Victory for Cox for Metro

If you followed the recent race, you know the results: I got 25% of the vote, and will face off against Harrington who got 39%, with the remaining 36% up for grabs. Our statistical team is still analyzing the precinct-by-precinct results, but the early numbers indicate an excellent opportunity for my campaign to make huge gains.

That's because Harrington had unified Democratic backing, and a unified Eco-Green coalition. In fact, they've been grooming her for almost two years to take over from Susan McLain, their long time ally on Metro. The majority of voters, however, who are skeptical of Metro's plans for the region, had three candidates to pick from, and split their votes 25-19-15.

Can I actually do that? Only time and hard work will tell.

Forest Grove News Times Almost Endorses Cox for Metro

This has to be the nicest almost-endorsement I've yet received:

Tom Cox, who’s run for past posts, including governor, as a Libertarian, is one of those rare government critics who shows up with well-researched analysis of the programs he doesn’t like and, in many cases, alternatives that could actually work. There’s no doubt that Cox has the brains and work ethic needed for the job.

They go on to endorse one of my opponents, apparently for spending more time in Forest Grove than I have, or at least more time in front of the editors.

Still, for not getting the endorsement, it's quite a nice bit of ink.

WSJ on Newark and Jane Jacobs

In an editorial-page article in the 11-May-06 Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on Newark's struggles to grow, Paul Mulshine gives us this gem:

[Richard Florida said,] "Jane Jacobs told me the problem is that these cities [like Newark] are run by squelchers." By that she meant politicos who try to stamp out anything they can't control. They love big public projects, but private enterprise makes them nervous. Meanwhile the professional planners on public payrolls are squelchers of a different sort. They keep trying to remake cities in their past image.

It's tragic that so many "planners" claim to love Jacobs but so obviously don't understand her.

Garlynn Woodsong Doesn't Love Me

What fun.

Now that Willy Week has endorsed me for Metro, the most righteous of the left are puzzling over it. In the process, I'm learning a lot about myself, or at least a lot about what others imagine I am.

Their Imaginary Tom is quite a monster. From the Willy Week web site's comments section:



i second what another commenter said about tom cox. metro is for people who like portland the way it is, not people who want to turn it into las vegas.
Posted by "jami" | Thu, May 4 2006



Tom Cox would be a horrible addition to the Metro Council. What we DON'T need is another subscriber to the Cascade Policy Institute style of misinformation and anti-transit, anti-bicycle, anti-smart growth rhetoric. Though former Intel manager Kathryn Harrington may not have gone "beyond the usual platitudes" during her endorsement interview, I would support her in a heartbeat over somebody who would seem to be dead-set on rolling back all of the progress that has been made in the region thus far.
Posted by "Garlynn Woodsong" | Thu, May 4 2006



Cox Ain't a Thinker
You argued that Tom Cox will get Metro thinking through its decisions. When he categorizes them as "anti-car, canti-housing, anti-business extremists," thereby insulting the voters across the Metro region who elected these people, I can' t imagine he'll have a productive working relationship. Instead, he'd be a bomb-throwing hype-monger hampering the important work that needs to be done.

We've got a group of smart people on Metro -- Rhodes Scholars, Harvard graduates, etc. We need another smart someone who will truly represent constituents -- Kathryn Harrington, not a radical-fringe self-financed candidate like Cox.
Posted by "Jesse O" | Wed, May 3 2006

Faux Public Process

Anybody who's gotten politically active in the Greater Portland Area will get a chance to be involved in "the public process." If you happen to be skeptical of the official line at one of the public process events, you'll quickly see how many of them are orchestrated and manipulated. I'm starting to better understand the impulses behind faux public process.

As a colleague wrote, "One of the things regional visioning attempts to do is to overcome NIMBYism. One challenge with U.S. policymaking is that local interests have more power than regional interests and they often optimize locally, creating negative regional externalities."

One can readily imagine the dismay of an expert, laboring for months or years, ushering the public towards a good outcome, only to be stopped by a sudden NIMBY uprising at the eleventh hour. How tempted our expert must be, to avoid the resulting 'negative regional externalities' by rigging the system.

I'm told that Australia has a different approach, where random citizens in an affected region are gathered for input, reducing the NIMBY effect while allowing for real input. This differentiates "the public" from "the neighbors" - and obviates the need for orchestrating meetings or rigging events.

There's something corrupt and corrosive about pretending to seek public input and then rigging the results. It may be an attempt at overcoming NIMBYism, but it's always wrong - and damaging - to raise public expectations (i.e. that this will be a fair and open process) and then fail to meet those expectations.

In addition to the general problem of corruption, the rigged process has another drawback: you get the result you predetermined, even if it turns out it was the wrong result. Since self-selected elites seldom consider themselves fallible, they are both more likely to engage in rigging 'faux' public process events and more likely to pre-select a flawed outcome.

Would an honest public process be superior? One source would say 'yes.'

Another option would be to let elected officials decide things, as they were arguably elected to do. But the fetish for public process is strong in the Portland area, and few are strong enough to withstand it.

Anti-Growth Anti-Humanism

There is an elitist yuppie attitude toward growth, a skepticism about advancement, that seems to say that poor people should remain poor "for the good of the planet" or some such.

Here's a detailed exploration of that appalling attitude.

