Hotlips Pizza manager Neil Hollister is orchestrating free noon hour concerts inside the Ecotrust building, 921 NW Ninth Ave.

“The owners, staff, and I have been talking about getting a group to perform for quite some time,” said Hollister.

Joining Hollister for a recent concert were old friends Kirsten Hisatomi (violin), Shauna Keyes (viola) and Ashley Peck (cello). At one time, the quartet went by the name Ruslan String Quartet. They’ve decided to revive the name.

The foursome played together from 1995-2015 but Hollister, who hasn’t played much in recent years, suggested that they get together and play like they did in the old days: for fun, pizza and beer. “For me there’s nothing more beautiful than matching tone and anticipating expression in a quartet. It takes spaces like the atrium to make that possible,” he said.

The other musicians play for local arts institutions, including the Portland Opera, Oregon Ballet Theater and Vancouver and Eugene Symphony.

Concerts are held on the last Monday of the month. The next concert is Monday, Sept. 28. The easiest entry is from the Northwest 10th Avenue parking lot.

Musicians interested in playing here are encouraged to contact Ecotrust manager Autumn Sharp.

Since June, a woman lived with her three dogs in a van parked in front of Rose Haven Day Shelter at Northwest 18th Avenue and Glisan Street.

While parking more than two hours violates the visitor limit in this area, parking enforcement workers, intimidated by her threatening behavior, failed for months to ticket her.

The dogs barked at all hours, disrupting the sleep of guests at the Northwest Hostel across the street. Multnomah County Animal Services paid a visit, concluding that the dogs were not in danger and leaving a supply of dog food.

The woman applied for and received a residential parking permit, which was revoked when it was learned that she did not submit a valid address.

“Portland Solutions is aware of this situation and has been responding to neighbor concerns,” Laura Rude, spokesperson for the city problem-solving unit, told the NW Examiner on Sept. 18.

“We’ve engaged in extensive outreach and have also coordinated with PBOT, which has issued citations for parking violations and has also offered outreach. We are trying to identify shelter or another option that would move this individual and their pets out of their vehicle and off city streets.

“We are grateful for the community’s patience and understanding as we address complex issues on an individual level across the city. Sometimes problem-solving for just one person can take a whole team of people and can require multiple attempts over a long period of time.”

In mid-September, the van left the area.

The four leading candidates for the three District 4 City Council seats have agreed to participate in the NW Examiner debate to be held at 5 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 5.

The 90-minute event will be held in the 600-seat Centerstage at the Armory, 128 NW 11th Ave., and hosted by the Pearl District Neighborhood Association. Admission is free.

Incumbents Olivia Clark, Mitch Green and Eric Zimmerman with be joined by Eli Arnold, a Portland bike cop who finished fourth in the District 4 race two years ago.

The moderator will be PDNA President Bruce Studer, and questions will be asked by NW Examiner Editor Allan Classen. There will be no live questions from the audience, although suggested questions may be submitted in comments below or sent to allan@nwexaminer.com.

The four candidates had each raised $67,000 to $75,000 as of Sept. 18. The highest amount raised by any other candidate was $22,000.

At the Malarkey, more is more.

On Wednesday, The Malarkey, 1210 NW Hoyt St., unveiled a seven-day-a-week happy hour served from 4:30-5:30 p.m. in a sunken bar where a bronze elk with thick haunches confronts you. Cheeky, gleeful homages to Portland radiate from there.

Happy hour menu offerings include a Caesar salad; crispy chicken; halibut ceviche; and a vegan cauliflower dish. Draft beers are $2 off, and Pacific Northwest Oysters are two bucks a shuck. The star is the smash burger ($10). With it comes an option to order a $1 Miller High Life. The burger is two-patties, and a real doozy. It’s served with Tillamook cheddar cheese, grilled onions and ramekins of ketchup and aioli for the curly fries.

Chef and restaurant partner Jose “Lalo” Camarena said Portland feels more awake, reporting how large groups of people glide in for dinner at 10 p.m. Every Thursday, Friday and Saturday, from 8 p.m. to close, there is a live DJ in the lounge.

General Manager Britt Sparkey, or just “Sparkey,” moved to Portland before the Malarkey’s late July opening to oversee operations. To date, she has teamed up with celebrity chef Brian Malarkey at 16 of his restaurants. The Malarkey is his 27th restaurant, and the first, she said, completed on time. Both she and chef Lalo have been made partners at the Malarkey. Neighbors have shared photos of themselves at Oba, once the beating heart of this part of the Pearl District but closed since 2017.

The Malarkey delivers a giddy glimpse of what comes next.

The Malarkey is open Sunday-Thursday, 4:30-9 p.m., and Friday-Saturday 4:30-midnight.

Portland State University is demolishing Montgomery Court, a 1917 landmark designed by famed Portland architect A.E. Doyle, shortly after leveling the 1930 Blackstone Hall on the same block in the center of campus.

Last year, the university approved a plan to build 550 student housing units with an $85 million construction bond.

Portland already has machine politics. The mayor now has to organize the rest of us without becoming what he is trying to defeat. At the end of the previous article in this series, I promised there was a plan. Here it is: Keith Wilson is doing something important, and he needs to finish it.

Nobody voted for this. Our city offices have been nonpartisan for nearly a century: No party affiliation may appear on a candidate’s ballot, filing or voters’ pamphlet. In 2022, we added ranked-choice voting and multimember districts because they sounded like more of the same protection. Then we handed the new system to 98 council candidates, several hundred thousand voters and every political organization in town. One side read the whole book. The rest of us admired the packaging.

The organization I have been describing looks formidable only because it understands something its opponents have not yet absorbed: Portland's ranked-choice elections are not won one candidate at a time. They are won by organizing the entire ballot. Three councilors are elected from each district. A candidate is guaranteed a seat at 25% of the vote plus one ballot, although the last seats need not reach that threshold. That makes second, third and later choices consequential. In District 4 in 2024, Eli Arnold began ahead of Eric Zimmerman, 8,123 first-choice votes to 8,005. Zimmerman nevertheless won after transfers; Arnold did not. First place was merely the starting position. The official count took 32 rounds.

The DSA understands the resulting organizational problem. Its candidates do not enter the election as isolated individuals. The organization recruits candidates, raises small contributions, communicates preferred candidates to its supporters and remains active between elections. Everyone else largely campaigns for one candidate at a time. I call that machine politics not because it is illegal, but because it is permanent, coordinated and designed to deliver votes across an entire ballot.

I am not approaching this as a newcomer. Fifty years ago, I was a pollster working against the political machines of New Orleans. The technology has changed. The operating principle has not: A full-time organization ordinarily defeats a collection of part-time campaigns.

That is the problem Mayor Wilson now has an opportunity to solve. A game that rewards organization stops being a scandal when everyone organizes. The question is who can organize the other three-quarters, and what rules will keep the answer from becoming another political owner.

The mayor discovers politics

Wilson has begun to answer the first question. He backed Kellie Torres in District 3 and has aligned himself with incumbents Steve Novick, Olivia Clark and Eric Zimmerman. The shape is visible, but it is not yet a slate. The candidates do not all endorse one another. They do not appear on one card. They have not given voters a common ladder for the second and third choices that actually decide these elections. At present, the mayor has several candidates standing near one another and hoping the public notices the resemblance.

Still, the movement matters because it reaches beyond endorsements. Wilson has supported restoring Abraham Lincoln to his original pedestal after his statue was toppled in 2020. He has defended police staffing and proposed additional investigators. He has bet his office on a homelessness pledge made in public and counted in beds, opening more than 1,500 overnight shelter beds against it. Those decisions do not amount to a complete platform, but they announce a disposition: Repair what was damaged, protect the basic institutions of civic order and stop allowing every municipal decision to become a subsidiary battlefield in the national culture war.

Wilson is also the only elected official positioned to assemble a citywide answer. Councilors represent districts. Unions represent their members. The DSA represents a political program. Business organizations represent businesses. Among them, only the mayor is elected by all of Portland. He controls the executive branch, proposes the budget and will be blamed when the city cannot govern. The new charter gave the mayor responsibility without a guaranteed council majority. That arrangement does not permit him to remain a neutral spectator. If he does not organize a governing coalition, the best-organized faction on the council will organize one for him. The assignment has four parts: Convene the coalition, write its principles, build a serious candidate-selection process and publish a common ballot. One rule governs all four: The coalition helps elect its candidates and never owns them.

Nobody wanted a machine

Nobody has to like this. I do not particularly like it. But look at the money already assembled, the crowded candidate fields and the permanent organizations working between elections. The argument over whether Portland should have organized political teams has been settled by events. We have them. The only remaining question is whether one ideological formation will enjoy a permanent monopoly on competence.

That does not mean copying the Democratic Socialists of America’s arrangement and changing the label. The distinction is not between a left-wing machine and a centrist machine. It is between electoral organization and political ownership. Portland needs the first and should prohibit the second.

