Moments of Truth...and Consequences
City council just won't shut up; the anniversary of Portland's loss of innocence; yet another scary thing about the Lid...
You Asked For It, You Got It
As I tuned in to the endless City Council session—all those grim-faced folks staring into their computer terminals—I recalled Jerry Lewis and his annual—44 years!—“Telethons…”
…the comic mugging and sweating and schnorring on TV in day-long appeals to cough up bucks to cure muscular dystrophy…which as of now, isn’t.
The twelve pols on the $8-million dias (each pulling down $133K a year and piling up lots of expenses) put on quite a show…15 excruciating hours.1 Maybe it was bad luck but every time I tuned in, they seemed to be trying to figure out stuff that’s in Roberts Rules of Order. And in being Portland Polite—until it came time to knee the cops in the groin.
So nice to know we’ll cut the grass in the ill-managed, profligate parks instead of beefing up the police. No surprises that seven pols, including the socialist caucus2, told Chief Day that he really ought to be looking for a job in city less congenial to the criminal constituency.
So it came as a real surprise that, of all people, Councilor Dan Ryan coughed up the most telling analysis of the socialists’ carnage….on Instagram, of all places.3 Here’s what he said (after clearing his throat with praise for his stands on “Support Our Storefronts” and a tennis center)...
Last night made one thing clear: this new Council is not aligned on key priorities.
I didn’t expect full agreement from this new Council, but I did expect a shared commitment to core city services and listening to Portlanders. The Mayor’s budget did that. Many of the Council’s amendments did not. Instead, we saw political micromanagement, false-choice amendments, and special-interest appeasement.
The most reckless move came just before midnight: a $2 million reduction to the Portland Police Bureau, passed by seven Councilors. This undermines public safety progress and ignores what most working families, small businesses, and seniors—want: a safer, more livable city.
Too many Council decisions now serve national narratives and political agendas that don’t reflect the reality on our streets. I won’t stand by while performative politics replaces practical solutions.
Ryan, for those of you with long (in Portland terms) memories, was on the last Council—back when they were called commissioners and actually ran city bureaus, as opposed to the bureaus being buried deep behind the city “administrator” and his layers of obfuscation and CYAism. (An arrangement we predict will come to be regarded with nostalgia when the current government stumbles through a few more budget marathons.)
Ryan was…how can we put this respectfully? Seen as an embodiment of the Peter Principle4, especially by Mayor Wheeler, who kept moving Ryan from one bureau to another in search of…whatever. Give him credit for calling the shot on this one.
Good to know Ryan will be on the socialistas’ case—but everyone has managed to ignore the elephant in the room, especially our local media scribblers.
This is what Julia Meier and her followers on the City Charter Commission—remember them?—wanted to happen. No one will own up to the origin of the bizarre three councilors per district scheme, which mandated each being elected with 25-percent (no more, no less) of the “ranked choice” vote, which no one really understands except for the company that wrote the computer code.
It was designed to barf up the likes of Mitch Green (“Socialize housing!”5) and Angelita Morillo (“I ride the bus!”) and Sameer Kanal (“Cops give me the willies”).
Elect people with 25-percent of a weird vote, and you will get people who appeal to a weird minority. Which is what Meier and Co. explicitly wanted. With plays being run in from the City Club and the Coalition of Communities of Color (an oxymoron), the “minorities” were expected to be racial; they turned out to be political: cultish, organized, disciplined, fanatical, and motivated. How else to describe the local Democratic Socialist Party? (Although it would be awfully nice to know where they actually get their funding.)
Thus, we have the spectacle (again, for those with memory circuits still operable) of Steve “Tiny Terror” Novick moving crablike toward the lunatic reaches of the left. He’ll be up for re-election next year, and he knows who he has to satisfy to keep his six-figure job. And it won’t be the city’s somnolent middle-of-the-roaders.6
They exist, but they’re uninformed, lack any real spokesperson, and are stumbling around trying not to offend anyone—or spend very much money. (As for the conservatives—Trump got around 75K votes in the county—their total political philosophy is, Lemme alone!)
Meanwhile, the marathon was yet another reminder that the mayor, no matter who sits in the Big Chair, doesn’t count for beans. The blizzard of “amendments” to his budget—124 in all, not counting the many amendments to amendments—were proof that the city council has run amok. If the geniuses who wrote the charter had given the mayor a veto, the meeting wouldn’t have lasted 15-hours. Two or three, tops.
But then Mayor Keith is kinda shy about power; he sat silently in the audience in the first council session as it deadlocked 6-6 over choosing a new president and didn’t do what the new charter commanded: break the tie.7
Stuff like this always comes back to haunt a pol. His moment passed. It ain’t coming back.
Happy Anniversary!!!
Sunday is the fifth anniversary of the death of George Floyd.
