Murmurs

[September 26th, 2007] New Look, same good dirt.

Where is Ken Magee ? The head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Portland office has been out of town since early July. And the feds are very mum about why. Bernie Hobson, a spokesman at the DEA’s regional HQ in Seattle, declined to comment. Equally silent were myriad other federal and local law-enforcement officials. Among the no-commenters: U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut (“I’m going to let them [the DEA] deal with that”) and Officer Scott Groshong at the Portland Police Bureau’s Drugs and Vice Division (“I can’t get involved with that”). Reached on his cell phone Sept. 12, Magee declined to tell Murmurs where he is. He did say he’s on temporary assignment elsewhere and still heads the Portland DEA office.

Last Friday, local blogger the One True b!X noticed that 2006 Rogue of the Year Emilie Boyles is recruiting a campaign manager in Portland for a mystery candidate. Reached in Eastern Montana, where she works at North America’s smallest TV station, Boyles says her “unincorporated organization,” For the Good of America, may run someone. But she wouldn’t say who or when. “Why worry about it?” she says. Well, because Boyles misspent $145,000 in public campaign financing when she ran for Portland City Council. According to her website (emilieboyles.com), campaign-manager candidates must be within federal poverty guidelines, or on welfare or disability insurance. She was also wondering on her blog “if you have a car you’re not using.” Sorry, we gave all our change to the last bum.

Let’s never fight again: Commissioner Randy Leonard and Mayor Tom Potter have buried the hatchet . Things had been frosty lately between the two, with Potter trying to stall Leonard’s anti-graffiti ordinance, and Leonard accusing Potter of being too close to the Portland Business Alliance. Leonard now blames the tiff on a shared stubbornness and the pressure cooker that is City Hall. “We had to get out of the building,” Leonard says. So they had a sitdown Tuesday, Sept. 18, in Potter’s Southeast neighborhood at Woodstock Wine&Deli and realized they agreed about most things. Potter’s decision Sept. 10 not to run for reelection also factored into the newfound niceness. “Nobody’s interested in piling on,” Leonard says. Says Potter spokesman John Doussard: “Tom’s a very collegial guy.”

Collegiality and Potter isn’t the first—or the millionth—connection that comes to mind for downtown activist Irwin Mandel , a former Potter supporter whom the mayor told to “shut up” at a February hearing. Last Wednesday, Mandel and wife Lili sat through three hours of the theatrical rollout for Potter’s VisionPDX premiere, only to walk out of the council chambers just as Potter began to speak. The Mandels were lonely dissenters that night, with Lili evidently relishing her role as “villainess.” The 79-year-old Irwin said the Visioneers had “created a new oxymoron” with the proposal to give city employees four hours a month in paid time off for volunteer work. “My dictionary defines a volunteer as a person who works without being paid,” Mandel deadpanned. More cringe-inducing was the ostensibly supportive testimony of Brenna Bell, who worked on the project. “We had no idea what were doing,” she said. “There were some huge setbacks. But it’s beautiful.”

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WEB-ONLY MurmUR:

The Multnomah County Library will soon have a second-in-command. The county will pay between $74,000 and $104,000 a year for a deputy director to help run the nation’s second-busiest library system (19.6 million items checked out or renewed last year). The new hire comes after then-County Chair Diane Linn came under fire in 2003 for hiring former Washington, D.C., library head Molly Raphael as director for $138,000 a year—nearly $50,000 a year more than Gov. Ted Kulongoski makes. Raphael, who now makes $144,000 a year, tells Murmurs the library had a deputy director before she came on, but she chose not to fill the position until now, taking on some of the work herself. “We felt it was time to bring this level of coordination and support back,” Raphael says. The county has 17 libraries with 465 employees and an annual budget of $52 million. Raphael says she hopes to have the position filled by year’s end.