Sign the recall petition

I picked up a lapel button last week that reads, "Say the thing that everyone is thinking."

Mark Zusman, the editor of Willamette Week, may not have written "what everyone is thinking" in his recent editorial urging readers to sign the Adams' recall petition, but he certainly has written what I've been thinking.

See whether he has captured your own thoughts too.

If so, sign the petition.

George may get his due — do

It's almost enough to get me to move to San Francisco so I can vote there. A measure to name the city's sewage plant after George W. Bush has qualified for the November ballot.

You can read the story here.

I particularly like the line that the White House refused to comment. Utter public constipation.

The president should be asked directly about the proposal at his next press conference.

Nor should Portland be outdone by the City by the Bay. We should insist that the Portland City Council name the city's new sewage storm water overflow pipe for the president:The George W. Bush Sewage Overflow Pipe.

Write Commissioner Sam Adams. His e-mail address is: commissionersam@ci.portland.or.us

Indeed it would be fitting if every last sewage plant in the country were named after the president.

How I voted

How I voted

“How I voted” should answer two questions.

The most common one is: for whom did I vote? I’ll get to that later.

The less recognized but equally important is: How did I go about deciding?

The answer to that is too complex to explore in depth, but it did not involve close readings the scattered quail bones and toad entrails. In a couple of cases I did give these methods passing thought.

(I’m a registered Democrat, so with the partisan races, I can’t help you Republicans. I’m not sure anyone can — at least not this year.)

I decided on several races based on my experience with the candidates and on discussions with respected and knowledgeable friends. For two Portland City Council races, I went on line and watched the Willamette Week interviews. Seeing how the candidates respond to questions can be as important as simply listening.

This year I lean to candidates who have “fire in their bellies.” Four of my choices hinged on that fire-in-the-belly factor. Below on my choices, I’ll put asterisks next to their names.

I’m leaning away from candidates who seem to have emerged from the party machinery or the bowels of government. Example: David “melting t-shirt earmarks” Wu. After five terms in office, he doesn’t seem to have made a ripple in Congress. I’m voting for his relatively unknown opponent Will Hobbs, who, amazingly, has been endorsed by both The Oregonian and Willamette Week.

So here are my votes:

President: Barack Obama (My view of Hillary hasn’t changed since I wrote about about her candidacy more than a year ago HERE.)

U.S. Senator: Steve Novick*

Member of Congress, 1st District: Will Hobbs

Secretary of State: Vicki Walker*

Attorney General: John Kroger*

County Commissioner: Deborah Kafoury

Portland Mayor: Sam Adams

City Commission, Position 1: Charles Lewis*

City Commissioner, Position 2: Nick Fish

City Commissioner, Position 4: Randy Leonard

Metro Commissioner, 6th District: Robert Liberty

Ballot measures 51, 52 and 53: yes, yes and yes.

Moving forward while getting "it"

Right now, I haven’t decided between Sam Adams and Sho Dozono in the mayor’s race.

My negative experiences with Adams in Hillsdale dealings outweigh his much touted experience in City Hall.

But I’m keeping an open mind, especially after meeting Sho Dozono last week

He had come to Hillsdale for one of Don Baack’s walk-arounds. The candidate was wearing mismatched walking shoes — on purpose.

One was an Adidas sneaker; the other was a Nike, so as not to offend. Talk about politically correct.

I was reminded of Thoreau’s advice that you should never to take a job that requires you to change the way you dress.

To which we should add: never run for public office if it forces you to wear mismatched walking shoes.

Then there is that obscure Dozono campaign slogan:

“Sho gets it. Sho gets it done.”

Which leads directly to the Clintonesque question “What is the meaning of ‘it’?”

A visit to the Dozono web site doesn’t address “it.”

"It" is an indefinite pronoun. Very useful for an indefinite candidate.

Then again, perhaps this is straw pronoun? Could “it” really be “them”?

And if so, why not say so, except that it sounds funny: “Sho gets them. Sho gets them done.”

Face it, these campaign consultants are WAAAAY overpaid.

Meanwhile on the Adams front, Sam’s suggestion that neighbors tax themselves through “Halo” local improvement districts (LIDs) in order to build sidewalks in Southwest Portland is turning out to be a bust. It’s one of those city proposals that swells attendance at neighborhood association meetings— because the citizenry is outraged. When the homebodies flick off the tube long enough to personally shout down city officials, officialdom knows it has a problem.

