A member of Stadiumhood Neighbors sent a letter to Sen. Lisa Reynolds regarding the science on “harm reduction” as a therapy for drug addiction. For personal safety reasons, he did not want his name published.

The current debate around syringe exchange and drug paraphernalia distribution programs in Multnomah County has become dangerously disconnected from reality. Public officials and advocacy organizations continue to frame these programs as unquestionably evidence-based while ignoring a growing body of research and the lived experiences of residents who are dealing with the fallout every day.

The science on syringe exchange programs is far more complicated than advocates often admit.

Research does show that syringe exchange programs can reduce HIV transmission among intravenous drug users. One major analysis found Syringe Exchange Programs openings associated with reductions in HIV diagnoses of up to 18%. But newer research examining modern fentanyl-era conditions paints a far more troubling picture.

A widely discussed study by economist Analisa Packham published in the Journal of Public Economics found that counties opening syringe exchange programs experienced a 21.6% increase in opioid-related overdose deaths following implementation. Her research estimated approximately three additional overdose fatalities per county per year and concluded that SEP openings were causally linked to increases in fentanyl-related deaths.

Critically, many traditional public health studies focus narrowly on disease transmission among users while failing to measure broader community harms. They rarely account for impacts on nearby schools, businesses, neighborhood livability, psychological stress on residents, retail theft, open-air drug markets or the normalization of public drug use around children.

In Stadiumhood, we have watched mobile distribution programs hand out needles and crack pipes within walking distance of Cathedral School. Portland People’s Outreach Project’s distribution site near Cathedral was about 850 feet from the school itself. Parents and residents repeatedly raised concerns after witnessing open drug use, discarded needles, dealing activity and individuals passed out near school routes.

To be clear: I support treatment, recovery and real compassion for people suffering from addiction and mental illness. What I do not support is a version of “harm reduction” that ignores the harm being inflicted on everyone else in the community, especially children.

Here’s something new. As the kick-off event for this summer’s Re-ignite the Pearl, free yoga classes are being held on on the large grassy oval area at the Fields Park, 1100 NW Overton St.

The first class is Saturday, May 30.

Local yoga instructors will lead the assembled in a series of poses, and all levels and ages are welcome. Plan to arrive about 15 minutes early, and bring a mat and water bottle. There will be a few extra of both for those who need them. Classes run 11 a.m. to noon, but stick around at the end of class to meet your neighbors.

Yoga in the Park is presented by the Pearl District Neighborhood Association as the start of a series of summer events. Plans for this and other community events (a farmer’s market for Northwest 13th Avenue, for instance) were hatched after a 600-strong group of neighbors joined a Town Hall and said they were ready for the Pearl to bounce back.

“You told us loud and clear that you wanted more reasons to gather, move, and connect as a community,” said Bruce Stader, Pearl District Neighborhood Association President. “This is us delivering.”

Yoga in the Park continues on the following dates: Saturday, May 30; Saturday, June 27; Saturday, July 25; Saturday, Aug. 29 and Saturday, Sept. 26

Portland’s recent budget stalemate exposed more than political division. It raised a fundamental question about whether the city is following the charter voters approved.

According to The Oregonian/OregonLive , the city’s 12 councilors spent three days grinding through nearly 40 amendments to Mayor Keith Wilson’s $8.5 billion budget amid a record $160 million deficit. When the dust settled, only 15 relatively modest amendments survived. More consequential proposals involving police and fire staffing, shelters, parks and housing repeatedly died in 6-6 votes.

The spectacle reinforced what many critics feared about a 12-member council: An even-numbered body can easily deadlock.

Under the charter, seven votes are required to pass a non‑emergency ordinance, resolution or budget amendment. A 6‑6 vote is not compromise. It is paralysis.

Meanwhile, Portlanders watching public safety positions and shelter beds disappear are asking the only question that matters: Why isn’t the mayor breaking the tie?

And that leads to the real issue: Is the mayor legally required to break a tie vote?

Charter language meant to be broad

The Portland Charter answers that question clearly.

Section 2-401 lists the Mayor’s responsibilities under “Duties”:

“The Mayor has the following responsibilities:
(e) Vote on matters before the Council in case of a tie, when the Mayor casts the deciding vote.”

Notice the phrasing: Not “some” matters—not “non-emergency ordinances.” The charter explicitly states “matters before the council.” That phrase, unqualified, means what it says: Any matter on which a tie occurs. This language was not an accident or an afterthought. It was deliberately crafted to be broad.

What reformers actually said

The history of the Charter Commission process provides the legislative intent of the broad tiebreaker language.

By 2022, one public concern surfaced repeatedly: a 12‑member council could deadlock. Reporting by Rose City Reform documented numerous warnings that an even‑numbered council would produce exactly the gridlock Portland is now experiencing.

Former Mayor Ted Wheeler urged the Charter Commission to include a mayoral tie-breaking authority specifically to avoid governmental paralysis.

Commissioner Carmen Rubio stated the rationale directly:

“As much as we’d want a majority to align around any policy agenda or issue that comes before City Council, sometimes that just doesn’t happen.

“The public is already frustrated around city council gridlock. If we don’t have a tool to break through those impasse times, it would just produce a different kind of gridlock and cause more frustration.”

Her comments described the tiebreaker as a general anti-gridlock mechanism, not a narrowly confined power limited to certain categories of legislation.

The commission listened. After what Rose City Reform described as “a deluge of warnings about a deadlock,” commissioners—including current councilor Candace Avalos—unanimously added the tiebreaker. The explicit purpose, as co-chair Melanie Billings-Yun put it, was to respond to Portlanders’ strong demand for a tiebreaker mechanism to prevent stalemate.

The public discussion consistently treated the tiebreaker as broad authority. One commissioner compared it directly to the vice president’s role in the U.S. Senate:

“{The}tie-breaker power decisive action is similar to what a vice president does with the U.S. Senate. They come in to break a tie, but they are not a member of the senate.”

The analogy matters because the vice president breaks ties not only on final passage, but also on amendments and procedural motions.

