Bad Boys

[October 31st, 2007]

WW recently called Randy Leonard “Portland’s orneriest commissioner” (see Murmurs, WW , Oct. 17, 2007).

“Are you going to issue a retraction?” Leonard demanded, tongue firmly in cheek, after Mayor Tom Potter walked out of a council session last week while grumbling about his own irrelevance.

At the Oct. 25 session, in the latest development of the never-ending debate over the proposed renaming of North Interstate Avenue to César E. Chávez Boulevard, Potter handed the mayoral gavel to Commissioner Sam Adams. The mayor then declared himself “no longer a voting member of this council,” and stalked out.

“I’m embarrassed to say, but I thought he was going to use the restroom,” Adams said, asked what he thought when Potter gave him the gavel.

There was symbolism in the handoff. Adams is the front-runner in next year’s mayor’s race. Potter announced in September that he wouldn’t seek re-election, promising not to be a lame duck. Now, less than two months later, he has quacked.

By abandoning discussion on an issue he’d championed, after staking out a purely principled position, Potter wound up acknowledging his irrelevance and ceding the high road to Adams, who is not high on Potter’s list of preferred successors.

Potter’s public outburst struck some City Hall insiders as extremely weird, but not entirely surprising. The mayor has a reputation dating back decades to his cop days for being both thin-skinned and stubborn.

“It’s new to the world, but not to the council,” said Leonard, who has sparred often with Potter.

(In fairness, council dysfunction isn’t a new phenomenon: Leonard and former Mayor Vera Katz regularly went at it in her final term ending in 2004. Katz and then-Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury went to joint counseling in 1995 to talk out their differences. And longtime council observers remember ex-Commissioner Mildred Schwab storming out semi-regularly in the 1980s.)

Potter has dug in on renaming Interstate Avenue—he wants it, and not another street, to be dedicated to Chávez, the late Latino labor organizer. But that’s unlikely to happen by consensus, now that many in North Portland have come out against the idea.

Commissioner Erik Sten was the key vote at the Oct. 25 meeting. Sten began on Potter’s side, saying he would vote against a compromise proposed by Adams and Leonard that would let other streets be considered. Sten, Adams and Leonard went on to discuss alternatives. (Commissioner Dan Saltzman was absent.) Those in attendance noted the mayor’s growing displeasure, culminating in the walkout.

“His anger was at the disrespect council members were showing by considering ending the existing process,” said Potter’s chief of staff, Austin Raglione.

But others say that by failing to compromise, Potter snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

“A minute before he walked out, I had concluded the best path was to vote his way,” Sten told WW . “That’s going to be a lot harder now.”

Serena Cruz, a former Sten staffer and ex-Multnomah County commissioner, testified at the meeting in favor of renaming Interstate. She fears the commissioners’ personal disagreements will overshadow the real point, which was to honor Chávez.

Cruz has a unique perspective on the council squabbling. She was one of the so-called “Mean Girls” who ganged up on former County Chairwoman Diane Linn. Leonard, Adams and Sten are earning a name as City Hall’s “Bad Boys,” with Potter playing Linn’s role as punching bag and pariah.

“It’s hard to say that the conflict between them isn’t affecting their work,” Cruz says.

That said, Cruz understands why Potter won’t back down on Interstate.

“The further council steps away from Interstate, the more credence they give to arguments opposing it,” says Cruz.

She suspects political factors could be at work, too. Under the Leonard-Adams compromise, the council would make a decision by next July—by which time Leonard, who is running for re-election, and Adams will have gotten through the May primary.

“I don’t know that it could be much earlier if you want to do an adequate job of public outreach,” says Adams. The public process on the renaming has been “scant,” he says. “I read about it in the St. Johns Sentinel , and I thought, ‘Oh, who’s behind that?’ Then I found out in September that they had been working with the mayor’s office since March.”

It’s not just Bad Boys and white guys who fault Potter’s process.

Bernardino De La Torre-Guerrero, director of the local social service organization Consejo&Co., says the insistence on renaming Interstate Avenue at all costs has been “counterproductive” for race relations.

He faults the entire council—and the more “politically connected” members of the Latino community who pushed it this far. Our resources would be better spent, De La Torre-Guerrero says, addressing larger issues like violence, education and alcohol abuse.

The Chávez issue comes before council Nov. 14.