Perhaps This Explains the Light Rail Fanatics

One recurring theme in both politics and business is the fanatic. Alone or in groups, these are folks who are true believers. Don't bother them with facts - they don't care.

One of the differences between politics and business is, the business fanatics will, if wrong, eventually run out of money and stop. Politics is all about playing with other people's money - those fanatics can go on in the wrong direction indefinitely if not stopped.

A new AMA study sheds some light on the phenomenon. In essence, people who buy in to the initial justification for a project will actively ignore or discount evidence, however strong, that the project isn't working. Apparently there's no clear technique available to make folks get past this bias if they're prone to it. Organizationally, the only hope is to make other people responsible for vetoing the plan if certain prearranged conditions aren't met.

Why other people? Apparently, once the first group gets bought in to the project, they will find ways to justify ignoring the prearranged limits.

Hillsboro Argus endorses Tom Cox

I didn't see that coming: the Hillsboro Argus endorsed me for Metro.

Apparently being a "single issue" candidate isn't always bad, especially if it's the right issue at the right time - and if you're on the right side.

I wonder how many other candidates have ever been endorsed for being skeptical of Light Rail. Any?

Cox endorsed by Willy Week

I'm in the cover story on Willamette Week this week - and wonder of wonders, they endorsed me for Metro District 4. (Scroll down to the Metro section.)

Read between the lines and you'll see that this is due to their disenchantment with the current Metro leadership.

This is my first mainstream media endorsement. Feels good.

Delegating

I'd always assumed I wouldn't be a business "coach" -- I've long had disdain for that label, despite knowing some good coaches. Too soft for me, I thought. Too touchy-feely. Not enough measurable outcomes and results.

Come to find, my last several clients are looking for coaching. Well, I consider myself someone who's responsive to the market, so now I'm coaching three people.

One of the big issues that has come up again and again is, how to delegate effectively.

Here and here are two good articles that cover the subject well. Read them.

Paglia Puts it Well

I do love the way Camille Paglia writes:

On talk-show call-ins, I started to hear real love for Bush, a protective
desire to defend him against the smug liberal hyenas. It was a pivotal moment in
the campaign. And the righteous fury of the Bush crusaders started to sway the
undecideds. For months on Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or other conservative
radio shows, I really didn't hear such great enthusiasm for Bush. But then all
of a sudden, there was a turning point. I remember sitting in my car in April
listening to Hannity -- who has become a major force in American politics and
whose talents as a broadcaster just keep getting better and better (though I'm
always wishing he had more respect for other cultures and a broader
understanding of our place in the world). He was talking slowly and thoughtfully
after hanging up with a like-minded caller, and I got really alarmed. I said to
myself, wow, here it is. It was a whole, comprehensive geopolitical picture: the
only way we can win the war against terror is to take the fight to the
terrorists abroad, America must be a beacon to the world. America has a divine
mission to bring liberty to the world. It was a view of destiny that had a
staggering clarity and simplicity.

Now if the Democratic consultants had any brains, they would have viewed all
this as an important system of ideas that needed to be logically addressed,
instead of just sneering at it. This is a war of ideas! But too many Democrats
rely on a juvenile Al Franken level of discourse -- sneer, sneer, sneer at the
benighted ones. We are all so superior in our little elite enclaves. So even if
Kerry wins the election, the Democrats have lost this war of ideas.

It's as if we have no eloquent speechwriters any longer. The Democratic Party
has become a p.c. wallow over the past 20 years -- a sinkhole of unctuous,
bleeding-heart liberalism and emotional manipulation, always using seniors or
"disenfranchised" African-Americans as convenient straw men. We're supposed to
be in a constant state of empathy, on high alert to a cosmos of injustice. And
always there are the aggrieved -- and those nasty people in high places who are
doing awful things to them! It's become a tedious soap opera removed from
reality.

The Democratic operatives, chummily clustered in their Northeastern drinking
holes, are missing the fact that most Republicans are not the top execs of
Halliburton but hardworking small-business people who lead orderly lives and try
to be good citizens. There's been a slow shift: What used to be the Democratic
base -- plain, unpretentious people going about their business and just trying
to do the right thing -- is shifting toward the Republican Party. Republicanism
is becoming populist. Republicans believe that tax cuts to large and small
businesses help growth, encourage spending and investment, and create jobs. The
Democrats have no answer to that except hysterical rhetoric. Rush Limbaugh
rightly calls it the tired old "Democratic playbook" -- more than 25 years
old.

The Real Question for Metro Auditor Candidates

The real question we should ask when choosing which Metro Auditor candidate to vote for is, not just who will check the books to see that no money went missing, but who is committed to that other form of auditing: performance auditing. (See here and here.)

Without performance audits, the Metro Auditor would only be doing half their job.

Which candidate has a history of overseeing performance audits?

Which candidate has a track record of collaboration with the other managers to improve business practices across an organization?

We don't need a "gotcha" auditor at Metro. We need a partner who will work with people at all levels to improve outcomes. That's a much tougher job.

Traffic Simulator

Fascinating traffic

Minnis in Trouble?

Great - now I'm hearing that Karen Minnis, already under attack from the left, may also have irritated the Libertarians enough that they too will "target" her. Shades of Mary Gallegos?

I hope Karen's people will mend bridges with the Libs.

