I confess that I was fairly skeptical when Portland City Council, fearful of voters potentially wresting control of the water and sewer bureaus away from them, vowed to bring in the Citizens Utility Board to kind of nose around and see if they could find any particular reason for the constant escalation of water/sewer rates. Portland's rates are among the highest in the country, and the City Council has been facing a backlash as irate ratepayers discovered that millions of dollars in ratepayer funds were being illegally diverted to pay for pet projects completely unrelated to services.
But much to my surprise, CUB has actually discovered a big part of the problem, and it turns out to involve the crony developers pals of Portland City Council itself:
After years of controversy and increasing water and sewer rates, the nonprofit Citizens Utility Board was brought in to help save Portlanders money. After spending months looking at the issue, they uncovered a problem.
“To put it in very plain terms, it means homeowners and ordinary people paying their water bill are subsidizing developers who aren’t paying the full freight,” Commissioner Nick Fish said.
In the past year alone, CUB found, developers paid nearly $3 million less than they should have. As well, developers underpaid on industrial waste fees by another $4 million.
One of the worst offenders on the Portland City Council, when it came to diverting ratepayer funds for pet projects, was former commissioner Randy Leonard, who spent $1.2 million to retrofit a former restaurant in Water front Park in order to convert it into a headquarters building for the Portland Rose Festival Association. He diverted another million to build a "demonstration Water House" in east Portland, another million to design and build the "Leonard Loos" (public toilets, popular with the drug crowd), and nearly another million to build an ampitheater in a park at the confluence of the Bull Run and Sandy Rivers.
Since Leonard left, the city has returned the funds used to build the Rose Festival Headquarters to the water bureau, and sold the "Water House" (albeit for less than half the cost of construction). The next question is whether or not they'll have their developer buddies start paying their freight. Fish, at least, claims to be submitting a recommendation addressing that issue to mayor Streetcar Charlie.