Why should he, when he'll have all the condo developers' money? But only $500 apiece. And $500 from each of their spouses. And their corporations. And their kids. And the secretaries of all the above.

Oh, and this is comical: It would create an appearance of a conflict of interest if he participated in "voter-owed elections," because he voted for it. Hear that, Richie Rich? He says you look like a crook!

Free municipal wi-fi, which has been so underwhelming in Portland, has now been shown to be a flop just about everywhere it's been tried. In other words, a not-so-hot idea.

Hey, I discovered this Portland-based publication. It's cool.

The baseball drama continues into the last day of the regular season, tomorrow. There are still four teams vying for two playoff spots in the National League, and it's possible that neither of the two berths will be settled tomorrow.

The Mets won (big time) and the Phillies lost today. If one wins and the other loses tomorrow, the winner advances to the playoffs and the other is out. If both lose, it's off to a special showdown game to see who makes the playoffs. If both win, there's that special showdown game, and potentially more.

Meanwhile, the Padres lost and the Rockies won (big time) today. If the Padres win tomorrow, the Pads advance. If the Padres lose, one or more showdown games may be needed. (The Cubs and the Diamondbacks are already in the playoffs.)

The most interesting possibility is this one:

If Colorado, New York and Philadelphia win Sunday and San Diego loses, all would finish 89-73. New York and Philadelphia would play the NL East tiebreaker Monday; the loser would play a three-team, two-day, wild-card tiebreaker with Colorado and San Diego on Tuesday and Wednesday. In that scenario, Colorado (the team with the best head-to-head record among the three teams in the wild-card tiebreaker) would get the choice of having a bye on Tuesday or playing both games at home.

Shockingly, national TV doesn't appear to have any of these games live. Sunday pro football, you know. Seems un-American, if you ask me.

UPDATE, 9/30, 3:25 p.m.: The Mets are out (thus the Phils are in), and San Diego and Colorado play a one-game tiebreaker tomorrow.

It's supposed to rain hard tomorrow, and so you could have the great food, drinks, tradition, and entertainment of the Portland Polish Festival all to yourself:

The downtown Portland Meier & Fra -- er, Macy's will reopen in about a month. And as much as they'd like to curtail the practice, it looks as though they will indeed be sending around discount coupons to get you in there.

The coupons don't do much for me. The fine print on the back usually excludes whatever I'm in the mood to go to Macy's for. But come holiday shopping time, I can't imagine not making the pilgrimage to Fifth and Morrison.

It's amazing how early people choose up sides on political campaigns these days. Here in Portland, we're 13 months away from picking a new mayor, but already it's clear where some of the local media stand.

Willamette Week clearly supports Sam the Tram, throwing his chief opponent under the bus a couple of weeks back. Meanwhile, the semi-weekly Trib is pecking at the Trammeister at every opportunity.

It's fun to speculate about why these two free publications are already lining up as they are on The Sam. WW loves the youth, the gayness, the devotion to Condo Tower Portland. The Trib probably hates all three of those things. Is it a question of reader demographics and advertisers? In some ways, it seems like the difference between under-employed grads of high-priced colleges and the parents who are still supporting them several years longer than they wanted to.

I have no use for Sam Adams and the wasteful, plastic Portland that he's creating. The place is going broke, and mercilessly chasing real businesses and middle-class families out. Sam is a driven man who will surely leave the population in a severe civic neurosis after even one term as mayor. But until there's a viable candidate to oppose him, there's no sense in blowing a gasket, as the Trib appears to be doing. The wisest course appears to be to lie back and enjoy the experience.

We've already showed you this one. But somebody just pointed me to another one to go with it.

Looks like our favorite candidate for the White House is going to take taxpayer matching funds to get him through the primaries. In exchange, he agrees to limit what he spends.

It's a bold move, and on its face, a principled one. Or perhaps it's a desperate one. Certainly it's an abrupt change of position from what Edwards and his advisors had been saying previously. In any event, the smartest pundit I know thinks it's a bad sign, because even if Edwards gets out of the early primaries alive, he could easily run out of money down a stretch run.

