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County
Chairwoman Beverly Stein took office in a 1993 special election,
following the death of previous chair Gladys McCoy. She
was a state legislator from 1989 to 1993. Termed-out in
2002, she says she will seek the Democratic Party's nomination
for governor.
Multnomah
County is the largest local government to be ruled by an
all-female elected council, according to the National Association
of Counties. All that intuition sometimes comes in handy,
like when commissioners considered the
county's vexing maze of mental health
services, presented in Rorschach blot format, at a Dec.
16 meeting.
County Chairwoman Beverly Stein (above) also voted against
the neighborhood notification plan, but the veteran politician
would never have publicly trashed Diane Linn (below) the
way Cruz did. Sharron Kelley, the longest-serving commissioner,
says Cruz may yet mellow as she ages.
Multnomah
County's budget for fiscal 1999-2000 is $899 million, making
it the fourth-largest public body in Oregon. The county
has 4,894 employees. At $275 million, the Department of
Environmental Services is the largest; the Sheriff's Department
has the most employees with 1,018.
Sharron
Kelley, whose term expires Dec. 31, has been a county commissioner
since 1989. Before that, she served as a Metro councilor
from 1984 to 1989.
Serena
Cruz does not speak Spanish.
Cruz
crushed a field of five well-known opponents in her May
1998 primary, polling 31 percent. In the November 1998 general
election, she beat Dan Ivancie--son of the former mayor--56
percent to 29 percent.
The
May 1998 special election that brought Diane Linn and Lisa
Naito to office was held to fill the seats of commissioners
Tanya Collier and Dan Saltzman, who were running against
one another for the City Council. As of now, Linn and Naito
face no opposition for this May's primary, which will be
for a regular, four-year term of office.
In 1998,
the Census Bureau estimated that there were 32,371 Latinos
in Multnomah County.
Of Portland
Public Schools' 54,746
students, 8.2 percent (or 4,471) are Latino.
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Read an email
to WW in which Commissioner Serena Cruz explains at length
her frustrations and recent votes.
Language
Link:
Serena Cruz may walk the walk, but does she talk the talk?
Dec. 2 was a full day for Serena Cruz. At a Multnomah County
Commission meeting that morning, she called some of her constituents
"racist" and, later, characterized a proposal by fellow commissioner
Diane Linn as "lunacy."
Says Linn, "I was anticipating a different kind of working
relationship."
So, too, were many observers of local politics when Cruz
was elected in November 1998. Her smarts eclipsed only by
her brashness, the Harvard and UC Berkeley-educated Cruz
came into office a year ago as the most promising rookie
politician in the Portland metropolitan area since Erik
Sten.
Some even thought she would be the Great Latino Hope in
a state where Latinos are the fastest-growing ethnic minority
but often don't see the political process as a place to
cast hopeful glances.
But Cruz, it is said, has spent so much of her first year
burning bridges that she may have to spend the rest of her
term rebuilding them just to get anything done, be it for
Latinos or for herself.
"Sometimes, I feel like I'm an outsider here," Cruz said
one afternoon in her 15th-floor Portland Building office,
where even on a gray, cloud-decked afternoon the view stretches
to the shoulders of Mount Hood. "I don't hear my colleagues
raise how our decisions will affect people of color or the
poor, but I don't always want to be the first one. Didn't
people do this before I got here? The political part of
it I just didn't expect. I didn't fully get how important
personal politics are to how things get done."
Cruz's discomfort is hard to miss.
"I think for whatever reason she's angry and frustrated,"
says Sharron Kelley, who's been on the County Commission
since 1989. "I don't know why."
Nor does anyone else in local political circles. A year
ago, they augured that Cruz might rocket as high as she
wanted in politics. Now, they wonder if she will clear the
launch tower.
A grand tradition in America is the modus operandi of first-term
politicians: do little while appearing to do much. It's
a safety dance. By issuing press releases and mouthing words
out of junior-high civics classes at public events, rookie
pols create the impression that they are veritable Duke
Ellingtons, scoring swinging orchestrations that will change
the very rhythm of public life, save taxpayers money and
bring justice to the oppressed. But whether in Congress,
a legislature or local government, wise political newcomers
often churn out nothing more than Muzak.
For there is no first-term politician alive who wants to
be among the dead come re-election night. To neutralize
this fear, a strategy has evolved in American politics:
sit on your hands; leave the tough calls to the veterans;
initiate no controversial legislation; only weigh in on
budget matters. Keep your style inoffensive and your substance
unassailable.
