Here because of the Voter's Pamphlet and Measure 26-156?

If you are here to read my full statement of support for Measure 26-156, which couldn't fit in the May Voter's Pamphlet, click here for the article titled "Why I now personally support the Portland Public Water District."  If you'd like more posts on the Water District, search this blog by the label "Water Board Initiative" (on the right hand side of this page, scroll until you see the "labels" list, click on the text "Water Board Initiative").

Sewer Bureau is not immune to mismanagement

Opposition to utility management reform in Portland has argued that the drive to better protect our public utilities doesn't need to include the sewer bureau (BES). That bureau hasn't, afterall, displayed the kind of gross mismanagement and cronyism seen in the Portland Water Bureau.  Never mind that the oversight gap we've identified leaves all public utilities vulnerable.

As we are beginning to learn, BES is no longer immune to the mismanagement issues we've historically seen at PWB. Unfortunately, where there is money and lax oversight, manipulation eventually follows. 

Portlanders are now learning about a recent BES construction project -- it is just office space, it does not serve any technical, waste-management function, and it doesn't even offer that much office space as it's just for 38 employees.  BES spent over $12 million on this one building, which comes out to more than $300,000 per office.  The per square foot cost is over $1,000, which is more than 3x quality new office building space in Portland. The lobby has $1,200 chairs and the bathroom stalls have $2,000 custom doors.  This is hard to justify, yet, the director of BES gets on camera and tries to claim it was a good deal because expensive things last longer.  Sometimes that is true, sometimes it isn't, sometimes there is a price point in the middle that is both quality and affordable and people spending public money are expected to target that point. Also, sometimes your architect wants to use your pocket-book to produce a grand show-piece for his portfolio.  Employees with BES were so upset about the spending, they outed the facts, and even offered photos of decaying sewer infrastructure that they wish the money had been spent on instead.

Here are some of the reports about this new, grand entrance to the sewage plant:

A video from KOIN: http://koin.com/2014/05/06/9-million-cost-overrun-prompts-bes-audit/

April 30, article from WW: http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-22479-space_of_waste.html

Company hired by Water Bureau pollutes creek and then donates to anti-reform PAC

CH2Mhill is the contractor that designed and engineered the leaky new water reservoir at Powell Butte.  When finally reported, the tank had been leaking 280,000 gallons per day for at least 5 weeks (that's 8 backyard pools everyday).  Ok, so that's a mess.

But that's not all... that leaking water had to go somewhere and somehow the geniuses at the Portland Water Bureau decided that large amounts of chlorinated water could just get dumped into Johnson Creek, despite it being a sensitive habitat and all. So, PWB tells the contractor to partially dechlorinate the water and then dump it in the creek. Only, the contractor didn't actually achieve anywhere near the amount of dechlorination needed to protect the wildlife in the creek.  In fact, neighbors (and presumably the contractors and the City employees on the job site) could SMELL the chlorine coming off the water in the creek bed.  And Water Bureau simply trusted the contractor that they were dumping responsibly. So they say. We have to ask, in what universe does Portland City government allow anyone to dump mass amounts of anything into a creek like Johnson without having staff on site to verify test results themselves?  Apparently, any old nose would have done.  Wait, that's right, the City hired this contractor so they definitely wouldn't have had any reason to be on site, you know, managing the project with our well paid in-house PWB engineers.

Only, chlorine isn't all we smell in this story.  Given CH2Mhill's role as the brains behind the project, it's likely they are overseeing the construction, acting much like a general contractor on the Powell Butte project (which is months behind and struggling to hold water).  It's safe to assume CH2Mhill is responsible for the subcontractor that illegally dumped... so by rights, CH2Mhill dumped chlorine in the creek and killed the fish.  Here's a fun revelation:  CH2Mhill donated $5,000 to the PAC formed by Mayor Hales to fight off a new governance structure for the Portland Water Bureau.

Incompetence reigns among Portland Water Bureau management and City Council fights to defend it. And what about the environmental groups in town?  What have they to say about the dumping (which happened months ago, yet is only just this week making it into the paper)? Where have they been on this case, why weren't they sounding the alarm when they first learned the tank was leaking?  Oh. Never mind.  This election cycle they're in the business of making the Water Bureau and City Council look good, despite evidence to the contrary, because they've decided to fight against local utility management reform.

Why I now personally support the Portland Public Water District... YES on Measure 26-156

My experiences as an active member of a Tabor neighborhood board, have heavily informed my personal position on Portland’s Public Water District proposal.  Many of you think those Tabor neighbors working on water issues are primarily concerned about the reservoirs.  The reservoirs are just the entry point by which citizens like me become engaged with the entire Bull Run drinking water system.  