Before an election, the organization must do everything the system rewards. It must recruit credible candidates, test their competence, raise money, build voter lists, conduct research, train volunteers, model transfers and publish a clear ballot. It must explain which candidates it recommends and why. It must tell voters how to use all six available rankings to keep their ballots alive rather than allowing acceptable candidates to disappear when early preferences are eliminated. It must operate every year, not materialize six months before an election and vanish the morning after.

After the election, its authority must stop. No party pledges. No ideological loyalty tests. No exclusion because a candidate refuses a position on a national issue. No compulsory caucus. No bloc-voting requirement. No twice-monthly supervision by an outside organization. No third-party cadre deciding what an elected councilor must do. A platform may say what candidates intend to accomplish. It may not become a contract dictating how they must vote.

That boundary is the whole undertaking. We need the organizational capacity of a machine without the obedience that makes a machine dangerous.

A Portland coalition

The model is not ideological conversion. It is coalition building around a limited mission. President George H. W. Bush did not assemble the coalition that liberated Kuwait by persuading Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, the European governments and the United States to adopt a common view of history. They disagreed about nearly everything beyond the invasion in front of them. Bush defined the issue, held the coalition together and stopped the mission where the agreement stopped.

Portland needs that kind of construction. Business leaders, traditional liberals, independents, neighborhood advocates, public-safety constituencies, practical progressives and labor members who want city government to remain city government do not need to agree about the world. They need to agree about Portland.

The common work is not mysterious. Keep streets safe. Address homelessness with measurable results. Maintain parks, roads and basic services. Tell the truth about budgets and capital projects. Hire people capable of doing the work. Treat disagreement as part of representative government rather than evidence of moral contamination. Keep foreign policy and national ideological campaigns from consuming institutions that have no competence to conduct either.

Issues kill. Principles ennoble. The immediate issue is the organizational monopoly. The principle is representative government in which elected officials exercise judgment for the entire city.

The ballot has to mean something

A Wilson endorsement list will not be enough. The organization needs an authentic public voice, a recognizable ballot and a method for deciding who belongs on it. It cannot simply collect everyone who dislikes the DSA. Opposition is not a governing philosophy, and resentment is not candidate qualification.

Its candidates should meet a public standard: demonstrated competence, personal integrity, respect for evidence, willingness to work across disagreements and commitment to a Portland agenda. They need not offer identical answers. In fact, if they agree on every question, we should suspect that the independence clause was written in disappearing ink.

The selection process also must be more serious than the present festival of self-nomination. Ranked-choice voting lowered the cost of entering a race and encouraged crowded ballots. That may widen participation, but it also asks voters to distinguish serious prospective councilors from people enjoying their allotted minutes of public attention. A useful organization performs that screening openly. It does not appoint councilors. It tells voters whom it has examined, what standards it applied and why those candidates deserve consideration.

The ballot should then say something simple and verifiable: these candidates accept the same governing principles, consider one another fit to serve and remain free to disagree after election. Rank them in the order you prefer. That is coordination without surrender.

Nobody's representative but yours

I learned the line in Louisiana, where political organizations rarely bothered pretending they were philosophy seminars. Every candidate should be able to look at the voters and say: I am nobody's representative but yours.

That does not mean the candidate arrived without allies, money or endorsements. Nobody does. It means no organization retains title after the voters confer office. The candidate may owe gratitude. The councilor owes judgment.

This is where the proposed coalition must differ from the structure documented earlier in this series. The DSA terms govern the relationship after victory: meetings, caucus and program. The new organization should govern only the conditions under which it lends its name and machinery before an election. Once voters decide, its candidates become public officials, not deployed assets.

The safeguard should be written before the organization wins anything. Political restraints invented after victory have the approximate tensile strength of cotton candy. The principles must be public, specific and enforceable through the only sanction the organization should possess: the right to withhold its endorsement next time.

The ball is in Wilson's hands

Wilson has started, but starting is not the same as building. His thoughtful consultation with stakeholder groups is the necessary first step. Before asking candidates and constituencies to stand together, he needs to know what they share, what they will tolerate and where agreement ends. A coalition this broad cannot be announced into existence. It has to be assembled.

The consultations cannot become a substitute for the decision. At some point they end and the four tasks begin, the last of which is asking whether the participants are prepared to appear together on one ballot. If the answer is yes, the organization will need the donor list, research capacity, field operation, transfer strategy and institutional memory that the other side already possesses.

This will be politically risky. Wilson will be accused of importing partisanship into a nonpartisan system by people who already benefit from disciplined political organization. Candidates accustomed to running alone may resist identifying one another as acceptable choices. Those same constituencies will agree about Portland more readily than they agree about one another.

Bush did not begin with natural allies. He began with a consequence none of them could accept. Portland's consequence is less dramatic but mathematically just as clear. On this divided council, six votes has meant failure. Seven governs. One side has built the organization capable of finding the seventh. Unless a citywide counterpart is assembled, Portland's nominally nonpartisan system will be governed by the only people willing to act like a party.

Only the mayor can decide whether to undertake this. He has the citywide mandate, the executive responsibility and the convening authority. The coalition should not belong to him after its candidates take office, but it may never exist unless he is willing to bring it together before they run.

The analysis is finished. The machinery is visible. The arithmetic is not waiting: all six District 3 and District 4 council seats are decided on Nov. 3. The ball is in Wilson's hands.

Robert Miller is a Pearl District resident who has spent five decades in the gaming industry. He holds a Ph.D. in operations research from Louisiana State University, writes The Center Held on Substack.

Sources

Robert S. Miller, “The Perfect Crime,” NW Examiner, Aug. 30, 2026. Documents the DSA endorsement terms, Working Families Party campaign machinery, national transfers, public matching funds and the seven-candidate 2024 slate.

Robert S. Miller, “Inside the Portland City Council Sweepstakes,” NW Examiner, Sept. 12, 2026. Explains the Droop quota, transfer mechanics, paired candidacies and the organizational advantage in Portland's 2024 election.

City of Portland Small Donor Elections, 2026 Election. Current candidate certification and matching-fund distributions: www.portland.gov/smalldonorelections/all-about-2026-election.

City of Portland Charter, Chapter 3, and City Code Chapter 2.08. Nonpartisan offices (charter section with amendment history from 1903); no reference to party affiliation permitted in candidacy filings, voters’ pamphlets or ballots: www.portland.gov/charter/3/all-articles and www.portland.gov/code/2/08

City of Portland, Learn about City government (Council Clerk). Seven affirmative votes required to pass a nonemergency ordinance: www.portland.gov/auditor/council-clerk/learn

Hoodline, “Portland Mayor Wilson Backs Kellie Torres, Sets Up Fight for Council Majority,” August 2026. Torres endorsement and planned endorsements of Novick, Clark and Zimmerman: hoodline.com/2026/08/portland-mayor-wilson-backs-kellie-torres-sets-up-fight-for-council-majority/

Office of Mayor Keith Wilson, City of Portland to return Lincoln to original plinth, Sept. 10, 2026: www.portland.gov/mayor/keith-wilson/news/2026/9/10/city-portland-return-lincoln-original-plinth

KGW, “Portlanders are taking more time to vote in local races,” November 2024. The 98 candidates for Portland City Council: www.kgw.com/article/news/politics/elections/portland-election-mayor-city-council-rankedchoice-voting-reactions/283-5b23044b-f0e0-4686-9711-c4706458e448

Oregon Public Broadcasting, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson talks up Rose City resurgence at State of City speech, April 18, 2026. Executive-mayor structure, police staffing and investigator proposal, and the 1,500 overnight shelter beds: https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/17/portland-mayor-keith-wilson-state-of-the-city-address/

U.S. Department of State, “The First Gulf War and The Gulf War 1991.” Coalition composition and limited mission: history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/firstgulf and history.state.gov/milestones/1989- 1992/gulf-war

City of Portland Elections, Frequently Asked Questions: Ranked-Choice Voting. Six available rankings and the 25% plus one council threshold: www.portland.gov/vote/questions/ranked-choice-voting-and-ballot.

Libby’s enthusiasm is contagious. His easy-going, conversational approach to the material has him singing the praises of working-class buildings and grand monuments alike. You say you’ve always liked how Big Pink changes with the light? The shimmering Spanish pink granite was selected by Pietro Belluschi, one of our city’s most acclaimed Modernist architects, who designed the building along with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

Libby recalls entering the First National Bank Building at 401 SW Fifth Ave.: “When I finally entered this building for the first time that same year and walked up the staircase from the foyer, I gasped at the three-story atrium, which resembled a grand Victorian railway station.”

The NW Examiner interviewed Libby earlier this month. That story is here. Photographs and illustrations from “In Search of Portland” can be viewed at Weedman Design Partners, 1905 NW 23rd Place, through Oct. 30.

In the video above, an audience member asked Libby to weigh in on saving the Keller Auditorium.

You will not be able to take your eyes away from the entrancing beauty of the watery world of manta rays that Oregon-based film director Cody Sheehy takes you to in “The Last Dive.”