The baseball playoff picture is a little clearer tonight than it was 24 hours ago. In the National League, the Cubs and the Diamondbacks have made the tournament, and the Brewers are out of the race. Either the Phillies or the Mets will get the third berth (the Phils edged ahead this evening as they won and the hapless New Yorkers lost); the fourth team will be the Phils, Mets, Rockies (who lost, first time in 12 games), or Padres (who won). The Padres are looking pretty good; the only way they could be eliminated would be in a showdown game next week, as they will be at least tied for a playoff spot when the regular season ends on Sunday.

The cannibalized widget that we posted in the wee hours of this morning as a "ticker" worked pretty well, and so here's another one for tomorrow's (Saturday's) games (times are Eastern; Fox will be showing some of the action):

In the American League, there was not much suspense today, and there won't be much until the playoffs start. The matchups are Cleveland vs. New York and Anaheim vs. Boston.

I hope this guy stays home...

It's such a gem. Let's make it bigger, noisier, and more polluting.

The guy's nothing if not an excellent politician.

As predicted here, the council of Metro, our regional government and slush fund, did not kill the Portland Convention Center hotel project yesterday. Indeed, they took a step in the opposite direction. Suddenly Metro is back to saying that the city will have to subsidize the white elephant even more than it already has. Oh, and get this: Multnomah County should also scratch around in its sofa cushions and come up with a subsidy:

First, Metro officials will talk to potential partners about sharing some of the development costs. The discussions will involve members of the Portland City Council, the Multnomah County Commission, the Oregon Legislature and businesses and property owners that might benefit from the construction of the hotel.

“We are not going to build this hotel without the financial commitment from all partners vested in the economic development of this region,” said Councilor Rod Park, who is heading up research into the project of the council.

Paging Mark Rosenbaum: I think the folks at Metro are a little hard of hearing on this one. Give old Rod a call and tell him the bank is closed.

Oden has talked often with teammate Darius Miles...

Today the Times opines that "Maine has grown into a hub of craft brewing, a smaller-scale East Coast answer to Oregon."

For more than a year now, I've had on my to-do list to take a good look at the credit card bills being racked up by the City of Portland. Our municipal government's always borrowing money -- for urban renewal, for the Big Pipe project, to pay pensions, for all kinds of purposes -- and frankly, I'm worried that it's getting us taxpayers in way over our heads.

For months, I've been dragging around with me the city's last two big, fat annual financial reports -- something called CAFRs -- but they're so long-winded, detailed, and full of jargon that it's hard to make heads or tails of them. Moreover, it takes forever for them to come out. For instance, the report for the municipal fiscal year ended this past June 30 -- that was three months ago -- won't be made public for another four months. If you're trying to get a current picture out of that document, it's hopeless, because the snapshot it provides is always seven months old or more.

But determined to find something more current, yesterday I scoured around a bit, and I believe I landed on exactly what the doctor ordered. It's this document:

I happen to know a bit about what this is, because in my time as a corporate lawyer, I drafted a couple of these. It's the "preliminary official statement" for some bonds that the city is now in the process of selling. In this case, the city's peddling 20-year bonds (i.e., borrowing money) to the tune of about $12 million to buy a "condo interest" in part of a new Portland State University building that will house the city's new archives. The bond sale is scheduled to go down next Tuesday.

Unlike the fat annual reports, the "POS," as it's known, has to be written in plain English. It's essentially a sales pitch, but by law, it must disclose all the material facts that an investor would reasonably want to know in deciding whether to invest in the city's IOU's. Financial institutions that buy bonds (i.e., lend big bucks) don't want hundreds of pages of hide-the-ball data, which is what the CAFRs seem like to me. No, they demand the straight skinny.

And so now we're ready to find out: Just how much debt is the City of Portland really in?

First, the latest number on the unfunded actuarial liability of the police and fire pension and disability fund. As of July 1, it's $1,802,394,343. That's $1.8 billion, with a "b."

Then there are the bonds, and they come rolling in at some high numbers:

- Unlimited tax general obligation bonds: $67,850,000
- Self-supporting bonds paid and/or secured by the general fund: $652,101,460
- Revenue bonds: $1,706,844,666 (including roughly $1.2 billion for sewer, $272 million for urban renewal, and $201 million for water)
- Total: $2,426,796,126

The grand total of the police and fire pension and disability liability and all the bonds: $4,229,190,469. That's roughly $4.2 billion of long-term debt that the city is staring at.

