Simon and Helen Director Park is only a block from Pioneer Courthouse Square, but it resonates to a completely different vibe. Quieter, and somehow more private, sunlight shines down between the FOX tower and the Paramount Hotel to illuminate the park with surprising warmth. In the shadow of the buildings the brisk breeze sucks away the heat, and steals napkins and wrappers that aren’t held down.

The park is populated with folks on lunch break. They’ve brought their brownbags, snagged a cup of tomato-orange soup at Elephant’s Deli, or a gourmet hamburger at Violetta, and they eat in the sun while still bundled for the chilly temperatures. Winter hats frame sunglasses, and sensible leggings are worn under short skirts. It’s not warm, by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s warm enough, just barely enough, to sit outside for lunch because you can’t stand being trapped inside for another day.

The fountain is now in operation, and the cleverness of its design is become apparent. What first seemed to be a low semi-circular bench is now the edge of the reflecting pool, a pool clearly intended to be easily accessible to all, and which is already a magnet for small children.

Gradeschoolers move across the park. They’re chaperoned in small packs, hopping up and over obstacles, instead of walking around them. One boy proclaims to his buddies “I got skillz!”, and none of his homies contradict him. They are a burst of noise and life threading through the noontime diners.

It’s a beautiful day. It’s a beautiful park. You can purchase slow food from a van, admire the public art, and enjoy a break from work in an indubitably pleasant public space.

It’s another spring day in Portland.

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Sam Adams, still our fair city’s mayor, is the Will Rogers of public works projects—he’s never met one he didn’t like.

Especially if it has something about it that’s trendy, green or sustainable.

Today, the City Council will vote on Adams’ proposal to siphon $20 million from Portland’s sewer fees to jump start the recently enacted 2030 Bike Master Plan. And from their comments to the media, it appears that everyone on the council except Amanda Fritz is going to go along with Adams.

Bicycling advocates—and I’m one of them—shouldn’t necessarily cheer this move. It could create a backlash that will set back the long term goals of bicycling for years and possibly scuttle other action on the bike plan, which despite the hype over a $600 million price tag, is still a plan with a lot of merit.

There’s been about an entire page of letters to the editor in The Oregonian opposing Adams’ scheme, not to mention rampant opposition on many local blogs, even on Bike Portland.org.

Here’s the gist of Adams’ reasoning: the Bureau of Environmental Services, which oversees the sewers, has come in under budget on several construction contracts during this recession. So the BES has about $15 million more than it had budgeted. There’s also some money for “Green Streets” projects and from some other small pots that account for the remaining $5 million.

One of the city’s goals in reducing the burden on its aging sewers is to divert rain water into the ground—which is why if you are a homeowner, you disconnected your downspouts a few years ago. Now the city is constructing bio-swales, which apparently are patches of ground with wildflowers and grasses growing in them on places where there used to be cement. The bio-swales absorb water that otherwise would flow into the sewers.

Adams’ idea is to stick such bio-swales into residential street intersections to create traffic impediments such as the little roundabouts you now see all over town. These bio-swale traffic calming features would be strategically placed on streets that will function as bike boulevards, which are low auto-traffic streets with few stop signs that offer bicyclists and clear and safe ride. Clinton, Ankeny, Salmon, 34th, Ladd and Tillamook are bike boulevards.

This is a “win-win” idea, Adams says, who also calls it a “two-fer.” And it is. It’s like booking air fare to New York and getting the hotel thrown into the package for free. Sounds great. Except that instead of flying off to the Apple, you should really be spending that money and time fixing your roof. Or maybe paying off your previous credit card bills.

There’s a backlog of sewer projects that BES would like to work on. Not as cool as Green Streets, but they will stop people’s houses from being flooded every winter. There’s also the fact that Portland has one of the highest sewer rates in the country and maybe that found money should be used to lower them.

The main upside to using the BES money is that the city can pull it off without asking the public for more money. It’s not the first time sewer fee revenue has been proposed for purposes not remotely connected to sewers. In fact, Mayor Adams wants to move a portion of these fees into scholarships for community college students.

