By Fred Delkin

 Congratulations, Multnomah county voters…you’ve just voted for lying and ineptitude on the part of your politicians by approving tax hike measure 26-48.  A majority of you believed the school and jail doom forecasted by your elected leaders if you didn’t approve this hastily cobbled together measure that doesn’t even spell out how or who will collect your dollars.  Or how they will be spent.

I guess a voting majority sees no need to improve operations, create efficient systems, reform administrative spending, perform audits and become accountable to taxpayers. As reader Karen Kellogg wrote to the Portland Tribune, “(the) yes vote ensured that we’ll get the status quo until they need more money and ask us again.  What were people thinking?” 

They weren’t, Karen, they’re the same voters who have put up with the spendthrift administration of Mayor Vera Katz (who can’t even spell ‘Capitalism’) for over a decade…a mayor who for years kept a ‘hands off’ policy toward an inept school board that literally wasted millions on searching for and appointing district supervisors.   The same mayor who hoodwinked her fellow council members into creating the financial disaster that is PGE Park, and now endorses an effort to get the state legislature to pass a measure to fund yet another stadium for major league baseball…the same brilliant thinker who has proposed roofing downtown Portland’s freeways to provide more retail and residential space in Portland

Only when the predictable school funding crisis hit critical mass did Vera and her handmaiden, county chair Dianne Linn, hastily cobble together 26-48 as solution.  And all those instinct-driven lemmings, also known as voters, endorsed this non-answer to the chronic problems that created it.

We endorse the current efforts to recall Katz with petitions that ask for your signature. Check out www.recallvera.com

© 2003 Oregon Magazine