Mobile Sten

[January 7th, 2009]

As new Mayor Sam Adams takes charge of City Council this week, the man who one year ago was the undisputed master of City Hall deal-making lives anonymously in self-imposed exile in Bend.

Last January, WW broke the news that then-City Commissioner Erik Sten was resigning midway through his third term (see “Sten Calls it Quits,” WW, Jan. 2, 2008) because he was “ready for my next act.”

Today Sten, his wife, Marnie Vlahos, and 5-year-old son, Nicholas, live in a leased home in Bend. That’s unlike former Commissioner Jim Francesconi, who is active in higher-education issues and lobbies City Hall for clients, or ex-Mayor Vera Katz, who also became a lobbyist.

Sten, 41, says he reads press accounts of Portland politics sporadically and occasionally chats with Adams and Commissioner Randy Leonard. Otherwise, he’s removed from the world that consumed him for 18 years, the first six as an aide to then-Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury before riding the “Sten-mobile” to a Council seat in 1996.

“Once you decide to leave, I think it’s best to just go,” he says. “It’s hard to be half-involved in things.”

Sten, whose management duties as a commissioner included housing, spends some of his time working on a fellowship from a consortium of major foundations called “Living Cities.” His task, through consultation and a written paper due by May, is to map out Portland’s efforts in battling homelessness for other cities.

He’s also doing some part-time work with a for-profit North Carolina environmental consulting firm. Except for four years as a Stanford undergrad, Sten had spent his whole life in Portland before moving to Bend after resigning. Initially, he didn’t plan to stay, but his son fell in love with Bend.

As a Kafoury staffer in the early ’90s, Sten engineered a bailout of more than 200 homeowners after the failure of a predatory lender. As a commissioner, he pursued affordable housing and populist issues, such as the city’s unsuccessful attempt to buy PGE and the controversial public-finance law for city elections. He spent his final years in office trying to reform the Portland Development Commission—and applauds Adams for recently announcing the consolidation of PDC’s housing arm with the city’s housing bureau. (See wweek.com for an update on Sten’s plan to use urban renewal money to build a school in the David Douglas School District.)

Such high-profile issues made Sten one of Portland’s most recognizable figures—especially downtown and in Northeast Portland, where he grew up and continues to own a home.

“In a lot of ways, Bend is farther from Portland than I ever realized,” Sten says. “Nobody recognizes me here and that’s great.”

He and his wife, who telecommutes to her job at a Portland nonprofit, are still considering what comes next when his fellowship ends in April. A return to electoral politics or even political strategy is unlikely. Sten says he’s unsure whether he’ll even return to Portland at the end of January for Adams’ inaugural party, which is likely to be Portland’s political-social event of 2009.

“Hardcore politics is addictive, but it’s also fairly repetitive,” Sten says. “Although being a city commissioner is probably the greatest job I’ll ever have, I don’t miss the day-to-day pace.”

Instead, Sten says he’d like to remain involved in housing policy but from the private sector.

“I miss some things—mostly the people,” he says. “But I don’t have any doubt I made the right call.”