A more straightforward option, would be to put a bond levy on the ballot, which carries the high risk of being shot down. According to a survey done for the bike plan, however, as many as 60% of all Portland residents would ride their bikes for commuting and errands at least some of the time, if only they felt safer on the roads. A well-conceived and targeted series of bond levies could be sold in this town. After all, we love our bikes as much as we love our libraries and parks, and those bond measures always pass. A good bike plan could win, too, but not with the stench of the city flushing sewer funds into it.

The plan, by the way, calls for $560 million to build new bike infrastructure, not $613 million. There are a couple of big, bike freeway projects in it. One of them is a nine-mile path shadowing I-84 from Lloyd Center to Parkrose, which would be the only major unimpeded bike route in the central part of town. Most of it, however, consists of filling those maddening gaps between bike lanes and adding more bike boulevards, particularly in the outer parts of the city where bicycling gets scary.

It’s a plan to create a “world class” bicycling city in Portland. But since in this economy—or in any economy in the near future—we can’t afford world class anything, there is a Plan B: the 80% solution. For considerably less money—about $200 million over 20 years—a scaled back list of projects promises a bike system in which “at least 80% of Portland residents within one-quarter mile of a developed low-stress bikeway. Implementation of this strategy is also likely to get the City most of the way toward meeting its vision of more than a quarter of all trips made by bicycling,” according to the plan.

That seems like a fair deal. The goal of the plan is to get 25% of all trips in Portland made by bike, which would be a fivefold increase. If the low-budget plan can get to 20%, or even 15%, that would be remarkable. And even if you have no intention of ever putting your butt on a bike seat, it will be good for you.

Consider this: according to AAA, it costs an average of 50 cents a mile to drive a car. You could quibble that your paid-off 1985 Corolla won’t come close to costing that much, but it’s an average that the IRS accepts if you use your car in business. So say you get on your bike and cut out half of your driving—again, using an average for the population of Portland, about 5,000 miles. That’s $2,500 more in your wallet every year.

What would you do with all that extra money? Take a trek to Katmandu? Buy that one piece of art that actually looks good to you at First Thursday? Sign up for both Zumba and Pilates classes? Pay off your mortgage or student loans? Eat at Pok Pok six days a week? Who knows?

One thing we do know, though, is that money spent on driving ends up going to companies far from here. Hardly any oil companies, auto manufacturers, banks or auto insurance firms are headquartered here. The money saved by not driving would be more likely to go to local businesses (Oregon does have a splendid assortment of custom bicycle crafters).

Multiply that $2,500 savings by 80,000 citizens (20% of the adult population of the city) and you get $200 million that could be pumped into the local economy. Yeah, we’ll have cleaner air, less noise, less stress, healthier bodies. All that. But it’s more enticing when some of that green goes into your wallet.

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• February 22, 2010 -- “I Thought Of That While Riding My Bike”* (2)
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Sunny and 60 degrees.

That’s the forecast for today. And while that hardly constitutes the arrival of spring, the raw unfiltered sunlight is shining down across Portland, and being celebrated in many diverse ways.

In Jamison Square, a gaggle of hipsters ceremoniously exchanged their square-rimmed retro eyeglasses for square-rimmed retro sunglasses.

At Reed College, a small but devoted coven of wiccans danced naked around a fire and celebrated the return of the sun. Although they had hoped to employ a few drops of the blood of a virgin in their rites, they were unfortunately unable to locate one.

In Lake Oswego countless homeowners squinted up at the sunlight flooding into their homes and jotted notes to their cleaning services to wash and squeegee the windows.

In Felony Flats, the tweakers running meth labs were completely unaffected, because they had long since covered all of their windows in aluminum foil and duct tape.

And finally all across Portland the sudden blast of sunlight through acres of pale and translucent skin resulted in a spike in Vitamin D production. Doctors suggest the effect is transitory, but citizens of the Rose City should be aware of the consequences of hypervitaminosis D, including elevated calcium levels and hypertension.

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A young African-American man remains alive and in good health today after being stopped and questioned by Portland Police officers last night.

The man, who said his name is Martell Jered Brandon, was neither tasered, shot with a bean bag gun, shot with a high-powered rifle nor bludgeoned after being intercepted by a pair of police officers shortly after midnight.

Eyewitnesses said that Brandon was walking along North Williams Avenue in an erratic manner when the police officers passed him in a patrol car. One of the officers rolled down his window and commanded Brandon to stop, but the command was ignored initially.

