The Blue Ribbon Commission on Portland Utility Oversight said it has made substantial reforms, but they will only matter if the city commissioners accept them.
The Blue Ribbon Commission on Portland Utility Oversight said it has made substantial reforms, but they will only matter if the city commissioners accept them.
“This continues to be a group that observes the process, but really doesn’t have a big voice in the process,” said Lori Irish Bauman, who penned this spring’s City Club report on utility reforms. The city needs something that “takes politics out of the process,” Bauman said. “We aren’t sure that this goes the full distance.”
The Water Bureau and Bureau of Environmental Services have been rocked by a series of scandals involving cost overruns and diversions of ratepayer money to projects unrelated to water and sewer services. Critics, charging that city commissioners were using ratepayer money as a “piggy bank” for nonutility projects, qualified a May ballot initiative that would have handed control of the two bureaus to an independently elected board.
Read more at the Portland Tribune.
