It's been amusing to watch as the average Joe and Jane in Clackamas County realize that their home turf is being turned into Portland. They're getting Blumenauered with bike paths, hit up in their car registration fees for a bridge in another county, and now being saddled with "urban renewal" -- the sucking of their property taxes for developer boondoggles such as streetcars and MAX trains.

Some of them are fighting back, including at the ballot box. Lately the opponents have killed the car registration fee for the bridge, interred "urban renewal" in Tualatin, and chased a heavily subsisdized solar energy project out of Wilsonville and all the way to north Portland. Now they're pushing back on the insane Milwaukie MAX with a ballot measure that would throw a money wrench into the "urban renewal" machinery that is needed to pay for the train.

The measure, for which signatures are currently being collected, would require big urban renewal decisions in the county to be put up for a public vote county-wide. The measure might actually make it onto the November ballot, and if it does it stands a good chance of passage.

So what do the county commissioners, who are pushing "urban renewal," do -- prepare a spirited "no" campaign? That would be fighting much too fairly. Instead, they'll confuse everybody with a competing ballot measure, which requires much less voter approval, and put a clause in it that says if both measures pass, the wimpier one prevails:

Meanwhile, Clackamas County’s legal counsel is working on its own measure that legal representative Scott Sedaris says would negate the one Williams is spearheading.

"If both were approved, we would have a provision in ours that says ours trumps," Sedaris said, before joining commissioners in laughter.

According to Dan Chandler, the county’s newly appointed strategic policy administrator, the preliminary idea is to create a measure that would require votes only from those within the boundaries when a URA is created or amended, and not from the entire voting population.

The reasoning, according to Chandler, is that officials would be challenged to convince voters in one area to approve a plan that would only benefit another.

As well they should be challenged. "Urban renewal" robs property taxes from all over the county, directly or indirectly.

The commissioners' strategy of dueling measures is hardly new, but it's a perversion of the initiative process. Laughing about it shows a true lack of class. We don't pay a lot of attention to the commissioner races down that way, but something seems really wrong.