Cleaning Up After the Elephant Parade

Some Portland stories can't seem to write the final chapter...

Today’s invocation…

The market always comes back to reality. It just likes to wait until everyone has convinced themselves that it never will.”

—Quoth the Raven, Substack.

The Bums’ Close Call

There was a recent vote in city council that got Homelessness Inc.™ all riled up…

…and prompted a council meeting which ran seven hours, inspired hundreds of pages of testimony, and the usual parade of impassioned witnesses. Four councilors ditched out of the session, as the Oregonian reported…

Three other opponents, Councilors Olivia Clark, Dan Ryan, and Eric Zimmerman, were absent during the roll call, as was Councilor Candace Avalos.

Avalos’s absence should have raised more than one eyebrow…after all, in her copious Blusky posts, she’s made it clear that she’s skeptical about the city’s “pack’em up, move ‘em on” strategy…

…although she dropped her posts a day after she skipped out on the marathon-meeting. Our theory: Candy counted votes and determined, brilliantly (since she helped write the city charter), that a Yes would split the council down the middle.¹ And maybe—just maybe—city attorney Robert L. Taylor might just announce that, by golly, the charter makes it clear that one of the few powers given the mayor is breaking a council tie. Cue our capon-mayor, Keith Wilson, who (we can only guess) would have voted No on a measure that the socialists had teed up to embarrass him. Although he does a good job of handling that himself.

Still, there were five votes for the measure. Close call. The real story: the Democratic Socialists are now firmly joined at the hip, never to be torn asunder if one of the clique does something dumb enough to get the sleepy moderates riled up.

And: that same “opposition” is too Portland Polite to offer much in the way of...well, opposition. Witness the walkout.

There was a shot fired by the retreating sensibles: Angelita “Mean Girl” Morillo had “disrespected” the mayor; in other cities, “disrespect” is known as “debate.” Portland will polite itself into terminal decline.

Angelita Morillo (author of the last-minute measure) and the other Fab Five could care less about their nominal defeat; she and the socialists actually understand how to maintain their power to intimidate (by scaring moderates who won’t come out and fight), and the power of their party (in a “non-partisan” council) to deliver a minority-majority. The charter was engineered for these folks. They get it.

The DSA types and their useful idiots understand that (1) most of them have another three years to do their mischief, (2) Portland voters have extremely short attention spans, (3) the close call will probably pry loose some nonprofit support among the people who pay their mortgages by ministering to the homeless, (4) they’ll always get 25-percent of the vote from their Democratic Socialist party fanatics, (5) any moderate/protest vote—no one knows if such a thing exists—will be chopped up as happened in the last election. .

If nothing else, the tedious meeting provided pols with welcome distraction from the real problems concealed by the word, “homelessness.” (Not as good as campaigning against ICE, but close.) As everyone knows, whether they’re brave enough to say it, the feral will depart only when incentives are trumped by tough, no excuses, relentless pressure from the civilized.

Fat chance.

Another Scooter Kill

We mentioned the city’s romance with those suicidal scooters in our Nov 3 dispatch, Scrapings From the Bottom of the Barrel, which noted that—just as any sane person might expect—the riders of these grotesque vehicles don’t always dismount safely. (A pothole killed one of them—imagine that! On a Portland street!)

No sooner had we made that observation than this headline was buried among the “ho-hum” items on the Oregonian’s website…

…in which reporter Zaeem Shaikh managed to leave out an interesting nugget from his rewrite of the police report, namely that this was the city’s fourth recorded scooter-kill, which amounted to 12-percent of all traffic related fatalities reported this year in Portland.

You would think this would be reason enough to start probing about reports of injuries, but no one in the city bureaucracy will say how many have been recorded (we’ve tried; emails are stonewalled). We guess the body count will go up, since it now gets dark early and the darting maniacs don’t like wearing anything but black (maybe they’re Antifa on the way to an ICEcapade) with no helmets, on a device with a taillight the size of a Cannellini.

It Was Stupid Then; It’s Just as Stupid Now

You might recall that our Sept. 17 post, Greasing the Skids, mentioned the Portland Public Schools’ teeing-up of $60-million for something called a Center for Black Student Excellence. This in spite of the 14th Amendment and an open threat by the Parents Defending Education nonprofit to sue in federal court on the basis of recent Supreme Court rulings on race-preferences—no big deal, since the city has now proclaimed that federal immigration laws stop at the city limits, so why stop there.

