Chug This For New Year's.

By WW Editorial Staff
  1. An arbitrator has decided the City of Portland violated its contract with Laborers’ International Union Local 483 in 2007. That’s when Portland’s Bureau of Transportation outsourced work on the city’s parking pay stations for parking to a Canadian firm. “The evidence is compelling and unequivocal: The City contracted out bargaining unit work,” the arbitrator wrote in his 20-page report on Dec. 17. The result? The city must now pay 780 hours of OT to six parking-meter technicians whose work was improperly taken from them. A PBOT spokeswoman says the bureau is reviewing the decision.
  2. Calling all lawyers. Portland’s Transit Riders Union (trimetriders.org) is in the market for an attorney to help it seek a court injunction that would halt the elimination of Fareless Square for buses starting Jan. 3. Meantime, the transit advocacy group plans to protest at 9 am on Wednesday, Dec. 30, at 200 SW Market St., outside the Portland Business Alliance, which backed the change to rail-only Fareless Square.
  3. Kent Craford, recently canned from his job as CEO of heavily subsidized SeaPort Airlines, is picking up some work from Republican Chris Dudley’s gubernatorial campaign. Records show Dudley’s campaign cut Craford—who formerly worked with another Dudley adviser, Dan Lavey of the Gallatin Group—a $5,000 check on Dec. 23 for consulting services.
  1. It’s midwinter and time for—planting trees? A quarter-page ad in The Sunday Oregonian exhorting Portlanders to plant trees featured the smiling mug of Bureau of Environmental Services Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who just happens to be up for re-election in May. Oregonian publisher N. Christian Anderson III, whose paper donated the ad space, says it was meant as “support for the organization [Friends of Trees], not the politician.”
  2. Houston recently topped Portland as the largest U.S. city with a gay mayor. Houston Mayor-elect Annise Parker also has a Portland connection: Her newly named chief of staff, Waynette Chan, worked in Portland politics in the 1970s and ’80s before accompanying former Portland police chief Lee Brown to Texas.
  3. That nagging feeling inside your head that there’s one thing left to do in 2009? Might be that you still need to donate to any of the great local nonprofits featured in WW’s annual Give!Guide. A big thank you to our generous readers, who have donated more than $650,000 since Nov. 11. But please add whatever contribution you can by going to wweek.com by the deadline of midnight Dec. 31.

WWeek 2015

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