Northwest labor press., April 20, 2012, Page 3, Image 3

Laborers Local 483 to City: ‘Stop the cuts’
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
It long ago occurred to Richard
“Buz” Beetle that saving his union’s
members from layoff was a matter of
public interest. Beetle is business man-
ager of Laborers Local 483, which rep-
resents 849 public employees — in-
cluding several hundred road and park
maintenance workers at the City of
Portland. And this year, up to 60 mem-
bers in Portland’s parks and transporta-
tion bureaus are facing the possibility
of layoff.
What does it mean for the City of
Portland to halt maintenance on a
5,000-mile road system that would cost
$9 billion to replace? What will it be
like when restrooms are closed and
trash cans removed in 10,975 acres of
city parks? Beetle and his union don’t
want to find out, and are waging a pub-
lic campaign to stop the cuts.
Portland Parks and Recreation has
been through four consecutive years of
budget cuts, Beetle told City Council at
an April 12 budget hearing — but this
year’s cuts are by far the worst.
Mayor Sam Adams asked the bu-
reau for three budget scenarios — with
cuts of 4, 6, and 8 percent. The biggest
cuts are in daily park maintenance. To
save just under $1 million, between 15
and 37 regular positions would be elim-
APRIL 20, 2012
inated. It means most park restrooms
would be closed. Some parks would
have no garbage cans; others would
have less frequent garbage pickup. In
the 6 percent scenario, the Fulton and
Hillside community centers would
close. In the 8 percent scenario, irriga-
tion would be cut, maintenance reduced
at Hoyt Arboretum, and the Dutch Elm
Disease program, which inoculates
street trees and removes diseased trees,
would be eliminated.
“The other years we cut all along the
periphery of our core functions,” Beetle
told City Council. “These cuts are dif-
ferent. For the first time we are cutting
into our core functions.”
And the cuts, Beetle says, come on
top of a $500 million deferred mainte-
nance backlog: Parks already have bro-
ken bathrooms and drinking fountains,
and maintenance employees write
work orders they can’t fill.
Meanwhile, the City of Portland Bu-
reau of Transportation (PBOT) faces a
$15 million cut — 14 percent — in
maintenance and paving. That spells
the elimination of 60 positions, half of
which would be layoffs, and half vacant
positions that will go unfilled. And
PBOT’s operating budget has already
fallen $16 million over the last decade.
What the new cuts mean, in concrete
terms:
• Contract-paving will be suspended
for five years.
• Street cleaning will be reduced
from nine to four times per year on the
city’s busiest streets, and on residential
streets to just once per year.
• Painting of pavement markings
will be cut by a third.
In a January letter to City Council,
Local 483 argued that cutting street
maintenance is a terrible idea — be-
cause every dollar you don’t spend on
preventive maintenance today will be a
10 dollar reconstruction cost tomorrow.
Cutting street cleaning will also cost
more in the long run, Beetle says: “It’s
not just that the arterials themselves are
going to be dirty. The problem is that
debris left in the street gets washed into
the sewer system, and from the sewers
it goes into the pump station, where it
causes havoc.”
City bureaus have budget advisory
committees made up of appointed citi-
zen volunteers, and this year, the com-
mittees were told not to consider new
revenues. But PBOT’s committee, in its
report, was blunt about the result of that:
“Current resource allocations are totally
inadequate to meet Bureau needs, and
are unsustainable in the long run unless
additional revenue streams (e.g., street
maintenance fees) are created.”
The gas tax, the committee said, is
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
becoming increasingly unsustainable as
a primary support for road mainte-
nance. Fuel efficiency has been going
up, and total vehicle registration has
been going down.
Other cities have made up for that
by assessing a street maintenance fee
on property owners. And in 2008, then-
commissioner Adams put together a
“Safe, Sound and Green Streets” pro-
posal, in which a $4.54 street mainte-
nance fee would enable to City of Port-
land to tackle the street repair backlog.
A poll showed majority support for it.
But Adams backed off when Paul Ro-
main, lobbyist for the Oregon Petro-
leum Association, threatened a ballot
campaign to oppose the fee.
Long-term, Portland may have little
alternative but to consider a street main-
tenance fee. But Local 483 felt an im-
mediate fix was needed too. To scour
the City budget for alternatives, the
union hired economist Peter Donahue.
He pored through a decade of the
City’s audited comprehensive annual fi-
nancial reports, and found a stash of
money — a $120.6 million balance in
the City’s “internal service fund.” The
way the fund works, city bureaus are
charged for a range of administrative
services that are centrally provided,
such as facilities, fleet, printing, IT sup-
port, employee health insurance, liabil-
Hadi Sharifi works as an automotive
equipment operator in the street
cleaning department at the City of
Portland. The department, which is
facing a 22 percent budget cut,
dispatches crews as first responders
during snow and ice events.
ity, workers’ comp, and legal. Donahue
found that over time, agencies were
charged more than those services cost
to provide, with the result that the fund
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