Next Up at City Council, 8/29/07

The Portland City Council’s Agenda shows a rare evening hearing, starting at 6 p.m. this coming Wednesday, August 29. It’s termed a “Special Meeting” because the code says the third Wednesday of the month is when the regular Wednesday afternoon session may be switched to the evening. I’m happy the Council is holding a meeting when more workers may be able to attend, no matter what they call it and regardless of both Mayor Potter and Commissioner Saltzman being on vacation.

Speaking of vacations, did you catch this review by Andy Dworkin and James Mayer in last week’s InPortland section of the Oregonian, of how many days off each Councilman has taken? Interesting.

The evening session this coming week is apparently a Commissioner Adams thing (yay Sam, thanks for the evening meeting!):

1035 TIME CERTAIN: 6:00 PM – Develop options to provide affordable health care services to uninsured workers of City contractors (Resolution introduced by Commissioner Adams)

1036 Authorize contract with a healthcare consultant to develop options to provide affordable health care services to uninsured workers of City contractors (Ordinance introduced by Commissioner Adams)

The sad part is it’s a plan for a plan, hiring a consultant and setting up a committee to look at ways of providing health care benefits for people working for the City through contracts. This is a longstanding problem, and those workers have been providing City services without health care benefits for too long already. But it’s a start – and finding out facts and running them by intelligent, invested citizens really is a good way to do business, even if it often seems to cost too much and take too long. I hope some of the affected workers will take the time (and evening opportunity) to show up and give information to the Council and viewers on cable about why this is a problem that deserves to be fixed.

It’s also unfortunate two other items weren’t assigned to the evening agenda, since they will likely attract many of the same constituents concerned about fairness and worker benefits:

1026 Create the City of Portland Sweatshop Free Procurement policy for uniforms and clothing purchases to be fully implemented in 2008 (Resolution)

1027 Authorize payment to Sweatfree Communities, Inc. to support formation of the State and Local Government Sweatfree Consortium (Ordinance)

Both of these are also introduced by Commissioner Adams. Excellent article on the topic by Marjorie Skinner in the Mercury here, with coverage of the campaign earlier this year in the Asian Reporter here.

A few things catch my interest on the relatively-short morning Agenda. There are eight items listed under Mayor Potter as Commissioner in Charge of the Office of Management and Finance (OMF), for things like creating new positions, adjusting salaries, and finalizing contracts. That may sound routine, but these items sound like the kind of thing the Chief Administrative Officer was going to do, that would allegedly save us all so much money, if Measure 26-91 had passed. Here we have the Director of OMF setting salaries in bureaus led by Commissioners other than the Mayor, and apparently it’s working quite nicely since Mayor Potter put them all on the agenda when he’s not even going to be there. So that’s good.

One of the contracts stands out:

1022 Accept bid of Wildish Standard Paving Company for the Portland International Raceway Repave and Realign Main Track Surface Project for $2,000,246.

In April 2006, Mayor Potter asked the Parks bureau to study the feasibility of moving the Raceway. I can’t find the results of that study on line, although I seem to remember a newspaper article or two about the alternatives on Swan Island being too expensive and/or not big enough. Apparently the idea of moving PIR is finished, if it’s being refurbished to the tune of two million dollars. Note that the Raceway is an enterprise operation of Portland Parks & Recreation, meaning the improvement should be done from PIR revenues rather than the General Fund.

This is weird:

1031 Direct the Office of Management and Finance to negotiate a fair purchase price for video replay screens owned by the Portland Winter Hawks and have them installed in Memorial Coliseum before the first home game of the 2007 Winter Hawks hockey season (Resolution sponsored by Commissioner Leonard)

Longtime readers of this blog know I like Hawkey, and even questioned the absence of video screens in Memorial Coliseum back in February. But the resolution says because the City owns the Coliseum, it has to buy the new big TV screens from the Hawks and install them. That seems rather tortuous logic to me – surely a contract with liability clauses could have been written to allow the Hawks to be responsible for and install their own screens, perhaps with a monetary rental payment when other performers use the video system. If we’re subsidizing the Hawks, an amount of money should be allocated for that reason, rather than “negotiating a fair purchase price” of the video screens. What’s to negotiate, anyway – what did they cost when recently purchased? Put the amount in the ordinance, so everyone knows.