Is it nice week on the Mayor's blog?

Every week is nice week... at first.

Every week is nice week... at first.

Oh c'mon! Who couldn't go for a bran muffin, a cup of decaf, and some good conversation? It's just the thing to help you forget about the guy in the next cube over who keeps calling his girl on his company cell instead of filing his TPS reports.

Or arresting tweeker thieves.

Say what you want, but Derrick's Dilemma has taken the heat off the Tram, no?

And the Saturday Market screwing, which I believe is going to get more real tomorrow. I'm sure the convention center hotel's on the move, too, along with the airport runway rezoning.

People have been screwing at Saturday Market for years - that's why it's so filthy down there.

I can't believe I'd ever say this, but I miss Vera. Potter is quite a piece of work, maybe instead of visioning, he should focus on the here/now.

TomBoy is blind. "focus" is what he's doing to "us." Visioning with 100,000 Portlanders is a joke....as is the visioner.

Heat off the Tram?? Well, today the NM URAC (regarding the Eighth Amendment to the South Waterfront Central District Project Development Agreement in the North Macadam Urban Renewal Area) voted 7 to 1 to support the Amendment to continue the tram.

The taxpayers will be picking up another $5M dollars towards the tram. TIF total-$8.5M plus all the other taxpayers costs this blog has added up makes the taxpayers total near $26M.

This URAC vote will now go to the PDC Board this evening with probably another yes vote.

There was much discussion on the lack of funding for most of the identified projects in NM, especially for transportation projects, greenway, parks, and affordable housing. The additional $5M doesn't help in that regard. But the tram must go on.

And the real number is way, way higher than $8.5 million.

Ya got that right....real number: a moving upward target....where she stops, nobody knows.

Glad you guys are focusing your outrage where it belongs -- on OHSU and their planners and architects who lied to the City.

Like the big O said on 4/2: "When Portland's City Council bought into a $15.5 million aerial tram in 2003, it didn't know one key fact: At that price, the tram was already impossible to build... The upper station's complexities were well known to anyone involved with the tram by January 2003. Yet no one working on the project at the time raised red flags about the impact on the upper station's cost. When the City Council approved the $15.5 million tram project seven months later, the upper station's challenges never came up."

It's just another familiar story: Nobody on the City Council asked whether the tram budget was fake, nobody on the City Council asked whether "clean money" was too easy to cheat on, nobody on the City Council asked if conventions would really come to a supersized white elephant convention center, nobody on the City Council asked whether it was smart to buy a water billing system from incompetents, nobody on the City Council asked whether Enron would laugh their PGE bid out of its offices...

Nobody on the City Council ever asks.

Maybe we need some commissioners who will ask.

We need judges who are not ceremonial rubber-stampers.

Commissioners simply do not need to ask.

Lee reports a 7 to 1 vote for the continuation of funding the tram increases.

And PDC continues the charade by accepting the NMURAC vote that includes those who kept the cost increases from City Council to begin with. No mention of a conflict of interest here, is there?

I'm sure Council will accept the increased funding plan with hardly a question.

Who amongest us will request City Council to seek redress from those who purposely lied to Council and defrauded us as taxpayers?

As Steve Duin asks in his April 11, 2006 column, "Forfeiting our own moral authority",

"...when did we decide we had no choice but to surrender to those cynical clowns?....When did we forfeit our own moral authority, and the will to say, 'Enough'"?

Perhaps we are the ones "...stuck on stupid." After all, look who we elected

"Like the big O said on 4/2: "When Portland's City Council bought into a $15.5 million aerial tram in 2003, it didn't know one key fact:..."

Anything at all about what they were doing.

What's new?

For the 17th time, OSHU moved the tram goal posts secretly, so they should pick up the over-run. Call it a lying penalty.

USA hospitals have more than enough money at the end of the day, so the over-run is really pennies considering OHSU's billions in finances, buildings, and research.

Pennies to Pill Hill. Mere pennies. Story over.