**Amanda Fritz is on board with tax jack for bikes due to it being a “Job Retention” plan for the Water Bureau. A bag of pop cans for the first one who comes up with a story that reports the Water Bureau was going to lay off workers. It’s 7:22 am. On Your Mark, Get Set, Go!**
They plan to “kick start” the $1.5 BILLION  (here) plan with a $20,000,000.00 check written on the taxpayers’ dime from the WATER BUREAU. That’s $2,500,000.00-million-dollar-a-mile. That previous $600,000,000.00 figure didn’t include, you know, like, paying people.

On Feb. 9, two days before City Council adopted the plan, Gailey — PBOT’s “expert in costing out projects,” according to another PBOT employee — told colleagues that implementing the plan would cost $1.5 billion, once PBOT included non-construction costs like personnel and overhead.

And don’t forget maintenance costs. Portland’s City Council has an aversion to including those costs for its pet projects, too. Why, that would make the numbers look bigger and people–taxpayers–might notice! 
Portlanders face some of the highest water/sewer rates in the country and they’re due to go up EVEN MORE (here).

According to the bureau, fully complying with the rule will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Paying for this could help increase average residential water bills from $22.02 a month to $41.18 over the next four years. Medium-size businesses could see their monthly bills increase from $510.13 to $935.45, while the monthly bill for large businesses could rise from $48,882 to $91,241.

So, what does the city do? Misappropriate money that could be used to LOWER rates to buy bicycling friends (see previous posts on this) favors even as the recession -hit-overly-taxed-higher-unemployment-rate-than-the-state-average Portlanders struggle. Stay classy, Council.