NEWS BUZZ

murmurs | scoreboard | rogue of the week

IS PPS LOSING ITS PRINCIPALS?
Portland Public Schools may be losing another highly respected principal. WW has learned that Charles Hopson, who for the past six years has served as principal at Tubman Middle School, is a leading candidate for the top job at McNary High School in Salem.

Coming after the earlier resignations of Kevin Bacon from Jefferson High and Ted Feller from Whitaker Middle School, Hopson's departure adds to the pressure on Portland Public Schools Superintendent Ben Canada.

Losing Hopson would be significant for a couple of reasons. First, Tubman, which serves a predominantly low-income, minority population, is one of the bright spots among the 14 schools targeted by the Education Crisis Team. Tubman has shown improved test scores particularly in reading, and preliminary data show a narrowing achievement gap between minority and white students. "The school has come a long way," says school board member Sue Hagmeier, whose daughter attends Tubman. "[Hopson] does a good job of not only designing what he wants to have done but focusing the staff on doing it."

Second, Hopson, who previously served as a vice principal at Jefferson High, was a candidate for the Jefferson principal's job last spring, and his name has surfaced again following Bacon's recent resignation.

Contacted by WW, Hopson confirmed that he is a finalist at McNary, which he says recruited him. Hopson says his decision to consider McNary was complicated because several people in the Jefferson community have encouraged him to apply for Bacon's job. "The difficulty is that I have strong feelings for the community that feeds into Jefferson," he says. If he were to leave, he says, it would be for the opportunity McNary presents, rather than because he's unhappy with the Portland district.

McNary is expected to name its new principal by mid-April.

--Nigel Jaquiss

ROUSING THE WATCHDOG
Portland's top government watchdog, City Auditor Gary Blackmer, wants to transform the way we investigate police misconduct. But instead of defusing the long-smoldering issue, his new proposal is likely to pour gasoline on it.

This week Blackmer will issue a report calling for big changes to the Police Internal Investigations Auditing Committee, the citizens' panel that reviews the bureau's misconduct probes.

Blackmer suggests replacing PIIAC's citizen volunteers with a staff of professional investigators who would work under him, behind closed doors. The staff would monitor ongoing internal probes, in addition to reviewing completed ones (as is current practice). On occasion, they could conduct their own investigations using private investigators, and put their case to an independent hearings officer if they think the bureau screwed up.

These proposals will infuriate many reformers, who hoped Blackmer would echo a city task force recommendation last fall that Portland switch to civilian investigators, as is done in Minneapolis.

But Blackmer says there is a "chasm" in Minneapolis between the review board and police. "The best way to change an organization," he says, "is to get the organization changing itself."

Jim Michels, an attorney for the Minneapolis police union, agrees with Blackmer that the union doesn't like having a citizen board ruling on police discipline. But he told WW that officers actually have "more confidence" in civilian investigators than in police internal affairs sleuths.

Whereas internal affairs sometimes pursues agendas based on internal politics, Michels said, civilian investigators "are very thorough and don't seem to have a bias one way or another."

Blackmer's proposal has undergone rapid evolution. As of Sunday, he planned to reduce public involvement by relegating citizens to a board of directors, and to curtail public hearings on appeals by dissatisfied citizens.

But by Tuesday his plan included two levels of citizen involvement, with public hearings both when appeals are filed and later, when staff disagrees with police findings.

--Nick Budnick

SCOREBOARD

WINNERS

LOSERS

1. Maybe he's not all wet. City Commissioner Erik Sten landed support from the City Council for his proposal to make the city's Bull Run reservoirs part of a regional authority, thus easing suburban fears of being hung out to dry. 2. A bankruptcy court judge revealed last week that despite his role in the largest pension-fund fraud in history, Barclay Grayson, the former president of Capital Consultants, scored a new $100k-a-year job. 3. Dope dealers rejoiced with last week's news that, thanks to voter-approved Measure 3, Multnomah County will stop using civil forfeiture proceedings to seize ill-gotten gains.

1. Thanks to an appeal by some Sauvie Island property owners, nudists on the "clothing optional" Collins Beach are under renewed legal scrutiny. An unfavorable ruling in Columbia County Circuit Court could put them under wraps for good. 2. Bad news for white supremacists: An Oregonian analysis showed that one of every seven babies born in Oregon is of mixed race. The O's study of 1999 birth records found that most of the "multiracial births" involved a white parent. 3. Taxpayers continue to subsidize timber companies, environmental degradation and exploitation of public lands. Last week the U.S. Forest Service announced that in 1998 its timber harvesting program lost $126 million, its worst year ever.

The Plot Thickens
The race to replace Bev Stein as Multnomah County chair is
heating up.

