September 2, 2011 6:33 AM

A recurring (and somewhat irregular) homage to my hometown

This is destined to be a very wealthy portion of the United States, and, if to this we can add the most temperate, nothing will prevent our rising, and becoming a valuable acquisition to the union. Much power now lies in your hands, and, I sincerely hope, we may commence our new career with a law in our statute books, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of ardent spirits in Oregon territory.

George Abernethy (Legislative Message, 1849)

I don’t write a lot about Portland. As much as I love living here- and I truly, deeply do- my interests, as least as far as my writing goes, have always been on what feels like a grander scale. Yeah, Portland can feel a wee bit provincial at times, but it has it’s own sort of quirkiness that’s finally beginning to grow on me. No, it doesn’t have the over-the-top corruption and epic lack of self-awareness that you find in Texas politics. It’s certainly not Baghdad-by-the-Columbia (apologies for the horrid paraphrasing to the late Herb Caen). It’s not quite as PC as San Francisco. And it’s most definitely not as self-absorbed as Los Angeles or full of itself as New York. Still, Portland’s unique character can be rather humorous…if one chooses to view in that vein.

The first episode of Portlandia referred to Portland as a place where young people go to retire. Hang around any of Portland’s ubiquitous coffee shops for any length of time, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. Yes, things are a little different here, perhaps because with so many hipsters trying to be unique things do get to be a bit weird at times. Beyond the coffee, the microbrews, the elephant ears, and the maple bacon donuts, this is really a very large small town…one that can quite often be rather schizophrenic. That’s just one of the reasons I love this place.

Going forward, I’m going to try to write more about Portland, mostly because there’s so much here that fascinates me. I know; we all think we live in a little piece of Heaven (except for those of you who live in Houston; you know you live in Hell…whether or not you’ll admit to it is another story). We all tend to think that our little corner of the universe is special and unique and wonderful, and just by believing it becomes that. So it is with my adopted hometown. I may not have been born or raised here, but I got here as fast as I could (and yes, I DID steal that from a bumper sticker in Texas).

As time goes by, and on a very irregular basis, I’ll pass along a few things that make me glad to live in Portland- where the skies are cloudy all day, and nary is heard a word that doesn’t involve complaining about the lack of sunshine. You may or may not find these things interesting or amusing, but to me they’re part and parcel of what makes my little piece of Heaven as quirky and disjointed and wonderful as it is.

Today’s topic is the City of Portland’s proposed Office of Equity, which left one wag wondering why Portland can’t also have an Office of Awesomeness? It’s an idea that, at least on its face, makes sense. After all, who would argue with ensuring that equal opportunities are made equally available to all Portlanders on an equitable basis? This being government- and Portland government, in particular- the devil is in the details. In his State of the CIty Address, Mayor Sam Adams proposed that Portland create an Office of Equity. He set a $1.1 million budget, which would pay for perhaps 8-10 city employees, with startup funds of $100,000 available on July 1st. So…great idea, right? Everybody’s on board and excited…right?

Well, not so fast there, kimosabe. It turns out that Portland already has an Office of Human Relations, and while Adams tasked Commissioner Amanda Fritz to supervise the Office of Equity, he neglected to make any actual plans or create a mission for the new bureaucracy. In other words, Adams created an office…but neglected to provide any details about what the office would actually do and how it would do it.

“It seems as if they’ve created something, but they don’t know what they’ve created,” former Mayor Tom Potter said. “To me, it’s integral to whether Portland is the kind of city we want to be.” But, he said, the plan has “no bones.”

Adams and Fritz established a 32-member committee to advise them on the new office, with advocates for students, minorities, contractors, laborers, and homeless and disabled people. But the only meeting, last month, accomplished little as Adams talked of “bridge-building” and others expounded on their particular interests.

“It’s only frustrating if you like getting things done,” said member Marcus Mundy, president of the Urban League of Portland.

And that, y’all, is what makes this whole escapade so…Portland. If memory serves, the term “wooly-headed Liberal” was coined to describe politicians in Portland. In this case, it’s actually rather amusing, because Mayor Adams set up an office to do what seems ostensibly to be a good thing. It’s not as if there aren’t examples of not-so-subtle racism in Portland. The state of Race relations in Portland isn’t exactly something those of us who live here can be proud of. Being good Liberals, though, we like to pat ourselves on the back in self-congratulation over our progressiveness.

So we have an Office of Equity with no mission, no direction (and currently, no director). As things stand currently, even if the office was fully staffed, funded, and armed with a mission statement, it would have no enforcement authority. I don’t know about you, but a city government office armed with little more than the power of persuasion and brow-beating seems kinda like a huge waste of money- no small thing in an era of ever-diminishing tax revenues.

And it’s not as if the City of Portland has to go far for an example of what they could do- if only Mayor Adams would remove his anterior from his posterior. Multnomah County, which includes Portland, has an Office of Diversity and Equity. If he was so inclined, Adams could pretty much copy and paste what Multnomah County does into his Office of Equity. That this hasn’t happened speaks to the drift and malaise that’s characterized much of Adam’s checkered reign as Mayor. Things have become silly enough that even the editorial board of the Oregonian has weighed in on the matter:

In the past half-year or so, the overly vague idea has gained some form and substance, but we’re still not sure whether it is as fully baked as it would need to be to successfully launch and do some good. Certainly the idea has a great deal of appeal….

An obvious observation here: Nearly every aspect of modern government — if not modern life — comes with rules about equity imbedded. There are rules for hiring, firing, promoting, demoting, sanitation, food service, lighting, the height of counters, the slopes of ramps and almost anything else you can think of. In a perfect world, they would all be followed and offices of equity, auditors, building inspectors and inspectors general would not be necessary. But as the disparity reports we just mentioned show plainly, that is not the world we live in. If we can manage to successfully take on such issues in the cause of fairness for everyone, why shouldn’t we try?

Well, for one thing, local governments don’t need excuses to start new initiatives. Money is tight. New initiatives don’t grow well these days, and those that do need to succeed, clearly and quickly.

Portland could start by taking an even closer look at the cost of putting together this initiative. Adams and Commissioner Amanda Fritz, whom Adams would put in charge of the Office of Equity, have already agreed to combine it with the city’s similarly tasked Human Relations Office, but the projected annual cost would be somewhere north of $1 million. It needs to be a lot south of that number….

Establishing an Office of Equity for Portland could be truly successful or a miserable waste of money. It can offer new insight and raise the status of many of Portland’s communities of color, making up about a quarter of the city’s population, and other disenfranchised people. Or it could do nothing useful for anyone. That depends to a major extent on the quality of the plans its employees and leaders devise and their carrying them out with discipline, commitment and transparency.

And therein lies the problem. The “quality of plans” is exactly what seems to be missing. The concept certainly isn’t lacking, but the details required for successful execution are. And, as is usually the case is such things, the devil is in the details. Mayor Adams has a good idea…but that’s exactly where things appear to have ground to a halt.

In an economy where so much more is expected to be done with so much less, Portland’s Office of Equity may just be a good idea at a bad time. The (lofty and as yet unstated) goals of such an office, while impressive and certainly worthwhile, may simply be more than Portland has the resources to tackle just now. A truly inspired leader, possessed of an idea like Adams’, would find a place for it in the system as it currently exists. This would save a good deal of time and money when compared to setting up an entirely new avenue of bureaucracy.

Then again, inspired leadership has never exactly been Adam’s strong suit. And so this is how things would in the Rose Gridlock and Consternation City.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on September 2, 2011 6:33 AM.

Remember when antitrust laws actually used to be enforced? I don't, either. was the previous entry in this blog.

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