You will also not be able to take your mind off the human subject of this film, Terry Kennedy. When a man tells you the best thing that ever happened to him was meeting a manta ray he named Willy, you wonder about that man, but you also want to meet him and the manta.

The film will be shown at Cinema 21 on Wednesday, Sept. 23, at 7 p.m. Following the screening, award-winning director Cody Sheehy will discuss the making of “The Last Dive.”

Terry Kennedy

He was a hell-raiser from the start. Growing up, Kennedy was in and out of juvenile detention. He joined the U.S. Navy and went to Vietnam. He was there in 1964 during the Gulf of Tonkin incident when the U.S. and the North Vietnamese naval forces first exchanged gunfire. That led to America’s hellish eight-year-long war in Vietnam.

Coming home from Vietnam, Kennedy rode with the Hell’s Angels, ran a bar and night club in Santa Monica. One night, someone set off some explosives in the bar. Kennedy and another bartender ran after the rabble-rousers, shooting their pistols into the night air to stop them. One of the bullets killed a marine. It was accidental, and Kennedy says ballistics tests showed the deadly bullet did not come from his gun. Still, he served three months in prison.

Kennedy finished his sentence and in 1981 sailed down to Mexico and lived for the next 50 years in the Sea of Cortez aboard a 48-foot-long trimaran he christened “Erotica.” What does that tell you about the man? The stories are endless.

This ride-hard-die-hard guy made his living as a diver and big game spear-fisherman. His biggest kill was a nearly 10-foot tall, 384-pound rock sea bass. Back then, Kennedy was a man who relished the fight between man and beast.

Kennedy lived a rowdy, unruly life, but he found serenity in the deep blue sea. In his lifetime, he has completed 14,000 dives and plunged to depths of more than 200 feet. He says that the underwater world became his saving grace.

When Terry met Willie

One day in 1988, while on the “Erotica” off San Benedicto Island, a manta ray surfaced and slapped its wing on the hull of Kennedy’s boat. It was quite a shock and quite the bang! But Kennedy, who does not panic easily, dove right into the ocean.

By the time Kennedy got into the ocean, the 2-ton, 20-foot-long, 22-foot-wide manta ray was about 4 feet below him. Kennedy says it came straight up to him, allowing Kennedy to sprawl on its back. Then the friendly manta ray took Kennedy on a ride like no other. Kennedy figures his first manta ride lasted about 15 minutes, and says it was like flying on the wings of a 747. The manta ray ended the ride by returning Kennedy to his boat.

That was the first time. He and this manta ray hooked up repeatedly over the next 19 years. Kennedy named it Willy and then added the last name, Wow, because Willie was just wow! Willy Wow blew his mind.

Kennedy says Willy recognized the bottom of his boat and would always slap his wing against the hull to get Kennedy’s attention. That’s just how he came knocking. And it was definitely the same manta ray every time. Each manta ray has its own distinct markings, like fingerprints, so divers can tell one manta from another.

Manta rays are smart. They have the largest brain-to-body ratio of any fish. Scientists say they are self-aware, master navigators and highly social.

The bond

Kennedy now lives on land, still in Mexico. close to the Sea of Cortez. I spoke to him recently via WhatsApp.

He said Willy had an effect on him almost immediately, “After Willy, my urge to kill fish went away. And I started realizing I am not just on the back of an animal; I’m on the back of someone who has the same intelligence as me.”

Kennedy says this revelation and his connection with Willy helped him find redemption—his future no longer defined solely by the earlier turmoil in his life and all the bad things he’d seen.

If you are skeptical that a man and a manta can be friends, well, it was all caught on camera. Stirred into the documentary of “The Last Dive” are home videos of Kennedy and Willy over their 19-year friendship.

Kennedy last saw Willy in 2007. He went looking for him again, but Willy was no longer around. Kennedy didn’t know if Willy was still alive or had simply gone elsewhere, as mantas sometimes do.

Meantime, Kennedy was getting too old to sail the rough seas on his own.

Director Cody Sheehy

Sheehy is also a diver and spends five months a year living on a boat off the coast of Mexico. That’s how he got to know the larger-than-life Kennedy.

Kennedy showed Sheehy hundreds of hours of underwater footage of him and Willy. Sheehy went through it all, frame by frame. He couldn’t get over what he was seeing on those home videos, especially the way Kennedy and Willy seemed to intuitively understand one another, “You could just see when Terry was in the water, Willy would just come right to him and start playing with him. It was such a joyful relationship. It’s like a puppy and an owner or something.”

Sheehy dived with Kennedy and saw for himself what happens when manta rays show up:

“It’s just like this energy comes with them and the ocean goes silent and they just have your complete attention. It almost feels like you’re just mesmerized or you’re in this weird zone, and it’s just an incredible experience. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.”

Kennedy’s rare and striking footage documented not just his friendship with Willy, but also manta ray behavior. No one had done anything like this before. Scientists say these videos and Kennedy’s knowledge have contributed immeasurably to our understanding of these fascinating sea creatures.

After seeing the footage, Sheehy and Kennedy started talking about making a documentary and trying to find Willy one more time. Last year, a couple of divers thought they had spotted Willy. So, with a crew of mariners and filmmakers, Kennedy set out in search of Willy.

That journey may be the film’s plot, but the film is also a plea to save the world’s endangered manta rays.

Mission

Kennedy says Willy turned him into an uncompromising conservationist. Clearly, his trajectory from big game spear fisherman to environmentalist was not a straight line.

In 1994, Kennedy made headlines after he videotaped Mexican fishermen brutally killing manta rays. That video went as viral as video could go before the explosion of the internet. The so-called “manta massacre” or “St. Valentine’s Day massacre” convinced the Mexican government to enact laws protecting manta rays, creating North America’s largest protected marine reserve.

It was Willy who led Kennedy to the underwater nets that fishermen were using to capture the mantas. Fisherman would haul the nets up and then slaughter the giant mantas to use as shark-bait. Kennedy believes Willy wanted him to see the nets because the manta knew Kennedy would stop the killing.

“The Last Dive”

The documentary is about much more than the journey to find Willy. It’s also about friendship and redemption, and what to some will seem like a logic-defying human-animal bond.

You may leave the theater not knowing what to do first, join efforts to save manta rays or take scuba diving lessons in hopes of visiting their world.

Since Kennedy’s long-ago voyages under the sea to meet Willy, it is now illegal under U.S. federal law and the International Endangered Species Convention to touch, ride or harass mantas. In other words, Kennedy’s experiences should never be repeated.

But back then, we humans really didn’t know much about the giant mantas. Thanks to Terry Kennedy and Cody Sheehy’s “The Last Dive,” now we do.

The Goose Hollow Inn’s sister-café, Fehrenbacher Hof, 1225 SW 19th Ave., celebrates its 25th birthday today, Sept. 20, with food and drink specials, and plenty of music.

It’s fitting that music be at the heart of the event since the café is named for the late Mayor Bud Clark’s wife, Sigrid Fehrenbacher, a violinist in the Portland Symphony for 37 years. Don’t miss the oil painting of her playing violin that still hangs in the café. She died at age 59 in 2000.

“She was a person in her own right; she was never in the shadow of the mayor,” said Charles P. Duffy at the time of her passing.

For this special event, the Goose Hollow Inn’s parking lot will be turned over for an afternoon and evening of live music, the planet’s best reuben sandwich and community.

• 3-5 p.m. The Webfoot Brass Band

• 5 p.m. bluegrass/folk/Americana from The Gander 4

• Door prizes announced at 6 p.m.

In past decades, about 20 employees filled the downtown headquarters of Portland’s pioneering neighborhood association program.

Now it is just Adam Lyons.

“I am the program right now,” Lyons told the NW Examiner.

Lyons has a cubicle in a sprawling—though mostly empty—floor in the Portland Building, about 30 square feet reflecting the diminished status of neighborhoods in City Hall.

His title, under a contract that ends in June, is interim district and neighborhood liaison.

If the program is to grow, it may first need to redefine its mission.

The former chief executive of the Office of Community & Civic Life, Amanda Garcia-Snell, was ushered out this spring under a nondisclosure agreement, making the circumstances around her departure a mystery. It may have had something to do with Garcia-Snell’s attempt to unilaterally redirect the program without engaging the 95 Portland neighborhood associations or considering their historic role in the system.

City Administrator Raymond Lee hinted at such during a discussion at the Portland City Club in June.

“There was a disconnect between our neighborhood associations and the direction of our leadership within that department,” Lee said. “I don’t know if we provided the guidance and the support … to ensure that it was meeting the standard that people have of our community engagement and civic life programs.”

Lee referred to a high turnover rate in program leadership over the past decade, long before he came to Portland last year.

“This tells me this issue is much bigger than just an individual. Is it the structure of how we’re functioning as an organization? If not, we’re just insane, because we keep repeating the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results,” he said.

Absent any clear marching orders, Lyons is listening and learning. He recently was able to add a part-time assistant. His supervisor, Laura Oppenheimer, the interim chief engagement officer for the city, is working with City Council members in applying new city charter code language that puts the office squarely under the authority of the city administrator.

