with two new three-lane bridges (on the one hand) and those who oppose widening the two two-lane sections of Interstate 5 where the Rose Quarter has grown up around it. That section of Interstate 5 is the only urban section of Interstate 5 between Canada and Mexico that hasn't been widened to six lanes - even in Eugene, Salem, Ridgefield, and Castle Rock (population 2,234) this vital commercial link has six lanes.

I've read only one sound objection to improving the Rose Quarter section to match the rest of the urban freeway, which is that Harriet Tubman Middle School is next to the freeway and widening the freeway would make the air quality at the school even worse. I don't begrudge that objection - the school was built in 1952, 14 years before the freeway opened - but it's sometimes occurred to me that the school district might have noticed the freeway's presence before it put millions of dollars into remodeling the building a few years back, and perhaps even considered moving the school to a new location farther from the freeway.

The three careers of Dennis Buchanan (1932-2017), and how chicken salad for lunch could have derailed MAX

Fifty-five years ago Dennis Buchanan left his job at the Chicago Tribune to come to Portland, where he took a job as an investigative reporter for the Oregon Journal.  He got the public’s attention with a story on the December 22, 1964 collapse of the John Day Bridge, which the chairman of the Oregon Highway Department termed an Act of God.  Mr. Buchanan found the blameworthy in a less lofty place.  As Mr. Buchanan put it years later, “My articles acquitted God and assigned responsibility to highway engineers who allowed a change order without following prescribed procedures.”  A few years later he moved to KGW-TV, also as an investigative reporter, where he broke a story about auto dealers fraudulently rolling back odometers on used cars, that included interviews with the mechanics themselves.  An affable man with an “aw, shucks” manner who spoke with a subtle touch of Texas drawl, Mr. Buchanan didn’t get the culprits to confess so much as he persuaded them to brag on camera about their skills with a screwdriver.

In his time as a reporter, Mr. Buchanan, who died on December 26, broadened his interests to include urban planning.  He researched and presented stories on the Forecourt Fountain, redevelopment of the Willamette riverfront, billboards, and visual clutter, and as a reporter developed connections with the elected officials and backstage political players of the day.

In 1973 he gave up journalism to become a stockbroker, but had the misfortune to enter the financial world immediately before a recession struck.  As he pondered the silent phones at the office a year later, a seat on the Multnomah County Commission became vacant, and the four remaining commissioners had the opportunity to appoint someone to fill it.

The hot local issue of the time was the Mount Hood Freeway, which would have connected the Marquam Bridge to US 26 east of Gresham, cutting a swath through southeast Portland.  Commissioners Alice Corbett and Dan Mosee supported the freeway; Commissioners Don Clark and Mel Gordon opposed the freeway.  A dozen or so public-spirited citizens applied for the vacant seat, some who favored the freeway and some who opposed it.  Mrs. Corbett and Mr. Mosee voted against every applicant who opposed the freeway; Messrs. Clark and Gordon voted against every applicant who supported it.

It occurred to Mr. Buchanan that he had been more active in Democratic politics than many of the applicants, and also that he’d never said anything in public about the Mount Hood Freeway.  Also, no one was trading stocks.  He had a word with a backstage player who made a few phone calls, and Mr. Buchanan’s name suddenly appeared on Alice Corbett’s lunch schedule.

He didn’t know Alice Corbett, and he asked his friends what to expect.  “Be careful,” one warned him, “she will come across as a lady, and she is, but don’t be fooled by her manner: she’s sharp, and she can tell the difference between chicken salad and chickens**t.”  Mr. Buchanan was prepared to give a noncommittal answer if she asked him what he thought of the Mount Hood Freeway, but he didn’t have to hedge, as she didn’t mention the freeway at all.  (She may have assumed that any stockbroker in pinstripes would of course support the freeway.)  He did, however, struggle to keep a straight face when Mrs. Corbett ordered chicken salad for lunch.

A few days later, after the commission had rejected a fresh crop of nominees on a series of 2-2 votes, Mrs. Corbett nominated Dennis Buchanan to fill the vacancy, he was invited to say a few words about his willingness to serve, and his nomination was put to a vote.  Don Clark and Mel Gordon, who were in on the secret, joined Mrs. Corbett in voting yes, and Mr. Buchanan began his public service.  He soon joined Messrs. Clark and Gordon in a procedural vote that effectively killed the Mount Hood Freeway.  The federal dollars that would have paid for the freeway were redirected a few years later to build the MAX Blue Line to Gresham, made financially possible only because the freeway was cancelled.

