They're at it again at Portland City Hall -- back to Wall Street to borrow a few more millions. This time it's a mere $3.6 million, for "assessment contracts relating to local improvements, sidewalk repairs, and system development charges, the costs of which have been assessed against benefiting property owners." If those assessed costs don't get paid, the city promises to pay the bonds out of any available funds it has. Some of the IOUs are expected to run for 20 years.

The latest bond sale's supposed to go down on Thursday. The bonds are rated Aa1 -- a notch below the Aaa rating that the city likes to brag about.

In the sales pitch for the new IOU's, the city makes an interesting disclosure: Its long-term indebtedness stands at about $3.29 billion -- down slightly from $3.30 billion in August of 2010. Apparently, Portland's taking a break from whipping out the credit card. A good thing, too, as unfunded pension and retiree health care liabilities have likely broken an additional $3 billion. By our best calculation, debt per resident is up over $11,000.

What's with the leveling off of red ink from bonds? Is it the sign of a new wave of fiscal responsibility by the city's politicians and money managers? Maybe. But it might just be that the bankers have showed them some ugly interest rates that render more big-pet-project borrowing out of the question, at least for the moment.

Longer term, the trend is still an increase in the city's indebtedness. Portland's bonds and other long-term loans stood at at roughly $2.86 billion less than three and a half years ago. That works out to a compound annual growth rate of around 3.93% between then and now.

But to to be conservative, on our city debt clock (in our left sidebar) we've cranked the growth rate for long-term bonds and interim financing back to 0.5% a year, pending further developments. Let's hope the trend continues. The debt per resident will keep going up, but not as quickly.