Approving tax credits is a little bit like continuing to drink after you know you've had enough—it seems like a good idea at the time but can be hard to justify in the cold light of sobriety.

OSPIRG (the Oregon Public Interest Research Group) took a look a four tax-credit programs lawmakers have green-lighted in recent years and that will cost taxpayers $300 million in 2011-13.

Below is a summary of what the credits yielded, according to OSPIRG's report. "BETC" refers to the Business Energy Tax Credit.

OSPIRG Foundation found that the available information is insufficient for taxpayers to evaluate the value of corporate tax subsidies. Gaps in the reports included:
· Amount of each subsidy: Only two of the four subsidy programs fully disclosed the amount of tax subsidies to particular recipients. Oregon Investment Advantage, projected to cost taxpayers $3.8 million in the current biennium, is one of the programs that did not report this information.

· Required outcomes: None of the four programs disclosed both a required and actual outcome for each corporation receiving a tax subsidy. One program, the Film Production Development Contribution, reported neither. And while the BETC program reported a required outcome for most recipients, it listed no outcome for 28 recipients who received $20.9 million in credits.



· Rationale for granting the subsidy: None of the four programs reported a complete methodology to justify their decision to grant a subsidy. For example, the BETC program reported considerable variation in the dollars invested for each unit of energy created or saved. The program reported that the credit to Portland General Electric cost taxpayers $0.30 per unit of energy, while the credit to Groundwater Solar cost taxpayers $1,088 per energy unit, or 3600 times more expensive on a cost per unit basis. No explanation was provided for the variation.

· All of the above: At least one enterprise zone tax subsidy program failed to report because the program lacks any mechanism to track these pieces of information.

What were you listening to last week, Portland? Here are the top selling albums from local record stores Music Millennium, Jackpot Records and Everyday Music. The week's in-store appearance guide is below.

Everyday Music

1. Leonard Cohen — Old Ideas
2. Adele — 21
3. Black Keys — El Camino
4. Lana Del Rey — Born To Die
5. Gotye — Making Mirrors

Jackpot Records

1. Dr Dog — Be The Void
2. Leonard Cohen — Old Ideas
3. Lana Del Rey — Born To Die
4. First Aid Kit — Lion's Roar
5. Bon Iver — Bon Iver

Music Millennium

1. Adele – 21
2. Leonard Cohen — Old Ideas
3. Gotye — Making Mirrors
4. Paul McCartney — Kisses on the Bottom
5. Black Keys — El Camino


THIS WEEK'S IN-STORES

Sunday, Feb. 26
Jabi Shriki @ Music Millennium (3158 E Burnside St., 231-8926), 5 pm

PORTLAND, OREGON, United States. Musical city.

For ten years, the city name has been circulating among music lovers, like Kathmandu at the time of Hippies. Portland would be the holy grail of music "indie", the city of treasures hiding "underground" and genies coming out of the masterpieces in secret, the musicians would find inspiration abundant and uninhibited ....

Portland, "green" city
The sap of ecology in the veins of its inhabitants for over a century. By 1912, the city put on a green urbanism and controlled. In the 1970s, Governor Tom McCall fixed geographical limits beyond which the city may not extend more: the town has to renovate the abandoned neighborhoods to best utilize the space available to it.
 
Portland, city nonconformist
What distinguishes the metropolis of Oregon is its people, their progressive thinking and creative. Portland is a town full of hippies the next century. A city for those who want to reinvent the world in green, a city of artists. Far from the stereotypes, imagine a little sister from Seattle with a mad passion for organic food, local, and community activity ...

Less than a week after a man's unnecessary death led the Portland Fire and Rescue Bureau to warn of the dangers of compulsive hoarding, firefighters across state line in Clark County put out a similar call.

Clark County Fire District 6 Tuesday night responded to a two-alarm house fire fueled by clutter "that made fighting and investigating it difficult." Four people—two children and their grandparents—were inside. All escaped uninjured.

The cause of the fire (pictured) is unknown, fire officials said in a press release. It is clear that, to firefighters and rescue crews, hoarding is not, as many see it, a subject of idle entertainment or a joke:

The flames quickly spread from the second story to the attic. When crews first arrived on scene they saw flames shooting through the roof and all of the windows on the second story. Firefighters had to keep a stream of water on a neighboring home so that it did not catch fire. …

Fire District 6 encourages you to consider your clutter placement and get rid of stuff you really don't use or plan on using to make your home safer for your family. Take a few minutes to walk around your home and ask yourself if you would be able to get out easily in the event of an emergency. Ask yourself also, if a rescuer would be able to find and reach you through the blinding conditions of a significant fire.

