Using City parks to respond to societal disaster

Strange. The City of Portland has named 17 parks where citizens are to gather in case of a major disaster.

In the same issue of The Oregonian that informed us of the opening of the parks, we learned that the City is sending the police to close a single park to Occupy Portland demonstrators.

The protesters are, in real sense, messengers and victims of a disaster happening now. And it is huge, affecting the “99 percent.” It has been going on for at least the last 30 years. For many it has been going on for centuries.

The disaster’s rubble and victims have been ignored in a society addicted to consumption, spectator-ism, false fear, enemy-making and growing debt.

Thanks to the Occupy movement, our eyes have been opened. We see the destruction everywhere — in the American political system, in the ravaged “no jobs” economy, in the shrinking middle class, in militaristic spending priorities, in the ravaged environment, in the inanities of a pandering media, and in a skewed system of “justice.”

On the day the articles appeared, Occupy said it would stay in a single park for two weeks. The police were ordered in to remove them after just a few hours.

In the case of a major “natural” disaster, like an earthquake, refugees would stay in 17 parks for an indefinite period. Will the police be sent in to remove them after two weeks?

The City’s disaster preparedness could be tested and put to work in this real, immediate American disaster by welcoming the Occupy movement. Rather than evicting the protesters, see whether they can be adequately cared for, housed and fed for a fortnight.

Greet and embrace the protest and its message with hospitality, not hostility. Acknowledge that we are today our system has produced a living disaster. In the communities formed in our parks, we must begin clear away its causes and rebuild.

Occupy Portland evolves

Tomorrow, Occupy Portland will choose a new home in a “park-like” setting.

The aim is to stay in the chosen city park for two weeks.

The two-week term limit is part of the broader evolution of the movement.

As a Quaker participant in the Faith/Spirit support committee for Occupy Portland, I was briefed this week on how the new Occupation will work.

“Sustainability” is clearly a new watch word. The old Occupy sites at Chapman and Lownsdale Squares weren’t sustainable for all kinds of reasons.

Indeed the movement has decided that no “Occupy” settlement that purports to be permanent will work.

So Occupy Portland will be migratory. Two weeks here, two weeks there....

That moves the message around the city. We could use it here in Hillsdale where Chase Bank wants to build a new branch that this community doesn't need and doesn’t want. (If you don't believe me come to the Hillsdale Neighborhood Association meeting, 7 p.m., next Wednesday, Dec. 7, at the Watershed Building, Bertha Court and Capitol Highway.)

Another important evolutionary change in Occupy is that it isn’t going to tolerate hangers-on who contribute nothing — or trouble. People who are just loitering or worse drug dealing or thieving, will be confronted at first in a welcoming way.

Here’s the plan: An active Occupier will approach a questionable character.

“Hi there! Are you plugged in?”

“No, man.”

“Well, you need to get plugged in. How do you want to help? The kitchen? The sanitary crew? The information booth?”

“I don’t want to get ‘plugged in.’ Just leave me alone.”

At that point the first community member calls over another. “Hey, this person doesn’t want to be plugged into the community.”

“Hi, let’s get you plugged in! What do you want to do?”

“I don’t want to do anything.”

So yet another encampment member is called over, and then another...until the person is surrounded by a dozen Occupiers all insisting that the aimless interloper get “plugged in” in some way.

The process continues until the surrounded person agrees to be “plugged in” or leaves.

Clearly the Occupy movement is evolving and growing stronger and stronger, and smarter and smarter.

A related point:

There’s also been a lot of discussion and planning about leaving the parks as they were when the Occupy groups arrived. Pre-Occupy photos of the condition of the sites have been taken for reference.

Much has been made in the scolding Press of the cost of restoring the original parks at Chapman and Lownsdale. According to Portland Parks and Recreation it comes to about $130,000.

What did that money buy?

Try knowledge and awareness — at last. Mass public education and broad civic engagement.

Try a stronger democracy.

Try the beginning of breaking the stranglehold corporations and the wealthy have on our government.

Frankly, it’s cheap at a price and a fraction of a CEO’s salary. For comparison's sake, Jamie Dimon, Chase's CEO, is compensated to the tune of $19 million a year. What's he done for democracy lately besides buy a few members of congress with campaign contributions? Is Dimon really "worth" 146 times the "cost" of Occupy Portland's witness for justice.

If anything, Dimon and his like should pay the social costs of their wrongs. Talk about not being plugged in....

Will future Occupancies cost the taxpayers of this city money? Absolutely. Will it be worth it? Absolutely...if we back this movement for an equitable and just society.

OPB: "Nike Community Center" possible

It seems that we might get stuck with the "Nike Southwest Community Center" after all.

Parks officials assured a group of us a week ago that the proposed Portland Parks and Recreation corporate sponsorship/naming rights rule wouldn't allow for plastering a corporate name or logo on community centers.

Oh yeah?

Here is über-activist Amanda Fritz, who generally favors corporate naming rights sponsorships, quoted in an OPB story that aired yesterday.

Amanda Fritz is a longtime community activist who lost a recent bid for city council. She has weighed in on the policy and says there is room for a corporate logo in a parks building.

Amanda Fritz: "But there isn't a potential to have a 'Nike Park' anyplace in Portland. There might be the potential under the sponsorship policy to have a 'Nike Recreation Center,' or something like that."

Today is the last day to comment on whether you want our parks commercialized and our community centers named for corporations. You can comment here.

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.