“Then the dude reached into his coat pocked and pulled out something shiny,” said Blake Miller, who observed the incident from across the street. “I thought for sure they’d open fire on him.”

“That was my iPod,” said Brandon. “I’d been bouncing to some Busta and didn’t hear the 5-0 at first.”

Upon seeing that the object was an iPod, the patrol car drove away. “Man, I don’t know what to think now,” Brandon said. “They didn’t shoot me, they didn’t harass me, they didn’t work me over. This is going to mess up my cred, you know?”

A police bureau spokesperson said the two officers have been placed on paid leave of absence pending a thorough investigation into the incident.

(Editor’s Update: Yes, we’ve turned comments off on this article. If you have issues, please take them up with me, thanks – Betsy Richter)

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If we are not part of the conversation or listening to the conversation, then what are we here for? For me the conversation takes many forms today. My personal preferred way is face to face. But that’s not always the way it happens or needs to happen.

We have at our fingertips tool after tool to have a conversation with people that we might not otherwise be able to have a conversation with. Those tools seem to grow in number as much as in controversy, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Yelp, Brightkite, Text … do I need to list more? And any site you can go to that offers a tool or tools to communicate or measure communication is about listening to the conversation.

Yesterday, I saw this tweet:

So, of course I click the link for OregonLive to read Anna Griffin’s post on OregonLive. “Sam Adams needs to toss Twitter and get back to the big picture for Portland” By Anna Griffin. Really? I disagree. I sometimes wonder what people are really annoyed or mad about when they write something like this? He is the Mayor. Twitter is one of the most transparent communication tools today!

“This is attention-deficit governing, driven by insecurity and enabled by the iPhone. In the short term, it creates the false sheen of engagement. Over the long haul, it’s no way to build public support for the hard and expensive decisions to come.”

False sheen of engagement? Engagement is engagement, Twitter is immediate and it’s timely. And why not use any tool available to build public support?

It would be like me saying: “I think the radio creates a false sheen of engagement because they are driven by sales and their advertisers have agendas contrary to mine. So Mayor Adams should dump any communication with radio.” Right — dumb, ill advised and limiting. Not to mention narrow-minded.

I find it so curious that people will participate in the very thing that they are complaining about. Instead of accepting the change and adapting to progress they fight it. The conversation is going to happen whether any of us want it to or not. So will we participate in it and use it for good? Or will we fight it and try to limit how we connect and tell others how they should communicate?

Email opened lines of communication like never before. We could read an article on line, email the author, and they would respond. Now we can mention a favorite author or individual on Twitter and the chances of you getting that “@someone is now following you on Twitter”, is pretty high. They are listening! And they’d better be!

If you’ve read the book “Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work & in Life, One Conversation at a Time” by Susan Scott, you are familiar with “Our careers, companies and relationships succeed or fail, gradually then suddenly—one conversation at a time.” and “No one engages; nothing changes.” If you haven’t read the book, I recommend it!

Susan writes, “Yes, the conversation is the relationship. One conversation at a time, you are building, destroying, or flatlining your relationships. It is possible, however, to create high-intimacy, low-maintenance relationships – one relatively brief conversation at a time.”

Are you listening to the conversation?

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I’m working on a piece for tomorrow about experiences parking in downtown Portland.

Yes, it’s a follow-up to this piece. Yes, it involves a towing story or two. And yes, I’ve already gotten a ton of feedback in email, thanks to a Twitter call out earlier today. But I want to include your experiences & thoughts as well as part of the story.

So if you’ve got one to share, please email me: betsy@ourpdx.com. (If you’d prefer to remain anonymous, that’s fine – just let me know how you’d like to be credited when you email.)

Thanks in advance!

And in the meantime — did you know you can pay your parking tickets online? Well, yes you can. And I’d suggest you do so if you have even one outstanding parking ticket ASAP, lest your own car be towed without warning.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Businesses don’t pay taxes; they just pass the cost of taxes on to—“

OK, so you’ve heard that. Most recently, you probably heard that from the opponents of Measures 66 and 67. One of their arguments is that Measure 67 in particular is nothing more than a sales tax, because businesses will raise their prices to cover the tax.

That notion is a myth that needs to be busted. Either the opponents have never taken an economics class or, more probably, they assume you haven’t.

Businesses will stick consumers with any increase in costs — labor, supplies, rents and taxes — if they can get away with it. But that’s a big if.

