Overzealous bean counters can be blamed for some pretty repugnant things: A zillion awful management books. Form 1040, Schedule C. “Rightsizing.”

Still, there’s value in efficiency. We need bean counters—especially in government, which all of us pay for, and all the more so when we know hard times are coming.

And tough times are coming to Portland. Rising gas prices, a plunging dollar and the everywhere-you-turn recession will begin to hurt the city treasury. This year, Portland enjoyed a $33 million budget surplus. But city financial forecasters predict that surplus will dwindle to $350,000 within five years.

Even that prediction assumes a “short and shallow” recession. That’s quite an assumption—one made when oil prices were about $117 a barrel. At this writing, two months later, oil prices had already hit $139 a barrel.

The City Council, which will finish the annual budget at the end of this month, knows all these signs of trouble. And it has put a few extra million into the city’s rainy-day fund.

But there is so much more Council members could do.

When we asked them where to cut the city’s $2.4 billion budget, commissioners and bureau heads told us they’ve already cut the lard.

We’re not so sure.

And so, in order to help out before the budget becomes final June 25 (’cause WW is nothing if not helpful), we reviewed bureau budgets, contracts and six months of small-time city expenditures—more than 25,000 purchases, from December through mid-May. We found multiple examples of questionable city spending. Is it nickel-and-dime stuff in a $2.4 billion budget? Sure. But to paraphrase an apocryphal quote from a late U.S. senator: A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

So, with that in mind, let’s play the hottest game in Portland City Hall (after Minesweeper)…“The Price Is What?!”

1. The city will spend $129 million next year to bring water to your faucet from Bull Run, which the Water Bureau promotes as pure and delicious. The city’s Office of Sustainable Development will spend nearly a million dollars to encourage conservation, recycling and other green policies. And yet, over the six months we analyzed, how much did city officials spend on bottled water?

A) None. City policy forbids it.

B) $8,000.

C) $16,000, mainly for firefighters.

Answer: B.

Commissioner Randy Leonard, who’s in charge of the Water Bureau, says he’s urged his colleagues to follow his lead and ditch the bottled stuff. Yet the bureaus of Transportation, Finance, Technology Services, Parks, Neighborhood Involvement, and Government Relations still buy bottled water, not to mention the Police Bureau and the offices of the City Auditor, City Attorney, Commissioner Sam Adams and Mayor Tom Potter. Potter’s spokesman, John Doussard, says his office keeps bottled water around for the mayor’s many visitors, presumably including the police chief of Guadalajara, Mexico, who visited in April. That old saw about drinking the water cuts both ways.

2. Why did assistant parks manager Joan Hallquist get an $1,111 chair in February, when, the month before, Northeast Precinct Officer Colby Panter got a $94 chair from Amazon.com?

A) Lack of oversight on small city purchases.

B) There’s no justice in this world.

C) “We’re just poor cops,” says Sgt. Brian Schmautz, Police Bureau spokesman.

Answer: C is a real quote, but A and B are also true.

3. Sam Adams is the only commissioner to take a voluntary $7,800 pay cut to his $96,200 annual salary. Which commissioner was the only one to charge $1,140 in parking costs to the city since December?

A) Potter, the only elected official with his own parking spot.

B) Adams, who has racked up more parking tickets than his colleagues (see “Meter-made,” WW, Dec. 19, 2007).

C) Leonard. What? A fire truck takes up, like, six spaces.

D) Commissioner Dan Saltzman, whose other car runs on solar.

E) Former Commissioner Erik Sten, who always claimed to take the bus.

Answer: B. Some advice to Mayor-elect Adams when he starts motoring about town in January to perform the mayor’s many ceremonial duties: The city has a motor pool. And Zipcar accounts.

4. Which Council member, in advance of a trip financed mostly by one of Portland’s sister city associations, expensed a $110 etiquette-training dinner at a downtown restaurant?

A) Potter, before his April trip to China.

B) Adams, who’s got bills to pay.

C) Leonard, who could use some etiquette training.

D) Saltzman, who just smiled and nodded the whole time.

Answer: A. The “Chinese banquet and business etiquette” training was provided by Portland-based TsaiComms at the Golden Horse restaurant, according to Potter spokesman Doussard. “There is a great deal of formal ceremony involved in these visits, and the mayor is expected to understand the customs,” Doussard says. Sure. But we coulda done it for free: Keep smiling. Eat what’s offered to you. Don’t stick your chopsticks in your rice. No public displays of affection. Cutting in line is OK. Oh, yeah—try not ever to get flustered and storm out of the room. That one’s pretty universal.