State Rep. JoAnn Bowman (D-Portland) jumped into the ring Tuesday, becoming the second candidate to officially declare her campaign (County Commissioner Diane Linn was the first) for the special election scheduled May 15.

Bowman, who will resign from the Legislature this week, says she's not bothered by talk that she's been on the losing side of two recent political campaigns: the failed effort to force a citywide vote on police accountability, and last November's attempt to repeal Measure 11, which was smashed at the polls. "We made the state of Oregon have a conversation about changing Measure 11," Bowman says.

She told WW she plans to raise and spend upwards of $200,000 on the chair's race--twice as much as experts feel is needed to run.

Will the election boil down to a choice between the feisty, outspoken Bowman and the inclusive, consensus-seeking Linn? Or will dark horse Sheriff Dan Noelle join the fray?

Last week the sheriff endorsed County Commissioner Serena Cruz. But Cruz backed out of the race the next day.

After a meeting held Monday between Noelle and Linn to iron out their differences, Noelle told WW he was "still thinking" about getting into the race.

Noelle said he'd make a decision by Friday, as other potential candidates were waiting in the wings--including one Noelle says he has "encouraged."

More candidates are expected to enter the field before the March 29 filing deadline. "It's an open seat and that's just too tempting for some people," says Rhys Scholes, Stein's senior policy adviser.

--Philip Dawdy

ROGUE OF THE WEEK
Seen a rogue on the loose?
Contact our roguemeister,
John Schrag
jschrag@wweek.com

We sighed when they shut down the Ross Island Bridge. We bit our tongue on the Broadway. We muttered about the Morrison. But now we can stand it no longer. Despite the jackhammers pounding away at three Willamette River crossings until October, a Rogues Gallery of bureaucrats--ironically named Keep Portland Moving--has given Paramount Pictures the green light to snarl traffic on that holy of holies, the Hawthorne Bridge--to film a movie called The Hunted.

The unholy alliance includes the Oregon Department of Transportation, Multnomah County, Tri-Met, the city Bureau of Environmental Services and the city Office of Transportation.

Commuters are fuming. "Three bridges being out of commission at the same time makes no sense," says Cheryl Stevens, a legal secretary who crawls across the Hawthorne Bridge every day on the 14 bus. "It just seems like it's an incredible inconvenience for a great number of people."

Paramount will shut one lane in each direction during non-rush hours and on weekends for the rest of March and close the bridge completely on weekends during April.

Hawthorne merchants, who endured a 13-month bridge closure in 1998-99, say The Hunted will cost them dear. "I'm very worried about it," says Hawthorne clothier Mary Sellin. "When the bridge is closed, business drops off."

Mary Volm, a spokeswoman for the city's office of transportation, says Paramount will spend as much as $22 million locally while filming and contributed $50,000 for a "bike oasis," which will provide covered parking for 10 bikes at Southeast 36th Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard.

That's great. But what we'd really like Paramount to do is spend two months shooting The Hunted in council chambers--with the big wheels at Keep Portland Moving as their quarry.

Spoofing Tom Hallman
In the past two weeks, The Oregonian's Tom Hallman has raked in two prestigious awards--The Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Writing and the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award--for his series last year, "The Boy Behind the Mask."

While Hallman's distinctive style pleases contest judges, some of his newsroom colleagues have long found his work overly sentimental and artificial. In the wake of his recent awards, the following satire of Hallman's prose, has been circulating around town. It was reportedly composed several years ago by an Oregonian staffer who had just cranked out a routine police story:

The yellow tape fluttered in the breeze.

Inside the lines, the bloody clothing was heaped in a ball.

Neighbors stared.

One woman stood alone. She didn't know anything about what happened.

"I didn't see it," she said.

Shots rang out.

Like fireworks.

Another shooting somewhere.

The victim was already gone.

She had been shot in the neck.

"She had a hole there," a fireman said, pointing to his neck.

Another woman stood alone.

She saw the body.

I'm a nurse, she said as she chatted with a friend. "I knew she was dead.

Her brains were falling out."

Police walked around. The yellow tape lines grew larger.

A police siren wailed.

Cats meowed.

A dog barked.

Police had seen this kind of thing before.

Shot in the neck. Dumped from a car.

Who knows what else happened?

It was in front of a school.

Children played there earlier in the day.

The King School.

Seventh and Alberta. 8:20 p.m.

She dead, somebody said.

Real dead.

Everyone had seen this before.

Dead.

Real dead.

slugging it out at Teleport
"Thank you for calling Teleport. Press 1 if your email doesn't work. Press 2 if you have been on hold since the last ice age. Press 3 if you wish to join a class-action suit..."

