Also, be sure to thank the Senator for having the courage to disenfranchise Oregon voters in the May primary, as noted by your impending exodus from the Democratic party.

They're all such sweeties.

Maybe one of Sten's competitors will remind him of his comments. They are applicable to much of what goes on in Cityhall.
A side note regarding the boy wonder. Some years ago just after he won his seat I invited him to come and speak to a group I represented at the time. He coouldn't make it for some reason. But time pased and I was working a booth at a Peace and Freedom event and he's making the rounds shaking hands. As he approached our table he turned to wave in the direction of some people on the other side of the event and even called out to them. Curious that I am I looked to see just who he was waving at, but no one seemed to acknowledge him. Then as he got passed our table, his back was turned to it all the time, he turned around to face the people at the next table.
Amazing character he is.
M.

Hope you will let me get away with this post Jack, but in the interest of solving the problem rather than mocking people. I will admit that trying to be understanding and giving people in City Goverment the benefit of the doubt that they are acting honorabley has left me like my favorite character Kevin Kline, stripped to his skivies left to die in the desert in Silverado. A movie I often pop into the VCR, when I want to believe that good can overcome greed.

The City has a real problem with knowing where its money is going. In the business world you have wonderful financial information, it was encouraging to hear the Mayor ask for Cost Benefit analysis at a Budget Meeting last week. You have to really understand finance and know where to look to make any sense of the budgets, things are funded in round about ways, and from different budgets, and they budget en mass and not to specifics, so it is hard to tell what goes where and almost impossible for an ordinary taxpayer to understand how thier money is being spent on what services. This lack of dicipline and direction, also, allows people that do have the money to come in and redirect the money. I think the most telling events have come out of your close tracking of the TRAM events, and the two folks who worked on it as City Employees then ended up an Employee(Mr. Brown) or defacto employee (Mr. Rhodes) of the developer. A lot of City staff hold the politicos in very low esteem, it is kind of like Jack Nicholson's famous line in A Few Good Men, most staff feel that council "Can't Handle the Truth" so they give them flash and not circumstance. Tell them they can have their TRAM for $15 million, tell them they can cut budgets by 3% every year while they grow services and keep all the old assets in play. Unfortunately a lot of the City Staff also feel the same way about the general public, and when you team them with a cadre of loyal "consultants" reality is about as far as it can get from practical policy.

I think on the most part Sten and others on the Council want to do the right thing, I think their office staffs really try hard to respond to the public and I have found them to be for the most part young, idealistic, and sincere, but between the powerful who they hob nob with all the time and staff telling them what they and the hob nobbers want them to hear, they are very often patsey.

I've always liked Eric for his "followup", sincere interest in issues neighborhood associations, or individuals put forth like the North Macadam Urban Renewal review before City Council.

We had meetings with Eric's staff and with Eric himself pointing out some of the failings of the proposed NM plan. He and staff seemed to honestly agree about many of our points, or at least interested in hearing more. Eric said he'd follow up with questions at the Council hearings so that Council could "explore" the issues. After 3 minutes at Council to try to explain all the issues we had there was not one question from Eric. But of course the developers, etc. got 45 minutes, and planning staff got another 45 minutes (in the pockets of the developers). And now we have all the issues developing about NM that we tried to express at Council. Citizen involvement? and he's the so-called citizens rep.