Other commissioners added that the tiebreaker would “incentivize council to not hit a tie” and encourage dealmaking when councilors wanted to avoid mayoral involvement.

Likewise, the League of Women Voters of Portland put it plainly in its endorsement materials:

“The mayor breaks tie votes of the council. This tie-breaking vote prevents gridlock.”

Nothing in the public record suggests a narrow power. The intent was broad. The language is broad. The purpose was broad.

January 2025 city attorney memo

On Jan. 2, 2025, the new council deadlocked 6‑6 on electing a council president. A motion was made to let the mayor break the tie. City Attorney Robert Taylor advised against it, arguing that officer elections are internal matters governed by Section 2‑110.

For that specific question, the reasoning is defensible. But Taylor went further—much further.

He cited ballot title language his office had drafted (“vote to break ties on non‑emergency ordinances”) for the 2022 voters’ pamphlet to argue that the mayor’s authority is limited to that single category.

A majority accepted the memo. Three councilors dissented. Consequently, a memo written for a narrow question became the basis for a sweeping limitation on mayoral authority.

Charter, not ballot title, controls

That creates a serious legal question: Can a post-election legal memo narrow powers that the charter itself, in plain text, grants in broad and unconditional language?

If the drafters intended to limit the tiebreaker to non‑emergency ordinances, they could have written that restriction into the charter. They did not.

Legal analysis begins—and often ends—with the plain meaning of enacted text.

The charter is unequivocal:

“Vote on matters before the Council in case of a tie.”

Budget amendments unquestionably fit within that category.

While the ballot title in a voter pamphlet summary used narrower language, subsidiary materials cannot rewrite enacted law. The charter itself uses the phrase “non‑emergency ordinances” elsewhere (Section 2‑117), proving the drafters knew how to limit the scope when they intended to. They chose not to here.

The contrast is stark. The charter uses broad language; the ballot title uses narrow language. Under basic principles of legal interpretation, the enacted text controls.

I served 12 years as mayor of Ketchikan, Alaska, under a charter that stated: “The mayor shall not have a vote except in the case of a tie.’ There, the council set its own rules, but the mayor still voted on every tie, including amendments to ordinances and budgets. Portland’s charter uses the exact same structure. The council sets its operating rules, but the mayor must break ties.

Why this matters now

Currently, the council’s operating rules, shaped by the city attorney’s interpretation, prohibit the mayor from breaking ties on budget amendments. If that interpretation is wrong, Portland is operating under procedures that directly conflict with its own foundational law.

This is not merely procedural trivia. Portland’s new government structure depends on the ability to function despite ideological fragmentation within a 12-member council. The repeated 6-6 votes during the budget process are exactly the scenario reformers anticipated when they added the tiebreaker provision.

What must happen now

If the mayor cannot break ties on major legislative and budget matters, Portland has a government with a built‑in paralysis mechanism.

This demands an independent legal review—not from the city attorney’s office, which authored the limiting memo, but from an outside constitutional lawyer with no institutional stake in the outcome.

The core question is simple:

Does Section 2-401(e)’s reference to “matters before the Council” mean what it says?

A stronger step would be for those councilors who believe the charter means what it says to jointly fund a request for judicial clarification. Public officials share standing to seek judicial enforcement of charter requirements tied to their official duties, especially where voting authority is allegedly diluted or disregarded.

If tied motions are treated as failures when the charter requires a mayoral tiebreaker, councilors could argue that the constitutional process was not followed. An incorrect interpretation, they can contend, effectively altered the governing charter structure approved by voters.

They may not only have the authority to challenge the interpretation but may have an obligation to do so. Because, if the charter means what it plainly says, Portland may have spent the week operating under the wrong rule.

Portland deserves a government capable of governing. The charter’s framers tried to provide one. Whether their work is being faithfully interpreted is a question that demands a straight answer before the next 6‑6 tie buries another decision.

Amanda Garcia-Snell, who proposed to replace the city’s “partnership” with neighborhood associations with public engagement standards set by the city administrator, has been placed on administrative leave today.

“I can confirm Amanda Garcia-Snell is on paid leave,” wrote city Communications Manager Carrie Belding today. “We can’t provide additional details regarding the employee’s leave status.”

She was hired in January, 2025, and had the title of First Engagement Officer.

Garcia-Snell announced in March that new standards for neighborhood associations and coalitions would be adopted by July 1. That timeframe was extended to sometime before the end of the year, and now perhaps for longer.

Todd Zarnitz, president of the District 4 Coalition and the most outspoken critic of the proposed changes, said he didn’t know what to make of Garcia-Snell’s status.

The issue to him is, “We can’t have the neighborhood system run by administrative rules that can be changed by fiat.”

The Burnside Bridge is turning 100 years old, and Multnomah County is throwing a free centennial party.

On Saturday, May 30, the entire bridge will close to vehicles for a pedestrian-only festival from noon-5 p.m.

This family-friendly event honors the people, history and organizations that have shaped Portland over the last century, while looking ahead to the earthquake-ready replacement bridge Project.

• On-Bridge Festival noon-5 pm: Walk, roll and explore interactive exhibits, history storytelling, kid-focused activities and even hula-hooping.

• Portland Saturday Market Early Kickoff: The market has called the Burnside Bridge home since 1976. Shop small starting at 10 a.m.

• Free Living Museum Tours: Tours depart from the on-bridge history booth at 12:30 and 1:30 p.m., leading you through the market to the in-office museum.

Movies from the 1980s are best known for action classics, with stars such as Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Norris and Willis. It was a decade of blockbusters. But when Elliot Lavine thinks of the ‘80s, it’s more cerebral. He has selected a challenging quartet of films for June. The comedy is dark. The films are edgy, bizarre, even hypnotic. Some of the decade’s films will leave you puzzled, maybe even disturbed. You will not leave the theater amazed by high-tech wizardry. You will also not leave the theater yucking it up. This group of films is good brain food.