You and I assume our greatest public asset, our incredible drinking water and the uniquely “green” system that provides for it, is being looked after by all the good minds on City Council.   You and I assume all hands are on deck to protect the region’s greatest legacy.  We are wrong.  

What appears to be a sensible division of labor -- each Commissioner takes charge of a few City Bureaus -- in practice removes the balances that keep bad decisions in check.  With each Commissioner becoming Lord of his own fiefdom, the individual Bureaus no longer receive thorough board oversight.  Functioning in separate silos, the Commissioners are rewarded for ignoring a colleague’s sloppy work and nonsensical decisions. By doing so, they build leverage, they build power, they avoid each other’s egos, and they find cover to hide from the bad votes they make while practicing politics.  A Commissioner may give a “yes” vote to a colleague’s outrageous pet-project, but he can claim he wasn’t The Commissioner in charge.

The Public Water District establishes one body where all members are clearly tasked with one job = managing our water and sewer utilities.  Each board member is clearly accountable to that task, and they can’t shirk the details of these complex utilities the way City Council does.

I’ve witnessed the failures of a Commissioner form of government.  I’ve watched advocates work for policy corrections within the normal remedies, and I’ve witnessed the normal remedies fail to be a fair match for systemic mismanagement.  Portland isn’t above corruption.  And I raise a red flag: our current form of city government does not provide adequate checks and balances to protect a public utility.  We are the last major city in the US to still use this style of Commissioner government.  This means we are the last major city to leave our public water in the hands of a single, distracted, non-technical, politically-motivated City Commissioner.  The proposed water board structure is not risky, it is widely used for all types of public utilities around the country, and it specifically mimics that structure successfully used in Eugene since 1911.  In fact, a dedicated water-board-of-directors is cited by the World Bank as a hallmark of strong, publicly-owned water utilities around the world.*1 (footnote)

Is this a new layer of government?

I was initially leery of the water district concept because I feared it would install an additional layer of government that might further complicate citizen oversight.  It does not.  This specific proposal does not create an additional layer of government; instead it substitutes the people sitting at the board-level.  The City Council steps aside, and a dedicated board steps in.  This new board sits within the same footprint of the current City structure.  The bureaus do not move.  These assets, the bureau employees, everything… it all stays within the City structure, only now, they’ll have active oversight from a dedicated, multi-member, single-mission board.

What our publicly-owned utilities sorely lack today is a place where the “buck stops here”  -- without a powerful mayor, or a powerful City Manager/CEO, or without a Council that will come together to serve as a responsible board of directors, we just don’t have it.  This is actually a problem for all the bureaus, and as a City we continue to bumble our way through with this unsound system and suffer the consequences.  But we can’t afford to keep messing around with our publicly owned utilities, and a dedicated board helps us patch this form of Commissioner government just enough to respect our responsibilities.  

The opposition

The environmental groups heading the opposition, have an interesting perspective.  The biggest among them, like Audubon, spent many years working for change in local government through the normal remedies.  Faced with a stodgy, uncreative body of grey-minded engineers at the sewer bureau, these groups committed to the hard work of making City waste-engineers more green.  Because they were successful, our City now employs innovative, green solutions to handle storm water, and we save money doing so.  Their hard-fought success informs their opinion that normal remedies work in Portland City government.  However, they were working against normal bureaucratic resistance, to bring new stuff to a cadre of people that tend to like sensible innovation, and they were ultimately asking that bureaucracy to change the way it spent money, not to cut the spending to which it was addicted. 

Similarly dedicated and qualified individuals spent those same decades attempting major cultural change in Water Bureau management practices.  These citizens repeatedly sounded the alarm over conflicting interests in the relationships between Water Bureau managers and the contractors that profit from the biggest water contracts.  They publicize Water Bureau practices that undercut the citizens they serve.  And they announce year after year, the list of build-projects City Council blindly marches into, simply because the corporations that write our long-term construction plans embed make-work in those plans while no one is watching.  These findings have been well publicized across all local media platforms through the years.  These citizens haven’t been working against normal government bureaucracy.  They’ve identified the vulnerabilities of our highly desired Bull Run system and they are telling you the normal remedies aren’t protecting your valuable water resources from manipulation.  All of our publicly owned utilities are vulnerable (as we now see).  We need to try something, and if that something doesn't work we need to try something else.

