No one can accuse Portland City Manager Mark Rees of being a prima donna. He prefers to do his work in the background and lets others, like the mayor and City Councilors, get the attention.
That won’t work when it comes to the matter of the Shipyard brewery and its 14-year partial sewer bill holiday. The city has known about the problem for a year, but it didn’t come to the public’s attention – including members of the City Council – until this newspaper first wrote about it on Feb. 3.
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Rees says he has been working on an investigation into what happened and how much Shipyard was undercharged. That work should come to a quick end if the city is going to maintain its credibility on this issue.
Already one member of the council, District 3’s Ed Suslovic, has called for an outside investigation into the matter. That seems to be premature.
At this point, there is no evidence that anyone did anything wrong intentionally. There is no reason that an in-house investigation couldn’t get to the bottom of what happened and make its finding available for analysis by the public. This is not a case of people investigating themselves: Rees only came to Portland in August and can be expected to conduct a fair-minded review of what went wrong.
The questions that need answers include how the city made a mistake billing its biggest brewery when there were no mistakes made with competitors’ accounts? And what was wrong with the city’s system of checks and balances that allowed the error to be repeated for so many years?
And there are questions that Rees himself should answer – such as why he was so slow about informing the council about the problem with Shipyard’s bill?
Rees is handling this in a deliberate manner, but time is running out. If the city cannot quickly produce a clear and transparent account of what went wrong, how much is really owed and why something like this won’t happen again, calls for an outside investigation would make a lot more sense.
Rees should be given a chance to explain what happened, even if he does not like center stage.
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