This is our monthly look at coming attractions for Cinema 21’s Saturday Morning Classics. Renown film programmer Elliot Lavine selects a theme every month, and we let you know what’s coming to the big screen at our iconic neighborhood theater at 616 NW 21st Ave.

To purchase advance tickets for the Saturday Morning Film Classics series, visit Cinema 21. All showings in the Saturday Morning series are at 11 a.m.

“The King of Comedy” (1982) at Cinema 21 on June 6. Director: Martin Scorsese.

Don’t come for the laughs and don’t mistake the title for a fun biopic. This film may star Jerry Lewis—who actually has been called the king of comedy—but there’s nothing slapstick silly about Lewis in this role of a beloved late night talk show host who is stalked and kidnapped by a failed, delusional stand-up comic played by Robert De Niro.

This may not be De Niro’s best-known role, though Lavine calls his performance “mesmerizing.” Lavine says Jerry Lewis, “in his role of a lifetime,” steals the show. This film is anything but a roaring good time. Rather, it is a disturbing take on fame, celebrity, obsession, fantasy and reality.

The film was a commercial flop when it was released. But Lavine says it has become a cult classic and a film that deserves to be reconsidered. Sarah Bernhard plays De Niro’s “demented accomplice.”

“Do the Right Thing” (1989) at Cinema 21 on June 13. Director: Spike Lee.

This was the film that Lavine says announced Spike Lee’s arrival as an important filmmaker.

The story takes place on a hot summer day and night in a Brooklyn neighborhood. Lavine calls the film an “incendiary masterpiece” and one of the ‘80s most important films. It is a deep reflection and commentary on urban America’s racial divide.

The racial tension is palpable between the neighborhood’s African-American residents and the Italian-American owners of a neighborhood pizzeria. The characters are unforgettable and there is humor in the drama, but the story is also an American tragedy.

The cinematography can be fast and furious, and Lee uses bold colors and exaggerated camera angles, all contributing to the oppressive heat of the summer and the oppressive atmosphere in a simmering corner of America. Lavine writes that on the big screen, “‘Do the Right Thing’ burns hotter than ever.”

According to Lavine, the film was supposed to be released in the summer of 1989 but was delayed until the fall because the studio feared a release in the heat of the summer could inflame audiences, inciting them to recreate the film’s violent scenes.

And let’s not forget the film’s hip-hop soundtrack, featuring Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” The cast includes Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Danny Aiello, Rosie Perez and Spike Lee himself.

“House of Games” (1987) at Cinema 21 on June 20. Director: David Mamet.

“House of Games” was the first film directed by David Mamet. (He had already won a Pulitzer Prize as a playwright.)

The neo-noir film is a thriller and Lavine calls it “a puzzle impossible to solve—until the very end.” Devious! It’s a story about con men and their con games, but trying to figure out who is conning whom will twist your mind.

A psychiatrist becomes mixed-up with one of her patients, a compulsive gambler. (She had just written a well-received book about obsessive compulsive disorder.) The shrink tries to help her patient but becomes involved in his dark, dangerous, double-dealing world. And she is incapable of resisting the intriguing forces that are entangling her.

The story baffles the mind, and perhaps the mind is its own character? Lavine says of all the films he’s programmed this month, this one definitely deserves to be rediscovered. Starring Lindsay Crouse and Joe Montegna.

“Wings of Desire” (1987) at Cinema 21 on June 27. Director: Wim Wenders.

“Wings of Desire” is the single foreign film this month. It was shot in West Berlin in what was still West Germany. The Berlin Wall is featured prominently—it would not come down for another two years.

German director Wim Wenders wrote and directed this story about angels who wander the streets of Berlin, listening to the private hopes and sorrows of the lonely. The angels cannot interact with the physical world. They can observe life but they can’t experience it. That detachment is challenged when one of the angels falls in love with a beautiful but lonely trapeze artist.

The film has been called a romantic fantasy, but it is also a meditation on what it is to be human and what it is to love.

The angels float over the city. Wenders filmed these scenes with the help of cranes and helicopters to give us swooping shots of the divided city. Reviewers have called the film, Wenders’ elegy to Berlin, seen from the perspective of angels and of everyday people. Most of the actors are European, but Peter Falk plays an interesting part as an American filmmaker in Berlin.

How to describe the film? Lavine admits it really just needs to be seen to be “properly absorbed and processed.” He calls the film “hypnotic,” saying it will linger in your mind long after you leave the theater. “From a film programmer’s perspective, it’s the perfect film to close a series like this one.”

For those of us addicted to drama, the June Saturday Morning Classics gives us that pleasurable high. Comfort not included.

Senators Lisa Reynolds (left) and Christine Drazan.

State Sen. Lisa Reynolds has a new explanation for why she mischaracterized the position of neighborhood activists seeking limits on distribution of drug paraphernalia: She didn’t think she was supposed to talk to them.

Reynolds killed Senate Bill 1573 in her committee in February, claiming that its proponents refused to compromise to aid its passage. Members of Stadiumhood Neighbors and Friends of Couch Park insisted that they would have accepted any reasonable revisions had they been given the opportunity.

Reynolds said she did not connect directly with her constituents out respect for Sen. Christine Drazan, the chief sponsor of the bill.

“We had what I thought was a really fruitful compromise,” Reynolds said, “and I’m hearing now the community would have approved, but that was not the message I got from the senator.

“I think maybe Sen. Drazan put words in their mouth,” she continued. “Maybe it was wrong of me to believe her. Obviously it was, but I’m not really sure it was my place to then go behind Sen. Drazan’s back on her bill, you know what I mean?

“We kind of don’t do that on each other’s bills—it’s like, this is her bill. It’s Sen. Drazan’s job to work that bill.”

Despite this deferential attitude toward Drazan, the Republican nominee to unseat Gov. Tina Kotek, Reynolds had little good to say about her senate colleague in a call to the NW Examiner.

“I probably shouldn’t be saying all this, but she played us all like a fiddle,” Reynolds added, “including the community.”

Sen. Drazan had a very different take on what happened.