These environmental groups (like Audubon) are also fearful that their hard-fought programs will loose ground.  These programs are safe with the status-quo, and they don’t want new players interfering in their comfortable position.  I love our green programs.  I love our bike lanes and our bio-swales and I want them.  However, I am willing to question which of us funds them.  When we charge for a program on a water or sewer bill, we ask every man, woman, and child – no matter their income -- to pay the same share in these livability improvements.  Is this fair?  It sounds unacceptably inequitable and regressive to me.  When a struggling single mom (which my own mom was) puts her kid in the bathtub, I think she should pay for just water.  Where these programs get their funding makes a difference to our poorest citizens, and I don’t think our bird-counts, bio-swales, and bike lanes should be paid for on their backs.  These programs should find their rightful place in our City-budgets, and some of them will need to move.  We must have that discussion, it is an equity issue.  But it is an entirely separate discussion from the one this community is having regarding reform to the utility governance structure.  Claiming the new, elected water-board will mean the end to our green programs is nonsense, and it is meant to cause a panic that slows progressive discussion.

I have a flyer that is being handed out by opposition groups.  It’s chock full of assertions designed to incite fear and it is so full of inaccuracies, I thought for sure it was just a hack job done by a not-really-educated-volunteer.  It turns out it's from the Mayor backed PAC, and they have plenty of access to the measure and lawyers who can read it.  But they are counting on you to not have read it, or understand it, but to react to their fear mongering.

I’ll try to look past the insult launched by the name (“Stop the Bull Run Takeover”) and the attempt therein to erase the actual history of the last decade, wherein both of the chief petitioners and other reform supporters have in truth helped preserve Bull Run.  I’ll try to look past the blasphemous invocation of the Bull Run alarm, against a measure that has multiple provisions that strengthen protections for Bull Run.  I’ll also try to ignore the fact that none of the organizations listed on the flyer interviewed initiative crafters before signing to oppose… instead they sidestep the fact that this new structure is a widely accepted best practice, in favor of fearing change.  I’ll try to factually address the flyer’s swath of non-facts. 

The first paragraph asserts: “ …voters will vote on an initiative that would strip the Bureau of Environmental Services and the Water Bureau from the City of Portland and hand it over to a costly new government bureaucracy, with no guarantee of lower rates.”  This is false.  These two Bureaus remain City of Portland entities, they are not removed from our City structure.  The new board steps into the existing structure of the City to provide the multi-member, board level oversight the City Council fails at – the City Council moves over, the new board moves in.  And, no one should ever guarantee lower utility rates, ever.  Our Bond rating is as good as it is because as a community we have always shown a willingness to raise rates to meet our debt obligations.  What a new board promises this community is wiser spending, on the neglected maintenance and mission-critical projects that back-log while Bureaus spend money on non-critical, crony-promoted projects.

Paragraph two asserts: “This well-funded corporate takeover would seize our water supply, our sewer system, our system of environmental protections and more than $15 billion of city assets.  It would put them under the control of a board that by law could not include people with direct knowledge or experience with the system – and which might not even be able to be voted on by a significant part of the city.”  Wow.  No assets are being seized, all assets remain right where they are today, publicly owned by the City.  There is nothing that prevents qualified individuals, as a class, from running -- qualified individuals are welcome to run.  There are provisions that prevent specific individuals from running; these provisions establish waiting periods for individuals from groups or corporations receiving Bureau money.  These waiting periods are reasonable conflict-of-interest safe-guards sorely needed to protect our valuable publicly-owned utilities from the kind of revolving-door manipulation they currently suffer.*2  As to the  comment that a section of the city wouldn’t be allowed to vote – the chief petitioners have always intended the voting boundaries to include every citizen currently receiving Portland Water Bureau bills.  The ballot was written to insure that the body that designates the final boundaries can give a vote to every billed person.  The ballot was written by an experienced Oregon law crafter: Greg Chaimov, former Counsel for the Oregon Legislative Assembly.

Paragraph three asserts, roughly, that rates will be shifted to make residents pay for the bulk of basic system costs.  They insinuate that large-water-using companies in town are behind this ballot, just to do this very thing: to shift their costs to you-the-ratepayer.  I believe the last time this idea was floated – the one to shift costs onto the residents and away from the large industries – it was a Portland Water Bureau manager’s idea, not big-industry’s.  It was rejected, as I believe it would be if it came up again in Portland.  We like to make everyone pay for what they use because it encourages conservation. 

Paragraph four – “Harming our Environment” – makes illogical leaps that are almost too numerous to unravel.  First, of all the ways we have to get money from citizen to government, property taxes are one of the less regressive, and therefore the most equitable, and therefore the most Portlandy.  Some of the fantastic green-programs we have in Portland are being paid for on the backs of our poorest citizens.  Everyone has to buy water, no mater what.  When our poorest buy water, they should just be buying water.  Second, I don’t believe any board elected by Portlanders would roll back our green programming or neglect our rivers – it just wouldn’t happen because this is Portland and you and I elect this board.