Mannix Smears Saxton

What a week for Republicans. Just as the Democrat establishment closes ranks around Kulongoski, the Republicans begin the dirtiest primary in memory. Particularly awful is the "independent" (Mannix-supporting) radio ad by Greg Clapper that dishonestly portrays Saxton as some sort of crony of Neil Goldschmidt. (In reality, the two men despise each other.)

Clapper is a past master at selecting a few semi-truths and heaping on innuendo. The lesson I take away from this is, next time, Saxton should hire Clapper just to keep him off the air.

There are some Indian Casino TV ads that are apparently pretty misleading too, but I haven't seen them. Yet. This may be a good political season for turning off the TV and the radio.

Sadly, this will probably hurt Republicans - a lot - in November. So whoever "wins" the current mudfest will have to spend a whole lot of time digging back out.

Are Republicans really determined to be a perpetual minority party in Oregon?

Marshall Goldsmith Library

Big thanks to my friend Howard Wasserteil for pointing me to the Marshall Goldsmith Library on the web. These articles are worth reading if you care about executive coaching and leadership.

Maslow and Motivating your Knowledge Workers

Read this for a good background on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and an exploration of how you can use it to understand and motivate your Knowledge Worker workforce.

I found it persuasive, though I believe he overstates the extent to which current Knowledge Workers can be assumed to have their lower level needs met. Certainly he's right that people worrying about their health or physical safety cannot be expected to perform at their best, especially in Knowledge Worker roles.

Why the Left Wants Your Children

I've wondered sometimes at the insatiable appetite of the Left for projects that destroy the institution of the family.

Wonder no more - in the context of addressing very specific facts, this article from The Telegraph gives the back story on how and why the Left is wrong and destructive, and specifically why it wants to take your kids away from you.

Skepticism on Global Warming

Here's a good reason to read the Telegraph - a well written and persuasive article challenging the global warming fearmongers. If you're a true believer in Global Warming, let this article be your road map - refute these facts and their implications. If you cannot, you'd better fall back on fear-mongering and intimidation.

Dashboard Spy

Not a bad little roundup of various Dashboards on the web.

Another Atkinson Sighting

I was in Corvallis earlier tonight to pitch the Republican Meetups as a way to help get Republicans elected in Oregon, and got to catch most of Jason Atkinson's speech to the Benton County Republican Central Committee.

Atkinson was exceptionally good. His time on the stump has polished him. He related many of the same anecdotes I've heard before, but they seemed fresh. His energy was good, slightly subdued and statesmanlike. His trademark good humor was in evidence. And he didn't shy away from any hard questions, including of course one on immigration.

The ORGOP is lucky to be able to field candidates of this caliber. With some professional coaching, I think he'd be even better.

Catch all three GOP candidates at the City Club of Portland on 5/14/06 - just $5 general admission.

Tom In the News

Jerry Boone may not absolutely agree with me on all points, but he finds me interesting - or at least interesting enough to write about. Thanks, Jerry!

Grandiose rail schemes do little to reduce congestion

Seattle is going rail-crazy. Look familiar to anyone in Portland?

Key quotes:

If initial goals are not met, the board sets new goals at a fraction of the level once promised. Current performance then is compared with revised goals set so low that nearly any improvement is cause for celebration.

and:

At present, the taxpayer subsidy for each round trip on the Everett-to-Seattle rail commuter line is about $547! Not included is the $6 fare ($3 each way). The $547 subsidy is 32 times more than the round-trip taxpayer subsidy for Sound Transit's regional express buses.

Amazing.

Open Space... or Public Safety?

As Metro considers whether to ask area voters for a bond to purchase open space, voters are increasingly saying "no" to new taxes.

I believe that the similar 1995 bond was, among other things, proof that voters are willing to pay for what they want. The anti-Measure 37 crowd has long insisted that government has to confiscate land (through uncompensated regulatory takings) rather than pay for what it takes.

One reasonable concern - brought up in the Oregonian article - is that voters do have an upper limit for how much they're willing to pay, and sometimes the last person to ask for money gets told "no" regardless of how worthy the purpose may be.

Will voters pay for open space, only to say "no" to other demands like public safety or local school options? Will they see this as a chance to buy open space now before the price goes up? Or will public safety get a "yes" and open space a "no"?

I have no crystal ball on this. I'm expecting the open space bond to pass. But I expected the Washington County public safety levy to pass in 2004, and it didn't.

I think the wisest course of action includes these steps: (1) trust the voters and abide by their wishes, (2) encourage economic growth that grows the pie and expands the tax base, so we'll have the money to pay for government services, and (3) relentlessly look for ways to save money and do more with less in delivering government services. Indianapolis managed to increase services for years while cutting taxes, and ended up with more cash at the end than at the beginning.

Post Dorchester

Attended my first Dorchester - I didn't expect there were so many reasonable Republicans. I don't say "moderate" because that's code for "Republicans who will raise your taxes" - I didn't see any of those.

But the Taliban wing of the party were few in number and apparently keeping a low profile. (No open handling of snakes, etc.)

Saxton won the straw poll - no surprise - and Atkinson finished a strong second - big surprise. Mannix was spanked, but the nonrepresentative sample of the party present makes that less significant.

Best parts for me: meeting key conservative bloggers (hello, Sailor) and dancing with three generations of pretty women.

Big Government Databases

The next time someone tells you the answer to some pressing social problem is a massive new government database, read this first - an audit of Australia's main social-service database.

