Take me out to the bankruptcy

The Portland minor league baseball team has been taken over by its league as part of a last-minute reshuffling in preparation for its 2004 season at PGE Park. As taxpayers of Portland know only too well, city government sank tens of millions into renovating the stadium, borrowing the money and signing an operating contract with the team's owners that was supposed to pay off the bonds.

But it hasn't. The renovation was much too expensive (luxury boxes for minor league ball?), and public interest in the team is nowhere near what it will take to service the debt. (The rest of the same bond issue threw many more tens of millions at doubling the size of the largely empty Convention Center.)

Mayor Katz, who along with Commissioner Erik Sten and Katz's then-economic development aide Sam Adams engineered the renovation financing (in secret negotiations with the baseball operators), had this to say yesterday about the latest development:

I am obviously very pleased that the Pacific Coast League, TIAA-CREF [the bondholders] and Portland Family Entertainment [previous owners of the team] have all reached agreements in principle to transfer ownership of the Portland Beavers AAA baseball team and the Portland Timbers soccer team to the PCL for the 2004 season.

Much hard work has gone into these negotiations, but there is still more work to do.

Over the next several days, the City and the PCL will be finalizing the terms of an operating agreement for the use PGE Park by the two teams.

It is essential that this agreement be reached next week in order for the City Council to have time to approve such an agreement prior to the Beavers' scheduled opening day game on April 16.

The City looks forward to that agreement being finalized and signed by the parties involved. After that, the City will begin work with the PCL on a longer-term arrangement for the use of PGE Park by the Beavers and Timbers.

All minor league baseball fans in Portland should be very encouraged by the PCL's commitment to maintain AAA baseball in Portland.

This speaks very well of our community's support for professional baseball and soccer.

License and registration

The real irony of the traffic stop shootings here in Portland is that they start with a supposed traffic infraction by the deceased.

In my 25-years-plus of living in this town, I have seen driver behavior deteriorate from model to largely dangerous, and the police bureau's interest in enforcement sink from mild to nonexistent. The police don't enforce the traffic laws much around here any more. People speed, run stop signs, run red lights, cut each other off, give each other the finger, etc. all the time. And except for drunk driving and photo red-light cams, law enforcement could care less. It says it just doesn't have the money or the person-power to do much about it.

But if you're a young male of color driving a funky old sedan or a "booming" car, you'd better use that turn signal, come to a full stop at the stop sign, and otherwise be a poster child for the driver's manual. If you know what's good for you.

Dial Rangoon 7-7500

Here's an outsourcing story for you, and I am not making this up: When needy folks call the Oregon state government for information on welfare and food stamps, the state has operators standing by --

Good morning

I just pulled one of my occasional major internal clock adjustments. Instead of staying up most of the night and sleeping all morning, I crashed at a normal hour and am now facing the unfamiliar sight of the morning sun streaming through my home office window.

Whenever I do this, I feel a brief reunion with the rest of the mainstream working world. But it's usually only a temporary euphoria. Within a week, it's back to Vampireville.

Hothead?

Looks as though the officer who killed the unarmed motorist in Portland Sunday evening has a bit of a history.

Read all about it

For those of you who are willing to go through their registration process (which so far hasn't hurt me, that I know of), the folks at KGW-TV here in town have a page up where they compile many (all?) of the press releases with which they're inundated daily.

Want to feel like a news editor, sorting through all of the raw data that comes across the news desk every day? Have a look.

Is there an echo in here?

The first sentence of yesterday's lead editorial in The Oregonian sounded awfully familiar.

Develop this

Today's Willamette Week has a pretty good take on the most recent police shooting in Portland. (Amazing when you consider they probably had very little time in which to get it written.) WW's Nick Budnick wrote:

[State Sen. Avel] Gordly, a former parole officer, says training also is key. Many cops complain that they are trained mainly in how to shoot. They receive far less training in non-lethal measures such as communication and hand-to-hand combat.

Oregon cops, including those in Portland, receive less training than the national average, according to former Portland detective John Minnis, who heads the state Department of Public Safety Standards and Training. There's time only for "basic fundamentals," he says, which is a "major concern."

"If you don't teach [non-lethal] options, you ultimately get what you're training for," Minnis says. "That, I think, is the fundamental problem."