Before Lyons can focus on rebuilding trust in the program, he has some chores to take care of. He recently learned that emails to Civic Life requesting information went into a blackhole for six months, and he’s gradually getting back to a long list of spurned citizens.

“I didn’t know how much administrative work there is to this program,” he said.

Lyons’ main thrust is reaching out to associations and coalitions, and assessing where the program might find a niche.

“They asked me to go through a reset process because I have a background in neighborhoods and I have relationships,” he told District 4 Coalition board members last month.

Lyons was executive director of the Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods from 2016-2020, a period in which City Hall was openly hostile toward neighborhood associations, disparaging them as opponents of diversity and inclusion.

City councilors Chloe Eudaly and then Jo Ann Hardesty oversaw the neighborhood office for successive four-year terms not known for neighborliness. Eudaly even took the word neighborhood out what had been the Office of Neighborhood Involvement.

“I love Northeast Portland, and when I became a director there, I loved that job. Then all of a sudden, the neighborhood war stuff happened. … It was just really depressing,” Lyons said. “I had to spend from 2018 to 2020 dealing with an angry or combative city infrastructure.

“The thing that I thought was so detrimental about the approach was that we had amazing neighborhoods and did amazing things.”

He then moved on to campaign for Mingus Mapps, who was fired from his Civic Life job and then defeated Eudaly’s reelection bid. Lyons then joined Mapps’ council staff.

Lyons said the anti-neighborhood attitude has largely disappeared.

“I never would have imagined that there was this much positive energy because of how bad it was before,” he said. “I hear the City Council members speaking highly of neighborhoods … The bureaus are really interested in getting much more engaged, and the neighborhoods seem pretty jazzed.”

But before peace and comity predominate, there is still the matter of city charter amendments adopted by the outgoing council in 2024 putting the Office of Community & Civic Life under the control of the city administrator.

District 4 Coalition President Todd Zarnitz discovered the unpublicized and undiscussed transfer of the program that Garcia-Snell relied on to bypass neighborhoods. Other district coalitions joined District 4 in protesting Garcia-Snell’s dictate, leading Lee to pause her initiatives.

But until the charter is amended or clarified, Zarnitz said this is no time to relax, fearing the administrator could “clamp down” on neighborhood associations if they interfere with city goals.

“If we’re under the thumb of the city administrator, that makes it nonfunctional,” he said.

Claire Carder, who represents the Maplewood Neighborhood Association on the District 4 Coalition, shares the concern.

“The way they changed it was underhanded,” said Carder, who believes the City Council needs to be involved in decisions about the program’s direction.

Another representative to the coalition expressed her skepticism on a private discussion blog.

“Why is this [Lyon’s] job temporary?” the representative asked. “If the city won’t even put someone in charge who is going to stick around, it sounds like Civic Life doesn’t have a future. … This feels all too familiar; that the city is trying to dismantle the neighborhood system yet again.”

With such undercurrents percolating, Lyons has little job security.

City Council is tentatively scheduled to hold a work session on Sept. 29 regarding policy direction for OCCL programs and citywide community engagement practices.

Lyons knows Northwest

Adam Lyons is no stranger to the Northwest District and Goose Hollow.

In the 1970s and ’80s, his parents operated Urban Gardens at 2714 NW Thurman St., which is now a bike shop.

“My dad was friends with Bud Clark, and my parents’ courtship happened at the Goose [Hollow Inn],” he said, “My entire childhood … was around civic activism.”

His parents were also close to Mike Ryerson, a longtime Northwest District resident who published The Neighbor newspaper and later worked 20 years for the NW Examiner.

Although Lyons grew up near Lloyd Center, “I spent a ton of time in Northwest,” he said.

By Dave Paull

National politics passed through Portland in the fall of 1984. As a reporter, I was able to get a candid—and very pointed—personal quote from the nation’s first female vice presidential candidate.

Paul Saunders had come all the way in from his farm out in rural Forest Grove to downtown Portland to meet her. He was a modest man who tended crops for a living.

Something about Geraldine Ferraro made him get off his tractor.

Ferraro was on the Democratic ticket with Walter Mondale running for president. She’d been campaigning about economic justice and farming policies in front of large, enthusiastic crowds in Oregon.

We were in the basement of the Benson Hotel, walking along a corridor, when the farmer approached Ferraro.

“Hi, I’m Paul Saunders,” he said. “I want you to know you have my vote.”

Sensing a moment, I quietly turned on my tape recorder and stepped forward, holding my microphone between the two of them. He was a Democrat too. He told her he valued her as a woman of principle. She listened closely.

Then she glared at me.

“Do you mind?” she said, with a fixed smile that said back off, buster.

I put the mic down and turned off the recorder.

But I got the quote. My story showed her as a woman of the people, hearing from a working man—a farmer—who pledged his vote while Ferraro protected his privacy.

More importantly, I had a snippet of a person-to-person moment, away from the slick campaign rhetoric. Just two people in a hotel hallway, talking quietly about their shared values. No cameras. No handlers.

Later, Ferraro was seen wearing a farmer’s hat to shield her from the Portland rain—or so it was said.

Paul Saunders would have appreciated that.

Not every woman who helped shape my career passed through just once. Some, I covered for years.

—

City Commissioner Margaret Strachan was the first woman ever elected to the Portland City Council. The others had been appointed. And she did it by beating the man who would later serve as an Oregon representative in Congress—Earl Blumenauer.

I knew her as a level-headed commissioner who helped develop the Central City Plan, overseeing transportation and housing.

Strachan overheard me filing an audio news report from City Hall one afternoon. The City Council had just voted on where a new Fred Meyer superstore would be located in Northeast Portland, and I rushed to phone it in to my radio station.

“Uh, Dave—you might want to check your conclusion there,” the commissioner said quietly. “Actually, it was the other way around. You got it wrong.”

Oops.

I called the newsroom. “Kill that story,” I barked into the phone.

Margaret Strachan could have said nothing and let it go. She didn’t. That’s a particular kind of public servant.

Not all the women I covered were profiles in quiet virtue. Some were fighting simply to be heard—or to control what was heard.

—

As soon as I saw her in the newsroom, I sensed why she was there.

Our investigative reporter had interviewed Penny Harrington after a mayor’s panel reviewed her conduct as Portland’s police chief and forced her to resign. She had risen through the ranks from policewoman all the way up to becoming the first woman in the nation to lead a major city police force.

Beginning as a policewoman in 1964, Harrington helped revamp police bureau policy, making a pathway for other women to rise through the ranks as she had.

After resigning, Harrington told the reporter she’d consider running for public office.

“At what level,” the reporter asked, “like maybe city council?”

With each yes answer she gave on tape, he upped the ante. “How about mayor — would you consider running for mayor?” She allowed that she might. Not declaring it, but not ruling it out, either.

As the on-duty newscaster, I was about to air that report while she was standing in the newsroom, on the other side of the soundproof glass. She was telling the reporter she hadn’t meant what she said.

She wanted him to kill the story.

After beginning the newscast on the air, I cued up the tape and pushed PLAY.

Harrington couldn’t hear the broadcast—it wasn’t audible in the newsroom. She may not have known we’d aired the story at all. She later moved to California.

The tape played. Portland listened.

Years later, I’d deliver news of a very different kind—not a scoop, but a loss.

—

Standing at the microphone, I sorted through my script, knowing the lead story would hit our listeners hard—especially the person it was about. One of her staff members told me that she liked listening to our morning show.

Then came the sounder—a sliding electronic tone signaling the newscast was about to begin.

“Good morning from the KOTK newsroom. I’m Dave Paull.”

Standard. But what followed was not.

I knew the woman involved in the news story. I had covered her for many years, from the Oregon State Legislature to Portland City Hall. I knew the fierce determination in her smile, knew her commitment to serve the people by giving the best she had.

“Mayor Vera Katz has cancer.”

No sugar coating. No hedging. It was a rare form of cancer that would eventually weaken her kidneys and kill her. I had interviewed her soon after the terror attacks on 9/11. Now this.

As I moved on to delivering other news of the day, I flashed on our last time together at her City Hall office. I was there to record her comments, but don’t recall what it was about.

What I do recall has stayed with me all these years later.

“Come on in here, honey,” she’d said, gesturing to a chair.

I knew she called others honey, too.

Still, it never left me.

Dave Paull writes “Beautiful Disasters — excavating meaning from a life spent listening.” To subscribe, write to: davepaull@substack.com.

Rose, the Portland Fire’s glitter-breathing mascot will attend the Pearl Party as is Dillon T. Pickle from the Portland Pickles. The forecast calls for perfect 70s weather both days.

The two dog parks at the park’s north end have been cleaned up in recent weeks by Rapid Response Bio-Clean crews. According to the Pearl District Neighborhood Association, the playground work is almost done, but that area will remain fenced and closed until all new sand and bark dust can be installed.

“It will be wonderful to have the park back. It’s been a challenging three years,” said Bruce Studer of the Pearl District Neighborhood Association.

