"Bend's Projects to Get a PR Push." Bulletin, 5/4/12.
Government hiring a public relations firm to sell the public on policy issues seems --- wrong.
If the policy has merit, it should stand on those merits. If it doesn't, trying to hustle the public into thinking it has merit is a bit of a con.
I really don't like them spending public funds on advertising.
It would seem to be the job of the government officials to convince us of the merits of their decisions. Not a P.R. firm.
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"Commercial Land Sales Show Signs of Recovery." Bulletin, 5/4/12.
When commercial land sells for "50 to 75% lower" than during the boom, should that be termed a "recovery."?
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"Tetherow Could Get Hotel." Bulletin, 5/4/12.
I'll believe it when I see it.
"No one knew that 2008 was coming," said Joe Weston..." (Tetherow developer.)
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.
Lots of people saw it coming. I prepared for it in my business. I started blogging about it in 2006, (go ahead and check, it's in the public record, eh?), and I was far from the first.
I've decided that whenever anyone uses this excuse, they need to be called on it.
Bullshit.
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"A Judicial Trend in Lending." Bulletin, 5/4/12.
Look, I just don't buy it. Lots of stories online, especially on the local Bend Economy Bulletin Board, about the shrinkage of inventory, the decline of foreclosures, blah, blah, blah.
I'm not going to even try to marshal the evidence, because I know how much overhang we had, and I very much doubt it has been winnowed down much.
I think the whole situation is being manipulated by the banks to a fair thee well. (If I was trying to buy a house, I'd be pissed about the lack of choice in affordable housing.)
I think it will be obvious to everyone when a real recovery takes place, and that it's years down the road.
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About Me
- Duncan McGeary
- I'm Duncan McGeary, owner and/or operator for the last 39 years of Pegasus Books in Downtown Bend, Oregon. These days I'm writing books as well as selling them. I'm the comic book guy. But even more so, I'm a book book guy. Books of all kinds. Big books and little books, children's and adult, fiction and non-fiction, hardback and paperback and trade paperback and graphic novels. Books with more words than pictures and books with more pictures than words. They are all part of the book world to me, and I love being surrounded by them every day.
5 comments:
Well, I came accross one anecdotal data point going beyond inventory numbers when I talked to a guy who runs a business cleaning up and maintaining foreclosed properties last week. He indicated that the volume of jobs he has here in Bend has been on a steady downward trend, while his work in Portland has been on a rise. He pointed out that the Portland real estate market has been lagging us by a couple of years so either the Banks are dragging their pre-foreclosure feet here or we are in fact on a long, slow scrape along the bottom ...
As HOMER himself pointed out 2+ years ago, Bend is largely still in the gravy because 1,000's and 1,000's of folks have not paid their MTG and are living rent free, and payment free. I can see the REPO man not busy, yet I know dozens of folks that have quit paying payment and their homes and lots still sit. The UGLY fucking fact is and I'LL say this quite loud in this forum. Is that ALL fucking foreclosures in Deschutes County have been on HOLD. The fucking REPO man can't fucking enter, until the JUDGE signs the 30-day eviction notice, and all the MTG companys are scared shit-less of presenting their paper in work.
In summary no jobs for the REPO man don't mean shit, ... 1,000's of homes are sitting in LIMBO in Bend.
WRT to Portland its a different story shit is moving along quite fine, there is HIGH demand for renters and investors willing to BUY. Bend lags the FORECLOSURE process and largely because the rural courts are swamped, while PDX has its own problems their are still a ton of judges signing eviction notices in MULT-CO, while in DESCHUTES-CO everything is at a HALT,
My personal guess is that the tri-county prine,deschutes... are all in the pocket of real-estate judges, ... once all these investments go to court then its a real loss, and most of our destination resorts are owned by the judges themselves.
When your at the bottom, everything looks like a 'recovery'.
But the real deal is that this is an election year, and it will not get any better than this, May-Aug, after that things will go to shit and 2013-2014 when things go Greek Austerity and they will, then most of these folks are going to go cannibal.
The city hiring a pr firm is nothing new in local government as evidenced by the tens of thousands the BLP schools spent 7 or 8 years ago on a local pr firm to get a new logo and push the big bond that passed just before the bubble burst. It was successful so you know the City is going to follow along. I don't like the logo the school district currently uses espeically in light of the fact that the previous logo was designed by a student in one of the high school graphics programs. A donation of $300 was given to the student's college fund for unlimited use of that logo. Go figure that they tossed that logo in order to spend all that money on the pr firm - they easily could have run a contest for the graphics students to participate in for a new logo for a similar amount of money that would have benifited the student directly. Better to spend a lot of tax payer dollars if in doubt, right?
I also don't understand why the City needs to sell one side of an issue (raising money and spending it on these infrastructure projects) over another (exploring / pursuing alternatives).
If the City wants to create a logo to remind people to keep their dogs on leash, or to advertise what times of year you can burn yard waste in a barrel, that's OK with me.
But it boggles the mind that the City gets to spend taxpayer money to convince taxpayers that the City's projects are a good use of taxpayer money.
But what about the flip side? Can a group be formed to take out ads showing that the City is a horrible steward of public funds, and has lost money on such boondoggles as the Avion Water condemnation, Juniper Ridge, the "visioning" exercise, the failure to inspect for ADA compliance, the "lemon" buses, Kevin Sawyer's full pension and benefits, the Bulletin land swap, et cetera?
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