Itching the Scratch

Items of passing interest as the dogs bark and the caravan moves on

Let us bow our heads…

“None of us have unlimited or guaranteed resources. That is the nature of the human condition. There is no reason that the government and its agencies should be exempt from this fact of life.”

—Patrick Barron, Mises Institute

Moda Mania

Brian Owendoff, who we have cross-posted here on PD, wrote an impassioned recent defense of cutting a deal—any damn deal—with the Blazers to somehow save the Moda Center. Along with Bill Oram, The Oregonian sports columnist, the governor,¹ and our capon-mayor, the idea is to fix up the old barn and prevent the Blazers from being shopped to a more congenial town. Owendoff thinks that’s a great idea…

The danger for Portland is not that elected officials negotiate hard. The danger is that ideological posturing and performative delays convince the NBA and Blazers’ ownership that another city would provide greater stability, stronger political alignment and a clearer economic future.

If that happens, Portland will not just lose a basketball team. It will lose thousands of jobs, hundreds of millions in annual economic activity, major concerts and events, national visibility, and one of the few remaining institutions that consistently brings the city together.

Of course, these are the people who will “negotiate hard…”

…so not to worry.

Owendoff is a deep thinker…but I beg to differ.

First, the city owns Moda—not the Blazers. The city bought it during the last administration (which socialists now busily blame for everything) for $1. So we’re stuck with the place…a legacy of the bad old days of Portland insiders’ self-dealing. Fixing it to the team’s specs is the real question—and our socialist pals are fond of saying it’s to make the boxes more comfy for the (drum-roll) ”rich people.” Catnip to the socialists, who are running an insolvent city—no fun for the type of pols who want what you’ve got. All of it.

Second: The buyer isn’t a Portland-person. He’s a guy who is probably sweating his core business: subprime auto loans…which are imploding in a weird re-run of 2008’s subprime mortgage crisis. It’s doubtful he has the money to make the team a champ—and the Blazers don’t have much hope in the draft, so he’ll have to pay established stars.

Ain’t gonna happen.

Third, be wary of all these ”thousands of jobs” data and spin-off bucks…these numbers are notoriously slushy-mushy. Remember those 30K houses GuvTina was going to build every year…a number that has no actual relation to reality.²

Finally, Moda is a wasting asset: two new 3,000-seat venues are going up, which will make the stupid “stadium-seating” configurations at Moda for touring Golden Oldie bands obsolete. One is owned by the Live Nation monopoly, which will book Big Acts into its own venue.

Personally, the best way out is to say bye-bye to a team that will never be any more than mediocre, let Bill Oram retire, give the Moda dump to Albina Vision Trust to wreck and replace with housing for the officially poor, and be done with it.

Speaking of Ms. Morillo…

I did my civic duty and attended the monthly meeting of my neighborhood (Montavilla—the place where bums go to retire) association. Guest of honor: the councilor herself, seen decamping from a big, gas-guzzling car at the church where the meeting was held.³ Morillo is famous for saying she rides a bus—brave girl!—just about everywhere. We should note that the Route 20 bus runs, somewhat reliably, down Stark Street, two blocks away.

After the association’s president read out a very long (and turgid) set of directions for safely addressing the elected official (elected, we hope you’ll remember, with 25-percent of the algorithm vote), Morillo was asked a few questions. The Moda center came up; she waffled. Talked her way around cuts to the city budget, didn’t rant about the cops, which is a good sign. She let everyone know that she hates (make that HATES!!!) AI and those damn data centers, which supposedly are driving up electricity rates.

It was standard retail politics, which she’s pretty good at. But one item in passing caught my eye. She and her socialist friends—presiding over a broke city and deciding which cuts to make in the budget—think the housing crisis will be solved if the city buys apartment houses, pays off the owners’ loans (assuming they don’t own them outright, which gets us into Albina-type issues), and then moves in tenants at rental rates that will never go up.

Socialist paradise!

And no one asked: Where’s that money coming from? Who gets to decide which private apartments—under pricing pressure from the big public-housing (tax free) developments—will get rescued. Who will ever leave the never-higher rent apartments once they’ve made friends with the folks who dole out the goodies?

Asking that would for sure violate the “be nice to our guest” policy. So I didn’t. Such is discourse in Portland.

Meanwhile, the headlines pile up…just one day’s worth in the local Business Journal…

…that might indicate that the city is in no position to start big, open-ended, results-in-30-years projects. Just sayin’…

More PBOT utter madness

The city is broke, and the socialists just passed yet another fee to pay for something PBOT seems to have no interest whatsoever in actually doing—fixing the damn streets.⁴

The bureau has a strange set of priorities, which I’ve seen displayed in my neighborhood several times: Take a perfectly adequate and little-used street and repave it! The latest happened this month; NE 87th Avenue, a dogleg through a neighborhood confined between the craziness on 82d Avenue, and the I-84 freeway.

I’ve driven that street often and—I’m no certified traffic engineer—87th looked rather smooth, compared with streets in the neighborhoods adjacent. (My street is gravel, but it doesn’t count; Steve Novick’s LTIC fee will get it paved—after the “historically neglected” folks get theirs, sometime next century).

The neighborhood’s Boswell, Jacob Loeb, snapped a picture of the street before…

…if you can find an actual pothole, you’d get a year’s free subscription to PortlandDissent.