5. When the Police Bureau’s $68,000-a-year videographer, Mark Rose, traveled to a broadcasters’ convention in April, he took the MAX to Portland International Airport because “it seemed like the cheapest way to go.” When the city’s $131,000-a-year government relations director, Dan Bates, traveled to Washington, D.C., that month to lobby for streetcar funding, he expensed a $96 parking charge at Portland International Airport to the city. Why does he say he didn’t take the MAX?

A) “I probably had to be at the airport at about 5:30 in the morning.”

B) “The last time I tried that, I missed my flight. Fucking MAX.”

C) “Hoodlums.”

Answer: A.

6. The Police Bureau has a staff of 61 in its HR division. With all this expertise (plus a videographer) on hand, why is the bureau spending up to $150,000 to hire a California company, B-PAD Group, to “script, cast, tape and otherwise produce” four “video behavioral tests” for potential recruits?

A) “We don’t know how to do it,” says Assistant Chief Brian Martinek.

B) It didn’t seem like too much to spend on a quick fix.

C) “That’s how they found me,” says former Chief Charles Moose.

Answer: A. B is also acceptable. C is made up.

7. What does the Water Bureau do when it wants to know how much rain will fall?

A) Spends $15 a month on cable TV to get the Weather Channel.

B) Consults ye olde Farmers’ Almanac, then looks out the window to see if “swallows fly close to the ground.”

C) Checks the website of the Climate Prediction Center of the National Weather Service, which publishes 30- and 90-day forecasts.

D) Spends up to $10,000 a year to hire its own meteorologists to provide written 30- and 90-day forecasts for the Portland area with 90 percent accuracy.

Answer: D. “This information is critical to...operations throughout the year for water supply planning and storm preparation,” says Water Bureau spokeswoman Jennifer Day. OK, we don’t doubt the importance of knowing how full the reservoirs will be. But we turned to an expert—Steve Todd, meteorologist-in-charge at the Portland branch of the National Weather Service—about the value of 30- and 90-day forecasts. “To get 90 percent accuracy that far out is really beyond the state of the science,” says Todd. (Granted, you could predict, with great accuracy, that it will sprinkle or storm on a given week—but such broad ranges have “limited value,” Todd says.) Statistically speaking, the long-range federal forecasters turn out to be right about half of the time, Todd says, whereas if you “threw a dart,” you’d be right a third of the time. (The Farmers’ Almanac, meanwhile, claims 80 to 85 percent accuracy, but take that with a grain of salt.)

8. Which is the most excessive expenditure in the Water Bureau’s annual public relations budget?

A) The $283,000 for four full-time PR staffers.

B) The city’s share of a $98,500, three-year contract to operate conserveh20.org, a ridiculous website promoting an obscure group called the Regional Water Providers Consortium.

C) The consortium’s $20,000-a-year contract with public relations consultant Jan O’Dell, whose average workload will be 25 to 30 hours a month, to devise an “outreach plan which brands the [consortium] as the region’s premier water conservation resource organization.”

Answer: This is a toughie. Arguably, B. See the next question for the reason.

9. Conserveh20.org, which is updated monthly, includes which of the following features?

A) A “kids’ corner” with games like “Washing Machine Basketball,” where you can help an anthropomorphic bee toss dirty laundry into a washing machine. (Nice break from YouTube.)

B) Sage advice like, “That tap that runs while you brush your teeth can be shut off until you rinse.” (No shit? News to us!)

C) An “accomplishments” section that lists a Homeland Security grant and some advertising awards from the American Water Works Association. (Apparently the branding works.)

D) All of the above.

Answer: D.“It is one of the better websites,” says Commissioner Leonard, who oversees the Water Bureau. “People in the Portland area are very pro-conservation.” The Web traffic-watchers at Alexa.com give conserveh20.org a lowly rank of No. 11.7 million—more popular than royjay.com (the Portland entrepreneur’s website ranks No. 15.4 million) but less popular than amandafritz.com (City Council candidate Amanda Fritz’s site comes in at No. 5.8 million). If you’re wondering, WW is ranked about No. 54,000. (New office cheer: We’re No. 54,000!) “The RWPC website is the Consortium’s primary information outreach vehicle,” says the Water Bureau’s Day, who helps author Portland’s “water blog,” which, in a PR coup, got mentioned twice last year on the New York Times website.

10. The city employs at least 37 people whose responsibilities include public relations, for a total of $2.4 million. Most bureaus have just a few “public information” or “community outreach” positions. Which bureau has the most PR positions?

A) The police. If it bleeds, it leads.

B) The Office of Sustainable Development. That’s how everybody from New York to Pyongyang knows that Portland is the greenest city since Babylon.

C) Commissioner Sam Adams’ office. How do you think he got all that screen time en route to being elected mayor?