Other

• 4:30-6 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 23, District 4 Portland City Councilors Olivia Clark and Eric Zimmerman will be at the Fields Bar and Grill, 1139 NW 11th Ave., to talk to constituents during happy hour.

• The last Yoga in the Park session happens at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26.

Hypnos Coffee, 807 NW 21st Ave., opened Sept. 10 next door to Russo Lee Gallery, where the artist Laura Domela’s show “Bright Side” is up for the month of September. This is the café’s second location; the first is on North Williams Avenue.

On a recent visit, all the café tables were filled with people locked in a deep trance with their laptops. The walls are a perfect light tan, and the baristas are welcoming and polite. They’re listening to Steely Dan, a soundtrack that matched the atmosphere of studious calm. Someone suggested the salted pistachio latte, but I went for the Cloud Top Latte. Resting atop single-origin Coava coffee is a sweet layer that tastes like an elevated version of Marshmallow Fluff, if you experienced that growing up.

A car show and Portland sports team mascots will highlight the free end-of-the-summer Pearl Party from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 19 on Northwest 13th Avenue between Glisan and Hoyt streets. Enjoy live music, food and beverages from local vendors and family friendly activities.

Take photos with the mascots between noon and 2 p.m.

The event is sponsored by the Pearl District Neighborhood Association.

On Tuesday night, for the first time in the history of Providence, R.I., a sitting mayor lost his own party’s primary. [1]

The winner was David Morales, a 27-year-old state representative and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and backed by the Working Families Party.

In July, he held a fundraiser with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and he ran the Mamdani playbook openly: rent stabilization, affordability, social media over television. [2]

The incumbent, Brett Smiley, a 47-year-old first-term mayor and a former gubernatorial chief of staff, was the establishment’s man in a city that had never once removed an establishment’s man this way. Unofficial results with all 82 precincts reporting: Morales 14,021, Smiley 12,678. About 52.5% to 47.5%.

[3] On Nov. 3, Morales faces Dave Talan, the lone Republican to qualify, in a city that has not elected a Republican mayor in decades.

[4] The same night, in the same state, Gov. Dan McKee lost his own primary, the first sitting governor in the country to lose renomination since 2018. [5]

Readers of this series will recognize the personnel. The Working Families Party is the organization whose machinery carried a slate into Portland’s council chambers in 2024, an operation this series documented transaction by transaction: the transfers from Brooklyn, the phone and text vendors, the in-kind allocations filed under each candidate’s name. Every dollar had a receipt.

The Democratic Socialists of America is the organization whose endorsement agreement sat at the center of that coordination. Whether the two organizations coordinate with each other is a question no filed document answers. What the record shows—in Portland and now in Providence—is that they keep converging on the same candidates, and the candidates keep winning.

There is a second Providence story, and for Portland it is the more important one. On the same Nov. 3 ballot, Providence voters will decide Question 7, a citizen-initiated ordinance directing the city to refrain from investing in the sovereign debt of, or in entities complicit with, foreign countries conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation or genocide. [6] Complicity has a definition: Companies that directly and knowingly enable and contribute to the violations. [7]

The measure also names its referees. Which countries qualify is to be determined by United Nations experts, United States court rulings or definitions in federal policy, and rulings of the International Court of Justice. [8] Its backers have identified about $2.5 million in city funds they say would be affected, naming Caterpillar and Axon Enterprise. [9]

The measure did not come from the machinery that carried Morales. It reached the ballot by petition, through a seldom-used initiative provision of the city charter triggered by more than 10,000 signatures gathered by a coalition called Providence for Palestine. The council placed it on the ballot unanimously. [10] The language names no country. The campaign for it and the campaign against it, both say plainly which country it means. [11] Last November, Somerville, Massachusetts passed a similar measure that named Israel outright. [12] Providence’s version does not need to.

Portland readers have seen the ballot’s vocabulary before, but not where you might think. Resolution 37723, the investment policy Portland’s council adopted last December, speaks in universal categories: human rights, war, armed conflict, genocide, slavery, torture, arbitrary detention, war crimes, crimes against humanity. The vocabulary on the Providence ballot is older and more specific. It is the vocabulary of the pledge: the commitment six Portland councilors signed on Oct. 17, 2025, to investigate the city’s complicity with “Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid, or genocidal violence against Palestinians.” [13]

As I reported last week’s installment, Portland’s method was translation: a country-specific pledge converted into country-neutral policy language, with the destination set before the categories were written. [14] Providence’s method is publication. The same words, occupation, apartheid, genocide, with ethnic cleansing added, go straight onto the ballot. No translation step, no council drafting process, target named by everyone except the text itself.

All three men who ran for mayor of Providence this year took positions on Question 7. Morales supports it and calls it the right thing to do. Talan, a board member of the Rhode Island Coalition for Israel, opposes it and calls it hateful. And Smiley, the incumbent the voters just retired, opposed it on different grounds: He called it legally unenforceable. [15]

Note what the losing mayor’s objection was. Not the politics. The administrability. Who determines which countries qualify, by what standard, at what cost. That is the question Portland’s Finance and Governance Committee spent Sept. 3 examining without resolving. In Providence, it will now be answered, or not, by referendum. A city electorate is about to be asked to determine by majority vote which foreign countries are conducting genocide. Whatever you think the answer is, consider the question. The measure travels lighter than the answers do.

One more parallel. Most of Providence’s pension money, a May 2026 city investment report shows, is not directly invested in individual companies or countries. [16] Most of the money is beyond the measure’s reach, a condition Portland readers will recognize from the Sept. 3 record. The vote is about the vocabulary, not the portfolio.

The second article in this series closed with a warning that what Portland watched in 2024 was a rehearsal: same machinery, same director, new national money. That reading has now been tested against an event. Providence was not influenced by Portland and did not need to be. That is what a playbook means. It does not spread by imitation. It spreads by being run, city by city, by national organizations with national calendars, against local incumbents who each believe their situation is unique. Smiley believed it. He ran on housing built, crime down, schools recovered, and he said at his own polling place that the progress could stop if voters made a different choice. [17] The voters made a different choice by five points.

Portland’s method—this series has argued—cannot be made illegal, and the state has twice confirmed that no law reaches it. The only court left is the one that meets on Nov. 3. It turns out that court has more than one docket. On the same Tuesday, Providence will elect a mayor and decide Question 7, and Portland will fill six council seats across the two districts where every seat is up. Two cities, one calendar.

They are not running the same play against you. They are running the same play everywhere. The program is now printed in two cities. You are still holding it.

Robert Miller is a Pearl District resident who has spent five decades in the gaming industry. He holds a Ph.D. in operations research from Louisiana State University, writes The Center Held on Substack.

NOTES

RESOLVED since v1: measure confirmed as Question 7; Talan confirmed as lone Republican general-election opponent (RI Current, WPRI, Epoch Times), resolving the earlier no-Novemberopponent conflict; adjudicator list and complicity definition sourced (Providence Eye, RI Current); backer figures corrected to Caterpillar and Axon Enterprise, not Chevron (JTA); template thesis recast: Providence ballot vocabulary matches the Oct. 17 pledge, not Res. 37723, whose categories are the universal list per the author’s own published Examiner piece. Exhibit THE TEMPLATE built accordingly.

[1] First-ever primary loss by a sitting Providence mayor: WJAR claim. Verify independently and capture.

[2] Mamdani fundraiser (July) and WFP backing of Morales need primary-source captures. Sanders endorsement confirmed (NBC, WPRI). Morales is a state REPRESENTATIVE; JTA’s “state senator” is wrong (NBC, WPRI, Boston Globe agree).

[3] Vote figures are the state’s unofficial election-night reporting as rendered by Epoch Times (8:15 a.m. Sept. 10, all 82 precincts). Before print, pull the RI Board of Elections page directly and cite it. Certified results will lag.

[4] Talan lone Republican to qualify: Epoch Times, Sept. 10, 2026 ("Talan was the only Republican candidate to qualify"); Rhode Island Current, Sept. 9, 2026 ("will face Republican Dave Talan, 77, in the Nov. 3 general election"). No Republican mayor in decades: stated directly by Epoch Times; the underlying fact is that the last Republican elected mayor of Providence was Vincent "Buddy" Cianci in 1974, and Cianci left the party in 1982 (GoLocalProv Cianci timeline; NPR obituary, Jan. 28, 2016). Fifty-two years.

[5] McKee first-sitting-governor-since-2018 claim: Epoch Times.

[6-8] Ballot language shown as reported (Providence Eye; RI Current renders the ordinance as “severe violations of human rights such as ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide”). Outlets differ slightly.

[9] Backer figures: Andrew Lapin, JTA, Aug. 24, 2026, "Providence voters to put Israel boycott movement to major test at the ballot box" (supporters "identified around $2.5 million in city funds," citing Caterpillar and Axon Enterprise). Syndicated in Times of Israel, Forward, Jerusalem Post. Boston Globe, July 30, 2026, reports the city holds no Israeli sovereign bonds directly, only about $119,000 through a Vanguard index fund, per city spokesperson.

