Signbusters United to save the Commons!

Yesterday I risked life and limb to take down another of Jobdango monstrosities. Photo to the right.

Ralph King is the CEO of the employment firm and apparently has no qualms about illegally planting his company’s signs all over the public right-of-way. Firm's owner, Tim Barron, has told a fellow sign-buster that jobs are more important than keeping the public right-of-way free of clutter.

So Jobdango officials know what they are doing is illegal. The firm has even been sued in the past for promoting Jobdango by writing in chalk on downtown sidewalks.

I phoned the company once to complain and gently posit my vision of what the city would look like if every business chose this form of advertising. I was met with a verbal attack. “Sounds like you have too much time on your hands. Get a job!”

I’m not about to subject myself to further abuse. I’ll just fight back by ripping down his signs (as I've done with 40 or so). Still I confess I don’t seem to be having much effect on Ralph and Tim. They continue to hire folks to put up more, weed-like. (Update: I took down two of their signs on Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway today, Feb 7)

A call to the City produced all kinds of blather about tight budgets, enforcement priorities (illegal signs are way down the list) and Catch-22 regulations. An example of the latter is that if I take down one of these signs there’s no longer a violation because there’s no evidence. The photo shown here,  I was told, doesn’t qualify as proof of a violation either. Go figure.

But I do have one hero in the city bureaucracy. That would be Marcia Dennis, who thanklessly fields complaints about graffiti and various other visual assaults on the Commons. She even hands out anti-graffiti kits stocked with rubber gloves and all kinds of solvents. Marcia has agreed to send me the names of other Portland “Sign-busters.” There must be a couple dozen of us with “time on our hands.”

It’s time to organize. A well-publicized, Michael Moore-like mass visit/sit-in at  Jobdango’s office might be in order. Or verbal complaints at a City Council session. Or a publicity campaign. Or an on-camera citizens’ arrest.

Those are all safer than tip-toeing along the edge of the Capital Highway on-ramp to Barbur while traffic whisks by just inches away.

Meanwhile, if you want the thrill of being told to get a life, give Ralph or Tim a call to complain. The number is: (503) 256-4446.

Oh, and if you actually need a job, don’t get it through Jobdango. It only encourages the company to keep blighting our city.

From one conflict to another, with love

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult. E. B. White

Before sun-up Saturday morning I altered the Army recruiting sign at the eastbound Tri-Met bus shelter/stop at Capitol Highway and Sunset Boulevard.

Beneath the sign’s “Army Strong,” I duct-taped a home-made sign reading “War is Wrong.” My small sign covered up the phone number of the recruiting office.

My actions left me conflicted. In fact the whole Army sign gestalt was, and is, a bit crazy-making.

Where to begin?

I have no great love of “outdoor advertising,” as the billboard industry likes to call its handiwork. It diminishes the outdoors.

Nor am I fond of public agencies foisting advertising on a captive, transit-riding public. I’ve actually testified on the matter of “sponsored” streetcar stops. And, in a related lost cause, I told this spring the Portland City Council to abandon the idea of selling naming rights (a form of advertising) to parks facilities.

The recruiting sign raised yet another issue —the little matter of war and the sleazy way the Army goes about recruiting kids who are, well, weak, and vulnerable to pitches like “Army Strong.” Add to that the irony of the Army’s macho description of itself as it tries desperately to keep up its troop strength — and morale.

Of course the sign, which is back-lit and glows at night, is attached to a bus-stop shelter heavily used by Wilson High School students, notably ones who take the bus.

So that’s one side of my conflict. The one that led me impulsively to put “War is Wrong” over the recruiting phone number.

The other side is that I have been known to rip down signs that are placed illegally on utility poles and in the public right of way. My garage is full of signs for 1-800-GOTJUNK, College Painters, Avoid Foreclosure and Jobdango.

Some consider me a zealot in this matter. They are right. I am.

So there I was staring at my illegal alteration of the Army recruitment sign, liking my message but feeling vaguely hypocritical.

I went away to think things over for a while. After two cups of coffee, my misgivings hadn’t disappeared.

Journalists have this rule that if something you write doesn’t sit well, delete it. That’s what I did with my amendment to the sign. Three hours after I did the deed, I undid it.

But I’m not finished with the “Army Strong” sign just yet.

I’m now toying with “improving” it by memorializing it. I have in mind making a string of those origami peace cranes. One crane for each of the more than 80 Oregonians who have been killed in Iraq. My idea is to festoon, ever so gracefully, my string of cranes around the margins of the sign.

People can make of it what they will.

Block branding in the parks

Before delving into this, I want to give you the place to comment on Portland Park and Recreation’s (PPR) proposal to sell naming rights to parks facilities. You have until this Friday.

Do it. Or read this, and then DO IT.

The alternative could be “Jockey” gym at the Southwest Community Center, or park swings brought to our children by “Nestles.”

I wish I could be as sanguine as my fellow blogger and activist Amanda Fritz about last week’s City Hall meeting on this sordid matter.

I found the two-hour session troubling in several ways.

Start with the fact that neither Parks Director Zari Santer nor Parks Commissioner Dan Salzman was present.

Then note that the meeting was the public’s one chance to comment in person on the proposal and its mushy language.

You’d have to be a PPR groupie to know that “the Citywide Parks Team,” the convening group, is not a closed cadre of parks managers but rather a diverse gathering of, well, parks groupies.