Adams, alas, is in charge of the Portland Department of Transportation and floated the Halo LID idea here. Expect him to run out from under the Halos as fast as he can.

By the way, Adams’ lawn sign slogans are as jejune as Dozono’s are vague.

They implore us to vote for Adams “Because Portland belongs to ALL of us.” Is anyone suggesting otherwise?

The other tag line is “Let’s move Portland Forward!” Reverse anyone? Neutral? Park?

Where is WEIRD when we need it?

Five bucks for Sho

Yesterday on the Sylvania campus I ran into my PCC teaching colleague Robert Dozono, an artist and art teacher. Seeing him, I was reminded that his brother, Sho, wants to be Portland’s next mayor. Sho is trying to rustle up the 1500 signatures (and $5 bills) needed to qualify for public campaign financing. Time runs out on the signature gathering at the end of the month.

Robert just happened to have the necessary signature forms so I handed him $5 and filled out my form, attesting to my Portland residency and registered voter status. I didn’t have to give my blood type or submit a DNA sample.

So I’m helping Sho out. Why you may ask?

I’m not even sure I’ll vote for Sho although several folks I respect think highly of him. No, I forked over my $5 because I believe in publicly financed campaigns. I also believe in competition.

If he manages to get on the ballot, Sho will make the race for mayor interesting and competitive. Until Sho declared his intentions, City Commissioner Sam Adams was considered a shoo-in.

No question Adams is bright, energetic and experienced. He’s also hyper-ambitious.

All things considered, I'd pony up $5 to publicly finance Adams' campaign, but Adams isn't seeking public money. I wish he would. Public financing puts politics beyond the reach of big money private interests and firmly in the hands of the people.

I haven’t had much experience with Sam in my wanderings, but two incidents stand out in my mind.

A year ago, without informing the neighborhood, the Adams-led city Department of Transportation allowed two utility poles to be planted in our new sidewalk on Bertha Court. We made a stink about the intrusion. The press got wind of it (thanks, Mike Donahue of KOIN, who happens to live in the neighborhood). Adams came out for an on-camera inspection. With KOIN taking it all in (there's noting more graphic than two utility poles planted in a sidewalk), Adams promised to do something about the poles.

Nothing happened except that his office asked me, of all people, to approach the owner of property adjacent to the sidewalk about agreeing to accept the poles on his lot. The property owner refused.

On reflection I should never have been asked to do the city’s bidding, and I should have turned down the request. As our elected representative and as the head of the department with responsibility for the pole problem, Adams himself should have made the call.

After the owner nixed my request, Adams never followed up. Today the poles remain in the sidewalks.

The other incident, a small one to be sure, stems from his city council campaign against Nick Fish. It was 2004 and our voter registration group, Hillsdale Votes, decided to conduct a straw poll in the Hillsdale Farmers market, mostly as a curiosity.

Fish had outpolled Adams in the first-round election but failed to get a needed majority for an outright win. That created the two-candidate race in the fall with Adams perceived as the underdog.

When Adams got wind of our little straw poll, to my surprise, he tracked me down to get the results. They showed that among a couple hundred market “voters” a large number were undecided. The results were significant — if Hillsdale mirrors the city, which it doesn't.

“Then we have a chance!” Adams exclaimed.

I don’t know what my response would have been. For starters, I doubt I would have even tried to find out the results of the little poll. Hearing the results, I might have muttered something banal like “that’s interesting.”

For Adams, the news from Hillsdale seemed a god-send.

Conclusion: I want the next mayor to care as much about intrusive utility poles as he does about political straw polls. The wish is worth $5

An Ethereal Tax

You got to love taxation that is angelic.

City Commissioner Sam Adams, our next mayor presumptive, has pulled off the heavenly association with “Halo” local improvement districts (LIDs) to tax residents for new, nearby sidewalks in some Southwest Portland neighborhoods.

In the past you were taxed only if you lived on the newly side-walked street. Now, as long as you are in the broader "halo" (a cleverly nebulous choice of words), you will be asked to be included in the tax "Halo." (We know all about those who don't live under halos; they're the ones who live under horns.)

Somehow The Oregonian's Tom Hallman, Jr. wrote about “Halo” LIDs without blinking this morning. When the media accept your language, you've won half the battle.

It's all about "subtext" as we say in media literacy. Like “The Death Tax” or “Choice” or “Life” or “climate change” (never “global warming”) or the “Defense Department” or the “Central Intelligence Agency” or "pacification" or "co-lateral damage."