Even more cautionary is this information about Canada's failed gun registry database. Or this one. Or this web site.

Private databases often do poorly as well - see the opening paragraph here. The difference is, when the private firm screws up, they can't tax you - at worst they go out of business and someone smarter takes their place.

Chalkboard's "Open Book$ Project" Slouches Towards Irrelevance

I actually had some hope that the Chalkboard Project would offer up something useful. I was particularly hoping that their "Open Book$ Project" would be good -- it promised to clarify just where all the money goes in K-12 education, educating us through one of my favorite things in public policy, "transparent budgeting."

The term "transparency" has vanished, as has my hope that the Open Book$ Project would be useful -- or that it would be anything other than another exercise in defending the status quo by hiding the relevant facts.

How can you tell that the Open Book$ Project is another union-driven scam? Two items: personnel and approach.

Personnel - the Open Book$ Project is being run by my friend and sometime sparring partner Steve Novick, a mere tool of the unions and big government. Steve excels at cherry-picking his facts to support his preconceived results.

Approach - the Open Book$ Project isn't using Activity Based Costing. For example, look at the accounting for buildings. Rather than allocate buildings to their functions -- i.e. the cost of an administration building should be grouped with other administration expenses -- Steve and friends have a "Buildings" category separate from both administration and actual instruction.

What does that mean? It means that when Portland Public Schools have 16 more schools open than the number of students would support, and a Taj Mahal administrative palace, all sucking scarce dollars away from the schools' instructional mission, you can't tell it from Steve's chosen method of organizing and presenting the data.

Instead, the great goal of the Open Book$ Project is now to be "snazzy." Not scrupulously accurate, not fastidiously clear, not painfully precise, and clearly not transparent.

So Steve Novick is using the Chalkboard Project to give what voters and taxpayers and parents do not need -- more smoke and mirrors.

Budnick is Just All Right with Me

He isn't Jesus, but the Trib's Nick Budnick is actually a very good journalist, and my prior post on the Metro Auditor article didn't reflect my belief that he is. After blogging my rant last Saturday after reading his article, I called him to ask, in essence, who it was that sold him the story.

I was surprised when he said nobody did. But I believe him.

This isn't to imply that, had there been an instigator or a source, that it would have invalidated the story in any way. As the Trib's Jim Redden puts it, in politics there are no virgin births. Had there been a midwife, shall we say, to this story - someone pushing Nick to write it - then the questions are the same: is the story accurate, fair, and newsworthy.

Having spoken now to Nick about it, I'm inclined to believe that he gave Alexis Dow the benefit of the doubt in several areas where he didn't have to, and that he erred on the side of caution. I revise my earlier assessment - not yellow journalism, but perhaps a pale cream color, or a very light blonde.

So where does this leave Dow? In brief, not looking too good. She's got a challenger with apparently roughly equal credentials, and a burst of bad press to overcome. Her next steps should probably be:

1. To the extent she's actually done anything wrong, naughty, or less than good, 'fess up and get it over with. Voters love a repentance.

2. To the extent there's anything to fix, launch a fix-it campaign. If you can't tell the voters that everything's all better, then tell them it's on the way to getting better, and here is your plan. Documenting her actual work hours would be good. (I still think it's irrelevant to a salaried person who is performing well, but public perception will say otherwise.)

3. Hire someone (on her own dime) to perform a 360-degree review of her, interviewing her staff and peers and providing her with a warts-and-all assessment of her performance and image inside Metro. Without that information, it'll be hard to move forward.

4. Hire (on her own dime) a good PR professional and get on the right side of the media. She's got to earn the trust of reporters, and a pro can help her do that by guiding her steps at this crucial time.

Metro needs a very strong auditor, and Dow has proven she is one. I'd hate to roll the dice on whether her challenger is as good.

AP done write English good

Normally the Associated Press (AP) Wire represents the best of professional workday journalism. Occasionally the AP Wire will emit something that does not do justice to the English language.

Such as this piece.

He "is doing very well, better than can be expected considering the bullet wounds," said hospital CEO Vic Fresolone. He said surgeons had repaired intestinal damage caused by the most serious of the wounds.
[...]
A nearby elementary school in Roseburg, a former southwest Oregon timber town of about 21,000 residents, was briefly locked down as a precaution.

First, the intestinal damage was not "caused by ... the wounds" - the intestinal damage IS a wound, caused in this case by one or more bullets.

And Roseburg is "a former southwest Oregon timber town"? What, did they move it to Arizona for better weather?

Metro's Cabal Finds Their Patsy

I predicted earlier that the hit piece on Metro Auditor Alexis Dow was timed and organized to support a rival bid. (Speaking of timing - the story broke just as Dow was going on a long-planned vacation. Makes it hard to fight back, doesn't it?)

Lo and behold, not three days later comes this announcement: Multnomah County Auditor Suzanne Flynn spontaneously decides to challenge Dow.

Did it just now occur to Flynn that she herself is term limited out of her current position? I somehow doubt that.

As for why one might see Flynn as a patsy... we know Metro is a haunt of Smart Growth religious extremists. Turns out Flynn has a master's degree in Urban Planning.

How that helps an auditor is a mystery - but it explains her passion for joining the High Church of Planning and Smart Growth. She's already a true believer too.