Surely you remember him—or what you were told was him: a martyr to (fill in the blanks, depending on your political inclinations). You might date the beginning of the end of Portland’s national reputation as an easygoing, nice place with nice people doing slightly nutty—but nice—things to the events in far-off Minneapolis that day. Which, as we now know, bore little resemblance to what we later learned…in the fine print.
Our radical friends and neighbors put on a hell of a show…
…although those helter-skelter days of fire bombs, lasers, “milkshakes,” tear gas, Antifa hunts, masked college sophomores, general hysteria have now been stuffed down the city’s memory hole. I doubt that the Oregonian, for example, will devote the same amount of effort to what happened during those years as they did in joining the white guilt parade by exposing its historic racism during the Floyd hysteria.
Today’s Wall Street Journal noted the anniversary—it’s behind a paywall, but here are a few uncomfortable look-backs8…
During the civil unrest between May and July, more than 2,000 officers were injured in the line of duty, according to an analysis by the Major City Chiefs Association, an organization of police executives. Of 8,700 protests across major U.S. cities that summer, 3,692 involved some level of illegal activity, and 574 included outright violence, including attacks on police as well as destruction of local businesses and other private property.
The report found 2,385 looting incidents, 624 arson incidents, and 97 police vehicles burned.
…and…
The movement—especially its main organization at the time, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation—organized the mayhem. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project reported in September 2020 that at least 86% of riots for which the identification of the participants was known were explicitly linked to Black Lives Matter activism.
…and…
…the founders of BLM, particularly Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, were trained by Marxist ideologues: Ms. Cullors in radical-left activist Eric Mann’s Labor/Community Strategy Center, and Ms. Garza in Gramscian scholar Harmony Goldberg’s School of Unity and Liberation.
The goal of these BLM leaders was clear. In 2019 Ms. Garza had told a group in Maine, “We’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country. . . . I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society.”
Walking around with silly signs—and even a guillotine-hat on someone’s head—is now embedded in our DNA.
Somehow, I think the Floyd riots and the city charter are weirdly related.
A Last Look at the Lid…
We’re not fans of City Commentary, which is run by Joseph Cortright, who used to be associated with Portland State University and is now principal of the Impresa consulting firm—and a charter member of the “jackhammer the freeways” cult.
It’s no surprise that he and his Substack newsletter hate the idea of straightening out the kink in the I-84/I-5 interchange…or, for that matter dropping a lid over the top of the freeway. And don’t get him going about the I-5 Bridge over the Columbia!
Hard to know what he thinks ought to replace freeways—bikes and buses, most likely.
His latest newsletter pointed out yet another reason to view the Lid with some apprehension, beyond all that talk about reuniting a neighborhood that hasn’t existed for five decades. To make the scheme work, as Cortright points out under the headline, Rose Quarter’s Deadly Off Ramps…
The plan to widen I-5 through the Rose Quarter, at the staggering cost of $2.1 billion, has a new added safety problem, a complicated new freeway offramp, of the kind that often leads to serious or fatal crashes.
…with a handy illustration…
…which, if it ever gets built, will be a symphony of crunching metal and another subsidy for the town’s proliferating body repair shops. I particularly love that blend-in with the traffic merging from two directions on Weidler St., which is pretty hairy as it stands…
..and leaves one wondering what will become of the BIPOC Village when the dust settles.
Actually, now that we think of it, the jackhammer doesn’t seem so bad…
It left me wondering if the councilors think they’re being paid by the hour.
The socialists seem like nice people, but you’ve got to wonder why they’re espousing a political fantasy that, in the real world, killed millions in the 20th century—and cost more millions any semblance of freedom.
As I write this, local legacy media hasn’t reported it.
The truism that executives (and pols) rise to their level of incompetence.
Sorry, Mitch, Metro beat you to the punch.
Fitfy-percent couldn’t be bothered to fill out the damn postpaid ballots.
The city’s legal eagle, Robert L. Taylor, proving he could read who holds the real power, said the mayor couldn’t break this sort of tie. Wilson retained his services.
Richard, you can write with authority because of all you’ve seen in politics working in Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia. This nailed Keith Wilson: “Stuff like this always comes back to haunt a pol. His moment passed. It ain’t coming back.”
I don't think it's random that Dan Ryan's spine only started to grow in *after* the charter was officially changed, and he decided to go after the moderate/has-ever-opened-an-econ-textbook-in-their-lives voting bloc of District 2. (Clearly an excellent strategy, based on the other reps he won with.) But whatever.
With the whole police budget thing, I really think Portland's only hope is to collapse under the weight of it's own idiocy, come to its senses, and rise from the ashes. I do place a fair amount of blame on the voting public, frankly. Regardless of the Political Machine, many of the survey-takers begging for public safety now are the same dummies who got swept up in the 2020 deranged white guilt era and voted to spend 5% of the Police Budget on the police accountability board. So even if it was .1% of the population responsible for trashing the city for the next decade, it was over 50% who voted to let them do whatever they want.