The city has yet again extended the "deadline" to pay the insidiously regressive "arts" tax, as their website - and preferred method for handling payments - crashed yesterday, which was formerly the "deadline". The initial deadline was April 15, then it was extended to May 15, and now it's extended until further notice. Doubtless, they'll tweak this turkey some more in the interim, as they've already decided to refund any payments made by state and federal pensioners after finding out that it's illegal to charge them. Before the city re-extended the deadline, Willamette Week noted:
The civil trial in the first of those lawsuits, filed by Lewis & Clark Law School professor and retired blogger Jack Bogdanski, will start in earnest next Wednesday in Oregon Tax Court.
This thing could well go entirely belly-up before the city decides exactly when its next deadline for payment is going to be. The city's moved to dismiss, and so their legal beagles and the tax law professor will spend some time presenting oral arguments May 22. It doesn't seem likely that the city's going to prevail on this one; would a guy who makes his living teaching tax law to up-and-coming lawyers be likely to challenge the tax if he wasn't fairly certain of his facts?
It seems like every two days, somebody over in Porkland City Hall dinks around with more tweaks to the so-called "arts tax"; new Mayor Charlie Hales has come up with the latest: even though the city's facing a $21 million deficit, he figures he can shake loose a couple million dollars out of the city's general fund to at least pay for some art teachers in Porkland Public Schools. In that scenario, the Porkland Symphony, Opera, and other trough-feeders would be left to rely upon their generous endowment funds.
Portland Mayor Charlie Hales on Monday pledged that the city will cover $2 million for new teachers at local schools if its arts tax is deemed unconstitutional.
Even the editorial board at The Oregonian has had just about enough; they say it's time to dump the whole thing and send it back to the voters, as it currently bears little - if any - resemblance to what was sold to Porkland voters at the time.
Consider where we are. The tax has been criticized appropriately as regressive and is currently tied up in court because it may be unconstitutional as well. In an effort to make the regressive, possibly unconstitutional tax less unpalatable, city council has adopted a $1,000 income floor and directed city staff, in consultation with Office of Equity and Human Rights, to develop some possible modifications by the end of the July.
Oh, and they also announced that public-employee retirees are exempt from the new tax. If returned for a re-vote, it seems unlikely that folks, even here in Leftist Porkland, are going to be willing to pass a law that treats private-sector retirees differently from public-sector retirees. With all their tweaking and geeking around on the new "arts tax", Porkland City Council's turned it into something completely different than what was originally approved.
Time to flush it down one of those $100,000 "Porland Loo" toilets and start over. Or better yet, just flush and forget.
Susie Nielsen over at The Zero bemoans the difficulties plaguing the Porkland "Arts Tax" and wonders whether it can be saved. After all, it sounds so easy: everybody in Porkland kicks in $35 to support "the Arts". But the question isn't whether it can be saved, the question is should it be saved?
As presented in the propaganda, it was For The Children™; a ruse for which the average low-info Porkland voter has been repeatedly demonstrated to fall. It passed with 62% of the vote. Doubtless, many Porklanders giddily imagined the schools hiring more art teachers and turning their precious snowflakes into celebrated artistes. But now, a few little details have started to emerge, such as: everyone who makes $1000 in a year is supposed to pay $35 to the city. Make a million, pay the same. and as many households have two income-earners, the low-income household pays at least $70.
And it gets better: PERS and So-So Security recipients don't have to pay the tax. Better yet, some 60% of funds thus raised go not to schools, but to organizations with already-generous endowments, such as Porkland Symphony and the Opera. In other words, to the black-tie crowd. That whole "It's For The Children" thing sucks them in every time.
Oh, and it's retroactive: if you lived in Porkland at some point in 2012 but moved elsewhere, you're supposed to pay up.
We all knew that the "green jobs" mythology relentlessly pursued by Barky and other Democratics was a colossal waste of money, but stats now out from the Barky administration's DOE are truly phenomenal:
For the over $26 billion spent since 2009, DOE Section 1703 and 1705 loan guarantees have created only 2,298 permanent jobs for a cost of over $11.45 million per job.
Back in 2008, Barky claimed he'd "create" five million jobs over ten years by "investing" (Democrat for "waste money") in "renewable energy". Evidently, it was one of those promises that looked great on a teleprompter.
It's worth noting that this number's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg; it doesn't include the millions of dollars that state and local Democratics have "invested" as well. Former Porkland mayor Sammy Adams and former Oregon governor Teddy Kulongoski handed over tens of millions of dollars to companies like SoloPower, SolarWorld, Vestas, Iberdola, and ReVolt - with little or nothing to show for it. Most, if not all of those companies are either belly-up or in the process of going belly-up. But it sure made for some great pressers and photo-ops.