Sure, people love to gripe about their Internet service providers, but over the last month, the flood of complaints about Teleport--a.k.a. OneMain, a.k.a. Earthlink--has swollen to biblical proportions. Now a class-action lawsuit soon to be filed by three local lawyers will give frustrated users a way to download their spleen.

Portland lawyers Phil Goldsmith, Andrew Kierstead and Matt Rossman are preparing to file a class-action lawsuit "on behalf of all Teleport and OneMain users in the Portland area" that will accuse the company of breach of contract and seek injunctive relief and damages.

Internet delays, like traffic jams, infuriate even the mildest mouse-jockey. Take Charles Sheketoff, executive director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy, who usually spends his time advocating for Oregon's poor. Now he sends missives blasting his ISP. "They're taking hours, even days, to deliver in-state email," grumbled Sheketoff. "'Earthlink' is an oxymoron."

Booted up in a Beaverton bookstore, Teleport was once one of Portland's most popular and successful ISPs. Its purchase by Virginia-based OneMain in 1999 did not seem to trouble Teleport's 49,000 subscribers, who noticed no substantial change in service.

But after the ascendant and ambitious Earthlink dug into its deep pockets and paid $262 million for OneMain, customers began to complain about backlogged email and elusive tech support. While users have kept their dot-teleport addresses during this trip up the cyber food chain, the recent nosedive in service is causing mass defections to other ISPs such as EasyStreet and IPNS.

WW reached Scott Lyon, OneMain's assistant general counsel in Reston, Va., who had no comment and referred us to Dan Greenfield, vice president of corporate communication, who had no comment but referred us to Van Holmes, corporate communications officer, who was not in.

--David Shafer

Murmurs
WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' PRESS PASS!

* Terence O'Donnell, one of the most astute and eloquent observers of Oregon history, spent his final days looking east--the Middle East, to be precise. Friends say that O'Donnell, who died at home Monday at the age of 76, was working on his first novel, an espionage story set in Iran. O'Donnell, former head of the Oregon Historical Society, spent 15 years in the Middle East and wrote the 1980 book Garden of the Brave in War: Recollections of Iran.

* Clackamas health insurer QualMed, now known as Health Net Health Plan of Oregon, was slapped with a $50,000 fine from the state insurance division after the company admitted that it arbitrarily withheld payment from claims. State investigators found that almost a third of QualMed's denials in 1999 were conducted without a "reasonable investigation," in addition to other misdeeds. QualMed was fined for similar violations in 1996.

* In a highly unusual move, federal Judge Thomas Coffin has ordered the Portland School Board to show up en masse in his chambers on March 15, presumably to explain to him why they've rejected district counsel's recommendation to settle a lawsuit brought by Minh Tran, a PPS administrator. Coffin, best known for presiding over the trial of cart-riding golfer Casey Martin, has argued that the get-together is exempt from public meeting laws, which means the public and the press are barred.

* Inbound commuters on the Sunset Highway were greeted by a new sign last week, just before the Vista Tunnel, directing them to PGE Park rather than Civic Stadium. ODOT isn't the only organization gearing up for Portland Family Entertainment's season opener: the Portland Tribune paid an undisclosed amount to sponsor three years of Friday night high-school football, trumping Portland's daily for the rights.

* City Commish Charlie Hales isn't mayor yet, but you'd never know that by reading the new City Smart guide to Portland ($14.95, Avalon Travel). Mayor Vera Katz didn't warrant a single mention, but Hales authored two brief essays and got a plug for his Steel Bridge skateboard park, even though it isn't built yet! How to explain the good fortune? Hales aide Marc Zolton (who gets a "special thanks" in the acknowledgements) got to know the guide's co-author, Paul Koberstein, when the two were slumming it at WW back in the early '90s. When WW suggested that the mayor might not be amused, Katz aide Elisa Dozono demurred: "Not amused? That's not true. We might be highly amused."

* Murmurs hears that Multnomah County Undersheriff Mel Hedgepeth is lining up support for a run at the sheriff's job next year. His likely opponent will be Gresham Police Chief Bernie Giusto.

* Oregon's farmworkers union, PCUN, got a boost when Southern Oregon University joined the 9-year-old boycott
of NORPAC Foods. The Ashland college is the fourth in the state to ban foods processed by NORPAC from its campus until labor conditions improve on the farms that provide crops to the giant produce packer. Willamette University, Western Oregon University and Lewis & Clark College had already joined the boycott.

* After 16 months of fractious relations with City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, the city's embattled 911 boss, Sherrill Whittemore, is "retiring" this week. Saltzman, who tried to force her out last year after a host of problems including chronic absenteeism, reports that she's continued to miss up to 20 percent of her work weeks. Still, it's taking a $71,000 inducement to get her out of Dodge.