Comparing New Seasons to Bain Capital was, for the most part, an ironic rhetorical flourish.  But some people didn’t see it that way.

Read more here:

Tigard-based Typhoon’s decision to shutter all four of its Oregon restaurants last week capped years of troubles for the once acclaimed Thai restaurant chain, which has faced a series of allegations of worker discrimination, pay violation and tax evasion.

On a less litigious note, the fall of the house of Typhoon offers a glimpse into the changing, inner workings of the ethnic restaurant industry in Portland, a city recognized nationwide for its culinary prowess.

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Things have languished thus for a while. But after talking to John Atcheson, vice president of Getaround, the San Francisco-based “peer-to-peer” carsharing startup, I’m thinking it might be time to spruce up ye olde family auto.

That’s an excerpt from my new blog at Oregon Business, where I’ll be posting once a week.  I will cross post here when appropriate, but also aim to do a better job posting original urbanista content.

Read the rest of the OB car sharing story here.

“It deeply saddens me that some people in power in our state continue to drive Oregon into a death spiral with their embrace of mediocrity,” said Knight, who was quoted in the Oregonian.

The O article also quoted Knight as saying the state board and Chancellor George Pernsteiner made an “astonishingly bad decision” against renewing Lariviere’s contract after it expires July 1.

I’ve been reporting on higher ed’s death spiral for a number of years, including here and here, as Oregon’s universities try to stay afloat in a state that no longer supports public universities.

And while I don’t necessarily agree with all of  Larivier’s proposals to make the state’s flagship university more independent, the UO president was an unabashed academic and a bona fide leader, willing to buck a system that has turned the state into a post-secondary backwater.  As I noted last week, Larivier’s decision to hand out millions of dollars in faculty raises, an effort to bring professor salaries in line with national norms, was unbelievably risky–and admirable.

It was also the final nail in the coffin for the UO’s erstwhile head of state.

Normally I’m not a big fan of the interminable planning processes that drive decision -making in PDX.  Not that I think civic action should be imposed via dictatorship, but a metropolis that has taken four years to put together the Portland Plan, with no tangible results–well, let’s just say that there’s no surfeit of leadership in the Rose City.

Having rendered unto that disclaimer,  I’d like to undercut my own argument by proposing the creation of yet another citizen advisory committee, this one to study recreational transportation.

Everyone knows that Oregon’s natural beauty–ocean, mountains, rivers–attracts  tourists and residents by the tens of thousands. But there’s dirty little secret lurking behind our recreational treasures. With few exceptions, the only way to get to  Mt. Hood, the coast, rivers, etc is via single occupancy vehicle. No trains, and only a smattering of buses.

All those hipsters and families who are living car free in inner pdx? Come the weekend, they (we?) hop in the car to go skiing, mountain climbing, backpacking and the like, creating bumper to bumper traffic on Highway 26, be it from Mt. Hood or Cannon Beach.

Driving to the mountains to ski or to hike is the equivalent of driving to a gym to exercise–one of those healthy/environmental living paradoxes that cannot be reconciled.

So I call on Portland planners to put together a recreational transportation survey, then use that survey to jumpstart a first of its kind regional recreational transportation plan.

Because imagine taking a ski train to Mt. Hood or a beach train to Astoria, modes that not only reduce traffic and pollution but also nurture the kind of spontaneous social interaction that defines great cities—and mass transportation experiences.

…at which point I was so cold, wet and miserable that for the sake of self-preservation, I lapsed into a Walter Mitty-like fantasy about crashing into the guard rail, catapulting overboard–my bike sailing above me in an arc to be captured by a passer by on his cell phone–then falling into the depths of the icy cold Willamette. There I summoned all my reserves and swam to the Eastbank Esplanade, where I was met by Sam Adams, who announced I would be awarded a medal for uncommon valor….

…at which point I was jolted out of my reverie by the new streetcar tracks on the Broadway Bridge, which were so slippery that fantasy almost became reality.

Much has been said about rain as a potential deterrent to Portland’s bike commuting aspirations.  In Amsterdam and Copenhagen, notoriously wet and gloomy climes, weather does not appear to prevent anyone from hopping on their bike to work or to the store, all the while looking tres fashionable.

Indeed, inclement weather is not so much a deterrent to bike commuting as is the combination of inclement weather and cars, which makes the prospect of a crash much more likely.   Take away the automobiles, and bad weather biking is not so different from bad weather busing or walking; dress appropriately, and you’ll do just fine.

To that end, I would have nixed the Eastside streetcar line and instead converted the stretch into one long and wide cycle track.  I support the streetcar in theory but not so much in practice. Or as my son remarks on occasion: “I sneer at the streetcar,” a reference to his ability to walk faster than the slow moving mode.

Ten years ago, the return of the Portland streetcar heralded a new era in urban planning, one in which “everything old was new.”  But in today’s fast paced world, that dictum has itself become something of an anachronism.

