Our Public Dollars are Sacred.

Let’s Act Accordingly.

 
Folks across Portland have been talking to me about how expensive it is to live here and yet it feels like nothing is getting better. Portlanders are willing to increase their own property taxes to help others in our community, to protect wildlife, support schools, and the arts, and to upgrade vital infrastructure. But we gotta know what we're getting for our money, and we've gotta see things getting better. Public dollars are sacred and a public budget is a moral document. We use public dollars to build the community we deserve. In some cases we pay a premium to ensure our dollars reflect our standards. We have a responsibility to lead with our values with every dollar we spend, and to demand accountability and transparency along the way. 

Take the Arts: very few people in our community can say that they have a deeper record advocating for public dollars and public policy in support of the Arts than me. I have spent a decade advocating for robust Public Funding to support art, music, and cultural organizations. But let's be honest: the Arts Tax is fundamentally broken. It needs to be

• Identify our community values, write them down, use them to guide our funding decisions, and never compromise from that list.

• Use our procurement processes to require protections for workers, opportunities to train the next generation, and pay wages that can support a family.

• Develop a definition of success for every dollar we invest in our community.

• As part of streamlining how our city bureau’s function as we hire our new city administrator, do a comprehensive audit of each bureau to make sure that funds are being spent wisely— and then actually implement the suggestions of our Auditor.

• Demand accountability and transparency from any person or program that receives any public dollars.

completely replaced with something that is more dependable, fair, and less annoying. Most importantly, we need something that robustly supports arts education in schools and supports artists and arts institutions in a sustaintable on-going way. And we need transparency, accountability, and a strategic direction for the nearly $7 million spent in Portland in support of public arts so we can see the results of that investment. 

Let's spend our dollars wisely so more Portlanders can feel like what they pay is being spent well and reflects why we live in this great city