Consider Diane Linn and Lisa Naito, who were elected to
the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners in a May 1998
special election. While both are freshman county commissioners,
they are political veterans. Linn headed the city's Office
of Neighborhood Involvement from 1993 to 1998 and for three
years before that was executive director of the Oregon
National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League;
she is married to Dick Springer, who served 16 years in
the Oregon Legislature. Naito, the ex-wife of Steve Naito,
served in the Legislature from 1991 to 1995 and was a Metro
councilor from 1996 to 1998.
As first-term commissioners, each has dipped into controversy,
but each has also played a steady, even game.
Cruz, on the other hand, has never heard of the safety
dance. It's not clear whether she acts the way she does
because of her relative youth--she is 32 years old--or because
she was raised poor, Latino and Mormon, or because, the
most likely scenario, she is Serena Cruz.
Cruz's style was in full flight on Dec. 9, when the County
Commission spent the morning considering an ordinance that
would ban smoking in all businesses, including restaurants.
Sponsored by Linn and Naito, the ordinance met token resistance
from the Oregon Restaurant Association and the few stray
smokers who testified, but they were overwhelmed by the
lobbying efforts of the American Lung Association, the American
Cancer Society and the American Heart Association, as well
as a packed gallery of supporters.
This ordinance, a version of which is already law in California,
Corvallis and Boulder, Colo., among other places, should
have been an easy vote for a liberal politician in Multnomah
County. County Chairwoman Beverly Stein easily joined Linn
and Naito in supporting the ordinance (Kelley, the most
conservative member of the group, opposed it).
But Serena Cruz--every bit the lefty that Stein, Linn or
Naito is--sat impatiently through the testimony of health
officials, high-school students and musicians hammering
home the message that secondhand smoke kills. Then, she
all but spat in their faces as she told them she would vote
no.
Hunched forward against the dais, Cruz went after the ordinance--which
would temporarily exempt bars, bingo halls and race tracks--like
a hyena with a wildebeest. She said the ordinance was the
"wrong tool," that it would encourage employees to narc
on one another, that it would add another regulatory layer
for small businesses to grapple with and that the county
had more important matters to attend to, such as living-wage
policies and countywide civil-rights legislation.
As Cruz read her statement, indignation rippled across
the standing-room-only audience: How could a progressive
liberal knock two decades of solid scientific research and
accumulated common sense?
Behind closed doors, Cruz disparaged the ordinance in even
more forceful terms, calling it yuppie, feel-good legislation
put before the commission to boost Linn and Naito's re-election
prospects in May.
Instead of attacking Cruz's style, lobbyists for the ordinance
cast aspersions on her reasoning and called her a hypocrite.
"It was the first time she'd given a statement on her position,
if you can call it that," says Melissa Torres, an American
Lung Association lobbyist. "She was going around in
circles."
Although Cruz's reasoning was more articulate than that,
it surprised many who thought they knew her.
During the 1998 election cycle, the Tobacco-Free Coalition
sponsored a meeting for candidates for city and county office.
"We put the question to everyone there: If an ordinance
came forth, would you support it?" says Bill Smith, former
director of the coalition. "Everyone was supportive, including
Serena."
"People are concerned by the about face," says Jim Eddy,
an active member of the Smokefree Workplace Coalition. He
says he doesn't understand Cruz's opposition to the ordinance
because "it's not based on anything I can sink my teeth
into."
Why was Cruz's opposition so heated? She says that in the
days leading up to the vote, pressure mounted as she heard
from constituents who'd been told she was pro-smoking. And
she didn't react well to the pressure. "It wasn't fun to
be continually beaten up on," she says.
Another example of Cruz's political thermodynamics came
the week before, over what seemed to be well-trod political
turf. Commissioners were reviewing a proposed resolution
for siting residential group homes. The idea was to trim
away some of the controversy that typically erupts when
these facilities for ex-felons or mentally ill people are
placed in neighborhoods. Informed by her experiences at
the city's Office of Neighborhood Involvement, Linn introduced
the so-called good neighbor certification process. It would
require that proposed homes work with neighbors and neighborhood
associations to ensure local community involvement in the
siting process.
"Lunacy," Cruz called Linn's proposal at the public meeting.
In her view, it would give "racist" neighbors or NIMBYs
the power to stop facilities that would quite often be serving
ethnic minorities.
