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Good works, community advocacy and fund-raising to be recognized on December 4
LEE PERLMAN
THE MID COUNTY MEMO
Mid-County has quite a pair of winners this year - the quintessential Good Boy and, from a city chieftain’s point of view, the ultimate Bad Girl.
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| 2003 Spirit of Portland Award winners and Mid-County residents Bonny McKnight and Joe Rossi enter East Portland Neighborhood Office. |
| MEMO PHOTO: TIM CURRAN |
Rossi, and Rossi Farms, are obvious choices for such an award. The business was once part of a network of Italian farms that owned the vegetable growing business in late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Portland. The Rossi holdings once included the entire Parkrose School District, and much of the community. They serve now as a historical reminder of this communities agricultural industry.
They have always been, and remain among the most active of the community’s boosters. The farm is the scene of at least three annual celebrations, the Barn Dance, the Harvest Festival, and the Haunted HayRide, which are fixtures on the community social calendar, and reliable fundraisers for Parkrose youth activities and many, many other worthy causes. Joe Rossi has contributed in other ways, using the farm tractor to pull a float in the Gateway Area Business Association annual parade, coaching and sponsoring a youth football team, lending his name and influence to insure city development, and proper naming, of Senn’s Dairy Park.
It’s an apt metaphor for Rossi’s image and the role he’s played in recent years: the reflexive good guy, not comfortable with self-promotion per se, but a soft touch for many worthy community causes, especially if he can help in a way that’s creative and fun. Through the good work of Joe and his family, thousands of dollars have been raised to benefit the Parkrose community.
He has livened up the Barn Dance with the showing of two amateur western movies, “The Legend of Parker Rose,” and “James Prescott and the Legend of Parker Rose.” The films were produced the summer before, on the farm and elsewhere, with the help of local talent and pro Tom Mannen. As the fictitious Parkrose namesake Parker Rose, Rossi is true to form: the good guy who is too idealistic and self-effacing for his own good, but who manages to triumph in the end with a little help from his friends.
The “Bad Girl”
McKnight is a less obvious choice. She is not who you’d naturally expect to see getting awards from City Hall, given how much time she spends fighting it, and not always cordially.
True, she is an active volunteer. In addition to chairing her neighborhood association, Russell, she represents it at monthly East Portland Neighborhood Chairs meetings, the equivalent of neighborhood coalitions in other parts of town. She served on the Opportunity Gateway Program Advisory Committee or PAC until quitting due to differences over policy and direction.
She also became a member of the Citywide Land Use Committee, a group of volunteers that meet monthly to discuss issues of general interest. And of Friends of Neighborhood Zoning, an ad hoc group that formed when a group of developers found a way to build at double the allowed density in many communities. When others dropped away from attrition McKnight, a quietly eloquent and confident speaker, gradually moved into a leadership position, and helped guide the latter group to victory when a majority of City Council was eventually moved to pass remedial legislation.
She has also naturally emerged as a foil of commissioner Randy Leonard, a rigid foe of the neighborhood cause on the zoning issue whose own measures to restructure the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, or ONI, have raised hackles. When Leonard met in September with neighborhood leaders at East Precinct to “clear the air,” while others tried to smooth the man’s ruffled feathers, McKnight tangled with him, refusing to settle for what she considered inadequate answers to her questions.
Her role as Bad Girl was confirmed during Leonard’s opening speech to the Neighborhood Summit, a citywide gathering of community leaders produced by ONI last month. The commissioner, who is accused of not engaging in proper process before taking action, recalled being criticized by his wife for not consulting her on a household issue. “‘That’s called process,’” Leonard said he told his wife Julie. “I said, ‘Now you’re sounding like Bonny McKnight.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘maybe you need to listen to Bonny a little more.’”
McKnight was the last speaker of the day, representing yet another group, the Neighborhood Political Action Committee. She called for a reorganization of city government “to match the coalition structure,” presumably seven commissioners elected by district. She also said, “In 30 years the the ONI budget has grown from $104,000 to $7 million. It’s time we got our money’s worth.” She also said people should “identify a way to work with Randy Leonard, if possible.”
Under the circumstances, her award is seen by some as a political statement.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” McKnight told the MEMO when the idea was suggested to her. “Maybe so. I hope so.
I’m very pleased with the award. It’s important to me that I was nominated by people who do what I do. This is not about me. The only difference is that I’m very verbal, but what I’m saying is not very different from what other people are thinking.” She was not amused or assuaged by Leonard’s opening monologue. “He really amazed me,” she says. “This seems to be a continuing theme that I’m causing all his problems. He’s characterizing all his problems as being caused by a few troublemakers. He’s creating his problems, not me.”
A lifelong East Portlander
Born in Emanuel Hospital, McKnight has spent nearly all her life in East Portland. She has worked as the director of a non-profit agency working with ex-offenders, an aide to former governor Betty Roberts, an outreach worker for Tri-Met, and as a worker for the Northeast Workforce Center, in the last case providing training and removing barriers to employment for the unemployed.
Now semi-retired, she leases a house from her son that she had previously sold to him. “I love the lifestyle out here,” she says. “I’ve lived further in, and it’s very different here. It’s a very stable community of small homes. I have seven fir trees, and a number of squirrels that I support.”
As a member of the East Portland Chairs, she is trying to convert the East Portland neighborhood office, one of two run directly by the city, back into the independent non-profit and coalition it once was - so far without success.
“The last few months have been the beginning of a new phase for citizen involvement in Portland,” she says.
Is that bad enough for you?
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