None of this has deterred the board of education’s fascination with this strange-looking building…

…out of every below-market office building in town. Somehow—plans are vague—this location will narrow the enduring achievement gap between black students and their peers. The school board will meet soon to obediently follow the district’s bureaucrats who have been doing “due diligence” on the structure.

Now comes the Cascade Policy Institute, our local think tank devoted to keeping taxpayers from being ripped off, with more thoughts on the deal. Two memos were filed with the board—let’s take bets on whether the board members will bother reading them—that put additional harpoons into the boondoggle.

The first memo by Cascade’s CEO, John Charles, Jr., outlines reasons why the creation of the Black Excellence Center will probably run afoul of constitutional law (but, what the hell, that document also stops at the city limit). The memo notes that while the school bureaucracy has shifted toward calling the center an open-to-all “excellence” whatsis, it won’t wash…

Although district officials now claim the center will be open to all students, public statements and presentation materials continue to frame the CBSE as primarily or exclusively for Black beneficiaries. This discrepancy heightens the program’s legal vulnerability.

…and…

If challenged, a court will not limit its analysis to current public relations language; instead, it will consider the broader context of the case. It will assess the totality of evidence, including initial planning documents, official board statements, and actual patterns of access.

…and…

State law compounds the federal risk. ORS 659.850 prohibits discrimination in public education “on the basis of race,” including practices that result in unreasonable disparate treatment. The Oregon Supreme Court’s decision in Powell v. Bunn makes clear that public schools cannot sidestep this requirement by outsourcing discrimination to community partners.

If the CBSE operates on PPS-owned property, uses PPS staff, or is funded by PPS dollars, its programs are entirely attributable to the district under state law.

When you finish the eight pages it might be time to turn to Cascade associate, Dr. Eric Fruits (we featured him in another post, Oct. 17’s Prof. Fruits Sees All, Tells All...), whose memo weighs in on the business aspects of the acquisition, and finds it wanting…

The purchase presents several disqualifying problems. First, the district proposes to acquire a building before defining the programs that will operate inside it, inverting the standard capital planning procedures. Second, the purchase creates permanent operational costs that the district cannot fund during a $50 million budget crisis. Third, the property’s commercial leases and functional limitations make it unsuitable for the district-wide student programming that voters expected when they approved the 2020 bond.

…and…

Using the building as a school rather than an office would likely trigger mandatory, expensive retrofits for earthquake resistance. This creates a strong pressure to maintain limited student use. This limited use, combined with commercial tenancy, raises questions about the purchase’s compliance with ORS 328.205, which restricts bond funds to “school buildings.”

Fruits highlights that, back in May, 2023, the school bureaucracy created a “CBSE Vision” for the Center based on input from community (aka cherry-picked) surveys. The “community” made it clear: they wanted “places to play,” including a gymnasium, a playground, and an auditorium. But when the school bureaucracy updated plans in a “Strategic Update” in 2025, these goodies had disappeared. Fruits hints why…

The One North property, constructed in 2015 as a commercial office building with wood-frame and mass timber structural systems, cannot accommodate these uses without complete reconstruction.

Fruits digs into the fine print and, predictably, unearths other nuggets…

In presenting the Strategic Update to the PPS school board, Nichole Watson, Senior Director of Family & Community Engagement, reported that the One North site will remain largely empty during the school day, with most student access occurring after school, on weekends, or during the summer.

This raises the question: If student use is so severely limited, why is the district acquiring a 75,700-square-foot facility, which is about the size of a K-5 school?

Fruits notes that the One North building lacks a bus stop, and is limited to 10 onsite parking spaces (one of the reasons the building won’t be used during the school day).

According to PPS enrollment reports, approximately 44% of Black students attend a school that is more than 5 miles away from the One North property, while less than 20% attend a school within 2 miles.Without school bus access, families must provide their own transportation or use public transit. This requirement excludes families without reliable vehicles or flexible work schedules— often the same families most in need of support services.

