It's hopeless

I see that the lame duck mayor of Portland and the queen of the Multnomah County commission held another one of their bizarre press conferences about the city's street crisis yesterday. They're very big on the media photo ops. They had an almost identical one in December. At that point, they were bragging about a framework for a draft of a plan for some programs. Yesterday they had moved from the framework to the draft. So now we've made it all the way to the draft of the plan for some programs. It took only three months. 

You wonder how many junkies, and small businesses, died in that span of time.

And if you think the wait was bad, you probably don't want to look at what we were waiting for. Forty-seven pages of bureaucratic word salad. The content is so bad, it's almost a parody. Turn any page and you find stuff like:

The Homelessness Response Action Plan creates new governance and accountability structures to allow decision-makers to set goals, objectives and the budgets needed to achieve outcomes. It creates a co-governance model in the Steering and Oversight Committee to identify responsibilities, coordination and goals. Under that committee, it calls for an Implementation Sub-Committee to track progress, identify challenges, collaborate and hold one another accountable to solutions. And it assembles a robust Community Advisory Sub-Committee to elevate the issues of those across the spectrum of providers, partners and impacted stakeholders to offer their input on goals and solutions and other kinds of feedback.

Lastly, the plan aspires to improve transparency and accountability through coordinated communication, accurate dashboards and data, and a single location to publish updates and information....

To reduce the number of people experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County, use data and analytics to understand and segment the homeless population; apply evidence-based, adequately resourced and braided interventions to each population segment; and ensure the interventions match the desired outcomes. Do all of the above with a premium placed on continuous engagement, improvement and speed, with the understanding that we must implement multiple interventions both in parallel and sequenced over time....

1. Create a culture of practice for using the Equity and Empowerment Lens. Applying the lens will yield:

a. Fair and just distribution of resources and opportunities

b. Systems that are sustainable and sustain all people

c. Meaningful engagement of communities of color

d. Authentically embodying racial equity and empowerment principles

e. Bold and courageous commitment to addressing root causes and barriers

2. When working through issues or making decisions, use the 5Ps framework - Purpose, People, Place, Process, and Power.

3. Understand the importance of intersectionality, especially when assessing community impact.

On and on flows the drivel. Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

It's never been clearer to me that the hundreds of millions of dollars of Metro "homeless" tax that are being collected every year – we should be breaking the billion-dollar mark right about now – are a total waste. The money's being put in the hands of complete fools.

Meanwhile, the mayor's taking public swipes at the county judge who's thrown her unelected monkey wrench into the city's attempts to clean up the humanitarian disaster on the sidewalks and roadsides. Although she richly deserves it, I'm not sure having the mayor mouth off about her in the media is going to help the city's case in court. And of course, the O jumped right in to make a bad situation worse with a completely reckless and irresponsible headline:

In an era when wackos are threatening the lives of public officials, that language is really unforgivable.