She scoffed at the idea that Reynolds was upholding legislative protocol forbidding lawmakers from “going behind the back” of a bill’s sponsors to hear what their own constituents want.

“I’m not aware of any such tradition,” Drazan said. “But let’s parse this out: Why would her constituents reach out to anyone if she was talking to them? The thing that’s outside the norm is their feeling that they had no option.”

It was the third straight year Drazan had sponsored a bill regulating syringe distribution on behalf of Stadiumhood Neighbors. She also had a Democratic co-sponsor, though every Democrat voted against an effort to override Reynolds’ refusal to bring the bill to a floor vote in February.

Was it an extraordinary overreach into a local issue beyond her senate district? Drazan sees it as an extraordinary lapse by Democrats who should have paying attention to their own backyards.

“There’s no universe where I should have been the chief sponsor for her constituents,” said the senator from Canby.

As for the claim that neighbors insisted that no amendments be considered, Drazan said she has text messages proving the opposite.

“The only interest they had was seeing that the bill not die,” she said.

Michelle Milla, chair of Stadiumhood Neighbors, said her group sought help from city, county and state officials in response to weekly needle and pipe distributions by an anarchist group known as Portland People’s Outreach Project. Neighbors invited public officials to tour the district and see spillover problems in surrounding blocks.

The only state legislator who would take the tour or take up the cause was Drazan, while Reynolds showed no interest, Milla said.

The issue touched a higher priority for Reynolds: preserving the “harm reduction” approach to drug addiction. She claimed earlier versions of the legislation banning mobile needle handouts within 2,000 feet of schools and giving citizens a private right to sue violators “would have done away with harm reduction,” which she considers a medically proven and useful practice.

Reynolds now supports a county-run registration system for harm reduction supplies. She calls PPOP a “bad actor” that she hopes would be restrained by such regulation. She also vows to introduce a new bill in the 2027 legislative session.

By Aubrey Russell

More than five years ago, on Oct. 11, 2020, the monument commemorating Abraham Lincoln in Portland’s South Park Blocks was vandalized and toppled on a day designated as an “Indigenous People’s Day of Rage.”

Within the last few weeks, it was revealed that the city has adopted a plan—at least as early as last year—to not restore the Abraham Lincoln monument to its original condition, but to instead restore the Lincoln statue to a place on the ground, next to—not upon—its former elevated base.

This plan to debase the Lincoln sculpture will come as a surprise to nearly all Portlanders. The act of removing someone from their pedestal has an obvious and universal meaning. An online search tells us that “knocking someone from their pedestal” means: “reducing someone’s ego; to humble or humiliate one.”

We feel that it is wrong for the city of Portland to humiliate Abraham Lincoln, who remains one of history’s most progressive, respected and positive figures. In these times, Lincoln must be a person we try to emulate. We should not desecrate his statue.

The process of reckoning with public monuments commemorating historic leaders is an important one. It is understandable that our country has removed offensive monuments to certain “leaders,” for example. But no city that we are aware of has decided that a monument to Abraham Lincoln should be subjected to debasement. We are not asking our city to discourage the telling of history, but to encourage it through an additive approach to interpretation that educates and enlightens people.

A model for successful public arts policy has recently been demonstrated through the restoration and return of the Thompson Fountain. The city coordinated an inclusive and diverse set of perspectives in celebrating the return of the Thompson Elk Fountain; one which brought a moment of joy, relief and hope to those who have been concerned about the sense of decline in our city’s downtown core.

The Lincoln statue provides a similar opportunity to promote healing in our city by adding to our understanding of history, while leaving intact both the physical monument to Lincoln and the accomplishments that place him at the forefront of America’s progressive movement. Lincoln, in the four short years given him in the White House, preserved the Union, transformed our ideal of liberty through his Gettysburg Address, gave hope to enslaved black people through the Emancipation Proclamation and gave legal meaning to freedom through the 13th Amendment.

When Portland conducted a survey in 2024, the city found that 82% of respondents wanted the Lincoln monument returned. The Office of Arts and Culture had publicly embraced this outcome for years. For the Office of Arts and Culture to now adopt a different course is wrong. We ask that the Office of Arts and Culture put Abraham Lincoln’s statue back on its base, where it belongs. Do not desecrate the statue; make it whole, as promised, once again.

Aubrey Russell is a Portland Heights resident and occasional contributor to the NW Examiner.

By Sharon Meieran

Since Bruce Whitman drove a car packed with explosives into the Multnomah Athletic Club, public attention has once again turned to mental illness, treatment gaps and the people who fall through the cracks in our system.

Once again, clinicians, law enforcement and advocates have reflected on what might have prevented the tragedy. Elected leaders continue to proclaim mental health a top priority, spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to prove how committed they are, yet they have repeatedly failed to identify—let alone fix—the underlying problems.

Whitman’s death was not an isolated tragedy in a broken system. In Oregon, the cracks are the system. After hovering around the bottom for more than a decade, Oregon now ranks dead last in the nation for prevalence of mental illness, according to an annual report issued by Mental Health America.

Instead of a functioning continuum of mental healthcare, Oregon has two utterly dysfunctional revolving doors, activated only after people fall into crisis.

The first is jail. People deemed unable to aid and assist in their own criminal defense due to mental illness are sent to the Oregon State Hospital—not for meaningful treatment, but to be stabilized enough to understand there is a criminal case against them. They then return to court and are almost always released back onto the streets. Cost: roughly $2,000 per day for stays that can last months.

The second is the emergency room. People posing danger to themselves or others can be held involuntarily for treatment—but because the state hospital is filled with people facing criminal charges, those on civil commitment instead languish in local hospital rooms, sometimes for years, never receiving the care they need before being discharged back to instability.

In both systems, intervention comes too late, proves ineffective, drains public coffers and changes little.

When the next tragedy inevitably occurs, debate cycles back to the usual suspects: civil commitment laws, treatment beds, workforce shortages and funding. All of these matter. But not in isolation. Fragmented solutions within failed systems mean little in the absence of a true continuum of care.

Oregon needs a functioning mental health system. But the state alone is not to blame.