After several years of service on the county commission, Mr. Buchanan ran for and was elected as the second County Executive, succeeding Don Clark.  The county’s biggest problem of the time was mid-county, the unincorporated area between Portland and Gresham, in which 150,000 people lived without sewers.  It was the largest urban area in the United States without sanitary sewers.  The county provided police service through the sheriff’s office, and other public services were provided either by a patchwork of agencies or not at all.  In Mr. Buchanan’s view, which he and Don Clark shared, the county couldn’t afford to provide urban services to the area without dragging down the county’s financial structure.

Some more backstage discussions ensued, resulting in Mr. Buchanan presenting to the county commission, in 1983, the famous “Resolution A,” in which the county resolved to get out of the business of providing urban services over the next three years.  Residents of mid-county who wanted police protection and urban-level services would have to annex to Portland or Gresham, and over the next ten years the two cities expanded until they met in the middle.  With city government came city sewers, city water, city fire protection, and the other services that mid-county residents wanted to enjoy but didn’t want to pay for. 

Unknown to the public at the time, when Mr. Buchanan presented Resolution A to the county commission, he had in his pocket an alternative, “Resolution B,” which he intended to propose if the commission rejected Resolution A.  Resolution B said in essence that the county would continue to provide urban services until it went broke.  He gambled that none of the commissioners would want to vote for a resolution that admitted that they were being financially irresponsible, and he was right.

In 1988 the county voters restructured county government and eliminated Mr. Buchanan’s position as County Executive.  He retired from public service, dabbled in private business, and became a poet and a painter.  Unusually among our local Solons, he sought no higher office and he didn’t care if he was recognized for what he accomplished.  He was a model that others might do well to emulate.

Dennis Buchanan’s political life demonstrates that big things sometimes come from small actions.  The next time you ride to work on MAX, imagine how you might be commuting today if, forty-plus years ago when Alice Corbett ordered chicken salad, Dennis Buchanan had laughed.

United Airlines: offering multimodal transportation to its paying customers

Asbury Barbur (1861-1941), who told you where you are

Among the anniversaries that passed unnoticed this year was one on November 21, the 75th anniversary of the 1941 death of a Portland city commissioner of the 1920s and 1930s.  You think you don't know his name, but you do, and if you own a Portland house that was built before 1931, his work is on your wall.  He was Asbury Barbur, first elected to the council in 1920.  One of his pet causes was to clean up Portland's system for naming streets and numbering buildings.  I should say "systems" instead of "system," for Portland's naming and numbering plans included not only the elements of the Great Renaming of 1891, but also the systems of Sellwood and St. Johns, annexed to Portland afterward.  (A remnant of the Sellwood system survives in the Clackamas County portion of the Garthwick neighborhood.)

Portland was plagued by similar and confusing street names, such as Tenth Street, North Tenth Street, East Tenth Street, and East Tenth Street North.  Intersections were similarly confusing: for example, from their intersection 42nd Avenue SE ran east-west, and 42nd Street SE ran north-south.  The post office misdelivered 2000 letters a day, and streetsigns often didn't match the streets they were on.

Commissioner Barbur spent 10 years persuading the rest of the council to adopt a single unified system of addresses and numbers.  In 1931 the council, having been cajoled, wheedled, inveigled, and bullied into joining the modern era, adopted the Barbur plan, which with slight modifications is what we enjoy today.  In the Barbur plan, odd numbers were on the west or north sides of streets, even numbers were on the south or east sides of streets, all streets ran east-west, all avenues and places ran north-south, and all boulevards were scenic (he missed the mark on Holgate).  Burnside, the river, and Williams Avenue became the baselines, and we adopted the five quadrants of North, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest as directional prefixes.  Numbers increased by 100 per block and 2000 per mile.  You could tell from an address such as 4010 SE 40th Avenue that it was on the east side of SE 40th Avenue, 2 miles east of the Willamette River and 2 miles south of East Burnside Street.

Few politicians are brave enough to advocate a plan that would inconvenience every registered voter in the city.  Commissioner Barbur took some of the sting out of changing everyone's address by having the city hire a company to manufacture hundreds of thousands of numbered ceramic tiles - the classic black-on-white "Asbury Tile" -- and then hiring crews of the unemployed to go from house to house to install the tiles on the front walls of every building in Portland.  They completed their work in 1933.  If you have an old house within the 1931 city limits, you probably have Asbury tiles next to your front door, courtesy of the city council.

Another part of the Barbur plan was to rename streets, not just to get rid of the duplicate and confusing names that had accumulated since 1891, but to give continuous streets a continuous name.  The most prominent roadway to be renamed was a highway that ran south from downtown, along bits of roadway named Fourth Avenue Extension, Witham Street, and Miles Street.  It's now called Barbur Boulevard, and it honors the man who gave you your address.