So when it was announced that the draft “Sponsorship Policy” would be presented and discussed, I figured I’d be an outsider looking in.

I wasn’t. That was reassuring until I realized that this would be a Q&A rather than a wholesome debate about underlying policy.

Those presenting the draft and fielding questions tried to give corporate sponsorships a “feel good” feeling. How wonderful it was to “form partnerships” with Nike and others, and “to leverage assets” (the public’s assets, by the way) and “develop diverse revenue streams” and “create win-win situations.”

The staff presenters often blurred the distinction between sponsors, who contract for something (a naming rights, primarily) in return for their cash “partnership,” and donors, who give with little (and even no) expectation of acknowledgement.

Definitions and words are important. At one point we were told that Columbia Sportswear had “adopted” Sellwood Park to help maintain it. Very nice, but just who is putting our parks up for “adoption”? Columbia Sportswear, a true donor, is to be commended, but I suggested a better choice of words lest we put the entire city up for corporate “adoption” of a worse kind—specifically naming rights sponsorship.

The chief presenter was PPR Marketing & Business Development Manager Bob Schulz, an affable fellow with a down-home PR manner. But when we got down to cases, he turned terse and defensive:

• What about Portland’s naming rights poster child, PGE Park? It isn’t part of PPR.
• Does its name create a city precedent? No, it was ad hoc.
• What about the large Nike logos on parks basketball courts Nike paid to have resurfaced? We wouldn’t do it that way if we had it to do again.
• What about Pepsi signs on scoreboards at community centers? We needed the contribution because we hadn’t budgeted for them. It won’t happen again.

And yet, here he, the "Marketing & Business Development Manager," was saying PPR needs corporate sponsorships (read "money") to keep the parks solvent.

The fact is that as a society we are starving what many call The Commons. It is vulnerable to an industry salivating at naming rights opportunities. These public facilities are indeed assets—assets to be taken over by corporate America, as the public and its representatives capitulate. The schools are in the same situation. Witness the Portland schools’ current struggles to extract itself from junk food deals with Coca-Cola.

We really are putting The Commons up for corporate adoption. Sadly the money once available to schools or parks is increasingly going to fight wars or pay war profiteers, or make up for what the super-rich no longer pay—and now spend on private jets and third or fourth homes.

I imagine a day a decade or so from now when our children won’t know that parks facilities or schools or civic stadiums (we had one here once, remember?) are owned by the public. They won’t know that Mommy and Daddy really do pay taxes to keep them running.

At last week’s meeting I suggested to the PPR staff that before they sell off The Commons, they might come to us, the people, to see whether we really want it sold off to commercialism and corporatism. Tell us what it will cost to avoid “corporate adoption” and ask us to pay for it. My guess is we will. At least we should have the choice.

I also suggested that the entire City of Portland, not just Parks and Recreation, needs to have a policy on corporate sponsorships and naming rights. Without that policy what is to prevent the renaming of everything owned by the public. “Viagra” City Hall? “Camels” Waterfront Park? The “Spandex” Morrison Bridge. We could tattoo Nike logos on the commissioners’ foreheads—all for a price.

Finally, I reminded them of a quaint old saying: “Virtue is its own reward.” It is famously reflected on an inscription on the Skidmore Fountain, whose name has not been sold off, yet.

Virtue, in the form of volunteerism and good citizenship, is “the riches of the city.”

Corporations in the naming rights hunt (and, believe me, that hunt is everywhere) might muzzle their marketing departments long enough to embrace the idea of virtue being its own reward. Imagine, giving something simply because it was the right thing to do….

Again public comment will be taken here
through this Friday. Feb. 23. I urge you to write that the selling of naming rights in any part of The Commons should be prohibited in the City of Portland.

Media Literacy group wants The Commons protected from commercialism

In a post two weeks ago, I wrote about the Portland Bureau of Parks and Recreation's proposal to sell naming rights to our public parks facilities in exchange for corporate money.

Are you really willing to accept the The Pepsi Community Center in Gabriel Park?

Now the board of the Northwest Media Literacy Center has taken a position against PPR's proposal and sent a letter of opposition to the City Council. I’m on the board and helped draft the proposal.

Unless you really intend for your tax dollars to provide billboard and other logo and slogan space for the likes of Nike, Pepsi and The Gap, I urge you to write the council (Mayor Potter and Commissioners Sten, Salzman, Leonard and Adams) as well as Parks Director Zari Santner to oppose the measure. The public comment period ends Friday, Feb 23.

Here’s what the NMLC board resolution says:

The Board of the Northwest Media Literacy Center (NMLC) urges the Portland City Council to reject a Portland Parks and Recreation proposal to legitimize and allow corporate sponsorships and commercialism in our parks and public facilities. The proposed policy would result in the selling of naming rights to public-owned park property and would allow commercial messages in our parks and recreation facilities.

• The NMLC board believes that parks facilities are part of the public Commons, which should be a “safe haven” from intrusive and rampant commercialization.
• We further believe it is the responsibility of the Portland City Council and the City’s bureaus to safeguard the entire Commons from commercial display, including sponsorship announcements, corporate naming, trademarks, logos and other commercial messages.
• NMLC is committed to teaching people—including public servants—to critically assess media messages in order to understand their impact on our communities, our society and our planet.