Counties are Oregon’s Local Mental Health Authorities, responsible for ensuring residents have access to behavioral health services. Multnomah County’s size—and degree of dysfunction—make it a major driver of the state’s last-place ranking.

Right now, no single entity in Multnomah County is responsible for coordinating behavioral healthcare. Mental health and addiction funding is not tied to outcomes. People bounce between streets, shelters, emergency rooms, jail, treatment programs and housing with no one accountable for whether they ever reach stability.

The consequences are visible in the human suffering and threats to public safety we see on our streets.

As a county commissioner, I worked with community leaders, experts and people with lived experience to develop a blueprint for transforming mental health and addiction care. But under Multnomah County’s structure, only the county chair directs departments, writes the budget and has the authority to fundamentally redesign systems. Tragically, comprehensive behavioral health reform has not been prioritized.

Bev Stein was the last chair to pursue major behavioral health reform nearly 25 years ago. Since then, the county has largely abandoned its role as local mental health authority. Reversing that failure will require new leadership.

Still, the county can begin building the foundation of a functioning system even now, through targeted investments in the current budget cycle such as:

• A centralized behavioral health coordination system—akin to an “air traffic control” center—to manage transitions, track outcomes and ensure people do not disappear between disconnected agencies. Counties and states across the country have accomplished this (see Alameda County’s Care Connect program or Arizona’s Regional Behavioral Health Centers).

• Intensive multidisciplinary care teams dedicated to moving people from streets to treatment to stability and making sure they remain supported.

• Expanded recovery-oriented housing, with services that actually support recovery.

And with all of these investments, the county must budget in a way that measures outcomes (stability, recovery, reduced cycling through ERs and jails) rather than processes (beds, referrals, spending).

Budget constraints are real. But the more the state and county have spent, the worse outcomes have become. The problem is not money. It is leadership unwilling to build a system that prevents crises, matches needs with effective management, supports long-term stability … and ultimately would cost less than we’re currently spending.

Ten years ago, Karen Batts died of hypothermia in a parking garage after leaving affordable housing and refusing treatment for severe mental illness. Last year, Vashon Locust, a homeless man with a history of mental illness, lit a warming fire that spread to a Portland city councilor’s home. Bruce Whitman is dead after driving explosives into the Multnomah Athletic Club.

These are not tragic exceptions in a battle-weary system. They represent thousands of people—patients, victims, and families—completely abandoned by the systems meant to support them.

This recurring tragedy is only inevitable if our leaders continue to allow it. It’s time to stop being last in the nation, stop the revolving doors and stop the suffering.

The last temporary parking lot in Washington Park proved harder to remove than a Supreme Court justice. That’s one of the reasons neighbors of the park are leery of turning the park’s soccer field into an overflow parking lot this summer.

Explore Washington Park, a nonprofit serving the transportation needs of the Oregon Zoo, Portland Japanese Garden and other park attractions, wants to allow cars on the field for two weekends in July and August.

EWP interim Executive Director Mara Gross told Arlington Heights Neighborhood Association board members this month that she intends to seek a Non-Park Use Permit from Portland Parks & Recreation. Beyond that, few details are known.

Neighborhood representatives are troubled by the short notice, the lack of community outreach and the uncertainty as to how PP&R will evaluate the application.

“How come no one’s doing a [traffic] circulation study, an environmental impact study and an engineering study?” AHNA board member Jay Shoemaker asked. “Why would you embark on this if you don’t even know how much it’s going to cost you to fix the field once you’re done? You don’t even know if you have those funds.”

Gross referred to earlier planning studies EWP has used to guide transportation planning, but offered no research to justify the parking plan, what she calls a pilot project.

“Since they were, very opaque about when they would actually be submitting, I think we need to assume it’s going to be submitted quickly,” AHNA President Darcy Wheeles said after Gross left the meeting.

Arlington Heights neighbors remember the “temporary” 129-space parking lot opened during construction of the MAX station that remains in use 28 years after the station was completed. Neighbors took the case to the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals, which ruled that the city had not justified the need for the auxiliary lot. In 2012, the city approved a conditional use permit for a 116-space accessory parking area known as the West Lot.

Northwest District resident Autumn Sharp failed to unseat District 17 state Sen. Lisa Reynolds in the May 19 primaries, receiving 13% of the vote. Sharp also failed to win an endorsement from Willamette Week.

But all was smiles at her election night “victory party” at the Northwest Hostel Cafe. She proudly held up a DIY “brave citizen award” citing the honorable mention she received from Willamette Week.

“From one vantage, Sharp has already won a victory here and taught Reynolds a lesson,” it read, quoting the newspaper.

The lesson had to do with Reynolds blaming neighborhood activists for refusing to compromise on a bill they supported to regulate pop-up needle and drug paraphernalia handouts plaguing the Northwest 19th and Burnside area for years. Reynolds killed the bill in her committee, blaming supporters for refusing to compromise on its terms.

Sharp and others in Friends of Couch Park and Stadiumhood neighbors called that a lie: They were never given the opportunity to compromise on the terms, which they would have been willing to do had they been asked.

Hours after accepting the challenge to oppose Reynolds at a Friends of Couch Park meeting in March, Sharp told the NW Examiner, “I know I won’t win, but lying makes me really mad, and if I lied to the public and then hid in my office, I’d get fired. I want to at least make her cake walk a little less cakey this spring.”

After offering several rationalizations for killing the bill, Reynolds shared something approaching an apology with the Examiner after the election.

“I will acknowledge that I wasn’t as responsive to the community as I probably could have or should have been,” she said.

She also pledged to work for a new version of the bill for the 2027 legislative session.

Friends of Couch Park President Kara Colley had a surprise for the candidate.

Tracy Prince is at home in her neighborhood.

Over coffee at Fehrenbacher Hof in the Goose Hollow neighborhood, she waved to and chatted with three people she knew: fellow historian Tanya March, Goose Hollow Inn owner Rachel Clark and Mark Velky, a neighbor who once served on the board of the Goose Hollow Foothills League with her.