The One North building currently has commercial tenants, including the politically powerful 1803 Fund, which has bankrolled, among others, the Albina Vision Trust. But, as Fruits notes, the Portland commercial market is in the toilet, and…

PPS has no experience managing commercial office buildings or competing for commercial tenants. Hiring professional property management adds another operational cost. Even with professional management, the district bears the financial risk if the building cannot attract tenants at projected rental rates.

And then there’s the fault line lurking off the Oregon coast. There are complex—and very expensive—rules for coping with the Cascade Subsidence; Portland’s city building codes classify office buildings as lower risk than, say, schools. One North would have to be retrofitted, which translates to: “unknown millions of dollars.”

Which means…

Given the costs of retrofitting the One North site, it is likely the district would never use the building in a manner that would shift the site from [lower risk categories to higher ones]. Thus, it is unlikely that One North would be used for classroom instruction, a result that would be at odds with the Center’s purpose to advance student excellence.

Finally, Fruits asks…

Can PPS lawfully use general obligation bond proceeds, approved by voters for school capital improvements, to acquire a commercial office building where the district plans to operate nearly one-third of the space as a commercial landlord?

Answer: delving deep into Oregon Supreme Court rulings and state statutes, there’s a real possibility that “The ‘Strategic Update’s’ description of the uses raises serious questions whether the One North site could be considered a ‘school building…’”

If not—and we can bet that there are litigants cued up to take the school board to court on just that question—and if the district is found to be operating One North as something other than a “school building,” then the district would be liable for a “claw back” of funds spent on the Center…

…which could force PPS to repay the misspent funds from its already-strained General Fund.

Fruits gives the schools an out: Keep the center, cut out the racial preferences, and drop it onto the nearby Jefferson High School campus...

A shared Jefferson-CBSE campus would reduce operational costs by eliminating the need for duplicate administrative and instructional staff at two separate locations. Teachers at Jefferson could lead CBSE programs, and CBSE specialists could work with Jefferson students during regular school hours rather than restricting programming to after-school hours, weekends, and summer sessions.

…which makes so much sense that it would seem to be a slam-dunk…except for one factor that Fruits, diplomatically perhaps, leaves out.

That’s the PPS alliance (some might call it captivity) with our old pals, the Albina Vision Trust. The nonprofit, to further its goal of creating a new race-specific neighborhood in what used to be a segregated black ghetto—now home, among other things, to the Trail Blazers and a massive PPS warehouse—lists a Black Excellence Center as a centerpiece in what is otherwise just a massive development play, one that would create the city’s biggest landlord. (We dealt with this here, here, here, and here.)

Anyone on the Board of Education will cross Albina Vision Trust at their peril. Especially now that the Trust is on the ropes: its plan to get the state to build a “cap” over the widened I-5 merge-mess, and where it will erect unspecified buildings, was overlooked in the recent ODOT carnage in Salem. And, lately, the Trust has been dropping posts on Instagram that lack the former muscular flair of JT Flowers’s oracular pronouncements…

…from recreating a neighborhood that decades of racial progress rendered obsolete…to coupons for free pizza.

How the mighty have fallen.

The Latest City Agitprop

As we mentioned here, our financially-strapped city has its very own five-person Ministry of Information that regularly dispatches propaganda to the masses. In the good old days of the Soviet Socialist Republics this was known as “agitprop.”

Aside from parroting the current party line (ICE bad; Wilson good), the Ministry also sends out nudges for the citizens to behave appropriately. Latest example:

…which begs the question: why just downtown—a place that many citizens wouldn’t go unless fully armed. How about the rest of the city’s commercial strips and hubs and shopping centers? I live down the road from Mall 205—and I can say that they need all the help—and shoppers—they can get.

Save This Landmark!

Word comes to us that the Gordon’s Fireplace property on 33d Ave. (also described as a hulk, an eyesore, and “A marquee symbol of Portland blight”) has been auctioned to an anonymous bottom-fisher for $575,000.

The building is a cultural landmark—a sort of Portland tattooed hooker in concrete—and we will sorely miss it. Considering the building’s knock-off price, we think one of our local real estate moguls should cough up the funds to preserve a nonprofit canvas for the city’s never-ending parade of graffiti artists to display their talent. Better, in our opinion, than tagging freeway signs and walls. The county might even dispense “harm reduction” paints and respirators. It’s a win-win.

1. Once again proving that the members of the charter commission weren’t able to divide 12 by 2.