Portland has been a disaster for the past several years. The city was the scene of some of the most violent (and eventually deadly) protests in 2020. It partially defunded the police and did away with a police unit focused on stop gun violence. And in November of 2020, the state or Oregon took another wrong turn when it passed Measure 110, which decriminalized the use of hard drugs. Both decisions have been disasters.

The decision to defund the police resulted in skyrocketing violent crime. Even when Portland’s hapless mayor tried to reverse course and rehire police, they couldn’t find people willing to take the jobs.

Meanwhile the decriminalization of drugs also created new problems including a rise in overdoses and even more problems with drugged-out homeless people on the city’s streets. Even the homeless drug addicts were giving the city mixed reviews:

“Portland is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.

He ticked off the advantages: He can do drugs wherever he wants and the cops no longer harass him. There are more dealers, scouting for fresh customers moving to paradise. That means drugs are plentiful and cheap.

Downsides: Tent living is no paradise, he said, especially when folks in nearby tents, high on meth, hit him with baseball bats.

So it has gradually dawned on the geniuses in charge that the city/state took some wrong turns back in 2020 and may need to dig itself out by actually changing things. Back in August, Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon announced she was forming a task force designed to help revive the city of Portland by carefully studying the problem and making recommendations.

Gov. Tina Kotek announced Wednesday she is launching a task force focused on bolstering the economic future of Portland’s central city, which continues to reel from converging crises…

The move comes as Portland’s urban core remains among the nation’s slowest to recover in the aftermath of the pandemic amid blocks of empty offices and storefronts as well as pervasive homelessness, open drug use and public safety concerns.

Today, Gov. Kotek announced she’ll be acting on the list of recommendations she got from the task force, which include adding more police officers and outlawing public drug use.

Under the plan brokered by Gov. Kotek, a Democrat, state lawmakers would be asked to consider a ban on public drug use and police would be given greater resources to deter the distribution of drugs. Ms. Kotek said officials hoped to restore a sense of safety for both visitors and workers in the city’s beleaguered urban core, which has seen an exodus of key retail outlets, including REI, an institution in the Pacific Northwest.

“When it comes to open-air drug use, nobody wants to see that,” Ms. Kotek said in an interview. “We need different tools to send the message that that is not acceptable behavior.”

Along with new drug use prohibitions and an expanded police presence, a task force led by the governor also proposed a moratorium on new taxes and other tax relief targeted at encouraging businesses to remain in the city.

None of this is rocket science. All of these solutions were obvious for at least the last two years. In fact, most of these recommendations read like something that could have been written by Newt Gingrich. That’s why proposing them has taken so long.

Portland passed a ban on open drug use in September but the city knew at the time that it couldn’t be put into effect thanks to Measure 110.

…the new version of the ordinance does not go into effect immediately. Instead it includes a “trigger” amendment, meaning the regulations would go into effect immediately after the Oregon Legislature or the courts change or suspend that statute.

Maybe in another six months the city and state will have actually done something about these problems. It would be a start. But if the city really wants to change the tone, it needs to crack down on the Antifa goons who routinely act as if they own the streets. Until it’s clear to these creeps that they don’t own the city, Portland won’t have solved one of its major problems.