The "city will oppose the state"? Ha, ha, I knew it! Portlandia thinks it's in charge of everything! Next thing they'll be trying to order the Feds around.

What is this: the CoP's equivalent of a teenage "You're not the boss of me" tantrum?

Chicago vs Illinois. How'd that work out?

TTR -- At least when a teenager really wants to prove that no one can tell him what to do, he will stomp down and join the Army.

"Is it possible that somebody is proposing that kind of legislation?"

Good news - Yes
Bad news - It's Jerry Brown

God, that'd kill them losing all that free money since never kill these URDs even if the pay off the bond.

Along with a dictatorial control mindset, the City of Portland (leadership) has an obsessive taxation anxiety disorder.

Option 1. Make all URDs illegal as was done in California.
Option 2. Require a citizen vote to approve new or expanded URDs.
Option 3. Redefine "blight". Particularly offensive is the criteria whereby blight is any land that is currently below its potential [tax] value.
Option 4: No. 2 & 3 above.

I prefer NO URDs at all. It is unfortunate that governments have abused this tool to encumber their citizens with developer-friendly projects that serve the Sustainability Green Machine. The GO Bonds of the past are a lot more honest. We knew up front what we were voting for and WE got to make the decision how OUR funds were spent.

Mr. G -

Its not quite as absurd as you imply.

Look carefully a the way the legislative districts were gerrymandered after the 2010 census. Large numbers of House and Senate districts had big chunks of Portland grafed ono the.

And the Portland political class is both in love with and addicted to Urban Renewal dollars for all sors of pet projects. Yet hey are blind o he damage UR is doing to school funding.

Is hillarious to listen to the Beaverton folks moan about their sudden cuts un school jobs due o lack of available funds, and contrast tha wih heir overwhealming vote to establish Urban Renewal in Beaverton and abet "The Don" in his ongoing looting of local finances for his developer masers.

Is not just Beaverton and Portland, either.
The urban renewal dollar scam / cancer is at work in a lot of other cities and towns.

To my knowledge, only Tualain has broken free, courtesy of a lot of angry citizens and angry taxing districts like fire and schools. The local Tualatin city council, IIRC, was shocked, but recognized the handwriting on the wall.

Unlike either Clackamas County, or the City of Lake Oswego,

Nonny, there are some behind the scene discussions re-examining urban renewal both statewide and in the metro area. UR votes in Clackamas, LO, Tualatin and a few others are the harbinger of what may be coming.

Politically, from the State Legislature and/or a state initiative process, urban renewal could be altered by Nolo's options 2, 3 or 4. It's time.

If all the 100 plus state-wide URA's were propertly auditied as required by UR state law, then there would be more impetus and convincing evidence to have lawmakers, and as well as voters, to make UR changes.

"Is not just Beaverton and Portland, either."

No, nearly every small town wants to be cool like the big kids & have glommed wholesale onto this same nonsense, even (or especially?) with all its incumbent consultants and bureaucracies.

A first step would be a very clear and specific definiton of blight; one that is not open to political interpretation.

I find all these recent articles about compression problems too funny. It is as if the authors don't consider the misguided priorities and politically driven spending piling on as the cause and not that it stems just from measure 5. Now they want to circumvent that inconvenient limit to add more tax revenue outside that which is legally allowed, by "adjusting valuations".

Public Banking -- The Linchpin to Reverse Centuries of Privatization?, By Rob Kall, OpEdNews, 12/6/2012

Tonight I went to a local meeting of the Public Banking Institute with Ellen Brown as the featured speaker.

Ellen Brown Speaking in Bucks County, PA

... The lecture and the conversations before and after really helped me connect some dots that tie together single payer health care, Naomi Klein's Shock doctrine, tea partiers, BANKRUPT CITIES, global bankers like the Rothschilds, the class war and the war of the top-down powers against the bottom up revolution.

Ellen Brown, author of Web Of Debt, gave some stats in her presentation:

A public bank is not for the public - it's created to serve in the public interest
Public banks serve governments -- cities, counties, municipalities, states and in other parts of the world, whole countries. They serve them by making interest-free loans to them [URD realms] and by earning far greater interest on money they have.

35-40% of everything we buy goes to interest.
(You don't have to be paying interest on anything directly to be paying interest. Interest is built into the product.)

29% of business profits go to the financial industry.

21-32 trillion$ are hidden in offshore tax havens.

40% of public projects, [URD's, e.g.] ... goes to interest.

12% interest for garbage collection.

38% interest on water processing

70+% interest as part of public housing costs.

How can governments recapture these profits? By owning a bank.

Socialist? No.
Banking is not a market good or service. It's financial infrastructure, which belongs in the public sector -- part of the commons.

PAALF is going to end Urban renewal by 2014. We're sick of being displaced for rich developers profits.

"Next thing they'll be trying to order the Feds around."

Whaddya mean next time. Ever heard of the Joint Terrorism Task Force?

I am confident there will be legislative proposals in 2013 to repeal the UR statutes. If the far-left CA legislature was able to do it, why not Oregon? It's one of the simplest ways of directing more revenue to schools and other special districts without raising taxes.

Maybe if they had a SUBurban renewal tax district some of those potholes and chronic infrastructure problems east of the river would get some attention.

The trick would be to say, "You can't have both simultaneously. ONE urban renewal or ONE suburban renewal project at a time and you must alternate."

And the area in question must be truly "blighted."