 Today's Cut isn't just one song. No, for your pre-Ash Wednesday festivities, we're giving you an entire album-length concept courtesy of Archers guitarist/vocalist Chris Cantino. 

CC TV (Gapless) by CC TV

As you will hear, this is miles away from the work that Cantino does in Archers. Rather, it is like a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the itchy rock of his band, filtered through a malfunctioning camcorder with the images broadcast through an equally malfunctioning television. Which, according to Cantino, is exactly what he was going for. 

"I wanted to simulate the experience of watching television," he told me via IM. "I think the traditional album format is a disgrace to art." 

To that end, the songs - such as they are, considering they are really short snippets of melodies denatured to the near breaking point - bleed into one another, soldered together with static and interjections from foreign TV broadcasts. Keen ears will spot bits of cover songs smearing into your field of vision as well - Television's "Days", Richard Hell's "Time", and a quick slap of a Malkmus tune. 

This is a daring piece of pop artistry by someone who maintains a comfortable dual existence as (in his words) a "punky slacker guy" and a lover of outre sounds from around the globe. Both sides of Cantino's musical personality are evident throughout CCTV and it adds up to a sumptuous feast of sound and incident. 

The Oregon Court of Appeals last week upheld the 2008 felony drug conviction of a bicyclist from Oak Grove who argued that Portland Police officer had no legal grounds to search him after he was stopped for riding without a headlight.

At around 3 a.m. on July 3, 2008, Portland Police Officer Justin Thurman noticed Jacob Charles Leino, now 28, riding without a headlight, appeals court documents say (pdf).

After Leino rode into a garage, Thurman called to him from the street to "come and talk." Thurman asked Leino for identification and ran his driver's license through dispatch to check if he had a criminal record (he did, for drunk driving two years earlier) or outstanding warrants.

Thurman then noticed a knife clipped to Leino's pants and asked to search him, to which Leino apparently consented; the search revealed cocaine and meth on his person.

Leino's public defenders argued in Multnomah County Circuit Court that the physical evidence should have been suppressed.

The records check based on Leino's driver's license, they argued, "was not reasonably necessary to the investigation of a routine, bicycle-related, traffic violation. Conducting a warrant check, according to [the] defendant, was equivalent to a criminal investigation without reasonable suspicion, and thus unlawfully extended the duration of the stop."

The appeals court didn't buy it. "[W]e reject defendant's suggestion that, because this case involves the stop of a bicycle rather than a motor vehicle, no check of any sort was permissible," Chief Judge David Brewer writes.

"We conclude that, in the course of a lawful traffic stop, an officer's act of contacting dispatch with a person's identifying information is reasonably related to the identification of the person and the issuance of the citation. Determining that a defendant is, in fact, the person he or she claims to be is reasonably related to the identification of the person and the issuance of the citation."

Add this to the list of good reasons to ride with a headlight after dark.

The precinct level results for last month's 1st Congressional District election are finally out (try to contain your excitement), which means we can take a sneaky peak at how those westside neighborhoods in Portland voted:

Nothing very remarkable, except that precinct 158, that tiny Republican holdout of 110 registered voters in the hills, remains strongly defiant of its neighbors (60 percent of 158 also voted for Dudley in 2010). Nob Hill and the Alphabet District (precinct 1017) are the district's bluest, with a Democratic vote of 83.5 percent.

In fact, if there's anything remarkable, it's how very similar the precinct results are to the 2010 Wu vs. Cornilles race, which was a much larger ballot with a higher turnout (almost 70 percent, compared to 53 percent for Bonamici vs. Cornilles):

Overall, Bonamici secured 75.21 percent of Multnomah County's votes, compared with Wu's 75.77 percent in 2010. Cornilles dropped from 21.43 percent to 19.92 percent.

So apparently drugs, sexual assault accusations and that tiger suit didn't make a dent in Portland's Congressional voting habits. Or this city just really doesn't like Rob Cornilles.

Enjoy your political data pr0n in map form? Check out the How Does Your Neighborhood Vote? page on our PDX Votes site.