D) I dunno, the Bureau of Environmental Services?

Answer: D. BES, which is responsible for sewer and water, has eight. The police and OSD have four each. Adams does his own PR.

11. The Bureau of Technology Services is acquiring new software to run the city’s email and calendar systems. What’s it getting?

A) Free Gmail accounts.

B) Microsoft Exchange Server for $700,000.

C) Zimbra or Open-Xchange open-source email server for a fraction of the cost of B.

Answer: B. A recap, for you technophobes: “Open source” refers to software that’s designed and distributed for free or with a nominal license fee. Microsoft—the city’s choice for email—is pretty much the opposite. An increasing number of businesses and governmental agencies use open-source software—among them Metro, the regional government, and Riverdale School District (see “The Rebel Alliance,” WW, Jan. 28, 2004). Is there any reason the city of Portland couldn’t go open source? “Not really. Other than the entrenched resistance to change because of job-security issues. It’s stupid,” says Oso Martin, who founded the local techie nonprofit Free Geek and now runs a company that’s refurbishing laptops for a school in Afghanistan.

12. How much would you pay to see Danish parliamentarian Svend Auken and a “multidisciplinary panel of local experts” speak at the Oregon Convention Center on a Friday?

A) Svend who?

B) No—how much would he pay me?

C) $163.

D) $98,000.

Answer: C or D, depending how you figure. The city approved a $98,000 contract with event planner Sara Custer to hold the one-day Portland Plan summit June 6, which was to be attended by no more than 600 people (so, $163 a head). They were fed, lectured and hopefully, as Planning Bureau business manager Celia Heron puts it, “inspired to think big.” The Portland Plan is supposed to chart the city’s course for the next 30 years. Over the next three years, 10 full-time Planning Bureau employees will be working on this project, on top of staffers from other bureaus who’ll also spend some time on it. Yes, it’s a big project. But is it really worth $98,000 to stage a one-day event for an audience heavy with public employees? “That’s one way of looking at it,” Heron says. “It’s actually the launch for the whole three-year planning project.”

13. What does the Planning Bureau have a $10,000 grant fund set aside for?

A) “Community-based projects.”

B) “Community-based projects initiated, designed and run by youth 21 and under.”

C) “Projects to reduce pet-community conflicts in public parks.”

D) “Body art.”

Answer: B. The 10 grand is included in the $160,000 budget for the Youth Planning Program, which aims to “make planning in Portland accessible to all youth.” You know, because teenagers are just dying to hang out with local bureaucrats. Svend Auken is the new Kurt Cobain. And, surely, they’re bound to present thoroughly researched, clearly reasoned suggestions on land use, economic development and traffic modeling. (“Pssst! Hey! Hey, Gil! Can I copy your Urban Design Assessment?”)

14. In 2000, Human Resources Director Yvonne Deckard, who is supposed to keep payroll costs under control, made $88,000. How much will she pull in next year?

A) Oh, let’s see, with 3 percent annual cost-of-living increases…about $115,000.

B) $154,000—increases of more than 7 percent a year, and about $18,000 above the average bureau head.

C) “Welcome to Human Resources: For English, press one. Para Espanol, oprima numero dos.”

Answer: B. Over the same eight years that Deckard’s salary increased by an average of $8,100 a year, the Office of Transportation’s sign maker saw his salary increase by less than 2 percent a year. Deckard wasn’t alone in her rapid pay growth among top-level city bureaucrats. More money going to the top ranks “means there’s less rank-and-file people doing the work of the city and more management people,” says Jim Hester of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees. “Some of these ‘management’ people don’t really manage anybody. Or they manage one or two people—and make $70,000 a year. It’s actually pretty shocking.” In the Purchasing Bureau, for example, more than half the staff of 38 are “supervisors,” “coordinators,” “managers” or “directors,” or “senior” specialists. The average salary in that bureau is $68,000 a year. Another example: A decade ago, the police records division employed 66 “specialists” and nine coordinators; today it has reduced the number of workers to 58, kept the nine coordinators and added four new supervisors.

15. Last year, more than 800 city employees took a 28-hour “mandatory supervisory training” course. It cost $150,000 to develop the curriculum, plus about $1.5 million in staff time to actually do the training. The course was apparently so rudimentary that 60 percent of those who took it later said, in a city auditor’s survey, that it was a waste of time. How many of the “trainees” had been managers for a decade or longer?

A) 8 percent.

B) 25 percent.

C) 53 percent.

Answer: C. One of the attendees was Assistant Police Chief Brian Martinek, who has two decades of experience. “It was pretty basic,” says Martinek. “In the Police Bureau, we require so much training that a lot of this is redundant [and] could be spent on better things.”