The café, or the Hof as locals call it, is a tribute to Sigrid Clark, a classical music lover who played violin in the Oregon Symphony and whose husband was Mayor Bud Clark. An oil painting of Sigrid hangs in one corner, Lincoln High students study in another.

Prince is fired up about the upcoming Vista Bridge Centennial, the highlight of this summer’s multi-event jamboree that celebrates the bridge and all things Goose Hollow. Since it also coincides with Providence Park’s centennial, the Portland Timbers have tapped into their Goose Hollow roots by rolling out a new away-game kit that features a goose on a lower corner of the shirt, just one reference to local lore embedded in the design.

There’s more. The Timbers will take possession of and reinstall the bronze sculpture of the goose that formerly graced the King’s Hill light rail stop at Southwest 18th and Jefferson. TriMet decommissioned the station in 2020, but the goose will find its new forever roost on the Southwest corner of Providence Park.

“The Timbers are all in on this,” Prince said.

Caffeinated, we walked from the Hof toward the Vista Bridge for a photo, but couldn’t find the right view despite Prince’s willingness to dodge traffic. Ultimately, we crossed Jefferson and climbed to the stately Kamm House, a mansion with a few offices atop a winding staircase. Alliance Francaise holds French classes on the ground floor.

This year’s annual Goose Hollow Days has been subsumed by the Vista Bridge Centennial celebration, an event that includes bridge planter contests; soapbox derby races; food and music, on Aug. 30.

Goose Hollow residents (and everyone else) are invited to share their views of the bridge by submitting photos, paintings or any related memorabilia to info@goosehollow.org.

Prince will be there Aug. 30 with her book, “Portland’s Goose Hollow,” in tow. It includes the definitive account answering the question everyone asks: How did Goose Hollow get its name?

Join Tracy Prince at one or both of her planned events:

• Goose Hollow History Talk on July 12 with ‘80s film about Goose Hollow

• Walking Tour of Goose Hollow on Oct. 3

Jamey Evenstar (formerly Jamey Duhamel) is running for Portland City Council in District 4. Before you consider whatever pitch she’s now making about community and civic engagement, you should know something: She has already told you in her own words exactly what she thinks of neighborhood associations and the people who show up to participate in Portland’s civic life.

That record reveals more than a disagreement over process. It reflects a governing philosophy that sees ordinary residents not as participants in democracy, but as obstacles to be managed.

That history matters in a city where public trust in government is already strained.

For decades, Portland’s neighborhood associations have served as the city’s civic backbone: volunteer-run organizations where renters and owners—newcomers and longtime residents alike—can show up, ask hard questions, challenge bad policy and hold City Hall accountable.

Which is precisely what Evenstar found intolerable.

An effort to sideline neighborhoods accelerated under former Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, who launched an open campaign to gut neighborhood associations’ standing in city code and replace independent citizen voices with organizations more amenable to City Hall insiders. The backlash was fierce because residents understood what was really happening: not reform, but displacement.

As The Oregonian reported in 2019, emotions flared because Portlanders recognized that neighborhood associations are often the only place where regular citizens, rather than paid consultants, nonprofit lobbyists or ideological staffers, can directly challenge City Hall. The Oregonian covered what many already knew: Weaken neighborhood associations and you weaken public accountability.

That fight was never really about “inclusion.” It was about control, shifting power away from neighborhoods and into the hands of City Hall insiders who decide whose voices count.

The effort eventually collapsed.

Jamey Evenstar was not on the sidelines of that effort. At the time, then known as Jamey Duhamel, she served as policy director for Eudaly.

Text messages later released from Eudaly’s office after public records requests showed Duhamel expressing open contempt for neighborhood associations and the residents who defended them.

“This is why we need our neighborhood associations in their place. They get too much power and voice.”

That statement is unambiguous. Not better engagement. Not broader participation. Less voice. Less power. Put them “in their place.”

That is not a reform agenda. That is a statement of political intent.

She continued, mocking the residents testifying at a city council meeting:

“Well they are white and ‘high caliber’ soooooooo ... any inconvenience is a big deal to their cozy lives. HOW DARE WE STRESS THEM OUT!!!”

And then, summing it up: “So. Much. Privilege.”

The issue here is not whether neighborhood associations are perfect. They are not. The issue is whether a City Council candidate believes citizens should have meaningful participation in the decisions that shape their communities, or whether those voices should be put “in their place.”

Neighborhood associations ask difficult questions. They challenge assumptions. They force public officials to justify decisions in public, whether on homelessness, public safety, tax burdens or basic livability. Neighborhood associations are often the first warning system for failing policy because they and their neighborhoods live with the consequences first.

That is why they are inconvenient to power. And that is why they are essential.

Most recently, Evenstar served as chief of staff to Councilor Candace Avalos, hired at the start of Avalos’s term in January 2025. She was a prominent public voice for the office, defending a roughly $20,000 taxpayer-funded trip to Vienna for Councilor Avalos and two staff to study social housing, writing that the cost “was worth the learning” and that the office did not “apologize for spending our own budget in a way that prioritized our values.”

She is no longer in that role. The circumstances of her departure have not been publicly explained. What we do know is that a person who recently vacated under unknown circumstances, one of the most senior staff positions in City Hall, is now asking voters to give her a council seat. Voters are entitled to ask why she left before deciding whether to send her back.

This election offers a simple choice. Portland can continue down the path where insiders dismiss neighborhood voices as irrelevant and govern without interference from the people they are supposed to serve. Or it can insist on the principle that the people closest to the consequences of public policy deserve a meaningful seat at the table.

Jamey Evenstar already told us which side she is on. Voters should believe her.

Sources: Gordon R. Friedman, “Eudaly, staffers bungled efforts to change Portland neighborhood association rules, emails show,” The Oregonian/OregonLive, Aug. 9, 2019, https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2019/08/change-to-portland-neighborhood-groups-is-stalled-records-show.html

Sophie Peel, “Here’s Who the Portland City Councilors-Elect Have Hired as Top Staffers,”Willamette Week, Dec. 17, 2024, https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2024/12/17/heres-who-the-portland-city-councilors-elect-have-hired-as-top-staffers/

Avalos office staff page, https://www.portland.gov/council/districts/1/candace-avalos/councilor-avalos

Bob Weinstein is a Northwest District resident and the former mayor of Ketchikan, Alaska.

