Defensive Driving

[March 5th, 2008]

Commissioner Sam Adams has spent months trying to convince Portlanders of the urgent need to pass a $464 million, 15-year tax for street repaving, better traffic signals and bike routes.

But Adams’ air-raid siren was more of a hasty mumble at City Council last week, when he essentially tabled council discussion of the proposal until midsummer. He says he wants to add “polish” before sending the tax to city voters in November.

That timeline would push talk of the transportation tax past the May 20 election, in which Adams hopes to win his bid for mayor by an outright majority against businessman Sho Dozono and nine other candidates, thereby averting a November runoff. The tax’s main critic, Oregon Petroleum Association rep Paul Romain, suspects Adams is putting off tax talk because the issue gives Dozono a line of attack.

“I will guarantee you—guarantee—that if [Adams] does not get 50 percent of the vote in May, this [street tax] will not be on the November ballot,” says Romain. “If he gets over 50 percent in May, there’s an even-money chance that he’ll say, ‘We don’t need to refer this, we’re just going to pass it.’”

Adams insists that’s not the case. The issue, he says, is “life or death.” Yet Adams is now leaving an exit door open. Despite an 89-member “stakeholder” committee’s endorsement of his tax proposal, Adams says he would oppose referring the tax to voters in November if so advised by that same committee.

Here’s a recap for those who haven’t followed each twist and turn in the tax debate. In January, City Council stood poised to pass Adams’ tax, but held off because of Romain’s threat to gather signatures for a voter referral in May. Last month, with prodding from Mayor Tom Potter, Adams agreed in principle to refer the package to the November ballot instead. But the longer the Council delays formal action on a referral, as it did last week, the better for Adams because mayoral voters may presume the tax isn’t a done deal.

Michael Zokoych, a committee member opposed to the tax, thinks Adams is delaying the proposal to improve his odds of winning the mayor’s race in May without a runoff.

“Sam wanted to get this thing passed in January. That was his timetable, and he was very adamant,” says Zokoych, who owns a shop serving sausage and Chicago-style sandwiches.

Last week, Adams backtracked from a referral of specific transportation-funding proposals. At his direction, the Council instead requested a report on how to “remedy” transportation “maintenance and safety deficiencies” on or before July 16. That’s the day when whoever is paying attention to City Hall probably will be reading about the results of a likely July 15 special election to fill the seat of resigning Commissioner Erik Sten.

More importantly, if the Council stalls until mid-July, tax opponents would have only eight days to gather the 18,170 signatures needed to get a referendum on the November ballot. (Romain & Co. would also have the option of filing an initiative petition in 2009, to repeal and refund the tax if it passes this year.)

Adams says legal concerns drove the decision to kick his package back to committee.

State elections laws prohibit public employees from taking positions on prospective ballot measures. Therefore, “city staff is restricted from doing lots of even basic research,” Adams says. “The City Attorney advised us that we had to take off my website anything having to do with transportation…even if it was two or three years old.”

That seems a paranoid interpretation, since a manual prepared by the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office says public employees “may address election-related issues while on the job, in a factual and impartial manner, if such activity is legitimately within scope of employee’s normal duties.”

City Attorney Linda Meng says she gave Adams no written opinion on the matter. But she says state law broadly restricts what sort of information unelected public employees can provide to the public.

“You can’t, for instance, say, ‘We need more money for roads,’” Meng says. “Using the word ‘need’ is a loaded term.”

This isn’t the first time Adams has used the city attorney’s advice to support a policy shift that also has political advantages. When Romain threatened a voter referral, Adams broke his tax measure into three parts, citing legal advice. But the trisection also served a political goal by complicating Romain’s efforts to gather signatures for a referral.