"Completed construction of Directors Park, opened in October 2009,
to enhance downtown retail and office development."

One would think the hole next door would be under construction with the completion of the park. Evidently, there is more involved in office development than creating a park downtown.

According to Der Fuher Transit Dictator Macfarlane, payroll receipts are up 4% over last years receipts.

So that must mean there are more people working right?

The glossy illustrates the collusion between the "City of the Future and Current Awesomeness" and their preferred types of businesses they have rubber stamped as part of the aforementioned awesomeness and the green legacy projects. They even included the Iron Work company that is going to delay the toy train on the seedy side of the polluted river. I think Vera's lapdog needs to immediately hire an army of wordsmiths to catch these errors. Apparently, the text/twitter staff are preoccupied with condensing communications into a limited format.

So...how many of these jobs aren't CoP Chief Director of Twitter positions?

I started to dig into their methodology but why bother. Basically, they're taking credit for everything that moves, so that any job growth since the depth of the recession is a result of their "economic development."

I would be most interested to understand how they define "retaining" jobs and what the city has to do with that.

Anyway, their employment data for Mult. Co. is cherry picked, comparing July 2009 to May 2011 to find a +5,500 job difference. If you compare May 2009 to May 2011, you find a 2,500 job LOSS.

From the peak in 2007, the county is down 34,000 jobs.

Great job, Mr. Mayor! So the 26,463 full-time private sector jobs lost since you have been working in city hall between 1997 and 2009 might be gone forever, making Multnomah County "one of the poorest performing counties in the West," but you have added 1900 Tweeters on the public dime. You are seriously touting the success of your downtown retail development when there is a 40% vacancy rate downtown?

Go back to Newport, Mayor Creepy. Or a community college.

(see http://oregonbusinessreport.com/2010/12/portland-area-near-last-for-jobs-among-199-others/)

(Commissioner Nick Fish spoke about the decision two-and-a-half years ago to create a Bureau of Housing separate from the PDC, and “unleash the power of two separate organizations—to have PDC focus relentlessly on jobs, and job creation, and the local economy.”)

Great- let's create another layer of government. And letting PDC not have to deal with unimportant stuff like affordable housing, allows them to focus relentlessly on getting publicly-funded no-bid jobs for their construction mafia buddies.

I'm really tired of the easy, unchallenged, access that the city's PR people have with the local media.

Hey, now, they've created a lot of PR flak jobs if nothing else.... they just cannot do math.. even though it may seem like 1000 plus new PR flaks.

Ha Ha. Good one, Jack. This brochure is funnier than reading the comics. I wonder how many of the "new" jobs went to creative class types to dream up new ways to spin the same old BS? The claims of actual job creation would be laughable if the reality wasn't so depressing.

I don't buy anything uncle Sam Adams claims or says.

Amanda Fritz, "We can't afford NOT to build Milwaukie Light Rail".

TriMet uses tax dollars to pay staff to lie.

http://trimet.org/pdfs/publications/review_debunking_portland.pdf

TriMet,"Light rail and streetcar investment has been matched with more than $8 billion in adjacent new development".

"Development and Transit
Light rail does not by itself promise redevelopment and prosperity – but it does provide access and access is a valuable commodity. That value translates into more density, less parking and new mixes of commercial and residential development. With access that is clean, quiet and less auto dependent, the character of the surrounding development can be more pedestrian oriented. The prosperity of the Central City and Pearl District is the product of a regional land use and transportation policy that makes reinvestment attractive. There is a synergy between urban renewal investments, streetcar construction and new development and redevelopment. Parking revenue and self-imposed local improvement taxes helped to support the streetcar program. Studies for the Portland Development Commission show that Portland’s livability has attracted a creative generation of workers. New talent and an environment that supports emerging business and industry contributes to the local and international economy, provides cultural benefits to the community and brings national and international visibility. These advantages allow Portland compete with regions like San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York. Regardless of profession or life-style preferences, everyone benefits from a well-developed and integrated transit system."

Perhaps with all of that transit development the COP is counting all of the gang-bangers, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes in their employment count. Those are creative, aren't they?

Of course they're touting jobs created, nothing about net job gain (because that, like unicorns, doesn't exist). On the upside, they didn't bang too loudly on the ever mysterious "jobs saved" drum.

This is amazing. There's been $3.6 Billion in development spurred by our rail transit in just the last 5 years?

How did the lie of "leveraged" investment go from $4.4 Billion in August 2006 to $8 billion today.

The answer is bigger lies follow smaller ones.

http://www.iedconline.org/downloads/smart_growth.pdf

"These case studies range from the use of transit-oriented development in Portland Oregon, where light rail has sparked $3 billion in new development

The Portland Streetcar, which opened in 2001, has been credited with leveraging $1.4 billion in investment around the transit loop."

According to NBER's dating Committee the recession ended June, 2009 based on an assessment of "the payroll and household measures of total employment, and aggregate hours of work in the total economy" among other economic measures. Good to know it was smart mayors and smart bureaucrats responsible for the job growth -- I hadn't know they brough us back from the brink. Stupid me, I've been looking at consumption expenditures and private investment as the principal job growth (tepid as it might be) drivers. I'll learn someday.

"We previously had 13 target industries—which was not focused—and now we have the focused four, which has become five,” added Commissioner Amanda Fritz."

The focused four, which has become five. Probably that went up to six, but was revised down to three between the point that statement was taken and transferred to the web.

UPDATE: since I started typing this, it was been retroactively revised up to 8.

"We created 1,900 jobs in Portland"

Yeah, they're all on Sam's staff and the PR flacks.

A more useful and informative statistic would be to know the number of jobs lost as result of stupid local policy compared to the number of jobs created by stupid local policy. Of course, that number is probably impossible for "experts" to be able to enumerate.

It's hard to determine how they're calculating these job figures as the report seems to count the reduction in the number of unemployment claimants as "increased jobs" (translation: people ran out of benefits and gave up looking for work). On page 4 they then mention the business license "activity" as indicative of the number of new businesses that opened up shop but don't appear to parse out renewed licenses from new ones.

Many of the jobs "created" appear to be attributable to Vestas, SoloPower and ReVolt, all which have received millions of dollars of tax breaks and subsidies to site facilities in Portland. A big chunk is also temporary construction work for the streetcars and MAX money pits.

Page 8 is pretty funny, Portland has a strong athletic industry because it's home to powerhouses like Nike and Columbia Sportswear. Except Columbia packed up and moved out to Washington County 10 years ago when the city wouldn't let it build any evil car parking for it's planned new headquarters location in inner NE. And Nike is in unincorporated Washington County.

Unbelievable that transit oriented development has created so many jobs when Interstate Lightrail proves the opposite.

The few coffee shops along the route layed off baristas, but the prostitutes increased so I can see the net gain. Or maybe Sam has a way of counting the drug dealers as employed. That certainly has increased. And if not that, maybe he is now including the drive-by shooters as employed.

How about looking at NET jobs created. If your policies and fees result in losing 3 jobs to create 1 job you did not "create" jobs in my book.