That could be bad news for Metro as an organization. If everyone's a true believer and nobody's a skeptic, it's easy to fall into Groupthink and make enormous mistakes. It's also a reason to question Flynn's ability to audit objectively. If she's a true-blue believer in the holy mission, will she ask the tough questions that Dow has asked?

Color me skeptical of Flynn's fitness for this position, and doubly skeptical of someone who'd be a party to the dishonest smear attack on Dow.

Better Management - Goverment Style (Fort Wayne, Indiana)

When I encounter skepticism that government can be made more efficient, I like to respond with examples like this. Emphasis added by me.

Fixing potholes and processes
Fort Wayne, Indiana, is one of the first major U.S. cities to roll out Six Sigma. Mayor Graham Richard, elected to the position in 1999, had long been familiar with quality improvement. In 1991, while serving as a state senator, Richard helped start the TQM Network, a group of small to midsized companies that used benchmarks to improve their processes. Most of these companies were suppliers to General Electric, a company that famously enjoyed success with Six Sigma. GE’s suppliers in the TQM Network took note, and many of them implemented Six Sigma programs of their own, Richard says. When he became mayor, those successes were still fresh in his mind.

[...]
The city’s first Six Sigma projects, permitting and pothole repair, were chosen for this reason because they were high profile and would provide noticeable results for Fort Wayne’s 250,000 residents. Both were problem areas: Before Six Sigma, it took an average of 50 days to get a city building permit, and it took up to four days for city workers to fill the many dangerous potholes that form on the city’s roads. Of course, before Six Sigma no one in the city’s offices knew these statistics, as no one had ever collectively examined them.

Richard’s goal was to get potholes fixed within 24 hours of their reporting. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” Richard remembers. “Everyone said, ‘You’ll never make it.’” Black Belts mapped the locations of potholes, finding the areas of the city where they happened most often and concentrated their efforts there. Today, most potholes are fixed within four hours after they’re reported.

In addition, Black Belts used flowcharts and maps to highlight redundancies in the city’s permitting system and slashed the amount of time it takes to issue a permit from 50 days to just 11 or 12.

The trick, Richard says, is for public agencies to institutionalize the notion that they are service providers, not bureaucrats.

“When you remember that fact, you’re telling people that you’re there to provide a service, just as anyone in the public sector would,” he says. “People don’t think of government as a business, but they should. We’re one of the biggest service organizations in the area.”

The often-substantial cost of Six Sigma training can be a deterrent to its successful implementation--especially for smaller companies and governments--but Richard found an innovative way to provide it. He used his connections with the TQM Network to have experienced Black Belts provide training, and then reached a deal with Six Sigma giants Raytheon and ITT to allow city workers to attend internal Six Sigma training sessions. A TQM Network Master Black Belt, Roger Hirt, served as a mentor to Fort Wayne’s fledging Six Sigma practitioners, and also offered Green Belt training.

Richard estimates that the training could have cost the city $50,000 per Black Belt, but it totaled less than a tenth of that sum.

In just five years, Six Sigma has revolutionized Fort Wayne’s city government. City workers have completed 60 Six Sigma projects, which have saved upward of $10 million, and there are now 35 Six Sigma belts on the staff. Fort Wayne’s school district is now implementing Six Sigma, and the city gets monthly requests for information from other public administrators interested in modeling Fort Wayne’s success in their own cities.

Fort Wayne’s Six Sigma-facilitated improvements include:

Variation elimination and bottleneck reduction, allowing the fire department inspectors to perform 23 percent more reinspections annually, without any staff increases.

Parks department workers, led by a Six Sigma Black Belt, designed an experiment to determine if city trees were trimmed at the right frequencies, reducing complaint calls from citizens by 33 percent.

Improved accounting in the transportation engineering department freed $150,000 that had previously been tied up due to inaccurate estimations of project costs.

On-the-job injuries have plummeted to one of the lowest rates in the country.

Pdx Trib Assassinates Alexis Dow

In a remarkable piece of yellow journalism, the Portland Tribune decides to take a little-deserved -- and highly one-sided -- whack at what looks like one of the better success stories of Metro, Auditor Alexis Dow.

The real reason, I believe, someone sold the Trib on a political hit-piece just before election season, was to pave the way for a new "reform" candidate who will be a patsy for the folks who don't like Dow's honesty and hard work.

I've never met Ms. Dow. But thanks to this pseudo-scandal story, I can be pretty confident she's good people. Good auditors are seldom popular, and Dow has won four "major government auditing awards" and is described by other auditors as courageous.

No wonder someone's out to get her.

Let's review the charges, and look at how author Nick Budnick uses innuendo to suggest what his facts don't support.

First, a seemingly rhetorical question that Budnick should have actually addressed, but doesn't. It's the headline: Who audits the auditor? It's a fine question -- but it actually has an answer, and the answer undercuts Budnick's thesis that Dow is out of control.

In any organization with an auditor, including the City of Portland which like Metro has a directly elected auditor, there's a budget for the audit department. It's set and approved by someone other than the auditor -- by a chief operating officer, or a chief executive, or a board of directors. Auditors don't get to raise their own revenue. So whoever pays for that function is supposed to exercise normal budgetary controls, including reviewing whether the money is spent within the rules. Dow may be directly elected, but that doesn't place her department budget beyond review.