Although Stein later joined Cruz and nixed the proposal,
many were furious with Cruz.
"She uses labels a lot," says Cindy Peek, Foster-Powell
Neighborhood Association president. Along with her husband,
Jack, Peek has been distributing audio and video-taped copies
of Cruz's comments. "I think that it's inappropriate for
an elected official to engage in name calling."
"I find it real interesting that she'd call folks racist
when we're talking about protecting family and community
and children," says Willie Brown of the Northeast Coalition
of Neighborhoods. "How could that be racist? It bothers
me that she'd say something like that, because it polarizes
folks."
Pam Arden, who ran against Cruz in the May 1998 primary
and now works for the North Portland Neighborhood Office,
says she thinks Cruz is letting her ethnicity color her
better judgment. "She's trying to make her mark as the only
ethnic person to bring these issues forward," Arden says.
"There's more to the community than just a diverse population."
Whatever hurt Linn may have felt after the meeting she
has submerged five weeks later. "This was a classic case
of thoughtful public discourse on a complicated case," she
says. "There were a few things said here and there; this
is a democracy. That doesn't mean we won't have disputes
and meltdowns."
Cruz is unrepentant.
"This is a very white community," she says, "and people
believe that there aren't racist attitudes in our community.
But there are numerous examples of direct and indirect racism,
and it's important to call it what it is."
Cruz also angered the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service with her bid last year to end Multnomah County's
policy of renting jail beds to the federal agency.
For 15 years, the county has rented jail beds to the INS
so it can hold illegal aliens before deporting them. The
policy brings the county approximately $3 million a year
in revenue.
Under its agreement with the county, the INS always has
a call on 100 beds in the county jail system. This puts
Sheriff Dan Noelle in the position where he's sometimes
forced to release local prisoners early to keep the INS
beds open, robbing him of control of the local jail system.
(No local prisoners have been released early since July
1998.)
But Cruz--for whom social justice is job one--felt that
illegals were often denied rights to counsel, detained unfairly
and tossed from the United States based upon INS caprice.
Nor did she like the appearance that the county was funding
social services on the backs of immigrants. Cruz saw the
INS as draconian, viewing it through the lens of family
history; her own mother was repeatedly ushered across the
U.S.-Mexican border during her youth.
Cruz said that the INS targets people based upon their
skin color, something many Latinos and other ethnic minorities
have long believed. Coupled with her frustration over what
she called the county's "immoral" policy, on Nov. 3 Cruz
formed a task force to review the INS-Multnomah County relationship.
(The task force will report back to the commission by the
end of February.)
Seven days later, the INS fired back.
"It appears that Commissioner Serena Cruz has taken an
issue related to the issue of our country's immigration
laws and distorted the facts," Joseph Shaffer, retired assistant
district director of INS's Portland office wrote in a Nov.
10 Oregonian op-ed piece. "Cruz has always played
upon the fear and suspicion many Hispanics have of the Immigration
Service. She knows she can easily cast INS as the villain
by making outrageous allegations."
Not only did Cruz anger the INS, she also aggravated many
Portlanders who can't see placing the concerns of illegal
aliens ahead of those of Oregonians.
Recently, however, Cruz's attitude toward the jail beds--and,
to a lesser degree, the INS--has softened somewhat. She
says she's learned that if the county drops its agreement
with the INS, then the agency will simply detain illegals
in another jurisdiction, like Yamhill County, which has
a reputation for making lawyers jump through hoops when
they want to see their clients.
"I understand immigration law much better today," she says.
"I understand that the INS has no choice but to enforce
the laws the Congress passes." Cruz says, however, that
in a large number of cases the INS has discretionary authority
over who it detains, and that's the area she wants to influence.
Some of Cruz's frustration and anger with the political
process is understandable, even to fellow commissioners
like Kelley and Linn.
"With the county bureaucracy, it takes patience and time
to understand how a county commissioner can move mountains
and make things change," Kelley says. "That has to be a
frustrating thing for a new commissioner. We've all been
there."
At 32, Cruz is the youngest commissioner by nine years
and is only four years out of graduate school. Prior to
her election, she was an aide to City Commissioner Erik
Sten; in his office, stagecraft isn't on the agenda so much
as jousting at giants like AT&T is. "I learned it's
not a bad thing to be the only 'No' vote," she says, after
two years of watching Sten turn into a Doctor No in training
at the City Council.