Is it anything to be concerned about?

It is if you look at it this way: They can talk all they want about what each debt is secured by, pots of money, dedicated revenue, etc., but the plain truth is that taxes get paid by people. Even corporate taxes get passed on to consumers, and a landlord's property taxes get passed on to the tenants. According to the POS, the population of the city is currently 562,690. If our debt is $4,229,190,469, at that population level it works out to $7,516.02 per resident.

Thus, the average man, woman or child living in Portland right now owes around $7,500 in long-term debt to individuals and corporations who own the city's bonds. And so it's time to get the old debt clock up on this blog:

Of course, it doesn't stop there. Metro is listed in the document as having $122 million of "property-tax backed debt" outstanding; Multnomah County another $256 million; Portland Community College another $113 million; the Portland school district another $472 million; and Tri-Met another $94 million. I don't have the populations of all those taxing jurisdictions handy, but it looks to me as though you can easily add another $1,000 a head for those bonds.

Yep, every resident in Portland owes something like $8,500 on account of local government debt. If you've got four people in your household, as I do, that's $34,000.

Not counting the state. Not counting the feds.

There are lots of additional fascinating details in the POS. I'll blog some more about them in the near future. But everyone who's interested in city government should download it (before it disappears) and look for themselves. Did you know that city tax collections for 2006-07 were actually down slightly from the year before? That the city has $172 million of short-term notes and lines of credit floating around? That 13.7 percent of all wages in the metropolitan area went to government workers?

Meanwhile, get ready to pay your 8,500 bucks. Plus interest, of course.

This is the last weekend of the regular season in pro baseball, and there's a spectacular story in progress back east. The New York Mets, who not too long ago were absolutely dominating their division, now find themselves on the brink of not making to the playoffs. Their primary nemesis (if you don't count themselves) is the pesky outfit from Philadelphia known as the Phillies.

If you like sports drama but you don't have all summer to follow the baseball version of it, here's a story you can catch over just a few days. In the National League, where the Mets and Phils play, there are seven teams still alive for four playoff berths. The Mets and the Phils will get one of the berths, and maybe even two. The other teams are the Chicago Cubbies(!), the Milwaukee Brewers, the Arizona Diamondbacks, the San Diego Padres, and the Colorado Rockies (who have won 11 straight games to come back from the dead). There could be a head-to-head one-game showdown on Monday. Indeed, in one scenario, there would be four days of crazy showdown games before the "regular playoffs" start. Or it could all be sorted out by tomorrow.

San Diego and Milwaukee will be televised this afternoon at 5; Fox will have that same matchup tomorrow afternoon at 12:55, but they'll also be trying to cover the Phils (vs. Washington) and the Cubs (at Cincinnati) at the exact same time. Sunday is pro football day, and I don't know which, if any, baseball contests will wind up being covered.

Here's a widget that I've cannibalized to see if we can get a live "ticker" going here for this afternoon and evening (times are Eastern). No warranties on whether it will work. (There's also a scoreboard of sorts, with final scores only, way down the right sidebar of our main page.)

I badly need your pro football betting advice... here.

The mindscrew from the tobacco companies just won't quit. They've got a lot of money to spend on obfuscating what's really at stake with the pending Ballot Measure 50 here in Oregon, and the latest diversion arrived in the mail today:

Wow, how subtle. Measure 50 -- which would increase cigarette taxes and dedicate the new revenue to state-financed health care programs -- is a threat to the Constititution. And look at that graphic! Not just the Constitution -- but the Bill of Rights!

What hogwash. Measure 50 has nothing to do with the Bil of Rights, and the tobacco companies who created this flyer know that darn well.

But do they want the voters to focus on what's really at stake? A couple of weeks back we blogged about the first flyer they sent out -- in which there was only one reference to "tobacco," buried way down where you had to look hard to find it. In this new beauty, it's the same deal. You have to hunt it down, but "tobacco" is in there exactly once.

