If you happen to visit Portland, you’ll feel right at home. It’s San Francisco 2.0. Or, perhaps, it’s the reverse. No matter. The two are nearly identical twins, at least when it comes to a variety of factors, both good and bad.
The West Coast weather is similar. Attractive water and impressive bridges grace both cities. And then there’s the societal decay. The depressing evidence is visible in too many grimy precincts. We had the misfortune of viewing some of it (too much of it, really) on a journey north late last month.
Portland’s fetid homeless encampments pop up with unfortunate regularity just like those in the once-proud city by the Bay. These makeshift dwellings house a compromised and vulnerable population marked by drug abuse, public toilet habits, occasional violence and unrelenting (and expensive) dysfunction.
Like the harried policymakers in San Francisco, those in Portland are consumed by the trials and tribulations (not to mention the costs) of the unhoused, not to mention their off-putting effect on the voting populace at large, including the business and tourist interests held hostage by all of this.
It’s no wonder that, like our own fading metropolis to the north, Portland has lost thousands of its residents over the last several years.
It’s a shame, really. The natural beauty in Portland and its surrounding towns and landscapes remains stunning. Not so much the city itself.
Welcome to San Francisco’s sibling in the northwest. Let’s not even mention Seattle. That’s another sad, though similar, tale.
RAIL BOONDOGGLE WILL NOT DIE: Government, at all levels, is confronting limitations on the spending of taxpayers’ dollars. What a concept.
At the same time, public transit agencies are begging for funding help due, in large part, to a dramatic decrease in ridership, largely due to work-related commute changes caused by the pandemic.
The timing is poor. That’s obvious. But some significant funds are being provided. Whether they will be enough to save transit agencies from major service reductions remains to be seen.
One particular entity, the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority, continues to prove that, no matter how obvious its deep and abiding fiscal flaws may be, cash will still flow.
The latest state budget includes the release of $4.2 billion to keep HSR construction going in the Central Valley. So the monetary life support for this manifestly mistaken operation goes on — and on.
For the many persistent critics of HSR over the past 15 years, anything that helps it to limp along and devour public dollars in the process is a cause for the gnashing of teeth and murmurs of frustration. Lawsuits against the project have come to naught.
The fast-train fiscal folly seems impervious to any and all efforts to drive a stake in it and kill it off once and for all. It’s a public-spending nightmare, a transit vampire devouring vast, endless sums, that simply refuses to die.
KRON’S ABSENCE EASILY HANDLED: Absence does not always make the heart grow fonder. That counter to a bit of accepted folk wisdom has certainly applied to the troubled condition of KRON TV-Channel 4. As the week began, customers of AT&T cable and Direct TV had been without KRON through July due to a financial dispute.
The impact appeared to be negligible. Or as that former KRON anchor/sage Gary Radnich might have put it: “Nobody cares.”
Some would-be viewers may well care, but not enough of them to make much of a difference. There are plenty of local KRON competitors out there selling the same sort of programming.
Sedentary life on the couch, such as it is, has gone on — with or without the presence of KRON on AT&T big screens.
TWO MORE MERIT WINNERS ADDED: Two more San Mateo County students of the high school Class of 2023 have received National Merit Scholarships, according to a supplementary list of winners released this week.
The local honorees are Joshua Yang of Carlmont High School in Belmont and Eli Zimmerman of San Mateo who attended Kehillah Jewish High School in Palo Alto.
For Carlmont, the latest local addition brings its National Merit total to nine, the most (by far) of any secondary school in the county this year.