The listing here are written by WW, but we crib events shamelessly from the Geek Portland calendar. Go there for more events and information.

During the 2010 race for Oregon governor, WW reported that GOP candidate Chris Dudley had taken a $350,000 tax deduction for allowing the Lake Oswego Fire Department to burn down his house as a training exercise. (Dudley wanted to build a new house on the property). That practice, which homeowners have engaged in elsewhere, is controversial. Critics say if the homeowner planned to raze his house in any case, the tax deduction is bogus.

A panel of three federal judges in Chicago ruled last week that a Wisconsin homeowner who also tried to claim a benefit of allowing firefighters to torch his house not entitled to a deduction. 

"By deciding to destroy the house and then making that demolition a condition of their gift, the taxpayers themselves became responsible for that decrease in value, even if the fire department provided the mechanism to accomplish it," wrote 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge David Hamilton. "None of the value of the house, as a house, was actually given away."

In the court's decision, Hamilton cited Dudley, although not by name. 

 Sure, you could spend hundreds of dollars to fly or drive down to southern California, wade through a sea of people, camp on the unforgiving earth, and end up paying $8 for a bottle of water just to brag to your friends for months afterwards that you were at Coachella, man! 

But wouldn't it make more sense to spend your money closer to home? To support the bands that you know and love and get a chance to see them up close and personal, rather than risking sun stroke as you try to see over the heads of thousands of other acolytes? Wouldn't you rather rest comfortably in the notion that when the show is over, you have the comfort of your own bed to look forward to? 

If you feel like we feel about huge festivals like the upcoming double weekend Coachella clusterfuck, you'll be happy to know that a huge chunk of the acts that are playing this year's event are also playing here in town or in a town much closer to Portland than Indio, California is. As a public service, we're providing you with a list of all those acts, broken down into handy categories for easy reading. We hope that it will help assuage your justifiable concern that you'll be missing the onstage reunion of Snoop and Dre, the return of At The Drive-In, and some of the only West Coast shows by Britpop titans Pulp (all acts that are NOT playing the NW any time soon). 

HEAVY HITTERS

The Black Keys - May 7th @ Rose Garden Arena (along with fellow Coachella band Arctic Monkeys)

Radiohead - April 9th @ Key Arena, Seattle (along with fellow Coachella band Other Lives)

Andrew Bird - April 11th @ Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall (along with fellow Coachella act Laura Marling)

Kasabian - April 11th @ Roseland Theater (along with fellow Coachella act Miike Snow)

Kaiser Chiefs - March 22nd @ Crystal Ballroom

SBTRKT - April 18th @ Wonder Ballroom

Explosions In The Sky - April 11th @ McDonald Theater, Eugene

M83 - April 25th @ Roseland Theater

M83

BIG-DEAL LOCALS

The Shins - May 25th @ Les Schwab Amphitheatre, Bend (along with fellow Coachella band The Head & The Heart)

Wild Flag - May 4th @ Crystal Ballroom

REUNIONS

Jeff Mangum - April 18th @ Crystal Ballroom

fIREHOSE - April 6th @ Doug Fir Lounge

James - April 9th @ Roseland Theater

DANCE TENT FARE

Datsik - March 11th @ McDonald Theater, Eugene

Justice - April 24th @ Roseland Theater 

Housse de Racket - April 7th, Wonder Ballroom

Morgan Page - Feb. 25th @ Showbox at the Market; April 7th @ Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver BC

araabmusik - April 29th @ Knitting Factory, Spokane

Feed Me - March 15th @ Roseland Theater

Neon Indian - April 26th @ Doug Fir Lounge

Zeds Dead - April 26th @ McDonald Theater, Eugene

Zeds Dead

BUZZ BANDS

Gotye - April 11th @ Crystal Ballroom

Grouplove - April 5th & 6th @ Roseland Theater 

Band of Skulls & We Are Augustines - April 11th @ Doug Fir Lounge

band of skulls

Suedehead - March 11th @ Roseland Theater

The Growlers - March 1st @ Mississippi Studios

First Aid Kit - April 12th @ Doug Fir Lounge

Oberhofer - April 9th @ Mississippi Studios

Gardens and Villa & Fanfarlo - April 7th @ Doug Fir Lounge

Sleeper Agent - April 27th @ Wonder Ballroom

IN A CATEGORY ALL BY HIMSELF

Seun Kuti - March 17th @ Mt. Tabor