Portland, Oregon has a budget deficit which will make it harder to address these problems.
Years of neglect has left Portland roads, buildings, parks facilities, water systems, technology and other types of infrastructure deteriorating at an unsafe — and expensive — pace. The city owns nearly $75 billion in these types of structures and equipment, and much of it was built over 50 years ago. According to a city audit released Wednesday, most of the city’s infrastructure is “near or beyond the end of its useful life.” And it would cost the city more than $1 billion per year to make needed repairs…
The audit, which is only the latest in a years-long string of city reports raising alarm about its crumbling infrastructure, says continued neglect could lead to lawsuits against the city, environmental harm, and even larger repair costs in the future.
The cost has already ticked upward. According to city data, repairing aging infrastructure was estimated to cost the city about $300 million a decade ago. Left unaddressed, that bill rose to $500 million by 2019. And the latest estimate from 2023 puts the cost at $1.4 billion.
Civil engineers keep telling us this is a problem across the US. Biden’s infrastructure program was a step in the right direction. Interstate highway system may be the best maintained we have through fuel taxes.
Most other fed systems are antiquated. We hear of problems and old equipment in air traffic control and the IRS. Probably the tip of the iceberg. Covid data submitted by fax.
Local govts usually do this with bond issues when they can get voters to approve. Maybe that is the plan in Portland.
Sewers and water are in major need many places. Out of sight, out of mind.
Dad in his last few years told me that it was the Great Depression WWII generation that understood infrastructural spending as essential (“If the firing pin in your howitzer breaks at the crux time, and you do not have a god d—n replacement close by, you and your idiot led Company gonna f—king DIE, and so if you wanna live you learn to take good care of stuff.”)
Dad bought superb tools, took care of them, and my brother and I still have and use them with loving care. Real Estate agents in 1980’s Los Angeles warned each other about me at open houses “There’s that horrible man who crawls under the house and finds bad joints in the sewer pipes”. You betcha.
The USA is going to start obnoxiously falling apart, but taxes will be cut because “Guvmint wasting my money.”
Portland’s new city leaders, already preparing to make deep funding cuts to balance this year’s budget, have few options to address the immense maintenance backlog…
*What’s still missing in the conversation is how to pay for all of this. A previous city facilities report, referenced in this week’s audit, estimated it costing the city around $10 billion to keep these assets maintained over the next decade. *
Clark suggested placing a general obligation bond, which would raise property taxes, on a ballot in the coming years to fund maintenance. Clark said she’s certain there’s no appetite for a new local tax (an instinct supported by recent polling), but hopes that attitudes will change in the near future, once Portlanders start seeing improvements to homelessness and public safety concerns. “We have to show that we’re gonna turn the city around first,” she said.
My family arrived and homesteaded in what is now Portland in 1843, and my bones are bonded to Portland. In the late 90’s Portland’s political leadership started getting lazy and greedy. The piper must be paid.
I agree with Bob’s and Ms. Clark’s attitude on these issues as far as I can make them out. And, more universally, homelessness in the USA occurs on a spectrum from the practiced “homelessness” of many people of all ages and races and backgrounds who are expertly gaming charitable institutions and instincts, through to truly desperate people who get overlooked and ever more lost (housing costs!!!, lack of Public Health in a rational organized form!!!) while ne’er do wells push ahead in soup kitchen queues. We need some massive governmental and social reorganization.
The no crime for drug use was a means to address the fact the people of color are disproportionately arrested for drug crimes. Turns out a lot of white folks be drug crimin’, too.
It would be cheaper and more effective to address the White Supremacist culture of the police force. What are the odds that you’ll be able to program “the culture” into the Chinese police robots once they’re available? {{ LOL }}