[10] Petition path: RI Current, Aug. 31, 2026. Section 209 of the city charter; first round of 1,005 accepted signatures received by the council April 16 (City Clerk Tina Mastroianni); council declined to enact, triggering a second round requiring 5 percent of qualified voters. Coalition composition same article: Jewish Voice for Peace RI, Reclaim RI, RI DSA, AFT Local 6516. Over 10,000 signatures collected in the second round, 6,036 accepted by the Board of Canvassers (Ocean State Stories, July 31, 2026, quoting Mastroianni; Steve Ahlquist substack, July 31, 2026, per Providence for Palestine release). Unanimous placement: council resolution submitting the ordinance to voters passed unanimously in a special session July 30 (Ahlquist, July 31). Precision point: the council unanimously placed the question on the ballot; it did not enact the ordinance.

[11] Both sides name the target: JTA, Aug. 24, 2026 ("both its proponents and opponents have framed the measure as a referendum on Israel and the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement"). Opposition on record: Ken Schneider, president, RI Coalition for Israel, at the Aug. 25 rally: "It’s absolutely targeted right at Israel... it’s all about Israel" (RI Current, Aug. 31). Proponent side: JVP organizer Zack Kligler quotes in the same coverage.

[12] Somerville: Question 3, Nov. 4, 2025, passed with 55.7%, 11,489 to 7,920, unofficial (Boston.com, Nov. 4, 2025; JTA, Nov. 4, 2025, "In a first, a ballot initiative to divest from Israel has won at the ballot box"). Ballot language named Israel: divest from companies that "engage in business that sustains Israel’s apartheid, genocide and illegal occupation of Palestine." One distinction to hold in reserve: Somerville’s question was nonbinding; Providence’s Question 7 is a binding ordinance. "Similar measure" survives, but an opponent will point at the difference. Body claims sourced here: Somerville population about 80,000, less than half of Providence’s, and Providence as "the largest American municipality ever to place divestment before the voting public" (Lapin, JTA, Aug. 24). The sequel: Somerville’s council voted 9 to 2 on Nov. 25, 2025 to work toward an implementing ordinance (Boston.com), and the city began exploring enactment in June 2026 (JTA). "Nonbinding" is aging.

[13] Pledge wording as reported by Willamette Week, Oct. 29, 2025.

[15] Candidate positions on Question 7: RI Current, Aug. 31, 2026 (Aug. 25 mayoral forum). Capture.

[16] May 2026 Providence investment report is cited by RI Current

[17] Smiley polling-place quotes: NBC 10 / WJAR. Capture.

The grand opening of Friendly House’s remodeled Brentano Building is scheduled from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 19 at 1715 NW 26th Ave.

The event includes food, live music by Boy and Bean and the Lila Sartola Quartet, magicians, face painting, an inflatable obstacle course, a dunk tank and a cake walk.

Friendly House volunteers will be recognized at 2 p.m.

Another historic landmark is on the block. This time the offer is for the 270,621-square-foot Power & Light building, which when completed in 1928 was the tallest downtown building.

Designed by the architectural firm of A. E. Doyle with the help of a young apprentice, Pietro Beluschi, in an Italian Renaissance Revival style, it was the home of both Pacific Power & Light and Portland Gas & Coke Company.

It was completed in less than two years just before the beginning of the Great Depression and at the peak of Laissez faire capitalism to house the growth engines of the time. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996 and was carefully updated in 2017-18 to current seismic code and contemporary office standards. It received an LEED Gold Certification this year.

But the current owner, who is local, can’t manage the debt with today’s market conditions and is forced to sell. The market will pick the value today, but expect a serious discount from the last sales price, selling well below “replacement cost.”

I have been in the building. It is lovely. Ironically, one of the few current tenants is ECOnorthwest, the city’s consultant that warned against the current “doom loop” we are experiencing (though still being poo-pooed by the most “progressive” on the City Council).

The building would also be a potential candidate for residential conversion due to its H-shaped floor plate, allowing light into “interior” units. But the apartment and housing market in Oregon is also suffering from the doom loop.

This is a true shame. A beautiful building inside and out, but economically infeasible for any use today. If downtown does not come back, it is likely functionally obsolete and will sit vacant.

The government can’t afford to maintain the city and certainly not this building. Public employees want to work at home. Visitors don’t come to downtown hotels anymore due to the surrounding livability issues. Yes, occupancy at some downtown hotels has ticked up, but at room rates insufficient to operate the building and make the capital investments needed. That’s why the hotels are in receivership and waiting for things to get better. That’s why downtown apartment buildings are selling at a discount.

That means shops and restaurants have too few visitors to stay profitable after paying the higher insurance and security costs required to ensure safety for workers and guests and to deal with the inevitable vandalism and theft.

Entertainment and cultural venues are trying to draw visitors downtown, but car break-ins, transit safety, parking limitations and costs yield negative publicity and resistance to coming into the city after dark. That’s why the Portland Five are struggling and would be losing money, were it not for the Keller Auditorium. We all know that story.

Our doom loop gains momentum from the failure of our Portland and Multnomah County governments to take seriously the behavioral health (addiction and psychosis) crisis and the lack of new housing stock. Who builds new housing when the people who can afford it and are paying the bulk of the taxes are leaving the area?

And the people who can’t afford the housing are coming to Portland at the invitation of the Democratic Socialists of America-inspired bloc of votes on Portland’s City Council—who make up half of the council and have paralyzed the city’s ability to respond to safety and livability problems.

This economic and political doom loop grips our proudly liberal city and state because we seem oddly incapable of compromising to help the very workers and disadvantaged people the City Council DSA bloc professes to care about.

One would be hard pressed to find a climate denier in Portland or Multnomah County. Most of us aspire to universal health care. I for one do not believe that capitalism, as it is being practiced today in this country, is the solution for healing our economic and climate future, certainly long term.

If there are Trump supporters in Portland, they are hiding or rapidly moving through. As a state, we have one billionaire, who is also a big philanthropist. We have some wealthy people, most of whom have given generously to good causes and things that enrich the community. We are certainly not the hotbed of capitalistic growth. I do not know anyone who supports the Trump Administration’s immigration policies and tactics.

As former addict and an ex-con, I have plenty of strong opinions about and compassion for those living on our streets with addiction and psychosis. I want these problems fixed now and have been volunteering my time to that end.

The vast majority of us want a safe livable city with some economic vitality, one that produces living-wage jobs in a city with sports activity, cultural opportunities and diversity, housing we can afford and with racial and ethnic diversity. The current City Council and County Board are doing little to produce this. They are focused on building power.

The most important thing we can do in District 4 is to fire Mitch Green and stop the 6-6 stalemate on City Council. But that will not be enough unless we change the county chair, who acts as CEO for the county.

We can start by hiring Dr. Sharon Meieran to replace the departing Jessica Vega Pederson, who continued the ill-conceived policies of Debra Kafoury to the point where Multnomah County is dysfunctional in almost every area the county chair is responsible for.

The pandemic set the stage, but the decisions of the state, city and county made in response to it are responsible for the doom loop we are in. And yes, for the lack of sustainable economic use of the many historical buildings downtown and in District 4, including this landmark historic building.

We cannot change the current status quo with those active in sustaining it in office. Let’s do that in November and set the stage for improvement.

By Robert Miller

Last November, under a voting system Portland had never used before, a coordinated slate won seven of the 12 seats on the city's new council. The first article in this series documented the agreement behind that slate. The second followed its money. This one answers the question underneath both: how does seven of 12 actually happen?

Fair warning: the answer is dense, because it has to be. It is arithmetic, and arithmetic does not summarize. So let me do what a prosecutor does on the first morning of a long trial and tell you exactly what the evidence will show, so you can follow every exhibit knowing where it goes.

• We will show you the game: a seat costs 25% of the vote plus one ballot, and every vote that a winner doesn't need moves to that voter's next choice. First choices start the count. Second choices decide it.

• We will show that first place does not win: a candidate who trailed two rivals took his district's first seat, and a candidate sitting in a winning position lost his, felled not by his opponents but by his own lane's discipline concentrating on the other guy.

• We will show, from the certified record of every ballot in this city, that coordinated voting was not a socialist invention: every organized lane built ladders, and the strongest single ladder in Portland belonged to the Chamber of Commerce's own coalition.

• We will show that the candidates’ money was nearly even, so nobody bought these seats.

• And then we will show you the one thing the evidence attributes to a single organization: ranking instructions, published on paper, working in all four districts at once, delivered by an organization that did something no other political formation in this city does. It did not go home after the election.

  Do not lose hope as you read. There is a plan, and it is next week’s article.

What happened

In November 2024, Portland played a brand-new game for the first time. Ninety-eight candidates ran for 12 council seats—three seats per district—and in two districts, the ballot listed 30 names. [1] Voters ranked their choices. When the counting stopped, a slate carried by the Working Families Party's machinery held seven of the 12 seats, and six of the seven went on to form a caucus of their own naming on the council.

Six of the seven went on to form a caucus of their own naming on the council; Pirtle-Guiney never joined it, Dunphy has since formally left it, and Green says he no longer attends.