Budnick could tell readers that, but it would undercut his "Auditors gone wild!" schtick. (Indeed, we learn further down that every one of Dow's expenses "had to be approved by Metro's finance unit" -- but that inconvenient fact is not introduced until the tail end of paragraph 8 on page 8, long after the false thesis has been established.)

The front-page, above-the-fold story opens with a list of overstated charges, each with no more than a grain of truth, each of which Budnick will later undercut or refute himself:

1. Although the Metro Charter prohibits Dow from outside employment, she earns $35,000 to $50,000 a year for serving on the Longview Fibre Co. board of directors and two subcommittees, which meet regularly.

2. Dow appears to be working significantly fewer than the 40 hours a week Metro pays her for.

3. Although Dow has three staff auditors in her office, she has repeatedly hired outside firms both to perform auditing work and to help with presentations.

4. Dow travels extensively and pays lavishly for trips only remotely related to Metro, while spending Metro funds on meals, parking and gifts for departing employees.

By playing these early on the front page and burying the details on page 8, Budnick and the Trib gin up their "scandal" - until you turn the page and discover the bait-and-switch nature of the reporting.

Dow is forbidden to have "outside employment" - except her Board of Directors position is not considered by anybody to be "employment" in any legal sense. And Dow didn't just assume it - she confirmed it with the Oregon Attorney General's Office before she first ran. That would seem to be the mark of a careful person who wants to do the right thing.

Budnick's article can only include a sniffy quote from Jewel Lansing about Dow's compensation: “I don’t think it’s illegal for her — but I think it ought to be illegal.”

Oh. So Dow carefully stays within the law, and that means we should criticize her for -- what, exactly? Failing to obey laws that don't exist?

It gets better.

Dow is supposedly working "fewer than the 40 hours a week Metro pays her for." But Dow isn't paid to work 40 hours a week. Dow is salaried. Salaried workers don't get paid by the hour, and can work more or fewer than 40 hours as they like, so long as they accomplish their jobs.

And the evidence is that Dow actually works more than 40 hours a week anyway. Budnick never tries to question this, accepting (as I do) Dow's contention that she works nights and weekends.

Then Budnick changes the denominator. After talking about working 40 hours a week, he rattles off how many hours Dow might or might not have worked on other tasks ... per month.

Here's a key passage:

Dow cautioned that her calendar is only a “planning tool.” But if she fulfilled her plans, she spent 24 work hours on FEI and Longview business in January 2005; 16 hours in March; 41 hours, including time on OHSU, in May; and 37 hours in September.

So, the worst Budnick can find is an average of less than 10 hours a week of non-Metro meetings, and that's what's scheduled. I looked at my own calendar, and I've got at least that much on my calendar too. But I know that I put those there so that I'll know what meetings I might go to (and to prevent double or triple booking myself), not all of which I must go to.

Budnick never attempts to find out how much time Dow really spends at Metro or how many of the outside meetings she really attends, preferring to rely on second-hand innuendo from two admittedly disgruntled former employees:

...[T]wo former staff auditors, Joe Gibbons and Jim McMullin, said that from their observations, Dow spent no more than half her time on Metro business.

...McMullin [...] worked for Dow for more than five years before quitting in frustration.

...Gibbons [...] said he worked for Dow for seven years before quitting in disgust.

I have to wonder how these two tie in to an earlier passage:

With no experience in government auditing, Dow hired top-notch staff, often veterans of the federal General Accounting Office. With their help, she has won four major government auditing awards.

It's hard to imagine Budnick would have omitted telling us if McMullin or Gibbons were part of that "top-notch staff" or were "veterans of the federal General Accounting Office" - more likely, I would guess, they were slacker hangers-on from before Dow arrived, who couldn't cut it under a hard charging and highly effective boss.

The rest of the article withers away under the light of this one sentence:

The Metro expenses she’s racked up on meals, travel and contracting are all “standard business practice” and, she noted, every expense had to be approved by Metro’s finance unit.

Oops.

So, why is the Trib and Budnick writing this tripe? Newspapers love controversy. This fake story by Budnick is much more fun than an honest one with the headline "Effective auditor shines light on Metro, wins awards, is in wide demand."

But that's the real story, based on Budnick's own words:

“...Alexis [...] cares a lot about Metro as an institution,” said former City Auditor Barbara Clark, who encouraged Dow to run for the job.

“I would describe Alexis as a highly competent professional and CPA in the work that she does,” Rasmussen said. “She sometimes takes stands that may be unpopular and may go further (on audits) than someone else who has less courage.”

...Dow hired top-notch staff, often veterans of the federal General Accounting Office. With their help, she has won four major government auditing awards.

Metro officials resist Dow and are hypersensitive about her recommendations, local auditors said. “I think it would take these guys a long time to admit they might have made some mistakes,”said former staff auditor Jim Luckeroff.

So, why would Dow hire outside PR and audit professionals to help her conduct and present her audits? Perhaps because "Metro officials resist Dow and are hypersensitive about her recommendations."

Personally, I believe there's a cabal of Metro groupies and fanatics -- including current and former staff as well as some elected officials -- who want Metro to be more unaccountable, who see honest folks like Dow as an impediment to their secretive impulses, and who are hoping to torpedo her re-election.

Nothing else explains the sudden appearance of a hit piece like this, at this time, aimed at this target, with so little behind it.

New Interstate Bridge?