And finally, paragraph six, the one that epitomizes the worst of the worst of public discourse.  When you cross so far into your own ideology that you fail to see the humanity of the human-beings with which you debate, you’ve gone too far.  That “longtime special interest lobbyist” is a civically engaged Portlander, and he and his “industrial water user clients” have been great allies to water watchdogs, especially in the fight to keep a chemical filtration plant out of Bull Run.  Large water users like the big brewing companies, employ a lot of Portlanders and when they speak elected officials listen.  Without their bold moves, you’d be drinking chemical soup from an unnecessary facility Water Bureau wanted to start building in 2009.  The large water users have consistently advocated for smarter spending, because they live and work right here too.  And as long as we’re on the subject, I challenge those that consider “lobbyist” to be an obvious moniker of evil.  I am a stay-at-home parent, artist, school and community volunteer, former project director for non-profits, and a small business owner.  I’m also a lobbyist and I have been since I was 10 years old going office to office in the Texas State Legislature seeking “yes” votes for the Equal Rights Amendment.  If you contact your elected officials with specific appeals on specific policy decisions, you too are a lobbyist.  And a valued, engaged citizen.

Footnotes:

*1 – In a review of well-performing public water utilities from 2006, a working group of World Bank staff examined a cross section of strong utilities from various spots around the world and on the development spectrum.  In it, they explain that with a multi-member water board, the personal interests and political motivations of each single board member, compete with those personal/ political interests of every other board member to, in affect, cancel each other out.  Thus, balance is achieved as no one special interest can skew the utility’s direction.  Multi-member governance boards are cited as a hallmark of well-performing public water utilities.  “Characteristics of Well-Performing Public Water Utilities” May 2006

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwjTV06zgxKYb0l2dUtCWUJDbEU/edit?usp=sharing

*2 – To hear chief petitioners answer a direct question about the conflict of interest provisions and why they are in this ballot measure, go watch minute 25:34 – 29:50, of this video from a public meeting where all parties (environmental opposition included) were invited to question the chief petitioners.  Linked here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qMgRM3Ci1s&feature=youtu.be  

Are we really as in-charge as we think we are?

In the Hotseat with a Willamette Week reporter, Mayor Hales called the citizen initiative to place the water and sewer bureaus under a single-mission, elected board... "political terrorism" and a "corporate takeover."  That's strong language designed to incite our progressive population against a progressive movement.

It seems to me we are living a corporate takeover NOW, with our current system of managing Portland's most valuable asset and its most dependable income stream (water).  Corporations manipulate the mechanisms that control our government spending, so that our spending specifically targets their businesses, thus directing public money to increase their own wealth.  Water Bureau employees and City Council alike have looked the other way for the last 10 years as they've steadily marched us into massive build projects we don't need, because the corporations that write our long-term construction plans embed massive make-work in those plans while no one is watching.  The corporations that make money building big, don't make any money when we don't build big things.

Our Commissioner form of government fails a public utility, whose intrinsic value makes it a juicy target for corruption.  We must move beyond the Commissioner led utility, and provide our water and our ratepayers with better protections.  In all the years Portlanders have talked about the failures of the Commissioner style of government, this is the first year citizens/businesses have opened their pocketbooks to hire the legal team required to write a ballot measure aimed at a solution.  We need to try something, and if that something doesn't work we need to try something else, but we can't just sit here in a state of analysis paralysis.  It is irresponsible.

The level of debt we see today from our Water Bureau isn't normal for Portland.  You don't have to look back that far to see a time when Portlander's paid in full for their water system as they went, with today's projects being funded by today's population, leaving tomorrow's population free to afford the projects that come up, tomorrow.  The debt load we carry today isn't just normal operating procedure, it is the result of years and years of mismanagement, favoring massive new construction while neglecting normal, necessary maintenance.  Our water system is a rare and highly attractive asset that will always be a rich target for the unscrupulous, and we need more eyes watching it.

The PUD proposal

There is an effort afoot to establish a new way of governing our repeatedly mismanaged water system, by setting up a Public Utility District.  The ballot measure establishing this PUD also establishes some other truly intriguing improvements to our city.  I am particularly fond of the first four major provisions listed below (these provisions summarized for me by a PUD Ballot Measure petitioner). 

The City Auditor’s office makes available online all of the details regarding this ballot measure, including the full text, the name the city has assigned to it for the Voter’s Pamphlet, and the legal challenges that were filed against the name the city wrote.  For that page click here. 