The agreement at the center of the coordination, documented in the first article of this series, was the Democratic Socialists of America's. The two organizations' lists were not identical, and the difference is instructive. Working Families endorsed all seven. The DSA's published voter guide fully endorsed only Green and Koyama Lane, green-lighted Avalos, Dunphy, Kanal and Morillo among its 23 partial endorsements, and left Pirtle-Guiney out entirely; she is also the one of the seven who never joined the caucus. [5]

Whether the two organizations coordinate with each other is a question no filed document answers; what the filings and the published guides show is that they converged on six of the same winners, share people at the top and won. The second article followed the Working Families money. This one explains the game, and, because fairness demanded it, reads every ballot in the city to find out who else was playing.

The new game

In 1868, an English barrister named Henry Droop worked out the smallest number of votes that makes a seat mathematically safe. His example: In a district of 4,000 voters electing three members, any group of 1,001 voters is guaranteed a seat; no combination of the other 2,999 can take it away. [2] One quarter plus one vote. That is the number Portland now uses: cross 25% and you are in, and everything beyond that line is surplus. The system doesn't waste surplus. It transfers it to those voters' next choices.

Strip away the politics and Droop's system is a rule from the mathematics of allocation: How to move scarce things so nothing sits stranded where it produces no return. Establish the minimum needed to complete one transaction. Stop allocating once the transaction is assured. Release the excess to the remaining demand. Repeat until the seats are filled. Droop did for votes what a competent bookmaker does for capital: once money can no longer improve one position, he stops stranding it there and puts it back to work. Honest math. But notice what it means: The count no longer ends when the first-choice votes are tallied. It ends when the transfers do.

First place doesn't mean you win

Here is the part of the 2024 results almost nobody absorbed. In District 2, fewer voters ranked Sameer Kanal first than ranked Elana Pirtle-Guiney or Dan Ryan first. Kanal took the district's first seat anyway; when other candidates were eliminated, their voters' next choices flowed to him and carried him past both. [3] In District 4, Officer Eli Arnold finished with the third-most first-choice votes, ahead of Eric Zimmerman. Third place wins a seat in this game. Arnold doesn't hold one. And the certified ballots reveal the detail that should end every lazy telling of that story: The transfers that lifted Zimmerman past him came principally from Olivia Clark's surplus, which broke 50% to Zimmerman and 10% to Arnold. [4] Arnold was not beaten by the socialists. He was beaten by his own lane's discipline, concentrated on the other guy.

Started behind two, seated first. Started in a winning position, never seated. Your first-choice vote is not the game. The ladder underneath it is.

Everybody built ladders

Before this series accuses anyone of playing the game too well, fairness requires the whole table. So, I ran one measurement, the same instrument for everyone, across the certified record of every council ballot in the city: When a voter's first choice belonged to an endorsement bloc, how often did their next choice stay inside it? [5]

Here is what the ballots say. Candidates formed pairs everywhere, and the strongest reciprocal pair in Portland was not the slate's. It was Olivia Clark and Eric Zimmerman, endorsed together by the business coalition United for Portland: half of Clark’s voters ranked Zimmerman next, and 46% of Zimmerman’s ranked Clark.

The slate's showcase pair—Tiffany Koyama Lane and Angelita Morillo, who campaigned as a pair and asked to be ranked as one—ran at 46% each way. In District 2, Sameer Kanal and Michelle DePass formed a pair across lanes at roughly 40% each way, which is the machinery of Kanal's transfer-powered seat. Measured as whole blocs, the strongest single ladder in the city belonged to United for Portland's District 4 slate, whose voters stayed inside it at more than twice the rate outsiders entered it, the strongest bloc ladder measured anywhere in the city, in any lane. [5] So no, coordinated voting was not a socialist invention, and anyone who tells you the chamber's side doesn't play has not read the ballots. I have.

Then what, exactly, was different about the slate? Reach and system. The DSA's published guide is the only instruction set in Portland whose voters laddered in all four districts at once. United for Portland's ladder was mighty in District 4, real in District 2 and absent in District 3. The labor council's worked in three districts and ran backward in the fourth. The ballots teach why: Ladders require short lists. Working Families endorsed 13 council candidates and seven won; the labor council endorsed 12 and eight won; United for Portland endorsed 27 and six won, and in the district where it endorsed 11 at once, its ladder dissolved into the crowd. [5] A guide that says rank these few, in this order, concentrates. And one correction the ballots insist on: this was not an army. Barely 1-4% of voters copied the DSA's complete guide.

What the guide supplied was humbler and more effective, a usable ladder laid onto voters' real preferences. One organization published that instruction citywide, on paper, before the election. That is the difference, and it is a difference of system, not of kind. Underneath all of it is one mechanism. An instructed ballot climbs, round after round, landing inside its team. The ballot of a voter who walked in alone and ranked three favorites from a field of 30 can die early—set aside, exhausted—while the instructed ballots keep working. Two ballots, one game, very different odds.

The bankroll

Instructions are free to write and expensive to deliver. Getting “rank them, in this order” into tens of thousands of hands takes canvassers, phone banks and texts; the machinery behind the slate spent $96,000 on phone and text contact in the nine weeks before the election alone. The second article in this series followed all of it to the dollar. [6] To get this done, the movement behind the slate mobilized more than $1.6 million: roughly half a million through the Working Families machinery, 83 cents of every dollar arriving from Brooklyn, and $1.1 million from Portland's own public matching fund.

Mobilized, not spent. And the distinction matters: almost none of it ever touched the organization's books. And in fairness, money sat on every side of the table. The business coalition's fund raised $1.2 million the same cycle, and the candidates' own war chests were nearly even: the slate's seven committees spent about $970,000 in 2024, an average of $138,000, with the other winners close behind and a public-match gap of about 8%. [6] Nobody bought these seats. Money was everywhere. The citywide instruction was in one place. Every dollar of all of it is on file. What no filing shows is the instruction the dollars carried.

The voter cannot see any of this happen. The old system was crude but face up: one vote, count the piles, biggest piles win. Voting in Portland now is like buying a scratch-off lottery ticket. It is fun to scratch. It offers not a clue as to the mechanics. And it is based on hope.

The casino

I spent five decades in the gaming industry, so permit me a short translation. You can beat the house. Coordination is required. It is not allowed in casinos. That is why they have cameras. And in gambling, bettors don't trust the house. They trust the game, because the game is regulated, and the entire purpose of regulation is that the odds printed on the felt do not migrate. Portland's felt says 25% plus one, same price for every player. But teams that transfer surplus internally while solo ballots exhaust are not paying the printed price. In 2024 several tables had teams. The count was honest. The odds migrated anyway, at every table, in whichever direction the local team leaned. And Portland employs no one whose job is to notice.

Droop's ghost

One last thing about the barrister. Droop knew that parties could win transfer games through vote management; he wrote down what it cost them: “an expensive organization and strict party discipline.” [7] His system was designed to make that machinery unnecessary, so ordinary voters wouldn't need a party to avoid wasting their votes. The 2024 ballots now show, clearly, that money can buy the first half of Droop's price and cannot buy the second. The business coalition's $1.2 million bought the most effective ladder in the city, in one district, for one night. Discipline is supplied by members, not vendors.

The machine

Here is the defining lesson of 2024, and it explains everything the exhibits showed. When the chamber, the good-government groups and the business class come together, it is a debutante ball. Committees, catering, flowers, a band, a triumphant night of it. And then it is over, and everyone goes back to their world, because their world is somewhere else: a company, a practice, a payroll. Politics, for them, is an evening they attend. This is not a failure of principle. The chamber has principles, and so do the churches and the good government leagues. What they lack is experience. Nothing in their world prepared them for an opponent whose politics is not an evening or a season but an identity: a congregation that votes. The ballots prove they can dance; their District 4 ladder was the strongest in the city. Then the band went home.

The DSA has no other world to go back to. Its stated mission, in its own words, is to end capitalism, and that is a full-time job with no completion date. [8] And progressive Portland's populism supplies the fuel such a mission runs on: It pitches the oppressed against the oppressors, and a war between the oppressed and their oppressors has no off-season, no closing ceremony, no last dance. So, there is no season for these politics. The winter home of the business coalition's $1.2 million is a bank account. The winter home of the DSA is a meeting. Full-time organization, member discipline, one operational goal, build power and keep it, legitimized by lofty goals: Americans have a name for that structure, and it is not an insult, it is a genus. Tammany fed the poor and naturalized the immigrant. Daley's Chicago called itself the city that works, and the trains ran, because patronage discipline pointed every job at a single purpose: stay in power. [9]

The machines were never legitimized by their machinery. They were legitimized by their ideals, and they delivered just enough of them to keep the franchise. Droop's system was invented to kill exactly this animal; New York adopted it in 1936 for the stated purpose of breaking Tammany. [10] Portland has now run the experiment nobody thought to run: What happens when the machine is born inside the anti-machine system, already fluent in its arithmetic. The answer is seated on your council. The math is doing exactly what Droop built it to do: rewarding whoever wastes the fewest votes. He assumed that would be the voters. It is the only full-time organization in town.

