On May 1, Denver police halted the practice of pulling over cars for minor traffic infractions, including expired vehicle registration tags, unless they pose an immediate threat to public safety.
@coloradosun After seeing this experiment play out in #PortlandOregon, I can assure you it's a terrible choice to let cars with expired tags or no plates / invalid plates run around unabated.
Clean & Safe: A Dirty and Dangerous Contract for Portland
Every year, Downtown Clean & Safe receives over $5 million to provide “enhanced services” to 213 blocks of Portland’s Central City. Yet below the surface of this seemingly benign contract lie threats to public transparency, public services, and even progressive public policies. In this segment, Guest Mole Alyssa Vitale explores how Portland business interests subsidize their anti-tax lobbying via a murky contract for sanitation and safety.
If you live in Portland, OR, this issue concerns you.
Your tax dollars are being used to subsidize corporate lobbying against progressive, community-supported issues like charter reform, Portland Street Response, universal preschool, and the Portland Clean Energy Fund. You have the right to demand transparency and accountability from the City.
What you can do
Through January 15, 2024, the City is collecting public comment on the recommendations for Portland’s ESD program. To submit public comment:
Read the talking points below.
Email the City ESD coordinator, Devin Reynolds: devin.reynolds@portlandoregon.gov.
The 2020 audit found that Portland had limited oversight of its ESDs and zero guidelines for ESD formation or governance, which results in overpolicing and prevents community members from monitoring or having a say in ESD activities. Essentially, the lack of City oversight enables PBA to shield its budget and activities from public scrutiny.
To address these problems, the auditor made three recommendations.
Review the status of ESDs, their purposes, and the City’s responsibility for them, then potentially propose City Code to manage ESD formation, allowed scope of activities in public spaces, governance, and reporting
Revise agreements with each ESD to align with code changes
Develop a process for City oversight of ESD contracts, including a dedicated liaison and public reporting of ESD activities, including law enforcement and security activities to City Council and the public.
The City followed all the audit recommendations, right?
After public comment closes, BDS Planning will present its final recommendations to City Council in February 2024. It is unclear if the City intends to follow through with auditor recommendations 2 and 3.
Through January 15, 2024, the City is collecting public comment on the recommendations for Portland’s ESD program.
To submit public comment:
Email the City ESD coordinator, Devin Reynolds: devin.reynolds@portlandoregon.gov.
The City has ignored significant public testimony against ESDs. During the Downtown Clean & Safe ESD contract renewal process in 2021, hundreds of community members wrote letters to City Council and dozens more spoke in public meetings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Yeda7ULI8) asking the city not to renew its contract with Portland Metro Chamber. The voices of these community members do not appear in the draft report or recommendations. Further, the public comment process for this report occurred over the holiday season, had little publicity, and was very rushed—all factors that will minimize public engagement.
The BDS Planning draft report is biased in favor of ESDs. BDS Planning makes money from consulting on “establishing, managing, and renewing Place Management Districts,” (https://www.bdsplanning.com/key-practice-areas) another term for ESDs. In other words, the firm has a clear interest in recommending that Portland “sustain and expand its ESD program.” Further, BDS Planning founder Brian Douglas Scott was involved in 1985 Oregon legislation that enabled ESDs like Clean & Safe to form, and several members of the BDS Planning team have worked at ESDs across the country. This bias in favor of ESDs shows in their report, which cites “concerns from the ESDs themselves about the accuracy and balance of the audit’s findings” without mentioning the significant public pushback against ESDs in Portland.
The draft recommendations do not meaningfully address concerns about transparency and accountability. While the report mentions the need for transparency with ratepayers, it ignores the need for transparency or accountability to the public. This is problematic for multiple reasons. One, ESD services directly impact the public as many services occur on public streets and sidewalks. Two, many ESD zones include publicly owned buildings, meaning public institutions are ESD ratepayers, and taxpayer money subsidizes some ESD services.
Under PBA, Clean & Safe has consistently failed to deliver results in line with its established mission and commensurate with the level of funding they request. Complaints about the dirtiness of Clean & Safe’s service area abound in the official record as well as in online and in-person chatter. Clean & Safe has not delivered on the promise of “enhanced” sanitation services via privatization. It’s against common sense for City Council to continue to throw money at a bad program.
If ESDs should exist at all, they should deliver effective public services — not subsidize corporate lobbying.
Another vision
All ratepayers, including the public as taxpayers, have a right to transparent information about ESDs, particularly their budgets and governance. Public resources are used to collect ESD fees, and public institutions are ratepayers in ESDs. The public should have clear insight into how ESDs operate, who governs them, and what services they offer in addition to detailed budget information.
The people of Portland deserve fair, transparent, and public processes when the City contracts with external organizations.
The City must invest in public institutions — not private organizations — to carry out essential public services, including sanitation and behavioral and mental health services. PBA has failed to deliver a clean or safe downtown, despite receiving millions of dollars each year to do just that. Time and again, the public has demanded the City invest in functional programs like Portland Street Response.
Some of the problems with BDS Planning’s Recommendations
● BDSP claims that districts like Portland’s ESD’s add proven value to urban environments. They have not demonstrated that this is the case.
● BDSP argues that Portland should sustain and expand its ESD program, even though there has been ample public testimony against them.
● BDSP proposes that the City should modify its guidelines on ESD subcontracting practices to give the ESDs more flexibility to work with small local firms. That is, they propose the City undermine its support for the the rights of subcontracted workers.
Portland has so many empty storefronts and little spots that it's easy to daydream about opening your own place, but at the same time beloved PDX institutions are closing in droves. It's such a shame
@devinprater I'm trying to improve the #Gentoo#Linux installation instructions so that they take blind users into account. I'm hitting a brick wall.
Right now #Gentoo boots a live ISO to a terminal. No SSH by default. No screen reader by default. Hell, if there is a problem at boot time with GRUB, you won't know.
What helps? The only thing I can think of is maybe having a serial interface an external device can "screen read" aloud. Any suggestions would be extremely helpful.
Is this a fairly common problem with installing Linux distros?
I have a fairly low-tech idea that doesn't scale up well: if anyone in the #portlandoregon area would like to install Linux but can't because of accessibility issues during the install, hit me up and I'd be happy to try and assist in person.
I've just submitted my OSM/Wikidata linking talk to be considered for #FOSSY, the new annual Free Software conference being held in Portland, Oregon. I picked the 'wildcard' track because I'm not sure where it fits.