Up next: Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” and “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

City Council healing requires return to basics

There were no winners at Thursday’s City Council deliberations that led to the Mayor Tom Potter’s walking out.

The clip of the proceedings that is on-line gives a different impression of the mayor than the one portrayed in print. He isn’t angry. He’s being matter of fact: He has been marginalized and feels “irrelevant.”

What he apparently doesn’t realized is his own role in his marginalization.

Should he have been made to feel this way? Should he have put himself in this position?

Clearly not.

Should he have walked out?

Probably not, but when he did so, he did it with no apparent rancor. He was simply acknowledging a fact.

Anyone who knows anything about group dynamics, knows that you must work at being inclusive, and you must remain open to change. The problem with raw majority rule (and that is what we were witnessing at the council) is that it doesn’t require inclusion. All it requires is a majority.

And the problem with stake-planting like the mayor's, is that you lose your flexibility and place in the discussion.

Commissioners Randy Leonard, Erik Sten and Sam Adams were shaping a majority solution that Potter had rejected out of hand. Hence the mayor became a non-person at the table.

Consensus has no non-persons. You have to address the minority’s concerns. You have to respect their views, even if it is going to take more time and force you to be flexible too.

Everyone has to work together.

Majority rule, which produces winners (and often arrogance) and losers (and often resentment), should be the last resort. (Sadly, partisan government hinges on majority rule. Fortunately, city government is non-partisan and offers the opportunity of consensus and inclusion — Thursday’s session notwithstanding.)

Thursday's meltdown is evidence the council has a lot more work to do on the street naming issue. It is time for the five members to go back to fundamentals by asking what is important.

You don’t honor a Cesar Chavez or a Rachel Carson, a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Mahatma Gandhi, a Dag Hammarskjold or a Rosa Parks by naming streets, schools, parks or fountains after them.

You honor them by honoring what they believed in and struggled for.

That's worth repeating: You honor them by honoring what they believed in and struggled for.

It is far, far more important to keep their ideals before our eyes than their names.

Name the familiar places of our Commons after the values they espoused.

If you could ask these leaders whether they would prefer a street or park be named for them or for their cause (Justice, Stewardship, Equality, Fairness, Respect, Peace, to name a few), who could doubt what their answer would be?

Honor them by honoring that answer.

Sam, Sam, Sam!

If the headline on this entry sounds like scolding, it is.

On this day, when I took down two commercial signs illegally placed in the public right of way (one from the notorious Jobdango), I find it ironic that City Commissioner Sam Adam's Portland Department of Transportation is relying on intrusive signage in the public right of way to get its message out about public meetings.

What next? Signs scattered throughout our neighborhood for planning commission hearings, City Council meetings, PTA meetings? Where does it end?

At last count, this community was served by three (count'em THREE!) community newspapers plus an on-line newsletter (which I happen to edit and publish). You'd think that would be enough to inform an interested public about a Portland Department of Transportation meeting.

Interestingly enough, Adams and his transportation staff never even notified me, as Hillsdale News' editor, of the meeting he is publicizing so widely and flagrantly on utility poles throughout Hillsdale. (By the way, the last time they did this, the signs stayed up a full week after the meeting had taken place.)

All this from a man who wants to be, and likely will be, our next mayor.

It could be a long four years.

Helmet Heads, Streetcars and Anita O'Day

Of myriad thoughts and experiences of this day, I’ll share three:

• When you are bald and ride a motor scooter, after removing your helmet, you have no worries about displaying flattened hair, a condition known as “helmet head.” For this I am grateful.

• The Oregonian this morning informs us that City Commissioner Sam Adams wants to expand streetcar service throughout the city. If the streetcar system he has in mind treats its passengers as captive audiences for piped-in commercials announcing city intersections as being “sponsored” by this or that advertiser, I do not wish him well.

• On my two-mile, eight-lap walk around Wilson High School’s track, my iPod in my ear, I am listening to jazz singer Anita O’Day, who died last November in Los Angeles at age 87. I have never paid much attention to “My Ship,” the song she is singing, but because she is singing it, I cling to its words. Anita O’Day is, as they say, “making it her own.” The piano accompanist is spare and rich and sealing the deal. A weakness of digital music is that the names of accompanists vanish, but I suspect the pianist behind O'Day is Oscar Peterson. As you read the lyrics below, imagine Peterson’s lilting, textured piano and O’Day’s dusky alto meting out the words in crafted phrasing. Imagine the music lightening a pace around a track.

