The expanded 12-member Portland City Council has already made its share of mistakes as the city’s elected officials navigate the transition to our new form of government. They’ve blundered their way through meeting protocols, grappled over when to take public testimony and passed an ill-advised budget amendment that had to be undone the next day.
But the City Council’s 7-5 vote to reject grant recommendations by the Portland Children’s Levy to organizations supporting the city’s most underserved youth stands out for its sheer recklessness. Parroting the sour-grapes complaints of a few politically connected organizations, a majority of councilors remanded the list of 64 selected groups back to the Children’s Levy for further consideration. The move has forced dozens of shoestring operations that provide foster youth support, hunger relief, mentoring and other services, to curtail plans or scramble to backfill funding that was supposed to begin next week, as The Oregonian/OregonLive’s Shane Dixon Kavanaugh reported.
With funding uncertainty at all levels of government amid an intense need for children’s services, the harm of this decision merits every effort to reverse it. The seven councilors who voted to redo the list should recognize the robust process that led to the recommendations and reverse their stance…