Thinking of retiring? Don't do it in Oregon. A new study of all 50 states and the Washington, D.C. non-state is out, and of all the places to consider for retirement, Oregon came in dead last.
The research was compiled by banking website Bankrate.com. Rather than including the number of beaches, lakes or golf courses, this list considered cost of living, crime rates, taxes, medical care and average annual temperatures.
With the 15th-highest cost of living and an average annual temperature of 48.77 degrees, Oregon came in last.
As for "business-friendly" Porkland, where they're all about "green and sustainable and density", jobs evaporated within three miles of the downtown area, by nearly 19,500 in the decade of 2000-2010. And it didn't end there: over 5,000 more jobs disappeared from the area between 3 and 10 miles from downtown.
Over in the suburbs, however, things are looking good: Integra Telecom is in the process of packing up its 500 jobs in its soon-to-be former downtown Porkland headquarters; moving the whole shebang across the Columbia River into Vancouver. And Nike, planning a massive expansion, rebuffed the goodie-bags dangled by Porkland city "leaders", opting instead to expand near their current campus in the Beaverton area.
In fact, while downtown Porkland's been bleeding jobs despite its cool streetcars and condos and bioswales and stuff, places like Beaveton and Hillsboro - both further than ten miles away from the Porkland city center - have added over 3000.
In Hillsboro, Salesforce.com is opening a large office, Oracle is relocating 130 jobs from Mexico, and Hitachi is adding 30 engineers. That's in addition to the new Intel fab facility under construction, the new baseball stadium, and the acquisition of a team to play there.
To those who follow urban planning trends, the fact that downtowns have been losing jobs to the suburbs for the past 20 years may seem surprising. The national news has been full of stories about the revitalization of America's urban centers over the past two decades. Planning concepts such as New Urbanism and Smart Growth were reported to be rescuing city centers from years of decline.
But in fact, although some people — especially young creatives — were attracted to high-density urban redevelopment projects, they did not bring an overwhelming number of jobs with them.
Porkland has long suffered from Smart Growth Syndrome and its "leaders" have taken great pride in wooing the "creative class" - in other words, young hipsters. To that extent, they've succeeded. But even the hipsters aren't going to spend their whole lives sharing a studio apartment with five room-mates and working part-time as a barista.
The U.S. Senate passed a bill yesterday that would allow states to tax online sales; a move endorsed by President Oblameless. With any luck at all, this'll die in the House.
Former Washington state governor Gregoire is enjoying her retirement, these days. Living in Lacey on a pension of nearly $160,000 a year, it's easy to see why. Unlike California, Washinton's legislature at least recognized that their pension system was unsustainable, and they modified it way back in 1977. But long-time "public servants" like Gregoire were exempted under a "grandfather" clause. So she, along with 208 others, enjoy public pension benefits well in excess of $100,000 per year - but only eleven of them have payouts higher than hers. Public service is deeply rewarding.
As for California, well - it's not surprising that they're in such a deep hole that their cities are going bankrupt. They never learned to stop digging.
Westside Express Service train at Wilsonville maint. facility.
As mentioned here yesterday, TriMet's ticket machines are incredibly unreliable, and it's been reported that as many as 2,000 people a month, attempting to pay with a credit card, have had the card rejected and an electronic cancellation message sent to the issuing banks - a claim refuted by a writer for The Oregonian. However, Portland television station KATU last night refuted the refutation:
PORTLAND, Ore. – TriMet admits its ticket machines have been causing banks to cancel or suspend thousands of debit and credit cards.
Spokeswoman Roberta Altstadt said a bug in the ticket machine software caused some of the machines to flag cards as stolen.
“We believe it was affecting about 1,000 to 2,000 credit card transactions a month,” said Altstadt. “For at least five years.”
One of their many PR flacks, Alstadt suggests that people pick up some tickets while they're out buying groceries, adding, "It can be that easy." The arrogance on display at the former transit agency (TriMet having recast itself as a development agency) is simply breathtaking. Of course, there's little reason for accountability there; the board is composed of government appointees, and nobody at the agency is elected.
But the ticket machines, though needlessly inconveniencing some tens of thousands (Vancouver residents are doubtless salivating over the prospect of having a couple of shiny new ticket machines on their side of the Columbia River), are really little more than symptoms of a much larger problem.
CPI notes that the "Westside Express Service", a nearly 15-mile- long commuter rail line that TriMet opened amid considerable fanfare some four years ago, carries approximately 20 to 50 riders on each trip between Beaverton and Wilsonville; each rider subsidized by taxpayers to the tune of $40 per round trip. And rather than taking passengers off the roads, thereby reducing congestion, WES actually increases congestion - and only around 800 people actually use the train each week. And while light rail's bad enough, their WES line's even worse:
The operating costs for WES are 12 times higher per hour than bus service, but the public benefits are not 12 times higher. In fact, WES is not even equal to bus service; it is far less flexible, and the equipment is unused most of the time.
