Just a note that some new information has come to our attention that causes us to re-set our City of Portland debt clock, always ticking in our left sidebar. The actuaries who estimate the city's unfunded police and fire pension and disability liability have determined (page 15) that the amount of that liability as of July 1, 2007 was $1,919,501,000. That's a mere 6.5 percent increase over the year before, which is pretty good considering that the three-year compound growth rate was 14.63 percent a year, and the seven-year compounded growth rate was 10.14 percent annually.

The new numbers were disclosed to the city in late September, but they were apparently just made public a couple of weeks ago.

We've re-set the police and fire pension portion of the clock to the new July 1, 2007 figure, and ratcheted the annual growth rate down to 6.5 percent, which is probably optimistic. The city still owes close to $8,100 for every resident, and so I wouldn't break out the champagne.