This Week in the Mercury
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
News / City Hall BDS Staff Ask City To Save Their Jobs
Posted by Matt Davis on Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 12:31 PM
About fifty staff from the city's Bureau of Development Services packed the council chamber this morning to beg council to use general fund dollars to save their jobs. BDS commissioner Randy Leonard announced plans to lay off 150 staff from the bureau in June, but was absent from the chamber this morning because of a previously planned private appointment that could not be changed, according to his staffers.
BDS staffers Marty Stockton (left, below) and Charlotte Phillips took three minutes each to ask city council to use general fund dollars to save some of their jobs. BDS looks after permitting fees, but council waived some of the permitting costs in a deal with Merritt Paulson to renovate PGE park for Major League soccer last month, and other construction in the city has tailed off significantly because of the recession. Another tranche of layoffs is expected to be announced at the end of this week or early next week, to make 150 layoffs so far, with a further 35 layoffs also expected some time over the next three months.
"This city council does not make these decisions lightly," said Mayor Adams, in response. "The chances are we will be cutting budgets again next year."
The mayor said he understood that families are impacted by the cuts and encouraged Stockton and Phillips to "continue to advocate" for their jobs. But there were no promises made.
Both staffers declined comment after their testimony, but another BDS staffer, who would prefer not to be named fearing they will end up on the next list of layoffs, was not charitable about the problems.
"A lot of this could have been avoided if they had been more proactive last year," said the staffer. "I was not surprised to see Commissioner Leonard absent because he has been largely absent from managing and overseeing BDS from the beginning. I was surprised to see the BDS director there, however, because he has avoided managing this issue from the start."
The BDS staffer said several staff-initiated solutions to the layoffs have been rebuffed by management.
"There's just no plan for how to deal with this, and the quality of service to the public is going to suffer," they said.
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Yep, that pretty much sums up leadership in the City as a whole.
So, dear BDS staffers, I hate to break it to you but neither Leonard nor the Mayor gives a rip about you. You've outlived your usefulness to them. You are no longer cash cows in the City's shrinking permitting and development process, and you aren't sexy or "creative class" or "world class" or "sustainable/green/organic/Euro" enough. Portland has, above all an image to maintain and your bureau is too "older workers", too working class, too nuts and bolts, too practical to fit into the Shiny Vision of shared bikes and Sunday Parkways and other fluff. And since PDC no longer really seems to do any actual DEVELOPMENT and instead works on....err...what exactly (hazy economic development strategies? and convoluted Super Urban Renewal Areas?), don't go looking for any city driven developments to permit anytime soon.
Just be thankful many of you are Tier 1 PERS and have guaranteed pensions. I would also suggest some job retraining. I hear that if you get a two-bit liberal arts degree and work for an alternative newspaper for a couple of years you have a pretty good shot at becoming a Planning and Sustainability Policy Adviser in the Mayors office. Or, there's always private security shooing away the homeless from downtown courtesy of the coffers at the Portland Business Alliance.
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Above posts are spot on! The bungle at BDS is a great example of why we should have a City Manager form of local government instead of elected redneck nimrods running multi-million dollar service bureaus. Every agency Randy runs is led by appointed BFF's. Probably good enough human beings, but definitely not talented and competent executives. A private business would have wallpapered BDS management offices with pink slips months ago and the shareholders (voters) would have ousted the Mr. CEO (Randy) at the next election (keeping fingers crossed).
After the next election, I hope Randy feels lucky to have a job guarding grease traps in a Greek restaurant with a pocket full of baking soda and a Fire Marshall Bill badge.
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