By Steven Moscowitz

One of the fundamental tasks of scientists is to engage in the systematic classification of organisms or phenomena. They identify unique characteristics of what they observe and create groups based on shared traits, structures or behavioral patterns. Ongoing study can result in the refinement of observed phenomena into new or subgroup classifications.

As a chemistry scientist, Primo Levi was an observer and classifier of substances. As a Jew growing up in fascist Italy, he was also the observed and the classified.

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Turin in 1919, Levi entered the University of Turin in 1937. One year later the National Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini passed the racial laws, which restricted Jews from attending public schools, serving in the military, marrying non-Jews, owning businesses or holding government positions. Because he had enrolled the year prior, Levi was allowed to complete his studies, which he did in 1941, with a degree in chemistry.

Upon graduation, Levi secured forged papers, which enabled him to work first for a mining company and then for a Swiss pharmaceutical company in Milan. When he returned home to Turin in 1942 following his father’s death, he learned that his mother and sister were hiding in the hills. He found them, and together they fled to Northern Italy, where he joined a partisan resistance group.

The next year Italian militia forces arrested the group. Initially placed in an Italian prison camp, Levi, upon being identified as a Jew, was sent to Auschwitz, where he worked as part of the camp’s slave labor detail until the camp’s liberation by the Soviet Army in January 1945.

Shortly after the conclusion of World War II, Levi wrote a memoir about his time at Auschwitz and the daily struggle for survival, “If This Is a Man.” And in 1963, he wrote a sequel describing his long, winding journey back to Italy after his liberation, “The Reawakening.”

And then, in 1975, Levi wrote a book about fascism and the holocaust that was unlike any other. “The Periodic Table” is a memoir structured as a collection of 21 stories in which he uses chemical elements as metaphors to explore his life as a Jewish-Italian chemist, his survival of Auschwitz and the human condition. Each chapter, named after an element, weaves scientific properties with personal narrative, philosophical reflection, and resistance against fascism.

In the chapter titled “Zinc,” Levi describes the process of preparing zinc sulfate. He marvels at the difference in properties between zinc in its pure form and zinc mixed with an acid. In the latter instance, “… the zinc wakes up, it is covered with a white fur of hydrogen bubbles, and there we are, the enchantment has taken place.”

Musing on the “enchantment that has taken place,” Levi compares the element in its pure form, “which protects from evil like a coat of mail,” and the element in its impure form, “which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life.” He concludes: “For life to be lived, impurities are needed.”

Notions of purity and impurity are fundamental to the book of “Leviticus.” The portion of “Leviticus” named Tazria-Metzora (“she bears seeds”—“a skin affliction”) covers the degree of ritual impurity experienced by a woman who has just given birth, various forms of skin affliction, the ritual process for treating someone who has such a condition and how such an impurifying condition can affect clothing and even dwellings.

On the surface, it is easy to read this ancient text as describing a binary value system between pure and impure, with impurity to be avoided as an obstacle to the desired state of purity. Rabbinic commentaries, however, treat impurity as an essential ingredient in producing the compound of a higher state of being.

This view of the life-elevating reaction produced by the interaction of pure and impure appears in Torah as early as the story of creation. There God proclaims as “good” the creation of light, land, sea, plants, and animals. After creating the human being on the sixth day, God proclaims it “very good.”

An early rabbinic commentary identifies the term “good” with the yetzer tov, the good inclination in all things. The term “very good” refers to the yetzer hara, the evil inclination in all things. That “evil” urge is the tendency to expand, build, acquire, compete. Absent passion and aggressiveness and acquisitiveness, the commentary proclaims, a human being would never start a business, plant a vineyard, expand one’s flocks, get married, have children or seek new knowledge.

The spiritual dimension of Jewish tradition, particularly as expressed through kabbalah and Hasidism, emphasizes the dynamic possibilities unleashed by a mindful mixing of assertive drives with domesticating ones.

Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the 18th century founder of the Hasidic movement Chabad, examined how to treat the human condition described in the story of Noah as “the intention of a person’s heart is evil from their youth.” He identified two approaches. One is complete repression of passion and the propensity for aggression. He found this technique to be unrealistic and ineffective for most human beings.

The second method he identified was the transformation of the heart, using the power of evil for good. This means not to avoid one’s darker nature, but to sublimate it, use it, harness it. The yetzer hara is the repository of enormous, undirected powers, which can be shaped into creative, sustaining, nurturing outcomes.

As a young man, Vincent van Gogh’s greatest desire was to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, father and uncle: to serve as a Protestant minister and to bring God’s words of love and compassion to the suffering.

He secured a position through the Belgian Evangelical Committee to serve as a lay preacher in a small community of miners. But within months, the committee decided he was not suited to the life of the clergy and revoked his commission.

Van Gogh was devastated and adrift. Within himself he experienced both profound sadness and a renewed purpose and joy: “Even in that deep misery I felt my energy revive, and I said to myself, in spite of everything I shall rise again: ‘I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.’”

That marked the beginning of a frenzied period of creativity and extraordinary artistic innovation that would last 10 years until his death in 1890. Van Gogh’s work joined together compassionate observation of others, a sense of wonder in the presence of nature and an intense exploration of his own inner self.

During those years van Gogh was tormented by an inner pain, the exact nature of which remains unclear. Scholars variously suggest that he suffered from bipolar disorder, borderline personality, psychosis, anxiety and depression. Through it all—or maybe because of it all—he painted … in ways never seen before.

Pictured here is his work “The Starry Night.” Van Gogh painted it while he was at the Saint-Paulde-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had self-admitted for treatment of his mental health.

