Goin' fishin'

Ding dong! The mail's here. Including some lovely correspondence from Portland's cutthroat revenue bureau.

It's a mailer reminding anyone who should open it that they might, just maybe, owe the city's hideous $35-a-year annual head tax for the arts. Then again, they might not, but just in case, they get a letter, a tax form, an envelope, and a colorful little flyer promoting the tax.

Even if you think it's appropriate for the city to keep spending money to sell the tax to a public that's largely sick of it, you have to wonder how much it cost to get that mailing to our doorstep. Including postage, printing, and the design of the flyer, a dollar? Two dollars? From our household, they'll get $35 this year. The cost of the mailer alone is probably somewhere around 4 percent of that. And from a lot of households on the receiving end, they'll get nothing.

You rarely see any numbers on how much in total the arts tax costs to collect (and promote). I'll bet it's at least 10 percent of what's collected. It would be a lot cheaper to just tack a few bucks onto the property tax bills and let the county do the dunning work at little additional cost. But that wouldn't be the Portland way. They're talking about doing something like that, but it probably won't happen.

Meanwhile, if you want to see your public arts money at work, get a load of this story out of Chinatown, where the "arts council" is finally getting around to removing some hideous sculptures that have annoyed and offended just about everyone since the day they were installed. There were eight of these stuck up on various corners, and now they're finally coming down. The liars' budget on installing them was $191,000; no one's bothering to ask about how much it's costing to get rid of them.

That's the kind of thing your arts tax money is going for, that and some fat nonprofit salaries. It's time to grab Mayor Wilson by the lapels and get rid of Portland's weirdest, and worst, tax gouge.