Portland's $100 million underground water tanks on Powell Butte is supposed to hold 50 million gallons of water. Unfortunately, they can't; they leak. A lot. And so the Portland Water Bureau is doing their level best to hush things up in order to minimize any further public-relations issues.
“It appears our reservoir leaking is increasing. We are at roughly 200,000 gallons per 24-hour day in the east and 80,000 gallons per day in the west,” project manager Jim Hall wrote in one email.
Hall agreed to speak with KOIN 6 News — until he spoke with the Portland Water Bureau.
PWB put the kibosh on that sort of nonsense. It's just the latest in a series of abuses by the City Hall-run Bureau, which is why there's a ballot measure coming up to wrest control away from the politicians there and place it under the purview of an independent, seven-person board. Naturally, the public-employee unions absolutely hate the idea.
Organized labor has a financial interest in preserving the status quo at the City of Portland's Water Bureau and we now see the first evidence of that—AFSCME Local 189 contributed $10,000 to the Stop the Bull Run Takeover PAC yesterday.
