We need more accountable government
In January, Portland Public Schools floated the idea of asking voters to increase the local property tax that pays for around 700 teachers, polling 400 voters to gauge their willingness. The answer came back a resounding no. [...] The poll results were disappointing but not surprising, said several observers, including school board Chair Gary Hollands, who suggested that voters might be suffering from “tax exhaustion.”
I'd happily pay more for better schools. What I can't unsee is the amount of administrative waste PPS indulges in relative to other districts. There was a lot wrong with the teachers' strike's execution — I say that as a supporter — but facts were surfaced. And even with that in the open, the school district chose to just push hard decisions to the local school level, where programs meant to address problems with racial equity are going the way of DEI programs at large companies.
So, doing a poll of 400 people and saying “welp, tax fatigue!" is the essence of unaccountable behavior because it suggests that there's no explanation besides "people don't want to pay taxes." Maybe what people want is a sense that the district took some feedback from popular support for the teachers' strike and decided to cut administrative cost in favor of direct investment in schools.
It's similar to a common Portland liberal stance I see that calling out the county's poor response to the housing crisis must be because everybody else (in our Democratic majority city, in our Democratic majority county, in our Democratic majority metro, in our Democratic majority state) must just be greedy and callous.
That lets the people who have botched the response off the hook because there's a perceived threat from organizations like People for Portland that "our team" could lose office over popular discontent about homelessness.
Sorry, no. That's terrible. We're not doing enough to hold "our team" accountable.
I would love it if a more gifted politician than Sharon Meieran emerged for the next county chair race, because the current team keeps screwing this up, leaving tens of millions of dollars unspent in well-documented cases of operational inefficiency, ideological purity tests, and a refusal to upset the privatization-heavy services delivery system. Worse, they have triggered a bureaucratic reaction from Metro, which is busy trying to build out an entirely new layer of bureaucracy at the tri-county level to do what the counties have not. More administrators, more bureaucracy, and trying to divert money from public health and treatment initiatives, which are also critical to keeping people in housing once they get there.