TriMet recently predicted that within the next decade, more than half of all bus routes will be eliminated due to operating losses if something doesn’t change. The Board places the blame for this on a labor union contract that saddles the agency with the costliest employee benefits package in the nation. But the union did not force management to build an absurd commuter rail line; that was a choice made by the Board alone, without any consideration of the legacy costs it would impose on future riders.
As has been mentioned here before on a number of occasions, TriMet is busily cannibalizing bus service in favor of efforts to force passengers onto their trains. It hasn't been working as planned; ridership continues to drop. Now, they're making clear their intention to kill half of all remaining bus routes, while blaming the union. Unions are, for the most part, nothing more than Political Action Committees for Democratics, and are justly loathed by many. However, they're not the problem at TriMet; managment (or what passes for management) is.
The Oregon state Senate yesterday voted to keep taxpayers off the hook by requiring companies playing around with wave energy along our coast to pay for any cleanup costs, equipment removal, and associated expenses relating to their installations. This is long overdue, and the same rules should apply to solar and wind companies. Oddly, Oregon Democratics passed this bill.
In Washington, Republicans from the Vancouver area fighting the new I-5 bridge with its crime train component were handed fresh ammunition when KGW television in Portland inexplicably decided to dig through then fine print of CRC documents and the reports generated by a forensic accountant and discovered north of $85 million in pork - which proponents of the CRC project hotly deny is pork, of course. Among the KGW findings:
$51M for a new TriMet maintenance facility in Gresham--located some 10 miles east of the CRC project
$2.7M for a TriMet administrative facility in South Portland
$10M for a "curation facility"
$15M for a restoration project at Lewis River, about 22 miles north of the project
Nearly $344,000 for upgrades to Portland's Steel Bridge, six miles south of the project
$6.9M for Hood River Channel Restoration, located 60 miles east of the project
Tri-Met figures it needs 20 new crime-cabs to service the new 7.3-mile light rail extension into Clackamas County, a line which County residents have repeatedly demonstrated that they don't want. They also figure they'll need 19 new crime-cabs to run on the line between Portland Expo Center into downtown Vancouver, also a line that Clark County residents have repeatedly indicated that they don't want. Really? Tri-Met needs 39 more crime-cabs to cover less than ten miles of new rail? Well, that's what they're claiming.
And so they really, really need a $51 million place to park those things. And naturally, they'll need to build a brand-new set of administrative orifices for their vitally important administrators, to the tune of another $3 million or so.
And although Fort Vancouver already has a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled "museum" holding some two million "artifacts", they can always use another $10 million facility because, hey - somebody might find another musket ball, or maybe an arrowhead.
And the Steel Bridge, which already carries trains, cound use half a million dollars in "upgrades".
And really, is it too much to ask to drop another $22 million on "restoration projects" for the Lewis River in Washington and the Hood River in Oregon - even though both are dozens of miles away from the CRC bridge itself?
This ain't pork; they're "green, sustainable, clean" and vitally important to the overall success of a low-clearance bridge project over the Columbia River that would, if built, impede maritime traffic. Oddly, none of this sort of stuff needed to be packed into the funding package for the I-205 bridge (which was designed, constructed, and opened for less money and in less time than has been wasted on merely "planning" the CRC).
“I can’t figure out why this is the most expensive light rail project in light rail history,” Herrera Beutler said.
By enacting "in-state tuition" legislation for illegal aliens, Oregon Democratics are dissing one of their great heroes and the first black President in the history of the country - Bill Clinton - as well as directly violating federal law:
In 1996, Congress passed—and President Bill Clinton signed into law—the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). [i] Section 1623 of this federal statute prohibits state colleges and universities from providing in-state tuition rates to illegal aliens “on the basis of residence within the State” unless the same in-state rates are offered to all citizens of the United States.
If students from Washington or California paying out-of-state tuition rates at Oregon universities get wind of this, it wouldn't be at all surprising to see a class-action lawsuit. And Oregon would definitely lose, which means that once again, the feel-good policies enacted by Oregon Democratics will have put Oregon taxpayers on the hook.
All views are welcome here, but there are a few rules that most understand intuitively. If you're stupid, you need them spelled out. So this note's for you:
1) You don't get to call people names (referred to in general parlance as an "ad-hominem attack").
2) You don't get to hijack discussion threads. This means that you confine your comments to the the post, and/or to comments related to the post.
3) You don't get to spit, drool, crap on the carpets, nor employ expletives - even if you believe that doing so showcases your vast intellectual capabilities.
4) If you happen to be stupid enough to be unable to comply with the above rules, you will receive one (1) warning - after which your subsequent comments may be removed, and your comment privileges revoked.