My ship has sails that are made of silk
The decks are trimmed with gold
And of jam and spice
There's a paradise in the hold

My ship's aglow with a million pearls
And rubies fill each bin
The sun sits high in a sapphire sky
When my ship comes in

I can wait the years till it appears
One fine day one spring
But the pearls and such
They don't mean much
If there's missing just one thing

I do not care if that day arrives
That dream need never be
If the ship I sing
Doesn't also bring
My own true love to me

Doing it wrong

Hillsdale can now see that it will have a new landmark in the form of the five-story tower framed in next to the new Watershed Senior Housing project.

We can also see that for all its good architectural intentions, it will also be a landmark to the failure of the city and the Portland Development Commission to step up and bury utility lines. We are left with poles, transformers and wires marring the view of the new tower.

The vertical structure naturally draws the observer's view upwards. Some of us had even hoped to put a glowing solar-powered beacon at the top. The problem is that what you see above two stories in Hillsdale is evidence of civic aesthetic anarchy and neglect. Overhead utilities like those in our Town Center simply wouldn't be tolerated in The Pearl, South Waterfront of the Lloyd District.

In the spring, after the city put in even more utility lines down Bertha Court, I lobbied City Commissioner Sam Adams about the need to underground around The Watershed, but to no avail. The cost, by the way, was estimated at $125,000. But that's another story told earlier here.

Community Partners for Affordable Housing, the developers, to their credit, even put underground conduits in the ground next to the building, but Qwest and Comcast refused to use them. The city should have stepped in and forced their use.

Until the city opens its eyes the blight here, we are left with a flawed and marred landmark, a symbol of good intentions that failed because of a lack of cooperation and foresight.

Poleaxed in Hillsdale

Last week I joined four Portland General Electric (PGE) employees near the site of the new Watershed Senior Housing building, which is under construction.

We had gathered in the biting cold to get a PGE cost estimate to underground utilities from in front of the building to the east property line of Papa John’s Pizza, a distance of 150 feet.

City Commissioner Sam Adams had wanted to know the cost, necessary information if we are to ever start cleaning up the overhead blight in the town center. Adams, mind, has made no promises. Still, we can hope....

Anyway, when our group began talking, the PGE delegation announced that the cost would be $250 per linear foot. That included the works—trenching, conduit, underground vaults etc.

Of course that would be PGE’s cost to the City. Comcast and Qwest would have costs as well, but the major part of the work would be done by PGE, a privately owned utility that owns the poles.

The $250 number surprised me, because eight years ago, a group of us who studied undergrounding for the City put the high end cost at $100 per linear foot.

But times, and costs, change.

Using a range finder, a PGE engineer determined the distance, half the length of a football field.

The $250 per linear foot figure and the 150 feet led logically to a stunningly simple result: $37,500.

Done.

Not so fast.

The leader of the PGE delegation began to scratch his head. Studying the overhead blight, he looked doubtful and tetchy. He was clearly unhappy with such simple math.

He asked if we wanted to underground the new light pole wires on Bertha Court too. They probably could be done fairly simply by boring a conduit line under the sidewalk rather than trenching and tearing up the pavement.

Sure, I said. “The vision is to get rid of the wires—all of them.”

More uneasiness. He had out his calculator now. I have no idea what he was tapping into it—and still don’t.

Finally he said, “I’m going to have to give you a different, more realistic figure. One we can live with.”

Prepare yourself, I thought. “OK, what is it?” I invited.

“It’s somewhere between $100,000 and $120,000.”

It was cold. We had been standing around for 45 minutes. The new numbers must have numbed me too. The man clearly was in no mood to argue. He looked vaguely pained. Besides, what do I, an undergraduate history major, know about the cost of undergrounding utilities except what I had learned 45 minutes before, some quaint notion about $250/linear foot.

Adams had wanted to know the PGE estimate and I wrote him the figure, with no editorializing. (Now, nine days later, he still hasn't acknowledged my e-mail and the number.)

In the day or two following the meeting in the cold, the whole experience gnawed at me.

In the course of 45 minutes, the PGE estimate had TRIPLED!

Better now than later, I guess. (Think OHSU tram) But then it occurred to me that time had gone by since we met in the cold with the range finder and calculators.

Where are the costs today? Where would they be tomorrow?

Could they be tripling every 45 minutes?

I am prepared to believe anything...and nothing.