16. Bonus question: The supervisors’ training grew out of Mayor Potter’s Bureau Innovation Project, which also conducted a citywide employee survey. Which of the following were actual responses to the question, “My bureau could track/measure progress toward stated goals by:”?

A) “Get rid of computers.”

B) “Goals? We don’t have any goals where I work. I’m not kidding. We’ve asked.”

C) “All bureaus are set up to perpetuate their own little kingdoms. Nobody wants to give up $ or positions.”

D) “I do NOT want to be tracked or measured. These are unnecesary [sic] goals by bureaucratic social engineers.”

E) “Hiring more homosexuals.”

F) “Mooooo.”

G) All of the above.

Answer: G.

Granted, any multibillion-dollar organization has some leakage. And some of the items we nitpicked may in fact be a good use of tax dollars. But it’s fair to say the focus of the current City Council, which has enjoyed relatively flush budgets in recent years, is not on identifying waste. It’s about preserving existing programs and funding new ones.

Maybe that’ll change after lawyer Nick Fish joins the five-member council this month. And you can expect a new voice for frugality next year, when either Amanda Fritz or Charles Lewis—both of whom promise a “back to basics” approach—takes Sam Adams’ Council seat following the November election, as Adams moves up to mayor.

In recent years, though, the main problem has been a lack of leadership and shared vision.

“Our budget process doesn’t work well,” says Bonny McKnight, a longtime neighborhood activist from outer East Portland. “What we’re seeing is clearly what happens when the council can’t set priorities. We’re suffering right now from every commissioner having their own bureaus that they’re advocates for.”

Martin Medeiros, a lawyer who serves on the city’s volunteer budget advisory board, says: “I love the city workers—they’re really bright people. It’s just that the bureaucracy takes on its own shape. What makes sense to those on the outside doesn’t make sense on the inside. It’s the chorus, ‘We can’t do that.’”

Yes, we can.

THE BIG STUFF

While much of this story has to do with the municipal equivalent of small change, it does speak to the need on the city’s part to try to be frugal whenever it can. But there are some big-ticket items we think also deserve a hard look. To wit:

• The $5.4 million the city will spend next year on the Portland Harbor Superfund site. Most of that isn’t being spent to clean up the Willamette River, mind you, but on consultants trying to limit the city’s liability. We’re all for cleaning up the river. But we are suspicious, frankly, that the city has spent $15 million since 2001 on this issue, beginning just a few “early action” cleanups—but not performing “as rapidly as folks had hoped,” says Rick Applegate, Portland’s Superfund manager.

Of course, the consultants and lawyers involved—on all sides—have every incentive to drag out the process.

• The redundant responsibilities across city bureaus like Planning, Transportation and Development Services, and with other government bodies like Metro and Multnomah County.

The following groups handle housing stuff: the Housing Authority of Portland, the Bureau of Housing and Community Development, the Portland Development Commission, Multnomah County Housing and Public Works, the Housing Authority of Clackamas County, the Washington County Department of Housing, plus a couple dozen nonprofit organizations and too many advisory committees to count.

Newbie Portland Commissioner Nick Fish wants to clear some of this up. Good for him.

• The Police Bureau paid $8.8 million in officer overtime over the past year. Most of that, $6 million, was “mandatory,” meaning it covered certain inevitable duties like homicide investigations, personnel shortages, training and court appearances.

Want to bleed the city dry? Contest traffic tickets in court.

After court costs and other deductions, about $4.40 of every $100 in traffic fines go toward city street improvements. But if you drag the officer who pulled you over in to testify, he’s going to get an extra $10 to $15 an hour in overtime on top of his regular salary of $23 to $31 an hour.

So even if you wind up paying your ticket, plus court costs, the city loses money.

Mayor Tom Potter, a former police chief, is looking for ways to cut mandatory OT. Good for him, too.

With just shy of 6,000 employees, the city of Portland is the second-largest employer downtown, after the state of Oregon and ahead of the federal government.

In 1996, a Seattle city audit found its municipal government had too many managers—about one for every six workers. Today, Portland’s government has the same average ratio of supervisors to underlings—1 to 6.

Between December and May, the city spent $21,000 on pizza. Hot Lips Pizza was most popular, followed by Pizza Hut, Sparky’s and Domino’s. In the same six-month period, the city charged $9,600 at Starbucks and $5,900 at Seattle’s Best.

The Police Bureau spent $170 on doughnuts and pastries from December through May.

The Fire Bureau’s $260 iPod (with speakers and an iTunes card) provides “motivational music” during workout sessions, which in the long run create “a reduced burden on the pension system,” according to Lt. Allen Oswalt, bureau spokesman.