Good site suggesting an alternative to the current gridlock: a new west side interstate bridge. See Portland Transport for an alternative, anti-auto view.

Anti-Carousel Demonstrations: is Civil Disobedience Next?

It is astonishing to me that Oregon police officers will staff the illegal Carousels of Information and keep taxpayers out. This implies that I - or you - could be arrested for attempting to access the government services we ARE entitled to, while protesting theft by people who are NOT entitled to those services.

Is the next step going to be trespass and civil disobedience? Will we see Daniel leading sit-ins and sing-alongs of "We Shall Overcome"?

We live in strange times when our own government treats citizens as second-class, and illegals as first-class.

Atkinson's Whiny Day

Jason Atkinson got spanked on the air by Lars Larson on Friday 03-Feb-06. I missed his previous day's appearance so I was catching the story mid-way, but Lars was convinced that Jason was in favor of broad amnesty for illegal aliens.

Leaving aside the merits of the amnesty discussion, I want to look at Atkinson's performance as a public speaker. He was clearly frustrated. His interviewer (Lars) was a long time supporter now grown hostile, or at least adversarial. Atkinson seemed to feel Lars wasn't hearing him; Lars seemed to feel Atkinson was playing word games.

Atkinson sounded whiny. I hate to say it because it sounds rude, but I'm being honest. Atkinson's voice went high and his tone grew plaintive. He felt beat up and abandoned and wasn't afraid to say it; yet he said it in a self-pitying way that wasn't appealing.

This is tough ground. Being at odds with your interviewer can make you seem unpleasant and argumentative. Standing your ground can make you seem stubborn. Yielding makes you look weak. Gentleness can seem wimpy and assertiveness can seem rude.

In this case, Atkinson ended up sounding whiny.

There are some techniques one can use to handle this a little better, but they are tough to do and require a lot of experience and practice. (These are techniques, not tricks. They only work if you're honest.)

One is, restate your interviewer's position, and then touch first on the points where you agree. Don't do it to camouflage the areas of disagreement, but rather to break up the negative back-and-forth rhythm of arguing, and to find at least a little common ground:

"Lars, your position seems to be that tomatos are not a fruit and therefore should not be treated as a fruit for tax purposes. Have I got that right? And I want you to know that I agree with you that it's wrong to take anything that isn't a fruit, and apply a fruit tax to it. It's wrong. Now here is where we disagree: to my understanding, a fruit is defined as the edible flesh surrounding a seed or seeds. By that definition, a tomato is a fruit and must be taxed as one."

In this fictional example, I've stated my position and stood my ground without making myself disagreeable. I've also found something to agree on, and made it clear that I've heard the other side.

Another is the "retrenchment" or slight retreat to a more defensible position.

"Lars, maybe I'm wrong on the tomato. I'm not a botanist. I'm always happy to learn more. But I'm quite certain that I oppose dishonest taxes."

There are others. The point is, a skilled and experienced speaker can manage a tough interview while still sounding statesmanlike.

Unfortunately, Atkinson didn't manage to sound statesmanlike. At least not this time. Fortunately, few elections hinge on a single interview - most campaigns are a marathon not a sprint. He can still shake this off and return to the fray with a renewed focus on calm, poise, and dignity.

The Trib Misunderstands Management

In its recent editorial on the OHSU Tram debacle and the botched firing of a key manager, the Portland Tribune gets it very wrong.

The Trib seems to think the key lesson here is the need to "better manage and protect relationships among the business community, its own employees, nonprofit organizations and other government agencies."

Not even close. Commissioner Sam Adams' attempt to force out Vic Rhodes was based on his belief that Rhodes had lied to the City Council about the project's costs and risks. The principle lesson is on the need for managers like Adams to be able to rely on staff to be honest and candid, and to hold them accountable if they are not.

The breakdowns that occurred with City's and the Tram Board's oversight of the project -- actually four separate breakdowns -- have nothing whatever to do with 'managing or protecting relationships.' (Put away the guitar and douse the campfire.)

Big projects like the Tram have some very specific risks, and managers are on the hook to understand and mitigate those risks. Neither the City nor the Tram Board did so successfully. As Charles Roxburgh writing in the McKinsey Quarterly puts it, there are some very common mistakes that managers make in backing big, strategic initiatives like the Tram - the science of behavioral economics has shown that the human brain is prone to a number of common errors in judgment that are relevant when evaluating strategies.

Here are the four mistakes made in the Tram project so far:

1. Overoptimism - assuming that building a tram larger and longer than any other ever built before would be easy to estimate accurately, underestimating the risk of the technical challenges. No engineering feasability study was even done before the design competition started, according to Rhodes.

2. Mental Accounting (one of Richard Thaler's contributions to behavioral economics) - the City's direct financial exposure to the project was relatively fixed at around $3.5 million. Overruns would be covered by others (OHSU, PDC, taxpayers, etc.) whose money seems less "real" to City employees. This led them to greater laxity and greater risk-taking, as well as less oversight.

3. Anchoring - an effect where exposure to an early number tugs people's estimates toward that number. According to The Oregonian, Rhodes was accused of suppressing key information in order to provide the City Council with a false Tram cost estimate of $15 million. That estimate became a rallying point for the project. The more realistic cost of over $45 million should have been obvious even then.

4. The "sunk cost" trap - throwing good money after bad. Developer Homer Williams was quoted saying that the Tram project had "passed the point of no return" - meaning that, no matter how much more it cost, the project could never be canceled, because a certain amount of money was already sunk into the project.