Pathetic News Story of the Day

Hang it up, lady. And fire your lame excuses for defense attorneys.

What's next? Habeas petitions on Crane stationery from her cell at Danbury?

Why blogs were invented

RoguePundit is cranking out some darned good readin' down there in the southern part of our beautiful state. If you haven't checked him out yet, you should.

Darren for President

A while back, Cousin Jim over at Parkway Rest Stop pointed out that there's a third-party candidate for President based right here in the Portland area. Shortly thereafter, along comes a message in my e-mail inbox from none other than the candidate himself.

His name is Darren Karr. Go ahead and hum "Hail to the Chief" as you check out his campaign web site here.

Scam spotlight

Isaac Laquedem has some thoughts on the Portland Old Town Fire Station relocation project. He doesn't like it.

To me, between Laquedem's views and the presumption of waste that accompanies all development projects coming from this City Council, it looks like another stinker.

More on the Coliseum

Lily Witham, a community activist in the Buckman neighborhood in southeast Portland, is pretty worked up about the city's plans for the Memorial Coliseum.

Witham and her Buckman neighbors have been trying for years to get the city to turn the old Washington High School, in their neck of the woods, into a community center. The city has agreed to this in principle, but funding for the project is far from secure. Meanwhile, the city has come up with a much faster-tracked plan to turn the Coliseum into a giant recreation center. That train is so far down the track that it already has an acronym: MARC (Metro Athletic and Recreation Compex?).

Witham is convinced that every dollar spent on MARC is one less dollar available for the Buckman center. And in these tight times, she's probably right.

She recently went over to City Hall to testify against immediate funding for a MARC study. And she came back mighty disillusioned. She writes:

I've known for years that Vera is in the pocket of the developers, but seeing it firsthand was absolutely sickening. At last week's (March 17th) city council hearing regarding the MARC proposal the deck was definitely stacked (and guess in whose favour??) The "invited" guests (pro-MARCer's all) were allowed to speak as long as they liked, while we peons had to adhere to the usual 2 minutes. Despite expert testimony from the head of Portland Parks & Rec's Planning Department (who stated quite clearly that the MARC would never make it financially for there just isn't a big enough audience to make a go of it), and reasoned and rational remarks from Commissioners Leonard and Francesconi (who both voted an emphatic "no"), Katz, Sten & Saltzman all voted yes. Saltzman included a lame statement about how "worried he is about Oregon's obesity rates" (yeah, right). Let's face it, the easist and cheapist way to lose weight is to get out and walk. We don't need a 100 million dollar center to lose weight.

I gave testimony against the MARC proposal, reminding the Mayor and commissioners that just one month prior they had voted unanimously for a community center in the Inner Southeast, and promised that our center would be the next one built. I asked Mayor Katz to remember that we have the second highest unemployment rate in the country, that our inability to fund our schools is internationally known and ridiculed. And that we have a brand new jail that we can't afford to open while hard-core criminals walk the streets after being arrested and released out a few hours later, due to lack of space. (This went over like a lead balloon.)

The funding ideas were pie in the sky, $40 million or is it $80 million from the Kroc fund (despite the fact that the project as I understand it is not eligible for the Kroc funds) and some various tax credits, urban renewal funds (read PDC monies) and historic tax credits.

However, the most disturbing thing by far were the "erroneous" statements by Paul Falsetto of the AIA (American Institute of Architects). Mr. Falsetto stated that "the coliseum is eligible for historic status and hence, tax credits." He continued "this project has already been approved by the State Historic Preservation Office" (SHIPO) and has the blessing of the National Trust for Historic Preservation."

A quick phone call to David Silton at the SHIPO office in Salem revealed that the coliseum could be considered eligible for historic status as a modernist building, consisting of a "bowl within a box." However, any significant alteration to the coliseum (including the MARC proposal) would immediately render the building ineligible for historic status. Mr.Skilton stated that he had made this very clear to Mr. Falsetto.

I next called Anthony Veerkamp at the San Francisco Western Regional Office of the Nat'l Trust. Anthony had recently been in Portland to tour the coliseum with Mr. Falsetto and take a look at the plans for MARC. He also made it very very clear to Falsetto that any alterations to the coliseum would cause it to be ineligible for Trust approval.

Outrageous! And although I have sent this information to The Oregonian, Willamette Week and the Trib, no one has even answered my emails.