Isaac to Council: Spend all of the unexpected money on roads and sewers

One consequence of giving money to a committee of persons who represent different interests is that they will quickly find ways to spend the largesse several times over.  The City of Portland discovered in January that it believes it will have $19 million more in revenue in the next fiscal year than it had planned to receive: $4.6 million of recurring revenue and $14.4 million of one-time income.  At the end of January the council voted 4-1 (Commissioner Saltzman dissenting) to adopt a policy proposed by Amanda Fritz to allocate at least half of the extra money (so about $7.2 million) to "infrastructure maintenance or replacement," meaning "emergency preparedness, parks and recreation, and transportation."  This policy will apply not only to fiscal year 2015-2016 but also to the three following fiscal years.

Within a week after the council adopted Commissioner Fritz's resolution, the Housing Bureau made a pitch to receive all of the remaining $7.2 million.  Not coincidentally, the Housing Bureau operates under Commissioner Saltzman.

It's a wise idea for the city to devote some more money to maintaining what it already owns instead of building new things and starting new programs such as the Office of Equity (a project of Commissioner Fritz, as it happens).  I'd like to encourage the council to resist every temptation to allocate any of the unexpected manna to any new project or program -- not just the $7.2 million that Commissioner Fritz's resolution requires to be allocated to maintenance and replacement, but the entire $14.4 million. I would allocate half of the $14.4 million to patch and repair roads and the other half to repair sewer and water lines underneath the roads before they're patched and repaired.

Until the city repairs the potholes and cracking pavement that it already owns, it shouldn't be building any more.  Similarly, until the city brings its parks up to par, it shouldn't acquire any more.  Feed the pets we already have before buying new ones.

Portland's streets - the question the council should be asking voters

The Portland City Council, having awakened to find that the city's streets are falling apart, has scheduled an advisory vote for May to solicit the public's opinion on how to best tax homeowners to pay for repairing the streets.  The council will then adopt the winning proposal and move on to determine how to tax nonresidential property.  Options include an income tax, a property tax, a gasoline tax, and others yet to be named.

The particular history is that in 1988 when the City Council first realized that Portland's streets were deteriorating, the council considered allocating 28% of the utility franchise fees that it receives to street maintenance and repair.  At the time, the city needed $38 million to catch up on street repairs.  The council set 28% as a target, but never achieved that target; in the first 8 years the council sent 12% of the utility fees ($29 million) to the transportation department for street repairs, instead of the 28% ($67 million) that the target called for.  The amount of money that the council chose not to send would have caught the city completely up on street repairs and the city would not now be facing a cost of $200 million or more to catch up.

I like the idea of the council asking the voters for their thoughts, except that the council is asking one question too few.  Instead of merely asking how the voters prefer to be taxed -- rather like the choice that Utah used to offer to condemned criminals, asking whether they would prefer to be shot or hanged -- the council should also ask the voters whether they agree or disagree with the choices of twenty years of city councils to divert money from street repair to other projects -- that is, whether the voters agree or disagree with the council's view that it's more important for the city to subsidize the Portland Public Schools and the Regional Arts Coordinating Council than to maintain the streets.

Portland's mayor hales Uber into court, calling it a taxi -- maybe

Uber started operating in Portland Friday evening at 5:00.  Welcomed by riders, Uber faced frowns from the City, which filed suit against Uber on Monday in state court.  Today Uber removed the suit to federal court (a routine step) and the battle lines are being drawn.

A few days ago I advanced the idea that Uber could comply with part of the City's car-for-hire code by recruiting its drivers from among the hundreds of persons whom the City's licensed to drive taxicabs, and then to bypass the strict limit on taxicabs by prohibiting the passengers from specifying which route the drivers will take to the passengers' destinations. (This would make the Uber vehicles not be taxicabs, thanks to a quirk of the City's code.)

A well-connected member of the Laquedemimonde passes along the tantalizing tidbit that despite this loophole being wide open for Uber to transit (so to speak), Uber won't do business with licensed cabdrivers.  Why this should be, I do not know. 

One unlikely possibility is that Uber hasn't figured out this loophole.  I call this unlikely because Uber's lawyers have undoubtedly already parsed the City's code with attention usually reserved for the Talmud or the utterances of the chair of the Federal Reserve.  Another more likely reason is that Uber believes  that licensed cabdrivers must then charge riders the rates that the City has fixed for taxicabs, without the discounts that Uber usually offers or the surge pricing that it commands in peak times -- or, even worse for Uber and its passengers, that Uber must charge the 35% premium over taxi rates if it is a limousine or executive sedan service

When I read the City's complaint (the filed suit is here), I noticed that the City asserts that Uber's cars violate either the taxicab or the limited passenger transportation (LPT) vehicle rules, meaning that the City doesn't know whether Uber's cars are taxis or not.  (The LPT rules are a catchall for anything that doesn't meet the definition of a taxicab.)  Whether they are taxicabs depends on whether the drivers let the passengers pick the routes, something the City doesn't know.  It should be a jolly bit of litigation.