Potter’s process

Back Story • In mayor’s last 16 months there’s still time for action

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, Sep 18, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (6 Reader comments)

jIM CLARK / TRIBUNE FILE PHOTO

Outside City Hall at least, leaders of local churches and other groups credited Potter for his accessibility and ability to engage people. For example, he was the kind of guy who was easy to approach for directions, as a family from Singapore discovered in 2005.

The list was long.

And pure Tom Potter — for better and for worse.

It was last Monday morning at City Hall. Potter — standing next to his wife, Karin Hansen, and sporting a beard he started growing on a camping trip to Southern Oregon a month before — was announcing that he would not run for a second term as Portland’s mayor.

Then he began listing his accomplishments.

He created a Human Rights Commission, he said, with the idea of “knitting our increasingly diverse city together.”

A racial profiling committee he had set up was “already forging recommendations for how police and citizens can work together to eliminate mistrust,” he said.

Another group was “tackling barriers faced by immigrants and refugees.” And his office was creating a Diversity and Civic Leadership Academy “to strengthen the capacity of people to engage government in identifying and solving issues affecting them.”

These things were at the front of his list.

Not bad ideas, of course. But not exactly Mayoral Legacy material, either.

And probably not everything that Tom Potter’s supporters had hoped for when he upended Portland’s political establishment four years ago.

Former Portland police Chief Potter re-emerged in Portland in the summer of 2003, out of retirement and out of nowhere. He mostly became a man standing against somebody, against the political money and political entrenchment of longtime city Commissioner and mayoral candidate Jim Francesconi.

Potter won the 2004 mayor’s race in spite of all of the political wisdom that said a mayoral campaign limiting contributions to $25 had no chance against a Francesconi campaign war chest that turned out to total $1.3 million. After Potter won, rather handily, he governed as sort of the anti-politician.

Three years later, Potter’s announcement last week signaled a political departure that seems likely to be as quiet and anticlimactic as his entrance was jolting and — to some — invigorating.

And Portland is still trying to figure out what exactly it thinks. Was the Potter administration exactly what the city needed? Or a lot less than it had hoped for?

“I think Tom did a whole lot for the city of Portland, in not being afraid to go against conventional wisdom of how government should operate, and by making himself available and accessible,” says Skip Bowman, a local musician and husband of former state Rep. Jo Ann Bowman, who suggested to Potter at a dinner party four years ago that he run for mayor. “It seemed, from my perspective, that morale increased when he was mayor.”

Still, even supporters have expressed some nagging thoughts: that Potter’s has been a mayoral tenure more about process than resolution. More about pondering than moving.

“We’ve had the foreplay, but we don’t have the action,” says former Mayor Bud Clark, a longtime Potter friend who was an important supporter in the 2004 race.

“I think we expected more,” Clark says. He pauses. “Maybe we just hoped for more.”

• • •

Politics not being entirely fair, people may remember two things above just about everything else when they think of Potter’s term.

One is an idea he strongly supported that was trounced by Portlanders at the polls. And the other is a process that his administration started to help define Portland’s future — but that continued to labor on in “input gathering” mode three years into his four-year term.

Potter strongly supported a change to the city’s governing structure that would have significantly strengthened the mayor’s office — and weakened city commissioners’ offices.

The change would have taken management of the city’s governmental bureaus away from commissioners, and given sole executive authority to the mayor, who would hire a professional deputy to oversee the bureaus.

The proposed structure change was part of a group of four changes to the city charter placed in front of Portland voters last May. Voters approved three of the changes. However, even after Potter had spent weeks publicly campaigning for the strong-mayor idea, voters rejected it by almost 3-to-1.

Along the way in the campaign, Potter found some strange bedfellows.

Many of the opponents of the strong-mayor idea were the people who had helped Potter get elected — in spite of Francesconi’s well-funded campaign.

They were neighborhood and grass-roots political activists who believed that Portland’s current form of government, with a mayor and four relatively powerful city commissioners, gives them a better chance at influencing city government decisions.

Meanwhile, many of the supporters of the strong mayor idea, including numerous leaders in Portland’s business community, had been strong financial supporters of Francesconi’s mayoral campaign.

“It’s fundamental in politics you have to keep your base,” city Commissioner Erik Sten says of the campaign on the strong-mayor question. “And he split his base into smithereens by sending out a proposal which a lot of his base — which I’m a part of — thought was bad.”

Potter sees it differently.

“Having spent three years in this job, I can tell you this form of government sucks,” he says, sitting at a table in his office three days after he announced that he wouldn’t run again. “It diffuses responsibility. It’s hard to pinpoint who made decisions.”

Potter rejects the idea that his support of the strong-mayor proposal had any lasting effect on his base of support in Portland.

“The folks who supported me (in the mayor’s race) had a different opinion,” he says. “(But) if they think that because of that … whatever else I’ve done has no value, I don’t agree with that.”

Another major Potter initiative — the “visioning” process, also called VisionPDX — is in many ways on the other end of the political spectrum from the idea of a strong mayor.

The project that Potter initiated after he took office hoped to survey 100,000 Portlanders about what they wanted the city to look like in 30 years. The project, which has involved hundreds if not thousands of volunteers, has so far cost more than $1.2 million and surveyed about 15,000 people.

A final report from the project’s steering committee — first scheduled to be finished last April, 17 months after the project began — now is set to be presented to the City Council on Wednesday. Potter aides say that ideas sparked by the project are likely to be pursued in the coming months.

Even supporters of Potter and the idea say the process has taken too long and probably needed more direction from mayor’s office staff — with continual requirements for concrete results — than it’s gotten.

“I think he wanted to have the vision project done a year ago, and implemented by now,” Sten says.

For many, the visioning process has been an almost perfect example of how Potter has both succeeded and failed as mayor.

The process, like other Potter initiatives, has sought to involve more Portland citizens in city government — and especially more citizens who aren’t upper-middle-class whites — than ever before.

The Rev. Chuck Currie, interim minister at the Parkrose Community United Church of Christ in east Portland and a longtime advocate for the homeless, says: “Over the last 20 years of my work on these issues in Portland … I found his office, out of all of them, to be the most accessible. He really did bring a sense of openness to City Hall.”

Sten says, “I’m astounded and pleased with how many new people he’s brought into community activism.”

However, Sten says, gathering input is only part of the job; creating worthwhile action from the input is the completion of the job.

“I don’t think they ever quite melded the outsider’s desire to bring in new people with the need to make the system work,” Sten says of Potter’s office.

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