Topic transition

Guess we'll stop talking about gay marriage licenses for a while.

Time to talk about licenses to kill.

Groundhog Day

Here we go again. An unarmed person of color is shot to death while allegedly being taken into custody by the Portland police.

Close to 36 hours later, we're told hardly anything about what went down. According to the police, he was resisting arrest. The arrestable offense? Driving without a license. The cause for the traffic stop? Failing to signal before turning into a food market driveway.

Ever turn into a driveway without signalling? Ever forget to have your license on you when you drove a couple of blocks to the grocery store?

Two police officers were there. They apparently tried a stun gun. And then one of them fired several bullets into the man's torso.

This is so sad, and so maddening. The police tell us to be patient. Patient for what? I guess for the end of the mandatory three-day waiting period before the official interviews of the officer who fired the shots can begin. He and the other officer involved get 72 hours to collect their thoughts (including "pre-interviews" that aren't recorded) and present their side of the story. So don't expect much more detail until Wednesday or Thursday. By then the dead man will probably be ready for burial.

In those 72 hours, the suspicions that something is being covered up invariably grow and fester. This time around, everybody knows it's going to get very ugly indeed.

There was a rumor going around over the holidays that the mayor was going to reassign the various municipal bureaus among the city commissioners. She never did it, but it's not too late for her to go ahead with it. She really needs to take herself off the police bureau immediately.

Her top priorities for the remainder of her term, published the other day in The Oregonian, didn't include anything related to the police bureau. They didn't include anything about keeping this from being a miserable, tension-filled summer in this city.

But it's time for a revision of that stunningly shallow list. And agenda item no. 1 ought to be a new commissioner-in-charge for the police.

UPDATE, 1:17 p.m.: The mayor has called for a public inquest, which the police union will surely try to block. Meanwhile, African-American leaders are calling for an FBI investigation as well. Sounds good to me.

Also, today we learn that the 72-hour waiting period has been abandoned, at least in this case. If indeed the bureau has changed this highly controversial feature of its post-shooting procedures, you would have thought it would have done so with some public fanfare. But it didn't.

I agree completely

If left-handed people are allowed to marry, what is next? They will want to marry horses and bicycles. If a left-handed person married a bicycle, can you imagine the burden that places on a child? Imagine a woman who has been raised by a left-handed mother and a bicycle father. On her wedding day, she will have to wheel a bicycle down the aisle instead of having a normal father escort her to her groom.

A booger a day keeps the doctor away

This important story comes to us from your best source for all medical news, UtterlyBoring.com.

The bloggers are taking over

Portland blogger extraordinaire B!x is profiled on the front page of today's Oregonian. Not much reaction from him on his blog yet -- he's probably too busy out there covering the latest fatal shooting of a civilian by police yesterday.

If you want to see him continue performing a valuable public service, be sure to click the guy's March Pledge Drive box and flow a few bucks over that way.

Memorial Coliseum

We took the kids to the Shriners Circus at the Portland Memorial Coliseum today. Typical small circus, with elephant poop getting the biggest laugh of the day, but it was a big hit for our girls, who had never attended one before. Tigers, elephants, stunt riders on horseback, highwire thrills, cotton candy -- who can forget their first circus? Or their kids'?

The occasion also marked my first visit to the Coliseum in quite a while. I've been reading about how the city has given up on the building in its current configuration, and now wants to gut it and stuff it with something else.

After thinking about that for a while there today, I think it's a bad move.

For an 11,500-seat arena, you still can't beat this one. It needs a few cosmetics, but the seats are still in great shape, the design of the hall is still immaculate, and it's a wonderful venue for events of certain sizes.

Granted, there are drawbacks: the hideous acoustics; the arena's awkward placement next to the newer, 20,000-seat Rose Garden; and the city's operations contract with the bankrupt Oregon Arena Corp., owner of the Rose Garden, which has every incentive to run the Coliseum into the ground.

If it's time to rip the place apart, it's because of those factors. But don't let the developers and their City Hall chums tell you the building's in bad shape physically. It's not.

Among the more positive aspects of the place are all the memories for longtime Portlanders, particularly of the Blazers in their heyday, and in their not-so-illustrious '80s. There were countless great moments on the basketball floor there. We also had the legendary Mayor's Balls under the leadership -- cultural, political and otherwise -- of Bud Clark. And one great concert after another, despite the lousy acoustics.

