Isaac Laquedem

Ted Wheeler becomes the state treasurer

It's official: Governor Kulongoski has appointed Ted Wheeler as state treasurer, in place of Ben Westlund, who died this weekend.  Mr. Wheeler is the chair of the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners.  The political jockeying for position now has two racetracks: one for the state treasurer's position (the filing deadline is today) and another to succeed Mr. Wheeler on the county commission.  More to follow.

When is a Toyota better than a Lexus? When you don't have the keys

Alas, this is one story that I'm going to have to reserve for my friends at the Drones Club.

Chile gives the Intrepid Traveler 8.8 reasons to remember this trip

It's been a while since the Intrepid Traveler (a long-time friend of the Laquedems) has appeared in these pages, not because she hasn't been traveling, but because I haven't been keeping up with her.  The last time she appeared here was in 2004, when she was in the Yucatan, just missing being robbed by the revolutionaries.  She expected last month's trip to be less eventful: not a trip to frontiers of unsettled politics, but a cruise and tour of the cities and villages of Chile.  The 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck while she was in the country.  She writes:  "We are in Santiago.  We would have gone to northern Chile and wait it out there until flights resumed, but, lo and behold, they had a large earthquake there yesterday.  The plates are really moving and I want to get out of Dodge."  (Intrepidity has its limit, which I think is around 7 on the Richter scale.)  She continues: "All old buildings here are roped off and most are greatly damaged.  I fear that most historic churches will be demolished.  They are in sad shape and will probably never be safe to enter.  Even the major cathedral is closed." 

How accurate are the news reports?  She writes, "The news just shows all the ransacking and looting and people protecting their property with guns.  All stations [the I.T. means the stations in Santiago, not the television stations in the United States, which she can't see] get caught on one subject and leave most of the story untold.  I get most of my info from taxi drivers, but I think they know more than what is on the news.  Most lines are down on the outskirts, and all the passenger overpasses are capsized or broken apart."  Help is coming from other countries:  "On our bus yesterday there were three doctors from France and one from China.  A Russian plane landed this morning with generators and electrical stuff." 

As with her 2004 trip, the Intrepid Traveler's report of this one helps me keep things in perspective, and not to complain so much about the rain and the evening traffic jams.

At least the Alaska "Bridge to Nowhere" got not built more cheaply

Does it strike anyone else as perplexing that the government has spent $100 million on planning the replacement of the Interstate Bridges without moving a spadeful of dirt, when for about $150 million it could have designed and built a new Sellwood Bridge? 

The Housing Authority messed up in 2007, and wants its tenants to pay now

The Housing Authority of Portland has justly been commended for its rebuild of the Columbia Villa housing project in North Portland.  The new project is called New Columbia.  It opened in 2005 and it's a distinct improvement over the old one.

Where the Housing Authority has fallen short, however, is on its understanding of the landlord-tenant laws.  Its property manager (an outside company, hired on contract) has been going over the books of the previous property managers and has discovered that some of the tenants paid the wrong amounts in rent during 2007.  The managers have been writing the tenants to tell them to come in and pay the extra rent, or to work out a payment plan, or to be sued.  The amounts are in the range of $1000 a tenant, and aren't large, unless you're a low-income tenant in a public housing project such as New Columbia, for whom $1000 may be an unattainable sum.

What's wrong with this picture?  Two things.  First, the arrearage stems from HAP's own mistakes, or those of its former managers.  Second, although Oregon law allows plaintiffs six years to sue on most contracts, we have a quirky statute, ORS 12.125, that allows plaintiffs (such as landlords) only one year to bring suit on a residential tenancy or a residential rental agreement.  What does that mean for HAP and its managers?  HAP and its managers are threatening to sue their tenants on unenforceable debts.  It seems to me that HAP shouldn't try to pass the cost of its own mistakes onto the people it's trying to serve.  It also may not have occurred to HAP that any tenant whom it sues whose lawyer is wise enough to find ORS 12.125 is going to be able to recover his or her attorney's fees from HAP, meaning that some of HAP's money that should be going to make life better for its tenants is instead going to improve the lot of their tenants' lawyers.

