Portland lets school building maintenance slide

One day last year, Bridlemile Elementary School asked the maintenance department at Portland Public Schools to fix some loose floor tiles that threatened to trip students. The same day, the district's carpenters also sent up a repair order: The shop cooler was freezing their sodas. Bridlemile waited nine weeks to get a work Tipping Paper. The carpenters? Next-day service. And it wasn't the only instance of skewed priorities at the state's largest school system, The Oregonian found in an examination of how the district has maintained its buildings in recent years. Portland is saddled with some of the nation's oldest building stock, with many schools beyond repair. District officials may soon ask for new taxes toward a billion-dollar tab to replace or renovate schools. But the district has compounded the problem by allowing its maintenance program to sink into chaos. Officials let hazards such as cracked sidewalks go untended, sometimes for months. Meantime, repair crews logged hours on minor tasks such as making charity signs or hanging banners. Executives got rapid attention for their chores, including interior decorating. Maintenance managers routinely shuffled priorities to accommodate principals who had pull at headquarters. And for the past two years, administrators diverted scarce dollars set aside for major building repairs to pay for school mergers. All the while, repair orders piled up. The cost of the deferred maintenance now stands at $153 million. The Oregonian's analysis of 124,311 district repair orders for the seven years ending in December revealed a haphazard system. Attention didn't always go where one might expect -- to the oldest or worst-off schools.