The record of the bankrupt beast next door -- just another luxury-box ugly duckling, way out of place in an egalitarian city -- is not even a shadow of that.

The Rose Quarter was a bad concept, and it's been fairly poorly executed. Rather than gut and stuff the Coliseum, I suggest demolishing the Rose Garden, building a baseball stadium on the other side of Broadway, throwing a few million dollars at a new coat of paint and some acoustical work for the Coliseum, and either moving the Blazers back in there or chasing them out of town.

O.k., not really. But paying the usual West Hills contractor suspects tens of millions of scarce taxpayer dollars to turn the place into a Home Depot or some sort of ill-defined, publicly financed MAC Club for the Pearlies seems an equally stupid idea.

Musical interlude (to the tune of "Love and Marriage")

Fish and Potter
Fish and Potter
They want reservoirs that still have water
Neither one's a phony
So let's get rid of Francesconi

Fish and Potter
Fish and Potter
Work for equal rights for Tom's gay daughter
They'll play hot potato
With Diane Linn and Lisa Naito

No, no, no more secret contracts
They're self-defeating
No, no, no more greasy deals without
A public meeting

Fish and Potter
Fish and Potter
They're the ones who get my imprimatur
This is no baloney
They sure beat Katz
They sure beat bats
They sure beat Katz and Francesconi

Let them eat light rail

Portland Mayor Vera Katz was unhappy when she heard both leading City Council candidates, Nick Fish and Sam Adams, criticize her record as mayor in the City Club debate the other day.

"I think it hurts the public's trust in government by having candidates who should know better run against government," she is quoted as saying in yesterday's O.

Oh, they know better, Your Honor. They're not running against government. They're running against your government, with its truly twisted priorities and breathtaking insensitivity to public sentiment. There's quite a difference.

It's good to see Adams having to defend himself after 10 years as Katz's "chief of staff" and "economic development coordinator." Now he goes out of his way to distance himself from much of what the mayor has "accomplished." He's no fool. From here on out, any affiliation with her is an albatross around any politician's neck.

Still alive, not too well

I'm getting just enough success in the NCAA tournament to keep hope alive, at least in theory. I'm still a major longshot to win any money, but my puny little ticket had a great Sweet 16 round, just concluded. I had five games with teams still alive, and all five of them won. Of the other three games, two of them went the way I wanted them to in order to set up the next round.

So now we're down to eight teams, with four games over the next two days. In two of the games, I have a chance of scoring points. In these, I need the following to win:

In the other two games, it doesn't matter to me much who wins, but for the sake of future rounds, I've got a preference for these teams:

So much depends on how the other players in the pool did. I hope the pool organizer has an update for us soon.

UPDATE, 3/27, 11:35 p.m.: Oh well. St. Joe's is out, which means I have no active teams left on my ticket. The points I collected so far won't cut it, I'm sure, but it wasn't an entirely bad entry. On to the next valuable time-waster -- we now return you to your regular programming, already in progress.

Tech talk

A friend with a DSL connection was complaining to me today that he can't get this blog to load on his browser, although he has no trouble getting the nearby 1221 SW 4th. I know the artwork and some of the hit counter scripts slow things down, but are any of the rest of you having this problem? Anyone have thoughts about what might be going on?

Have a great weekend.

He's no kook

Michael Newdow, the atheist who's challenging the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, represented himself before the U.S. Supreme Court this week. And from all accounts, he did a great job. If you're registered at The New York Times, you can read parts of the transcript of the oral argument for yourself here.

Newdow, a nonpracticing lawyer, is currently employed as an emergency room doctor. At one point he had the audience in the courtroom applauding him -- something that doesn't happen very often in the Supreme Court -- and he even got in a rehearsed closing line just before his time expired -- not easy to do.

The case has several interesting features besides the main issue. With Justice Antonin "Ducky" Scalia having recused himself, the Court could come down in a 4-4 tie, which would leave the Ninth Circuit's ban on the phrase intact. Another possibility is that the Court could rule that Newdow has no standing, because the real injury is to his daughter rather than to him, and she lives with her mother now. On the other hand, Newdow made a pretty good case that he's injured enough when the folks in the public school implicitly tell his daughter that her dad's religious beliefs are wrong.