If you have to travel by yourself, make the most of your companion

Baritone Robert Orth, in town to play Don Alfonso in Portland Opera's production of Cosi Fan Tutte, is often away from home, appearing on stage.  This week in Portland, someone asked him if he ever felt lonely being away from home so much.  "When I started to travel," he replied, "yes, I did feel lonely.  But now that I've spent thirty years on the road," he said with a whimsical tone that the dry words don't reflect, "I find myself endlessly fascinating."

After 27 years on death row . . .

Noting the hangman's frown and the law's righteous rage
Our murderers live in terror until they die of age.

-- Ambrose Bierce

Can you have lunch if you don't eat anything?

When I entered the business world many years ago, my co-workers and I would go out to lunch, and most of us would order a glass of wine with lunch.  Many of the others I saw in the local restaurants were also drinking wine or a cocktail with their meals.

Times changed.  Ten years later, I saw hardly anyone at lunch having a drink.

I went to a brown-bag lunch meeting not long ago.  I brought my lunch.  As I looked around the room, only one other person had brought any food -- a bag of grapes.  Two others had brought smoothies.  Most of the people at the lunch meeting hadn't brought any lunch.

It's an odd sign of how our society has changed.  Not only do we not drink at lunch any more, but we don't eat either.

Oregon State University misses a basket

If I were on Oregon State's basketball team, I'd be concerned that the proofreaders at my school's advertising agency missed this particular typo. 

SB 1045: deputy sheriffs need good credit, but their paymasters don't

The Oregon legislature is holding a special session this year, as a sort of pre-test of what annual sessions might look like.  The legislators won't face the flood of bills that they have to consider in the regular (odd-year) sessions, but they have enough to keep them busy.  One of the quirkier bills in this year's hopper is Senate Bill 1045, which would prohibit employers from using credit reports to make employment decisions.  The bill has a few exceptions: federally-insured banks and credit unions could still run credit checks on their prospective employees, as could other companies that are required by law to do so (I don't know of any offhand), and public safety agencies.  It's an odd concept: if the bill passes, an Oregon county could run a credit check on a prospective police officer who drives a county car and carries a county gun, but not on the financial manager who handles the cash that pays for the car and the gun.

WES's first year is a success, if you don't look too closely at the numbers

TriMet issued a statement crowing about the success of the Westside Express rail line (the one that runs between Wilsonville and Beaverton, nicknamed "WES").  It opened one year ago, and according to TriMet 42% of the people who ride WES are making trips for which they used to drive their cars.  That's an outstanding statistic, if you don't know that WES averages only 1200 riders a day.  WES runs 16 trips each way on weekdays, or 32 trips total, so each trip averages about 40 riders.

WES cost $160 million to build.  To put that number into perspective, the numbers being bandied about for the cost to replace the Interstate Bridges, build lots of ramps, bring light rail to Vancouver, and save civilization are in the range of $5 billion, or about 30 times the cost to build WES.  About 126,000 vehicles use the Interstate Bridges each weekday, which at 1.2 occupants per vehicle means about 150,000 people.  That's 125 times the ridership of WES, at 30 times the cost.

Comparisons are invidious, of course; the cost of the Interstate Bridges doesn't include the cost of the road network that gets cars to and from the bridges.  Similarly, the cost of WES doesn't include the cost of the road and transit network that gets riders to and from the WES stations.  These numbers do suggest, however, that instead of crowing about WES, TriMet should be working hard to bring its capital cost per rider down to the efficient level of the highway system. 

You can't wait until 5:00 to close up shop? Sometimes the FDIC can't either

The FDIC is getting frisky: at 4:55 today it posted the news that it's closing First Regional Bank (Los Angeles), without waiting for business hours to end.

First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company, Raleigh, North Carolina, Assumes All of the Deposits of First Regional Bank, Los Angeles, California

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 29, 2010

Media Contact: Phone: (202) 898-6992 Cell: (703) 622-4790 David Barr Email: dbarr@fdic.gov

First Regional Bank, Los Angeles, California, was closed today by the California Department of Financial Institutions, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver. To protect the depositors, the FDIC entered into a purchase and assumption agreement with First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company, Raleigh, North Carolina, to assume all of the deposits of First Regional Bank.