Teddy Bear

[March 5th, 2008]

Multnomah County Commissioner Maria Rojo de Steffey won’t drive over the Sellwood Bridge. She knows it scores 2 out of 100 on a federal sufficiency scale.

“I don’t want to be there,” Rojo de Steffey says. “The bridge that went down in Minneapolis was rated 50.”

So she was understandably peeved when the county’s scheme to fund a $450 million fix for the span collapsed like a Minnesota bridge last week. Meanwhile, 30,000 vehicles still cross the bridge every day.

If the Sellwood Bridge falls apart tomorrow, it’s hard to say who’d be most to blame.

It could be the city councils of Gresham, Troutdale and dinky Maywood Park (pop. 800), which all voted against putting a measure on the May ballot to hike the county’s car registration fee from $54 to $102. The county needed permission from each city in the county to spend all of that extra money on bridges.

It could be Clackamas County, whose drivers account for many of the cars on the bridge. Gresham and Troutdale wanted them to commit to help, but Clackistani officials cried poor.

Another contender in the blame game: Lonnie Roberts, the county commissioner from outer East Portland. When it was time for Roberts to step up and tap his roots in the East County old-boy network, he failed to convince Troutdale and Gresham to go along.

“It’s not that I didn’t come through,” Roberts says. “We knew it was an uphill battle from the beginning.”

That ain’t entirely so. As late as November, Multnomah County Chairman Ted Wheeler told WW he was confident he’d corral all the jurisdictions to support the plan.

So why isn’t anyone blaming Wheeler, the promising political newcomer who took on the ambitious task—only to see it go down in flames during his 13th month in office?

No one’s questioning Wheeler’s sincerity or his intelligence. But a year into his administration, it’s becoming clear his political toolbox may not come with a wrench for bending reluctant partners his way.

Rojo de Steffey thinks Wheeler should have cut a deal with Gresham and Troutdale, which wanted a 40 percent cut of the money raised from the higher car registration fee. Wheeler refused, saying it would be unfair to other cities that had already agreed.

“That’s how politics work. You give and take, you cut deals,” says Rojo de Steffey, an eight-year board veteran who’s spearheaded the effort to repair or replace the Sellwood Bridge. “It’s naive to think if you’ve got one way you want it done, that’s the only way. There’s lots of ways to work with people.”

Rojo de Steffey remembers last fall, when the board voted 3-2 to continue giving Gresham, Troutdale and other small cities a $6 million cut of the county’s business-income tax each year. She and Commissioner Lisa Naito voted no. Roberts, Wheeler and Jeff Cogen, also a newcomer to the board, voted yes.

“I said both to Jeff and Ted, you’d better think about what you’re doing and what you want in return. And they asked for nothing [from the cities],” she says. “I think it was naive on their part.”

While the Sellwood deal collapsed, Wheeler says he never threatened to yank the cities’ business-income tax payments—nor did he offer up anything to sweeten the pot.

The episode was a reminder of last May, when Wheeler went head-to-head with City Commissioner Randy Leonard over who should fund the Hooper Detox Center. Wheeler lost that game of chicken when Leonard threatened to cut off funding for 57 jail beds, one of Leonard’s own pet projects.

Erik Sten, Portland’s longest-serving city commissioner, says Wheeler’s mistake then was in not offering any deals in return. “I think he’s very good and very collaborative at talking to the other players,” Sten says. “[But] he doesn’t always go into the negotiations with a strategy of trying to deliver something that the other side wants.”

Wheeler defends his no-shenanigans political style. “There are a lot of ways of persuading people,” he says. “I choose to be straightforward. I choose to look them in the eye.”

Some question whether that will be enough as Wheeler faces even tougher tasks, like opening the mothballed Wapato Jail. “He doesn’t play political games,” says Cogen, Wheeler’s closest ally on the county commission. “Time will tell whether that’s an asset or a liability.”