Wake-up call

If you're a Portlander who hasn't read the WW piece on the economics of the current Portland mayoral race, you absolutely must. Commissioner Jim Francesconi has raised a bejillion bucks, including tens of thousands apiece from the same Old Money interests that have controlled Portland for years. He's poised to crush his opposition on the strength of campaign finances alone.

All the more reason to vote against him in May, force a runoff later in the year, and gain more time to decide whether we really want more of the same as we've been getting.

Once you've reached the ABF point, the question becomes who among the other candidates has a decent chance in a head-to-head against Diamond Jim. To me, at least so far, it's Potter.

Company came early

Hectic day here. It started just after 7 a.m. -- way before I want to wake up, but nature called. As I performed my middle-aged-guy ritual in the bathroom, I heard a strange noise coming from the next room over, where we have our TV.

It sounded like some kind of drilling noise, or maybe some feedback through a speaker. I figured there must have been a short in some electronic system or another, but the TV was off -- only the cable box was on. I turned it off, too, and headed back to bed. Seven in the morning is the middle of the night for me.

No sooner had I closed my eyes than the noise started up again. I hustled back into the TV room for further inquiry. Was our cat, Gloria, doing the extreme version of one of her hairball expulsions? It was too loud for her snoring. No, Gloria sat lazily on the glider, wide awake but in no distress. Like me, she was keying into the drilling sound, which was definitely coming from the wall behind the TV. This is the south-facing wall on the second floor of the house.

What the...? I threw on some pants and shoes, stumbled down the stairs, and headed out into the morning drizzle to see what was going on on the other side of that wall.

When I got directly under the spot where the noise seemed to be coming from, the woodpecker saw me and flew away. He had been doing his work under the eaves, as he stood on one of the little decorative buttress thingies that add charm to our older home.

But he didn't go far -- just as far as the chimney above. I cussed his little pointy-beaked a*s and went back to try to catch another hour or two of sleep.

I hope he doesn't return. I'd hate to have to start checking out BB guns on eBay.

More Kerry-spam

Today in my e-mail I got a shout out (if you'll pardon the expression) from "Gov. Howard Dean, MD." With yet another pitch for a campaign contribution to JFK Lite. Er, no.

The luxury ghetto

Portland's River/Pearl District is supposed to be the hot, hip, happening place to live these days. I dunno -- down there you get neighbors like this and this, and you're liable to stumble across something like this on your morning walk.

Welcome to my drivel-fest

Greetings to Phil Stanford's readers. If you're looking for 1221 SW 4th, go here.

Sweet 16

There are 8 games in the round of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tourney that starts today. On my pool ticket, I predicted wins by teams in 5 of those games, and of course I'm rooting for them with all my might, despite my having only a minimal, mathematical chance at this point of winning the pool. They are:

In the other 3 games, I didn't predict that either of the actual teams would win, but I do have an interest in the weaker team winning so as to give my teams a chance to win the next round, which starts Saturday. Therefore, I'm also mildly rooting for:

Just goes to show, you can get a lot of mileage out of a five-buck wager.

UPDATE, 11:57 p.m.: All four Thursday games went my way. Let's hope for another perfect day on Friday. If there are going to be any more cinderellas, let it be Xavier and UAB!

Pretty pointless profile

The Portland Tribune's front-page "day in the life" of Multnomah County Chair Diane Linn yesterday was the waste of a dead tree. She buys gum at 9:08 a.m.! She drinks nonfat lattes! Her daughter's getting braces on her teeth! All the breaking news. Oh, and her political career might be in jeopardy. You don't say!

One interesting facet of the piece was the attribution of all Linn's political woes to the gay-marriage flap. No mention was made of the library director salary fiasco (BTW, the new hire reportedly just bought a house in Dunthorpe), or of Linn's "snow day" blunder. Gay marriage casts such a long shadow that I guess those other issues are supposed to be quickly forgotten.

Perhaps the only tidbit of real news in the piece was this: The county income tax is being collected by the City of Portland Bureau of Licenses! This is the bureau that's currently in major turmoil, as City Commissioner Randy Leonard has unceremoniously fired its chief for poor performance. The bureau that's being criticized for doing nothing about its 30 percent delinquency rate.

This is who's going to bring in the big bucks for the county? Don't count that $128 million yet, folks.