But unlike Sten, who has a consistent foil in Mayor Vera
Katz and will always look good being the dissenter against
her developer-friendly agenda, Cruz does not have a foil
on the county commission. In fact, the five commissioners
are so close to each other in political philosophy that
trying to tell them apart is a bit like a blind tasting
of macro-brews.
"The County Commission tends to argue over the details,"
says former two-term commissioner Gary Hansen, who is intimate
with the commission's thin ideological divide. "Because
of the narrow differences between them, people tend to get
ticked off easily, but things do tend to move forward."
This situation is not unique to Portland. In San Francisco,
which is all-liberal-Democrat, all-the-time, it's typical
for city/county supervisors who share the same political
DNA to fight as if they want to cut off one another's oxygen
supply.
If you listen to the political talk around Portland, you'll
hear that Cruz may even be right on some of these issues,
but that her style is so contrary to existing Portland norms
that it makes many uneasy about her. They say that Cruz
often acts as if she weren't only elected but crowned as
well--and that she has turned into a royal pain in the process.
"Cruz is very strong-willed," says George Eighmey, a former
state legislator who ran against Linn in 1998. "I can accept
a lack of people skills in people who are very bright, when
they come up with good ideas. But it's the people-skills
people who win the day."
The way veterans see it, Cruz is too smart not to do the
math and realize that re-election beats corporate law any
day (she worked for local law firm Ball Janik before joining
Sten's staff). She works too hard and is too passionate
about her beliefs to throw it away over ego. Many observers
figure she'll run for higher office in the near future,
possibly as soon as 2002 when term limits push Stein out
of office. Ironically, Cruz would probably square off against
Linn for county chair.
"Every politician looks for the balancing act," says Hansen,
now a state representative. "You figure the lay of the land
and what can I do to be effective, but that takes some time;
there's a learning curve."
"What we've got here is youthful passion," says Kelley.
"I think she'll evolve into something different, but I'd
hate to see her lose her degree of passion. She's sincere
in everything she does."
At moments, Cruz herself seems to understand that she needs
to evolve or face the dread hand of political Darwinism.
"I have to figure out how to distance myself from my core
values of social justice and tolerance, so I know how to
express my opinions, but do it in a way that is professional,"
she says.
Late during the Dec. 16 commission meeting, Cruz provided
a perfect clip of how passion and politics sometimes blend
like flour and water. Sometimes, she's the only commissioner
who can make rhetoric sound real. The topic was group homes,
but Cruz had calmed.
"I was nervous we'd reinforce notions in our community
that people who use these facilities are drug addicts and
mentally retarded," she said. "They are our brothers and
sisters! They are not the Other! Government's place is to
challenge the fears that aren't real and support the ones
that are."
Language
Link
Serena Cruz may walk the walk, but does
she talk the talk?
Although many in Oregon's Latino community are thrilled
to have a Latino in high elected office--state Sen. Susan
Castillo (D-Eugene) is the only other Latino elected to
a major office in the state--there are some who feel that
Cruz is not Latino enough.
When they are religious, Latinos are typically intensely
Roman Catholic. Serena Cruz was raised in a strict Mormon
household in Eugene, albeit a single-parent one. It was
a mixture of Latino and American culture. She and her siblings
ate rice, beans and tortillas. Her mother, who as a youth
had picked onions and cotton throughout the Southwest, wanted
her kids to be fully Americanized. Mrs. Cruz didn't mind
that her oldest son played James Taylor and Joni Mitchell
on the radio, though she herself would've preferred ranchera
music.
Still, at North Eugene High School, Cruz would occasionally
hear herself called "spic" and "wetback" as she walked the
halls. Such taunts didn't eat into her too much; she was
Mormon, after all--one of the chosen people.
Cruz left the LDS church when she was 20 and took graduate
degrees at both UC-Berkeley and Harvard University. She's
articulate and smart, and she represents the fastest-growing
ethnic minority in the county. Some say that she still has
a major Achilles' heel: She doesn't speak Spanish.
"If you don't speak the language, you can't be the best
representative," says Christopher Santiago Williams, executive
director of the Oregon Commission on Hispanic Affairs. "You
need to be culturally tied to Latinos, and language is the
strongest link to our culture."
Says Cruz, "I don't believe you have to speak Spanish to
advocate for the community. I wish I spoke Spanish, but
I don't think that makes me less of a Latina." --PD
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Willamette Week | originally
published January 12,
1999
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