Let’s go back to Econ 101, where you learn about supply, demand, pricing curves and economies of scale. (I know, it was a boring class, so we’ll just go over the Cliff Notes.) Essentially, businesses have two goals that have to be balanced against each other: 1) charge as much as they can for their products or services and 2) acquire as many customers as possible.

Say I have a burrito stand downtown. If I price my burritos at $1 (and the quality is as good as any others), I’d have so many customers, they’d be lining up for blocks. But I’d go broke because $1 wouldn’t cover the cost of ingredients, rent and other expenses. At about $3 per burrito, I’d break even but make no profit. From what I’ve observed, burrito stand operators can make a living with a $4.50 – $5 burrito. If I charged $10 for a basic burrito, I’d make a lot more money per burrito, but I’d go out of business because I wouldn’t have enough customers, if any.

What happens then if the price of beans jumps 50 percent? I could figure out how much more money it takes to make a burrito and tack that onto my price, maybe bump it up a quarter or fifty cents. Since all other burrito carts are subject to the same price of beans, they also raise their prices — all except Enrique down on the next block. He keeps his prices lower and gets more customers. He’s not losing money, because the extra volume makes up for the lower margin. So that forces me to lower my prices as well. Eventually all the burrito stands end up back at the same price and have to figure out some other way to make up the lost profit.

In a competitive free enterprise environment, businesses will do anything to avoid losing market share. They will take losses for awhile, or cut costs or reconfigure their business model and offer different products or services. In fact, they are constantly doing all of this. Raising prices, especially in a down economy, is going to cost market share unless they can come up with compelling reasons to charge more.

So what’s going to happen to businesses if they can’t raise prices and their taxes go up? Are they going to lay off workers? Go out of business? Probably not if they have survived the past year.

You’ve heard about, and very possibly experienced, the Great Recession of 2009. Depending on which economists you trust, it is either over or it isn’t. For the past year, however, businesses have already been laying off employees, cutting other expenses and scratching out a buck any way they can.

Recessions are like long juice fasts in which businesses purge toxic elements from their systems. When businesses are in growth mode, they often have to hire people they wouldn’t otherwise want to employ. Recessions give them an opportunity to trim the deadwood. Recessions force businesses to rethink every part of their operations and that makes them better. Most companies have cut hours and employees over the past year to the point they can’t cut any more and operate efficiently.

I have a friend who is vice president of a moderately sized company that manufactures and markets upscale tile. A year ago, he had to go through the horrific process of laying off a fifth of the company’s employees due to rapidly declining sales, since demand for its products was affected by the implosion of the housing market. He absolutely hated having to cut so many jobs. A few weeks ago, however, he told me the company finished the year with a decent profit despite a $2 million drop in sales. And the company president and owner took his annual month-long vacation to Cancun as usual.

The leasing agent for a firm that owns a big chunk of southeast Portland property recently mentioned that Starbucks sent him a letter demanding a 25 percent reduction in its rents (the firm leases to Starbucks in two locations). He said the same letter had been sent to every Starbucks landlord in the U.S. Given that Starbucks was closing down hundreds of stores, the company had a lot of leverage behind its demand.

Starbucks’ stock price has nearly tripled in the past year. Intel’s shares are up more than 50 percent. Stock prices for most of those banks we all bailed out are up double or better. In fact, most of the market has recovered from the precipitous fall it took 15 months ago. The big corporations are making big profits again. These are the companies that will pay the most under Measure 67. Some of the biggest will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars more, and it will come out of those profits.

They have done pretty well, considering. Many of the rest of us haven’t. It’s only fair they pick up a bit more of the tab on public education and the other essential services that these ballot measures will protect.

The burrito stand? Under Measures 66/67, it will pay $150 minimum tax — or less than a penny per burrito.

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• January 10, 2010 -- A Statement Left Out of the Voter’s Pamphlet…??? (11)

Yes, it’s time for another election — this time, the January 26th Special Election. Registered voters have already received their Voters Guide, with ballots due any day now. But we’ve uncovered a statement from a concerned citizen that inexplicably didn’t make it in the Voters Guide. We’re republishing it here in its entirety, well, just because…

Dear “Fellow” Oregonians,

I know it’s very tempting to raise taxes on those who are better, er, better off, than you. You may think it will be no skin off your nose — a nose which, unlike the gallant captains of industry, has never been put to the grindstone. You may be persuaded by arguments that the government “needs” our money, as if we didn’t need it ourselves.