The people organizing this PUD will eventually have a website and when they send it to me I will link it here.  An interesting offer was made by one of the backers today, to City Council.  “Follow community will and we’ll call off the dogs,” essentially.  Read about that in WW.

Major Provisions of the PUD ballot measure:
(provided by petitioners)

* Enshrines protections for the Bull Run watershed in the City Charter (prohibitions on logging, entry)
* Prohibits privatization of water/sewer system
* Prohibits regionalizing the water system by turning over ownership to outside entities
* Prohibits co-mingling Portland’s pristine Bull Run tap water with water from the Willamette River or other inferior sources
* Creates a new Water/Sewer Special District within the City of Portland
* Removes utility management and rate-setting from City Hall politicians, and sets up an independent elected volunteer board
* Volunteer elected Board is comprised of seven members, with a term-limited chair.  Petitioners believe that volunteers elected based solely on their visions for Portland’s water and sewer system will do a better job than the politicians when it comes to managing these two utilities.
* Board to be elected by zones rather than at-large
* Requires an annual independent financial audit, including benchmarking against similarly-sized American cities
* Outlines strict conflict of interest provisions for contractors and board members (currently none exist)
* Consolidates two utilities – water and sewer – into one, eliminating redundancy and management top-heaviness

My Evolving Opinion

I for one am reluctant to install a new layer of government, especially given how ineffectual citizen oversight has been with the government body we have now.  However…The Commissioner form of government, like we have here in Portland, absolutely fails a public utility.  

You and I assume our greatest public asset, our incredible drinking water and the uniquely Green system that provides for it, is being looked after by all the good minds we’ve placed on our City Council.  You and I assume this to be especially true when a landmark issue like LT2 comes along, pushing massive changes to a system that doesn’t need them.  You and I assume all hands are on deck carefully wading through the options, to assure the region’s greatest legacy is protected.  We are wrong.  

What appears to be a sensible division of labor (each Commissioner takes charge of a few City Bureaus), in practice removes the checks and balances that prevent bad decisions. Functioning in separate silos, the Commissioners are rewarded for ignoring a colleague’s sloppy work and nonsensical decisions. By doing so, they build leverage, they build power, and along the way they trade votes and avoid stepping on each other’s toes.  But this system also provides them with cover; they may have traded a yes vote for an outrageous pet project and you’ll be stuck with the bill, but they can claim they weren’t the Commissioner in charge.

The PUD would establish one body where all of the members are clearly tasked with managing the Water Bureau.  Each board member is clearly accountable, they can’t look away and shirk blame afterwards the way City Council does.  Nick Fish is in the news a lot lately, he’s dissatisfied with the mess Randy Leonard left him with the strange assets Leonard acquired for the Water Bureau (the Water Demonstration House is just one of them).  But, every one of these projects pushed through by Leonard got at least three yes votes from Council, and Nick Fish was usually one of them.  He can’t claim he didn’t know about them, because citizens were there each time raising the red flag.  The silo system created by the Commissioner form of government allows too much cover for politicians to hide from the bad votes they make while practicing politics. The members of a new water board won't be able to point fingers at anyone else, they will be accountable for their work, and because of this I think we may get better work products.

The opposition to the PUD is an interesting community, and I’m trying to make my way through their concerns point by point to see if I share any of them.  So far, I’ve heard…

1. A fear that the new Water Board could be infiltrated by big polluters and corrupted to do their bidding. This is illogical.  The system we have now is clearly corruptible.  The new system is no more or no less prone to corruption in its existence.  Both systems provide officials we elect, so their weakness is equal. Neither system provides yet another separate body with oversight power (other than the independent audit that would be required for the new Water Board, and this is a significant perk over the existing system).   When the City Council mismanages the PWB today, we have no one to complain to except City Council… where is the outside oversight? Every large business in town has influence over City Council, that much we know already.  How is a new system any more susceptible to this kind of corruption?  The Harry Merlo’s of the world can influence the current system, they aren’t looking for a change. The new system defines and bans relationships with conflicting interests, these safeguards don’t exist in the current system, and we desperately need them.


2. An assertion that one of the backers of the PUD is the nation’s biggest polluter, mainly Precision Cast Parts.  As of the last time I checked the state run site for campaign tracking, Precision Cast Parts was not a donor to the PUD initiative.  

I wanted to understand better the statement that Precision Cast Parts is the “nations biggest polluter." I assumed it was a statement about the volume of pollution put out by the company, that they put out more pounds of pollution than any other company in the nation.  (That is not true.)  Unrelated to this PUD, the idea that we had a factory in town producing more toxins than a big coal company was worrisome.  Their ranking is not about volume.  Here is an Oregonian article.