It's a bungle out there

The Weed's got a couple of stories in this week's edition spotlighting government failures in Portland – although they don't quite connect the dots on that score. On the cover is a story about how a low-rent downtown hotel that was housing people who would otherwise be homeless eventually rotted and was shut down. It's been sitting vacant for months. Some of its former occupants are now on the streets nearby while government and charity bureaucrats are busy contemplating their own respective navels.

This colossal waste of resources is brought to you by the unholy convergence of worthless city government, worthless county government, worthless Metro government, the unbearable "nonprofit" industrial complex, and the greed and shamelessness of private nursing home operators. That clown car is no match for the mental illness and drug addiction that's fueling most of Portland's problems. If you think pouring a quarter billion a year of tax revenues into the current structure is going to fix any of it, you haven't been paying attention.

Meanwhile, the state DEQ – you know, the one that let the stained-glass guys poison the air in a residentual neighborhood for decades – is sitting on its hands again while some guy runs a shredded-tire export operation on the Willamette River in the heart of town. Huge mounds of the stuff, open to the elements, a stone's throw from the river. It's all perfecty legal, they say. They don't call our governor Killer Kate for nothing.