The way out

So, what levels the playing field? Not repeal; the math is honest and it protected voters in ways the old system never did. Not outrage; you do not out-argue a playbook. You update yours. Everything measured in this article, the pairing, the instructions, the ladder, is legal, public and available to any group of Portlanders willing to organize, and the ballots prove it works in every direction: the chamber's coalition built the stoutest ladder in the city, and voters in every lane built pairs. The game pays whoever organizes. Yet in 2024, roughly three of every four voters still played it alone. And a game that rewards organization stops being a scandal the moment everyone organizes.

There is a country that proves it. Ireland has run its national elections on Droop's arithmetic for a century, in districts of three to five seats, and every Irish party plays the game the slate played here: paired candidates, ranking instructions, managed transfers. [11] Nobody calls it a machine. They call it Tuesday. Portland is already learning: the mayor announced last month that he is assembling a slate of his own. When everyone plays, the discipline of one bloc stops being an edge and becomes the new normal, and the voters get the proportional council Droop promised them.

One more time, then: the dealing was honest and the count was perfect, and the old poker saying still holds, but read it carefully now. The mark was never the team across the table. Every organized lane had its ladder. The mark was everyone who walked in alone, ranked three names on conviction and hoped. Last November, that was most of this city. And the answer to a full-time organization has never, anywhere, been a seasonal one.

Next week: How Portland's other 75% starts playing, and the plan already built to do it. Do not lose hope. There is a plan.

Notes

[1] AEI, An Initial Assessment of Proportional Ranked-Choice Voting in Portland, Oregon (2025); Multnomah County certified November 2024 results.

[2] H. R. Droop, On the Political and Social Effects of Different Methods of Electing Representatives, read March 10, 1869 (Library of Congress copy); quota also in Droop, On Methods of Electing Representatives, Macmillan, 1868.

[3] Multnomah County certified tabulation, District 2; author's computation from the certified cast-vote record (Nov. 29, 2024 files).

[4] Author's computation from the certified District 4 cast-vote record: P (second = Zimmerman | first = Clark) = 0.50; P(= Arnold) = 0.10.

[5] Author's cluster analysis of all four certified cast-vote records, one instrument for every bloc. Endorsement sets: Portland DSA voter guide (Oct. 16, 2024); unitedforportland.org 2024 endorsements (both tiers); NW Labor Press union voter guide (Oct. 2024). Full table, method, and limits available; measures association, not motive.

[6] Verified record from part two (ORESTAR; City Small Donor Elections disclosures). Candidate committee totals: calendar-2024 ORESTAR account summaries; public-match figures are amounts approved. United for Portland Action Fund receipts: Portland Elections Commission 2024 report.

[7] Droop, 1869, verbatim.

[8] Democratic Socialists of America, About Us (dsausa.org): “As we are unlikely to see an immediate end to capitalism tomorrow, DSA fights for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people.” Page capture on file.

[9] “The city that works,” the Daley-era epithet for Chicago; see Mike Royko, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (1971), and Cohen and Taylor, American Pharaoh (2000).

[10] PR-STV adopted by New York City in 1936 as a reform aimed at Tammany Hall; used 1937- 1945.

[11] PR-STV in Ireland since 1922; on party vote management, Michael Gallagher, in The Politics of Electoral Systems (Oxford, 2005).

Robert Miller is a Pearl District resident who has spent five decades in the gaming industry. He holds a Ph.D. in operations research from Louisiana State University, writes The Center Held on Substack.

Portland General Electric’s proposed transmission project through Forest Park, known as the Harborton Reliability Project, still lives.

As a result of a city of Portland and PGE mediation process, PGE recently filed a revised application for Phase 3 of the Harborton Project. Portland Permitting and Development Department has deemed the application incomplete. PGE plans to revise and resubmit.

Though soundly rejected in 2025 by a unanimous City Council vote after strong opposition from the public and conservation groups, the company is pursuing a fast-track path that could result in public meetings as soon as October.

That is according to sources at the Forest Park Conservancy, the nonprofit whose mission is to protect and restore Forest Park.

“The public believes this project was stopped (by the original City Council vote),” said FPC board member Carole Hardy, who attended closed-door negotiations between PGE and the city that led to the city’s promise to support a new application. “There has been little notification that it is back on the table and what the long-term impacts on Forest Park will be.”

Hardy said the latest PGE proposal includes $5.5 million ($3.1 million more than the original proposed amount) for mitigating the damage to the park’s ecology.

PGE announced that the new plan includes site restoration measures based on mediation input that are “reasonable, technically feasible and likely to yield ecological benefits.” The application includes “additional technical information and analysis including information about system reliability, alternatives, environmental considerations and construction methods.” PGE’s project overview can be found at portlandgeneralprojects.com/Harborton

The newly revised PGE application involves payment of $250,000 to the city to hire a third-party consultant prior to pursuing future project phases estimated to consume an additional 15 acres of Forest Park.

According to Hardy, little else about the latest version of the application has changed from PGE’s original proposal. Hardy said viable alternatives avoiding the park have still not been analyzed.

The proposed funding for park restoration is far less than Forest Park advocacy and conservation groups like FPC, Forest Park Neighborhood Association and Bird Alliance of Oregon had asked for, Hardy said. The groups originally requested an additional $5 million from PGE to offset the damage from the project to conserve additional land outside the park, a jointly managed trust for mitigation outside the park and oversight to see that PGE funds would not backfill city budget deficits.

“PGE claims other alternatives will cost too much and they have to pass those costs onto ratepayers,” she added. “PGE’s poor planning has pushed the city to a flawed decision which violates public policy and public trust.”

During mediation, PGE threatened to bring a federal lawsuit against the city if it was not allowed to access their easement, which appeared to shift the city’s position and willingness to negotiate a settlement, Hardy said.

Lack of transparency by city officials and PGE is an issue.

“By cutting conservation groups and public voices out of the final negotiation, the city failed to negotiate to the full extent possible, leaving behind the exploration of alternatives and additional money that could be used for restoration,” Hardy said. “Now PGE is pushing to fast-track the process, minimizing the time the public has to review the revised application and provide input.”

The public voice still matters. PGE will post the application online when it has been deemed complete. A public hearing will then be scheduled, and any decision rendered by the hearing officer may be appealed to the Portland City Council.

Hardy suggests that interested parties contact their City Council representatives and Mayor Keith Wilson.

Darcie Meihoff is a past board president of the Forest Park Conservancy.

Following a forum at which Abraham Lincoln was called a murderer by a panelist selected by the city of Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture and a plan that would not “return Lincoln to his pedestal” in the South Park Blocks was presented as a final decision, Mayor Keith Wilson had heard enough.

Two days later he made an announcement.

“I ran for mayor to repair, restore and revitalize our city. Now that Portland’s longstanding statue of President Abraham Lincoln has been repaired, it is time to restore it to its original pedestal as a proud piece of our citywide revitalization,” read Wilson’s statement.

“I ask that we reflect on the fact that the statue of President Lincoln came down not in an act of togetherness and self-examination, but in a moment of unilateral, senseless harm.

“I’ve listened to our community: Healing that wound requires prioritizing restoration above other goals. Reinterpretation, however earnest and well-founded by national experts, should never be forced by an act of destruction alone.

“As we move forward in restoring Lincoln and finalizing plans to restore other Portland monuments in the coming years, we will continue to bolster our community engagement strategies—incorporating lessons learned through this process.”

Two days earlier, Portlanders gathered informally but respectfully in the South Park Blocks on Sept. 8 to hear the words of Abraham Lincoln, as delivered by actor Steve Holgate, who has been portraying Lincoln for more than 30 years. A banner called for honoring the 16th president by returning him to his pedestal, where vandals topped his statue in 2020.

Then they joined a larger crowd across the street in the Portland Art Museum for what was promised as a “conversation” about the return of the statue in an event organized by the city’s Office of Arts & Culture.

The plan to return the statue to ground level a few feet from the plinth was made “to increase accessibility and spark reflection,” according to an earlier statement by Darion Jones, assistant director of the Portland Office of Arts & Culture.

But reflection was not the mood of the Sept. 8 panel. One panelist accused Lincoln of murder for failing to pardon more than 38 Dakota men sentenced to death by a military commission.

Another panelist thought it would be better to not return the statue at all because “I truly believe that it’s going to be destroyed … because I don’t think that people feel heard.”

Many in the audience of about 250 stood at intervals, held “Return Lincoln to his pedestal” and spoke out in anger. Loud voices complained that the format—which provided no opportunity for audience input other than writing notes to the panel—did not live up to the title of the event: “Lincoln’s return: a public conversation.”

“I was very disappointed in the event last night,” Deputy City Administrator Donnie Olivera wrote in an email yesterday. “It was not what I requested of staff and was frankly embarrassing to me and the city. For better and for worse it was illuminating and thus I made a recommendation to the mayor on a different course of action.”