The French have a wonderful phrase, "l'esprit de l'escalier," literally "the spirit [or wit] of the staircase." It refers to those witty rejoinders that come to mind as you descend the staircase after leaving a party, things you wish you'd said while you were still at the party.
Steve Stadum of Oregon Health Science University wrote a letter to Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard, taking Commissioner Leonard to task for asserting that OHSU knew the Ftpht would cost more than the City thought, but kept quiet about it before the City Council voted to approve the tram. The sense of Mr. Stadum's letter is given by this excerpt: "Commissioner, your charge that OHSU 'lied' to the City Council is simply untrue and, frankly, outrageous. It is an affront to OHSU and to me personally. Moreover, it is deeply troubling that you have never bothered to contact me or anyone else at OHSU to discuss your concern but have instead chosen to accept baseless allegations and, worse yet, to repeat those claims in the media and rely on them as the basis for your stated position on the tram funding issue."
The letter (posted by Jack Bog, here) says that it was hand-delivered to Commissioner Leonard's office. Commissioner Leonard wrote back that his office didn't receive the letter, which (he says) was apparently hand-delivered to just about everyone except him, and found out about it from a blog (Jack's). The last paragraph of the Commissioner's letter gives the flavor of his response; it reads: "Sorry, Steve. Your latest attempt to mislead the public is just not credible." (Jack posts the Commissioner's response, here.) Commissioner Leonard explains his response in comments to Jack's post, here.
It occurred to me on reading this exchange that, although Commissioner Leonard might have benefited from a little esprit de l'escalier, Mr. Stadum would have benefited from a whole lot of it. One of the ways that I pass the time between breakfast and the cocktail hour at the Mausoleum Club is to ask various bits of government for favors and decisions that those bits sometimes don't want to give. I've found that I'm more successful when I ask nicely and grovel a little bit (that's me at the public hearings, with my nose pressed into the carpet near the microphone). I don't get much of anywhere when I yell and scream. (Mrs. Laquedem says fondly that I can threaten more gently than anyone she's ever met.)
Mr. Stadum's employer has a problem. It needs a tram to be completed, and the interested parties don't want to pay for the horrendous cost overrun. The City might pay some of the cost, but the chance of the City pitching in goes down if the tram's main customer insults one-fifth of the City Council. (I went to grammar school well before the New Math came into vogue and therefore learned how to handle simple fractions.)
So, with that in mind, as a sort of public service I'm soliciting ideas in the nature of l'esprit de l'escalier on what Mr. Stadum should have written to Commissioner Leonard, instead of the letter he did write. I've put my suggested letter in the continuation below.
Here's what I would have written to Commissioner Leonard, if I were Steve Stadum. (Note to Kari Chisholm: I'm not Mr. Stadum.)
Dear Commissioner Leonard:
I'm disappointed in your recent remarks about the funding gap for the tram. You've suggested that OHSU intentionally misled the City about the cost of the tram. I understand why you feel that way, but that's not the case.
OHSU employs _____ people on Marquam Hill, and we expect to employ ____ more in the South Waterfront. We operate ____ buildings and treat ____ patients a year. We know a lot about medical care. We know something about building and operating medical facilities. But just like the City, we've never built anything remotely like the tram. Just as you might rely on someone with medical experience when you face a health problem, we relied on people with architectural and engineering experience for issues relating to the tram.
We were wrong.
We took good-faith but very preliminary estimates, and treated them as if they were hard and fast cost figures. Just as our physicians often recommend that patients seek a second opinion before undergoing surgery, we and the developers should have sought a second opinion before appearing to commit so firmly in public to the idea that the tram would cost about $15 million instead of the $50 million it's likely to cost.
That's our mistake, not the City's. As you know, OHSU has already committed $___ million of additional funds toward the cost overrun. We know that public money is in short supply, and three members of the Council have said in public that they will oppose any proposal for the City to pay more toward the tram than the $3.5 million that the City has already committed to the project.
However, we do need the tram, and it's already halfway toward completion. OHSU wants to make it possible for the tram to be completed on time. If the City will pay an additional $15 million [? Isaac's guess] toward the tram, which we understand the City can finance through bonded indebtedness, OHSU will pay to the City an amount in lieu of property taxes equal to what the City's portion of the property taxes would be if our property were not exempt from property taxation. We will continue to pay this amount until the City's tram bonds are paid in full.
This is a considerable expense for OHSU. When our South Waterfront projects are finished, OHSU will have properties on the Hill and in South Waterfront with a total value of $200 million [? Also Isaac's guess] or more. The current assessed value would be about $140 million [?] and if these properties were on the tax rolls then the City's share of property tax would be about $1 million a year, or more.
Again, OHSU deeply regrets the confusion and embarrassment of the cost overruns of the tram. In retrospect, we would have done a great number of things differently to avoid this problem. Let's work together to solve it.
Very truly yours,
Steven Stadum
SS:il