Please consider the consequences of approving Measures 66 and 67. Measure 66 would add a confiscatory 1.8% surtax on individual income above $125,000 (or above $250,000 for a married couple). Do you think that’s pocket change for those of us who have the kind of income and life that you all want? Of course not.

For example, take the poor couple who bring home a mere $500,000 a year. If Measure 66 passes, that extra tax will most likely keep them from hiring an au pair from France to look after their kids during the summer, thus depriving our state of an opportunity to develop friendship between nations.

Or consider the heiress whose annual stipend from the family’s estate comes to a measly $3 million annually. The surtax on the income would cost jobs for ordinary people. Since I find myself in this predicament, I know I would have to lay off the crew that is renovating my stables with imported tile and granite, perhaps forcing these hardy young men to return to whatever country they came from.

We really can’t afford to be losing jobs in this dire economic climate. Who but the wealthy can create jobs by investing their money in important ventures? Those with wealth also have the insight as to which investments will pay off. The stock market is a total mess at the moment, and nobody with any brains would throw money into a start-up small business (the majority of which fail). No, there are superior options, such as “life settlements“.

Yes, by purchasing life insurance policies from elderly people (and betting that they die early so we can cash in), we are not only providing economic stimulus to needy families, but also keeping the deserving bankers at Goldman Sachs employed during these difficult times.

Now as for Measure 67, it’s just criminal to make a corporation pay taxes when it doesn’t show a taxable profit. For example, my father’s corporation has not shown a profit for years. Why should it be gouged by the government to pay taxes? I must assure you, however, this company is a very good investment that has yielded an average 5 per cent annual dividend. How can that happen without a taxable profit? The operative word is taxable. With tax credits and loss carry forward, all of its profits magically disappear! What’s the use of good accountants if you still have to pay taxes?

Remember, what’s good for the big corporations is good for Oregon. And who knows, you just might win the lottery and become rich yourself. Then you will understand how I feel. Please vote “No” on Measures 66 and 67.

Ava Rishus-Lee
Oregonians Against Job-Killing Child-Molesting Baby-Seal-Bashing Vomit-Spewing Flesh-Eating Taxes

(Editor’s Note: Gil is yet another new OurPDX author. Please welcome him to our ranks!)

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…that you can still enter to win Xanadu tickets by playing the Xanadu trivia contest on Twitter? Follow @ourpdx & we’ll send out today’s question at 12 noon. First person to respond (yes, on Twitter!) will be entered into a drawing; winner will be chosen on Saturday & will receive ticket’s for Saturday’s opening night performance! Not on Twitter? Sadly, you’re missing out on a chance to win tickets, among other things…

(The rules & regs are in Morgan’s post here; congrats to @divebarwife, @taradublinrocks & @ladygeek, who got their responses in less than 9 minutes on average!)

…you can also still get tickets for the Marysville Elementary School Auction tomorrow night at 6 pm. Can’t go? There’s a handy donation link there as well. Need the backstory? Get it here, here, or there.

…PDX.fm has 2 channels now? Go see! (I’m already a fan of @zanger’s new 9 am showThe Life Portlandic, even before he said nice stuff about us…!)

What do you know that we should know…?

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Although injuries knock their stars flat,
The Blazers will go to the mat.
Though their line-up grows lean
They’ll still field a team:
Three rookies, one coach, and Trail Cat.

When you marry you think it’s forever,
And it’s fine to be sad when it’s over.
But no matter how mad
You might be at their dad,
You DON’T throw your kids in the river.

Supposedly we’ve turned the corner,
the Recession is finally over,
I’m sure that sounds fine,
to the folks standing in line,
at the soup kitchen waiting for dinner.

The Westside got told what to do:
Boil tapwater a minute or two.
I wonder what’s odder,
boiling our own water,
or that fact that we’re drinking bird poo?

We hope you enjoy New Year’s Eve.
And you spend a day off at your ease.
But please keep in mind,
as you’re watching halftime,
The Oregonians at war overseas.

(Editor’s note: We invite you to add your own in the comments. Or should we say, we dare you….!)

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