"to improve the City and PDC’s effectiveness in supporting neighborhood-based job creation and business development"

How can a city government do that? In Portland, the default assumption is that the city should be up to its elbows in literally everything. Then you set up offices and commissions and spend a billion dollars finding out that the city government has next to no ability to "create jobs."

What the city CAN do is what people in a left-of-center city like Portland hate to hear: just get out of business' way, and stop charging fees for everything. When they say something is bad for business, like reducing street parking, actually listen to them, instead of rolling your eyes and dismissing them as cranks.

"Let's take the money that's being spent on all this psychobabble and pave a couple of streets. Or feed a few homeless people. Or hire a teacher."

...or give it back to the people who earned it in the first place!

"seeks to spearhead"

"seeks to expand its toolbox"

Gee how special. They're Seekers.

Of busy work.

This region is chuck full of Seekers at multiple agencies who produce nothing but more for them to do.

"Market PDC and non-PDC products and services to small businesses including those owned
by minorities and those with limited English proficiency."

I like the specific call-out, are they being defensive or showing a preference?

I just filled an entire Buzzword Bingo card!

Just curious: If you spearhead a strategy, does that make you a ... spearchucker? Clearly whoever is working on this needs some sensitivity training. PDC really must rid itself of such institutional racism. I'm calling the city's Human Rights Commission!

"PDC seeks to expand its toolbox..."

More like a bs-filled sandbox than a toolbox. And it needs contracting, not expanding.

The focus of the Neighborhood Economic Development Strategy is to...identify action steps to build a comprehensive Neighborhood Economic Development system.

Nice work guys. If they pay $135k to come up with stuff like that, I want in.

Just curious: If you spearhead a strategy, does that make you a ... spearchucker?

No, I think it means you're the one getting..."chucked".

The PDC should draw a little red urban renewal box around every public school requiring maintenance and go to work.

"Draw a little red urban renewal box around every public school"

And when they are finished with the deferred maintenance on schools how about attacking the deferred maintenance of our roads and bridges. No, not those bridges, the other bridges; the ones that CARS and TRUCKS go over.

Snards,...In Portland, the default assumption is that the city should be up to its elbows in literally everything...

...elbows, seems more like up to our necks with debt, and the planning, overplanning and into controlling every aspect of our lives if they could, including what kind of toilet paper we would be allowed to buy in the stores.

Smart growth, smart meters, smart alecks!

Enough to make you upchuck.

Dear god, all that talk and no actionable items - Mental mastubation at its finest!

Can someone help me find the definition for "non-profit commercial development[,]" other than as a Gap?

Such a public-private utopian model for economics should be labeled the Unicorn model of economics. In such a model the only people that actually get to make any money are the public employees. Their labor, hypocritically, is not free. I'd bet that the advocates would have a hard time articulating the labor theory of value (if they ever heard of it), which can be understood without distinguishing between for-profit and non-profit or between public ownership and control versus private ownership and control of the means of production.

I'd bet that even Karl Marx, the critical economist that he was, would find this economic psychobabble laughable.

We need to treat Crony Capitalism similarly to how we treat religion, avoiding excessive entanglement. Just think if the hand's off policy as discussed in a recent Volokh.com post were applied to economics?

"not even give the appearance of such [economic] preference or favor," (my edit)

Judge Grilling Parent in Child Custody Case About the Parent’s Secular Humanism

These meddlesome nuts have a free speech right to bark all they want from a street corner, but have no right to consumption of compelled tax dollars from the private folks who's very private rights they seek to destroy.

This non-profit nonsense has become a religion unto itself, and leads in only one direction -- toward collective suicide by collective starvation.

This is Plannerspeak all the way. It's folk Marxism masquerading as economic development "strategy".

Maybe their building some of them really important 'linkages'...come to think of it, I had scrambled eggs and linkages for breakfast this morning ;)

Just wow. Your tax dollars at work.