Alas, in today’s rudderless world, implementing innovation is an uphill battle.  So as I wait for “new” new urbanist ideas to be legislated and funded–cycle tracks everywhere, high speed rail, commuter rail, Bus Rapid Transit–I will continue to ride, gingerly, in the rain.

So wrote Clackamas County Commissioner Ann Lininger in an op-ed about public employee bashing, a piece published in today’s Oregonian.

Just as I wrote a few days ago…

Then again, my son is chafing at the bit because of the research and reading study hall he is required to take as a junior, one of three study halls he has this year.  ”We do absolutely nothing; Get me out of that class,” he says at least once a week, a directive I aim to follow up on soon, even if the only alternative is for him to come home even earlier than he already does.

Indeed, perhaps nothing is more tragic then listening to a group of smart, boisterous goofy 16 year old boys  in your kitchen, as they scarf down $80 worth of groceries–that cheese, salami, bread, and fruit was supposed to last a week–all the while talking about the cell phone games they play and the music they listen to during endless hours of study hall.  ”I wish I could take a real class instead,” says one boy routinely, utterly without guile.

And you ask yourself, if these intelligent, happy, motivated kids are languishing, what is happening to the kids like Julio Marquez, the latest victim of gang violence, or the thousands of other teens who struggle academically, who are unhappy and unmotivated.

And you think about what it will take for meaningful tax reform to be implemented, for new kinds of public private partnerships to be created. Because of course you are not lambasting Portland Public Schools or Grant, or principal Vivian Orlen, but the deficits of  the larger educational system, one that is going out not with a bang but a whimper.

And in the end, you say: oh well, my kids, they’ll be all right.

On the surface, both articles describe a certain kind of truth about how taxpayer money is being spent.  And yet, lurking behind the high minded journalistic descriptors– “months long investigation”–are formula stories peopled with formula characters.  The journalistic formula is this: choose a public agency, any public agency, be it local, regional or state, commandeer budgets, contracts, vouchers, and FOLLOW THE MONEY. Once you’ve ascertained money is being wasted, let your story unfold via three stock characters: the clueless public employee, the greedy public employee, and the Kafkaesque public employee.

Voila: the story was written before you made your first phone call.

Now don’t get me wrong.  Following the money is a storied journalistic tradition, as is the role of the fourth estate as a government watchdog.

But when the only big story a daily newspaper has to tell is about alleged misuse of government funds by villainous, idiotic or bureaucratically constrained public employees, the specifics of any given story get lost in the ideology–and the medium, in this case the Oregonian, becomes the message.

Does an article about the disproportionate number of PPS employees earning more $75,000 merit placement on the front page?  Does it deserve more than a paragraph or two? Read this article, and the details of a few salaries are lost; what comes out loud and clear is there is something problematic about educators earning in excess of $75,000.

Not coincidentally, that message was also hammered home last month in another front page O story-about the University of Oregon president daring to hand out faculty raises during a recession. (Buried in the story was the fact that this money was not coming from public coffers, in part because there are no public coffers for education left).

You don’t have to be an Occupy Wall Street true believer to recognize that the real story in journalism today is not about government waste, even government waste during a recession, but about corporate influence over government. Imagine if the Oregonian ran weekly (monthly) investigations following the corporate lobby money trail, documenting pay disparities between corporate execs and rank and file workers, and discussing educator pay scales in context of the economic benefit tax payers would derive from supporting a well-compensated educator workforce.

Would that be journalistic overkill?  Perhaps.  But right now, in the O, such coverage would look an awful lot like journalistic balance and integrity.

Once Portlanders finish their annual leaf/fall yard cleanup, the 32 gallon green yard debris cans will be far too big for paltry food scraps alone. That individual waste management trucks have to stop at each and every house, spewing emissions into the air, is also too single-family-home and car-ish for the 21st century. Not to mention the physical toll imposed by all that repetitive motion on the sanitation workers themselves.

Here I’ll digress for a moment to note that when my son was a toddler/preschooler, he liked nothing better than following garbage and recycling trucks around the neighborhood, where he would mimic with his hands (he didn’t talk until he was three) the motion of the compressors. For months (years?) I worried lest the friendly neighborhood recycling guy think I was in love with him, so frequently did my star struck offspring and I follow said recycling man around, stopping and starting in sync with the starting and stopping of his waste management vehicle…

But back to the issue at hand.  Abandoning the individual pickup for a neighborhood or block wide pick up would reduce noise pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention it would help build community –and when one proposes anything new in pdx, one must give a nod to community building just in case some misguided soul were to question the strength of our much vaunted civic ties.

Finding a location for a neighborhood compost bin, garbage dumpster and recycling bin would present something of a challenge.  But Portland, so we are told, is full of pioneering sorts willing to take on such a challenge, especially if subsidies or incentives are involved.  Certainly there’s no reason why the city can’t launch a pilot project in a SE Portland neighborhood or two.

Oh, and if successful, the phrase “not in my backyard” would take on entirely new meaning…