Loeb didn’t report what it cost, although he noted it came out of yet another of PBOT’s bail-out fees, which are never-ending. And he noted this weird footnote…

This project creates an opportunity for a near-continuously paved north-south pedestrian path between NE Hassalo Street and NE Glisan Street. However, missing paved sidewalks on the northern edges of 8631 and 8636 NE Holladay Street will require pedestrians to walk across the lawns of these homes to reach the new ADA curb ramps and the existing paved sidewalks. Future redevelopment of those properties could require installing new sidewalks to complete the pedestrian connection.

Won’t the next owners of those properties be surprised!

Meanwhile, here’s a tour of a street one block away…

…it’s probably “pirate pavement,” and it’s about 1.5 lanes wide, and it’s a mess. But look on the bright side: no one has to cross anyone’s lawn.

How government really works, chapter XXXVI:

We’re on the city auditor’s email list, which often deals in arcana that defies easy translation into street-English. But they recently unloaded an interesting graphic…

…that says more than a month’s front pages from WillyWeek and The Oregonian about how Portland government really works. There’s Waymo, which wants to run its driverless cabs on Portland’s shoddy streets—what a vote of confidence!

Then there’s the 1803 Fund, that’s got its nonprofit beak deep into the Albina real estate, “cap the freeway” play. Its city form (even less informative than their IRS form 990, if that’s possible), lists a whole bunch of people you’ve never heard of, unless you’re greasing some skids with the planning bureaucracy. What did they discuss? Your guess is as good as mine.

There’s a super-busy entity called the Portland Psychedelic Society Action Fund, which—in the last two months of 2025 (the Auditor is a little slow in posting current dollar-amounts), showered socialist counselor Mitch Green’s policy director, Christian Aguinaga, with $18,000 worth of lobbying. All of the lobbying on the form was for calls to the policy guy…which makes one wonder: Were they calling from a payphone in Outer Mongolia?

They’ve kept at it in ‘26; their goal is a psychedelic mushroom inside every head anywhere, anytime—just what the city needs. Almost as much as a new pavement on 87th Avenue.

DEI marches on…and on…and…

As the city grapples with whacking funds for fire and cops and who-knows-what else, you will no doubt be excited to learn that the city has finally hired…well, let’s let the city’s website spell it out…

Diversity champion Latricia Tillman will serve as the City of Portland's first Chief Equity Officer, leading the Office of Equity and Human Rights and directing the City's work to make equity and inclusion a fundamental part of decisions, operations, policies, and service to the community.

The legacy press rewrote the press release, and that was that. She’ll be paid somewhere between “$160,784 to $233,729.60,” according to the help-wanted ad. Go figure.

Ms. Tillman has been working the DEI patch for 16 years, bouncing from one government bureaucracy to a consulting business, and now into Doom Loop city. We may be crashing, but we’ll do it with our DEI flag flying high…

Ms. Tillman last worked for an outfit called Espousal Strategies LLP; she was in the middle of the rather large staff of diversity warriors…

…all doing something or other, although even the LLP had trouble connecting their goals with, well…anything concrete (even worth a $-quarter-million a year)…

From transportation and economic development to climate and civil rights to education and public health, we work at the intersection of policy and lived experience. Our approach is rooted in trust, curiosity, and a commitment to delivering creative, winning outcomes that reflect the needs and aspirations of real people.

One wonders: Who are the “unreal people?”

To paraphrase the socialists, “When I hear the words, ‘lived experience,’ I reach for my Pepcid.” If you dig around the city release, here’s her record…

Tillman has demonstrated leadership across these roles, overseeing budgets up to $54 million and leading divisions of up to 275 employees. Her work has produced durable, system-level outcomes, including increasing state investment in health equity by 400% over five years, embedding equity into legislation that transforms health systems, and establishing Medicaid reimbursement for doulas, community health workers, peer support specialists, and interpreters.

Good for the doulas; they’re now on the public teat in a program that’s infamous for gaming and bogus payouts. And the encomium enthuses that Ms. Tillman managed to spend 400-percent more on, well…her equity programs. Which remain undefined.

Seems like this would produce a ton of “equity”—a word whose definition is carefully omitted from her blurb. We’re left to wonder: If the needle hasn’t managed to move after 16 years of effort and those 400-percent gains and the doulas and the “lived experience”…maybe it’s time to retire.

Nuts will be served hot

Mark your calendars…

We wonder: How many of the comrades are actually on the FBI, Southern Poverty Law Center, NSA, military intelligence, state police, Portland police, etc. pad as “informants?”⁵

1. Hot local rumor: Tina will quit right after the primary to preserve the Democratic party/SEIU/Teachers Union hegemony.

2. I once wrote to the guv’s office to ask where they had obtained the magic number. You know you’ve hit a decayed tooth when there’s no answer.

3. The church is scheduled to be torn down and replaced with up to 90 apartments for the officially poor. Just what the neighborhood needs.

4. Even after a kid on a scooter (riding one fails a fundamental intelligence test) was killed when the contraption hit a pothole. (You’ve gotta wonder if the company renting out the kamikaze-machines refunded the fare to the kid’s parents.)

5. Back in the day (1969), I was a reporter in Chicago when the machine’s district attorney raided a squat where Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was holed up. They found him in bed and riddled him with bullets. The DA claimed Hampton had fired first; he had a picture of a bullet-hole in the door to prove it—but someone went to investigate, and it was a nailhead. In the resulting scandal, it developed that almost every other Panther was actually on one or another intelligence agency’s payroll.