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LEE PERLMAN
THE MID-COUNTY MEMO
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| East Portland State Rep. Jefferson Smith will face Charlie Hales in a November runoff to be Portland's next mayor. Mid-county Memo photo/Tim Curran |
One of the most important functions a Portland mayor has is the assignment of city bureaus to the five members of council to administer. What bureau assignments would Smith make? Noting that incumbent Amanda Fritz and challenger Mary Nolan are due for a runoff election, Smith told the Memo, “I would be humble about assignments until I know what the full council will be.” He would assign himself the Office of Management and Finance, and “absent extenuating circumstances,” Police and Emergency Services. He might also keep the Bureau of Environmental Services and he hasn't ruled out overseeing the Office of Neighborhood Involvement. Nolan, in her Memo interview, had said she would like to have the Portland Development Commission but that the mayor usually keeps it; Smith agrees this is the tradition but says, “I'm not committed to that.”
He adds, “[Commissioner Dan] Saltzman wants more frequent rotation of the bureaus, and it's a proposal with merit. It allows all of us to see the whole city, and how the bureaus interact.” Discussing other bureaus he says that with transportation, “We need to see the whole city, watch how we'd address rising transportation costs with revenues that are not keeping pace.” Regarding the water bureau he says, “We need to look at near-term cost-reduction strategies, and look for more savings over time.”
At a time when the city budget cannot furnish everything everyone would want, where would Smith look first to make cuts if necessary, and what services would he preserve at all costs? “While I wouldn't quickly eliminate anyone's job, the first place I would look for cuts would be the management structure,” Smith says. “The aspirational staff-management ratio is one supervisor for every 11 workers; in the city now, it's one to six. I would also look at large outsourced contracts.” Programs he would fight to save are the Schools Uniting Neighborhoods after school programs, the parks bureau's summer recreation programs, and citizen participation.
What has been Smith's best day in public life, and what is he proudest of? “I try not to feel pride because I'm part of a team endeavor,” Smith says. However, referring to his experience in the Oregon House of Representatives, he says, “I was glad when we got on-line voter registration; people are using it. I was pretty satisfied when we got a water bill across the House and Senate floors and the governor didn't veto it. It wasn't perfect, but any bill with investment in water resources and environmental benefit is very hard to put together, and people were trying to shotgun it.” Smith said he later collaborated with Jody Wiser of Tax Fairness Oregon on a bill that shrunk such breaks and “saved $10 million.”
The happiest day was “the day I announced I was getting married” (to Katy Lesowski).
Smith's greatest regret - what would he have done differently? “I supported voter-owned elections,” he says, “but if I had it to do over, I would have pushed harder for it. Had we raised $25,000 more, had we knocked on 10,000 more doors, we would have won. Under the current campaign arrangement, the number of people who can run with campaigns costing what they do is very small.” (Voter-owned elections, repealed in 2010, provided public funding for the election of candidates who collected 1,000 contributions of $5 each from eligible voters.) His worst day in office, he says, was “the day I was bummed because we re-upped [renewed] $50 to $100 million in corporate tax breaks; we lost on a procedural vote.”
Some of our readers think the budget of the new Office of Equity would be better spent on maintaining our public infrastructure. Smith says, “We do need to spend more on infrastructure. The Office of Equity is an imperfect scapegoat for that. It's a pretty small part of the budget.”
Regarding the East Portland Action Plan Smith says, “I'd assess it very positively. It's done a significant amount to increase involvement and coordination by east Portlanders. An increasing number of people here are engaged in city processes. It's an experiment with participatory budgeting. It also seems to have increased our sense of community.”
Critics argue EPAP - created to address the city's chronic inattention to the area - is a top-down, government-induced solution using crony capitalism to secure political outcomes favorable to City Hall. Simultaneously EPAP gives city government political cover, masking its failure to keep promises made to voters more than 20 years ago during annexation to provide amenities the rest of Portland enjoys: A robust, developed park system built-out sidewalks and paved streets.
Asked about his personal and his campaign's contributions to businesses east of 82nd Avenue, Smith said, “We shop here (Smith lives in Mid-county), do our dry cleaning, get bike stuff, pay our taxes here, eat dinner here. We hosted an event at El Indio (in Gateway). I think we advertised with you guys. I'm the candidate, not the campaign manager, but I've asked that we advertise in local media.”
Finally, we asked Smith, if it emerged that you were involved in an incident embarrassing to you, how would you handle it? “I hope that I would have the courage to acknowledge the behavior, explain it, and apologize,” Smith said.
Interviewer Lee Perlman's side note:
Both candidates were a bit coy about their future bureau assignments, but that is par for the course for Portland mayors. They gave virtually identical answers to the question of how they would deal with embarrassing situations. In retrospect, we have to say it is too bad they cannot seem to practice what they preach.
Following my interviews, it was revealed that Smith's driving record includes a number of serious infractions. Rather than simply come clean, it was revealed in installments that his license had been suspended seven times, and that at least once he was caught driving with a suspended license.
As for Hales, it would seem that anything he does wrong is someone else's fault. When it developed that a recent campaign statement was plagiarized from a 2009 Oregonian article, Hales said it was first the fault of his staff, and later the St. Johns Review newspaper. The Southwest Community Plan, a venture Hales oversaw, which had a cost over-run of more than $1 million and took more than three years past its scheduled time to complete was, according to him, the fault of City planners. (Some of those planners beg to differ.) Then there is the matter of Hales' dual residency and tax records, Smith's failure to vote regularly before 2002 and the suspensions of his law license three times for failure to pay dues.
Consciously or not, they both seem to be promoting the bumper sticker, “If God meant us to vote, he'd have given us candidates.”
Interestingly, they both have campaign headquarters in southeast Portland, albeit in very different areas (Hales in a storefront on Southeast Grand Avenue, Smith in an empty industrial space on Southeast Holgate Boulevard. They also both have cute and friendly office dogs.
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