Each of these errors is one managers can expect to face, and City Councils should too. Each one of these errors can be mitigated if one takes it seriously and puts in place the right planning structures and procedures.

For example, for overoptimism, score the project based on its cost, timeline, level of new technology, and staff expertise. Large and long projects with high costs that are outside staff's experience are much riskier than small, fast, cheap projects that are done routinely. For these large projects, have a formal risk assessment with much broader parameters and test it over many more scenarios (i.e. steel price fluctuations; technical glitches). For large strategic initiatives, require three alternatives be presented using different levels of technical risk. (To this day, no alternatives to the Tram have even been voiced.)

To resist sunk-cost errors, establish "gating" criteria that the project must pass through or be killed automatically, and have the discipline to stick to it.

Managers with responsibility for large and risky projects like the Tram have an obligation to understand these risks and take mitigating steps. The City of Portland should retrofit all its current projects - including the Tram - with mitigation strategies.

And employees who lie to their bosses about the costs and risks of projects should be fired.

Oregonian: the only bad tax is one that wouldn't pass

Wow. According to The Fishwrap, the only thing wrong with Potter's new proposed tax is that it wouldn't pass.

Nothing about the effect on the economy or the business climate of yet another tax in a high tax area.

Nothing about a broken vow to voters - the vow three years ago that the I-tax was "temporary" and would buy leaders time to fix the underlying cost structure problems.

Nothing about the underlying cost structure problems.

What a worthless editorial.

PDC: Why so Dysfunctional?

Got the news yesterday that the PDC (Portland Development Commission) has a track record of miserable cost overruns on projects. Not just the $15 million Tram that's now over $45 million and climbing - even a simple pedestrian bridge over I-5 that was supposed to cost $1.6 million will now exceed $5 million.

Why is there such an epidemic of bad forecasting, overspending, and failure to contain costs?

I'll have to take that up in a future posting. There are lessons for all managers here.

Brilliant Talk by Atkinson

Jason Atkinson's performance Thursday night (26-Jan-06) in front of the Multnomah County Republican Meet-Up group was the best I've seen from him, and perhaps the best of any candidate for Governor of this state.

Naturally I tend to judge candidates against myself, or my own rosy image of myself. Tonight Jason performed better than I think I ever have myself.

I have not seen all three candidates in every one of their venues, so there's a lot I have not seen. And there's much more ahead.

But tonight and for the first time, I can imagine Jason Atkinson actually winning the Republican nomination and the governorship.

I still haven't picked my favorite, and I will enthusiastically support whoever wins the primary. I have things I like about Saxton; I have things I like about Mannix. Now I have things I like about Atkinson too.

What did he do right?

He was both comfortable and confident, exhibiting a sense of leadership and of commanding the room without effort. He knew his material. His plans for the office are more specific than I've previously heard from any candidate, and were delivered with confidence. His phrasing of the role as the "CEO Governor" worked well for me.

Best of all, he had a human story for every question and issue, and put a human face on his answers. He demonstrated a sense of caring (without the bathos of a Bill Clinton) and of deep sincerity.

This party could use a dozen more people like Jason Atkinson. I'm glad the one we have is running for Governor.

Increase Recycling Using Market Forces

When I went in front of the Oregon League of Conservation Voters last week I brought with me a bucket filled with dozens of plastic items. They were different sizes and had different recycling numbers, but they shared one feature: Hillsboro won't recycle any of them.

The way to get more of these items recycled, I said, was find places that already do recycle them, and figure out how they manage it.

Consider a margarine tub. A margarine tub contains the same polymers as some of the screw-top bottles that the recyclers do take. You can tell because they have the same number inside the little "recycle" triangle. The difference is in the manufacturing process - tubs are stamped; bottles are injection-molded. That results in a different end product with a different level of demand by the plastics-recycling industry.

In the case of Hillsboro and margarine tubs, that's no demand at all. Nobody around here will buy them, so Hillsboro Garbage won't collect them from your recycling bin. They have to go in the trash and get buried in a landfill.

However, in San Francisco, you can recycle your margarine tubs at the curb. The difference: in Lodi, California some 80 miles east is Epic Plastics, which turns recycled margarine tubs into a landscaping product called Bend-a-Board.

In other words: there's commercial demand for that plastic.

So the trick to increasing the amount of solid waste that's recycled isn't to spend buckets of taxpayer dollars, nor is it to slap a mandate on the private sector, but to emulate the pattern found in nature, where every entity's waste product is some other entity's food. Find a way to identify or create a product that uses the plastic.

For the Portland Metro area, I would suggest that every area's waste stream be analyzed at least at the granularity of the eight jurisdictions that have solid waste contracts with haulers. Identify the major waste elements that are theoretically recyclable but are not yet being recycled. Partner with the science teachers in each area's high schools and middle schools and hold recycling science fairs to come up with potential commercial products that use those waste materials.

This could also be opened up to the general public. We've seen that average folks will do extraordinary things with little more encouragement than an annual event, publicity, and a small prize (build seige engines; build absurd flying machines; etc.) so this should attract some free creative labor as well.

And since I'm surely not the first to think of it, we should steal any good ideas that look like they've worked for others in the past, whether for recycling rubber, plastic, or anything else.