Wait, I'm confused here... if I am always to trust the word of the Merc above all, then surely the PBA are the bad guys here, not to be trusted, right?

"If this measure passes, the ownership of the Portland water system gets transferred to a government that a few people might be able to control,"

As opposed to what we have now?

Don't get me wrong; I oppose this initiative, I think it's reactionary and ill-conceived and you'll forgive me if I don't trust citizen initiatives around our water supply after the last one was so riddled with pseudoscience, deceit, and new-age woo-woo-ery. But that line elicited a guffaw.

Something needs to be done about how the water bureau is run, but this is not it.

It's a bad idea, but it would never have gained traction if the Water Bureau budget was not used as a slush fund.

City Council candidate Sharon Maxwell has some good ideas for reforming the water bureau. We need some new blood on the city council.

"If this measure passes, the ownership of the Portland water system gets transferred to a government that a few people might be able to control."

Actually, it would get transferred FROM a government that a few people control.

Portland is the last major American city to cling to an egregiously unrepresentative form of at-large government, abandoned by every other major city in the wake of the Voting Rights Act.

See the following link to a Mercury article interviewing Professor Paul Gronke, a political scientist and election reform activist and Director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College. Without district-level representation, "our system is stacked against individuals and in favor of incumbents and the entrenched powers that be."

http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/odd-city-out/Content?oid=10982122

While there are plenty of pros and cons to the current Council system, to claim that it's "egregiously unrepresentative" is false.

Under the current system, every Portlander is represented by all five councilmembers.

Under a ward system, however, each voter would be represented by one person. If that person is terrible, or doesn't care about the 49% of voters who didn't support him (see US House of Representatives), then you're out of luck.

Your notion that election by ward is some magic bullet is a fantasy.

Regardless, it seems long past time to get rid of the mini-mayor system.

Yeah, whatever the fuck that means.

Go ahead and run a campaign to change the city council if you want. The last one was trounced. Have fun.