Oregon PERS, PGE and big halftime show

By Taxpayers Association of Oregon
OregonWatchdog.com

During the big game, we saw a half-time show that featured a 10-minute musical cultural tribute to Puerto Rico. One of the cultural features of the show was exploding telephone poles with people falling off them. This was the singer’s tribute to the famous Puerto Rico’s power outages and the government corruption behind their cause. Decades ago, during Puerto Rico’s prosperous times, the flush-with-cash government decided to route excess tax funds to grow government pensions. Government pensions grew so big that when tough times came it became impossible to pay them. The politicians’ solution was to use electric bill fees to pay for the government pension disaster. Having utilities pay all kinds of unrelated government expenses meant that the grid upkeep was ignored and soon became an old, disaster-prone, falling-apart mess.

Power outages became routine, and when they happened, local liberals blamed the United States for ignoring their island and not giving them billions (more) to fix everything.

Today, environmentalists load all kinds of regulations upon utilities. This is one reason both the catastrophic Maui and LA fires were so terrible. Utilities were so over-burdened they could not afford neither time nor money to do basic brush removal or basic safety pole repair. Today, Oregon’s utilities are so over-burdened that officials are expecting rolling blackouts to hit Oregon soon.  Also, Oregon’s $24 billion pension debt (PERS) is so massive that it is draining agency budgets both state and local. PERS sucks up so much public money that there is less room to fill potholes, house criminals or keep the lights on.