Oh, and get this -- a vote for the cigarette tax is a vote for a sales tax!

I'm not sure Measure 50 is a great idea, but when I see the Merchants of Cancer working from their usual lying script, it makes by blood boil. Yes, let's put a tobacco tax in the Oregon Constitution. If it turns out to be a bad idea, we can take another vote and pull it back out. Just like we're now doing with Measures 37 and 49.

If you think Philip Morris could give a darn about your rights, here, have a "light" cig.

It's that time of year again. The Polish Festival rocks the house at St. Stanislaus Church on Interstate Avenue in North Portland this weekend.

I don't normally bore readers of this blog with any of the dozens of Internal Revenue Service rulings and announcements that I encounter every year in my work. But this one may be of interest to a broad cross-section of the public.

Willamette Week returns to some familiar themes this week. Jeff Merkley -- bad. Erik Sten -- crusading genius. (Now that he lives in the West Hills, he's even more so.) Downtown business owners -- very bad. Homer Williams -- selfless patriot.

The Sten story is interesting. Opie* wants to take property taxes from the Pearl and use them to help the David Douglas School District. A couple of problems with that. First, didn't the city float bonds to pave the streets of gold in the Pearl? If we use the property taxes to help David Douglas, doesn't that stretch out the life of those bonds? Given the crippling police and fire pension obligations that are going to be coming due pretty soon (they're at $1.8 billion currently), shouldn't we get that debt cleared up before we start in on any more Great Ideas?

Second, isn't there a legal problem with what's being proposed? I seem to recall that the Oregon Tax Court says that cities and counties can't levy property taxes to help schools if the schools have already hit their property tax limit under Measure 5. If David Douglas is already maxed out under Measure 5, isn't it illegal for the city to float it more property tax dollars?

*- New nickname pending. Too young for "Jed Clampett." Maybe "Jethro"?

The Senate voted 76-22 today to start throwing stuff at Iran:

It is the sense of the Senate--

(1) that the manner in which the United States transitions and structures its military presence in Iraq will have critical long-term consequences for the future of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, in particular with regard to the capability of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to pose a threat to the security of the region, the prospects for democracy for the people of the region, and the health of the global economy;

(2) that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran from turning Shi'a militia extremists in Iraq into a Hezbollah-like force that could serve its interests inside Iraq, including by overwhelming, subverting, or co-opting institutions of the legitimate Government of Iraq;

(3) that it should be the policy of the United States to combat, contain, and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies;

(4) to support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments, in support of the policy described in paragraph (3) with respect to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies;

(5) that the United States should designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, as established under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and initiated under Executive Order 13224; and

(6) that the Department of the Treasury should act with all possible expediency to complete the listing of those entities targeted under United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1737 and 1747 adopted unanimously on December 23, 2006 and March 24, 2007, respectively.

UPDATE, 4:05 p.m.: A commenter suggests that the bold language set forth above was taken out of the amendment before it was passed. That seems entirely possible, as the amendment set out above was passed "as modified," and that modification no doubt could have taken place on the Senate floor today. So maybe this one is not as bad as it first appeared.

UPDATE, 10:41 p.m.: The commenter was right (as usual). The two bold paragraphs were indeed deleted.

They're going to that big federal building on Broadway facing the Greyhound Station. It's so nice that that sweet Melvin Mark fellow will make a few bucks off the deal.

Meanwhile, the group trying to get the market going is gearing up for a big foodie event this weekend. It's a heck of a week for chow around here, and I'm still hungry.

I really, really love my brother.

Speaking of food in Portland, here's a colorful character.

There's supposed to be a big announcement today at 1:

The United States Tennis Association (USTA), Oregon Sports Authority, Portland Arena Management and Global Spectrum, operators of the Rose Quarter, will make a major announcement regarding the host city of the Davis Cup Final, scheduled for November 30 – December 2.

The crazy thing is, apparently it's going to be in the Coliseum.

A bit of Portland nostalgia today over at Dingleberry.

Scuttlebutt here on more candidates for Oregon attorney general. On the Republican side, we're told, "two GOP attorneys with past governmental experience [are] considering getting into the race." I figure one is Mannix; who's the other? Jack Roberts?