portland city commissioners

Never Ask the Stupid Question

You ever just get into a thing where you do and keep doing until you get to the point you are exhausted and on autopilot and look back to wonder what you were doing to that point. That is EXACTLY how the past two weeks has been for me. Running for chair of the school senate committee on Government operations and finance, homework, nerve attacks, passing out, taping myself back together. Sometimes though, things work out in a way where you are just happy to have.

Despite being exhausted that running for the chair, well it is something more then that now. The problem is that a lot of things going on I am finding needs more then someone to help good ideas, they need someone willing to take the field as well. Always something to be done, and despite it my body is not the font of energy it once was and sometimes, especially since my nerve damage there are limits that have to be respected physically or there will be more problems then whatever good is done in those few moments.

The fraility of existence unfortunately is not something that can be mentally broken sometimes. It must be dealt with, in that dealing though new answers arise. Moments of thought sometime occur here, I like to call them sigma moments, not because of things like sigma grind set, but because it would be something Sigma the character (overwatch) would most likely think of.

So ya, a lot of things are happening here, which is why I went radio silence, things have gotten so hectic I have to actually use a calendar like a responsible adult. You know what I hadn’t looked at what has been happening in Portland since trying to help the students I represent. Hopefully it was a slow news week….

Ever ask yourself why you should ever ask a question that seems to be the start to disaster?

We are starting off with the Willamette Week, who did some interesting journalism this time. Some progress in some areas, but this article is about the value of money.

I am just going to save some pain and just go to the numbers. 82 units, refurbishing a building from 1911 and the refurbishment will cost 36.15 million dollars. Which is about 480,000 per unit or just about 13,00 per sq foot for units that have no bathroom or kitchens. I do not know about you, but this so expensive that anyone tries to explain this as a good value needs their head examined because the only reason this money is of some value is if it’s in someone savingsd account because you aren ot getting that value or even half of it on the work.

https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/02/01/the-fairfield-apartments-will-cost-1300-per-square-foot-when-renovated/

I would fire the people who okay-ed it, the people who accepted the contract, the company, anyone who thought this was a good idea. There would be mass firings of the failure that allowed this to stand. Why would all this be important, why would the value of things be needed especially now?

https://katu.com/news/local/portland-public-schools-announces-hiring-freeze-amid-budget-issues-education-school-academic-standardized-testing-teachers-teaching-enrollment#

Portland Public Schools and …

https://www.koin.com/news/portland/memo-portland-fire-and-rescue-to-freeze-spending-hiring/

Portland fire and rescue have to freeze spending both of them are within the range of the project or even could be heavily aided by the half that could be cut by the building if someone with a calculator worked in Portland politics.

Get some progress done, bask in the bright light if this stupidity and then try to make your day a little better

Stay Strong

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At Worse There Can Be Change

The city of Portland seems to read my blog because a few weeks ago I made a post that I wouldn’t write on it unless it was just something abyssal. A new high in low. It seems that it looked at my blog post, handed me a half open bottle of some hipster brew and asked me to hold it because it seems every day since then it decided to just keep digging for the grail in stupidity and I wonder here if they had focused such efforts into something good the progress that would be made.

Never ask how bad dumb a group of politicians can be. I should have known.

So, rapid fire because Portland leadership is a font of idiocy so deep that we could only approximate the bottom. One. Jo Ann Hardesty One could lead a class on morals by taking what she had done in her job as commissioner and simply going, don’t do that. Now, that would be rude, she would have had to do one thing of good. Right?

Well, after running up debt and then being sued for it and then the hit and run debacle and then the uber debacle and then being an idiot in the pandemic, and the being an idiot during the homeless issue and backing the politics that drove business in the ground, and then not pushing for punishing the D.A for not charging those who had politics similar. I mean all of these are absolutely shameful. Calling a political opponent Republican when he is not just because he has a different opinion. Now, some may see that statement and think I support Rene. I have not seen his work and right now there has to be a major amount of work done for me not to count him as an abject failure just because he wanted the position. It is the risk that comes from people failing at it for long periods and really if one could fire the commissioners since Hales then many would.

The mayor before Wheeler I used to call him as interesting as wallpaper paste, now I have to say he had to be smarter then any person in politics. That or, he was one of the luckiest because after that things went down at the speed of gravity. Where things hoped to have change is after a cycle with the main morons and people went, there is no better candidate, no one wants to run and now we are happy with this. Well, happy is not the word I would use but people have shown they are willing to look away as long as things still stay as normal.

Wheeler, the mayor, went out to protest with people he thought would be the base of the city only to find out that he was wrong. Went on pushing the ideology and backed by the movements of the D.A crime spiraled out of control, police budgets cut, and then the spiral grew wider. There will be a time where Portland has to begin to grow but the ideology of the past decade needs to be discarded for the toxic process that it has been. Not because the political party is toxic, it isn’t but because what has taken Portland has been thought to be for some moral superiority and brilliant action when morally its often disgusting under the surface and tactically its as useful as a paper seat belt.

This is not going to Brown and what she did because she caused damages as well a lot of them, but everyone thought they could stand together against Trump instead of actually working on bettering their areas. If it had been done it would be the greatest flaunting against their foes because what the president had wished when those described above hated him, could look to their city and say. We are doing it and we got it. That would be too hard they found out and did the political thing of try to get people to look away except there was no place to look without their failings on full display. It is now something where other cities and states look at, and go ‘don’t be like that’.

I wish there was some good news, but there isn’t and won’t be for a while, but everything can change and Portland will too, it just may take some time.

Stay Strong.

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