Van Gogh painted more self-portraits than any other renowned artist except for Rembrandt. He had an enhanced awareness of himself on multiple levels: his mental anguish; his longing for community and human attachment; and his sense of God’s presence. All of that is on display on this canvas.

Stabilizing the center of the painting is a village. It is not one that van Gogh could have seen with his eyes from the asylum. It does not even seem to be a setting located in southern France. Rather, it is evocative of childhood home for van Gogh, the Netherlands. Home is at the center of van Gogh’s awakening to himself, nature, community and God.

The role of home, dis-ease and spiritual healing appears in the portion Tazria-Metzora. “When you enter the land of Canaan … I shall place an eruptive affliction on a house of your possession,” proclaims God. Settlement in the promised land is not the end of dis-ease. Quite the opposite. To have achieved the realizations of one’s spiritual journey only heightens susceptibility to spiritual disorder … so that one can achieve a new cleansing. An elevated renewal.

The rolling movement on “The Starry Night” canvass is an expression of both van Gogh’s inner turbulence and his awe-filled appreciation of God’s dynamic presence. The village is both nostalgic artifact and a dream just out of reach. From inside an asylum’s walls, van Gogh painted his life, compounded of spiritual attunement and personal alienation Both anguish and hope, pain and beauty share this great canvass of one man’s life.

As a young man, van Gogh was driven to bring the comfort of God’s love to those who suffered. As an artist, it was his own suffering that he confronted and addressed through the empathy that he felt for his subjects and through his wonder at nature’s marvels.

Steven Moskowitz, who has lived in Northwest Portland for 20 years, was former Mayor Bud Clark’s public safety advisor and since 2004 has been a rabbi.

This past week, a Providence Park security guard checking on a man in crisis suffered major injuries after being attacked. Earlier this month, a former Multnomah Athletic Club employee drove a vehicle carrying propane tanks and improvised explosive devices into the Club. In March, a woman in severe mental distress caused the fire that severely damaged Elephant’s Delicatessen while searching for food.

In the last several days, we also witnessed multiple people in visible untreated behavioral crises in the Stadiumhood corridor. Too many people like this are cycling through public spaces without enough intercept or stabilization capacity. Portland keeps approaching these systems as if they compete with one another instead of reinforcing one another.

Next week, Portland City Council holds budget hearings on May 18-20 on a proposed budget that reduces police, fire, and behavioral health response resources across the city at the same time those systems are strained.

Among the proposed cuts is CHAT (Community Health Assess and Treat), Portland Fire & Rescue’s 20 person behavioral health co-response team that intervenes in high-acuity crisis calls before they escalate.

CHAT is staffed by nurses, paramedics, and EMTs trained to respond to severe behavioral health and overdose calls in the field. Since launching in 2021, the program has documented more than $16 million in healthcare savings. Despite this, the program still has no stable ongoing funding source. Portland is also simultaneously lobbying the state to expand CHAT while considering these local cuts.¹

The answer isn’t CHAT instead of police or fire. It’s CHAT and police and fire. Weakening any part of this ecosystem just moves the cost somewhere more expensive and more dangerous. All safety budgets should be preserved and strengthened. The Mayor’s proposed cuts to safety budgets tops $32.2 million. Portland residents still have time to weigh in before the vote.

Three things you can do before May 20:

1. Submit written testimony at portland.gov/budget/join

2. Sign up for in-person or virtual testimony at the May 18–20 hearings (same link)

3. Email your councilor to protect safety budget programs

District 4 City Councilors:

• Council Vice President Olivia Clark: councilor.clark@portlandoregon.gov

• Eric Zimmerman: councilor.zimmerman@portlandoregon.gov

• Mitch Green: councilor.green@portlandoregon.gov

Community and Public Safety Committee members:

• Steve Novick Chair; Angelita Morillo Vice Chair; with Eric Zimmerman, Loretta Smith and Sameer Kanal

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Sauvie Island Fire Department Chief Chris Lake, who had a 28-year professional career with fire departments in St. Helens and Scappoose, finds nothing quite as rewarding as his part-time job heading the otherwise all-volunteer department.

Lake’s childhood dream of being a fireman has come true, and the reality has lived up expectations.

“And then some,” he said. “It’s been a fabulous career, and being here is even better, because I work with some awesome people. This group has been so rewarding to me.

“These people train and sacrifice their time for their community at no cost,” Lake said. “These folks have families, jobs and other things they do in their life, but when they get the call for help, they drop what they’re doing and help their community. They have incredible respect from me for what they do.”

He sees the annual free breakfast, held May 16, as a way to give back to the community, and perhaps inspire another generation of would-be firefighters. While the department has a full contingent of 40 volunteers, there is always a need for more, he said.

And whether a future firefighter or not, the breakfast builds community among the approximately 2,000 people who live on the 24,000-acre island, which is considered the largest river island in the United States.

An emergency preparedness event will be held May 16 in the Linnton Community Center gym, 10614 NW St Helens Rd.

Funded by a Metro Central Enhancement grant, it will include a giveaway of 100 go bags. Although open to all, it targets residents in the Metro service area: Linnton, Forest Park, upper NW Portland, and Cathedral Park.

• Expert speakers on resilience and Q & A with neighborhoods from 1:15 to 3 p.m.

• Kids’ tables for all ages beginning at 1:15 p.m.

• Emergency backpack and supplies giveaway beginning at 3 p.m.

• Resource tables with demonstrations, samples, free gifts and handouts beginning at 3 p.m.

• Hazmat truck will arrive at about 4 p.m.

For information, contact Nancy Hiser at nancyhisee@comcast.net

Ostensibly to improve transparency and clarity, the director of the Office of Community and Civic Life announced in March that transformative changes affecting Portland neighborhood associations would be enacted by the city administrator by July 1. No longer would neighborhood associations and coalitions partner with the city in writing guidelines for citizen participation.

The announcement came as a shock to neighborhood leaders, who have relied on city code giving them a seat at the table in crafting policy governing coalition funding and goals.

Despite claims of openness, the changes seemed to come from nowhere. The best legal and organizational minds in the neighborhood network stewed and studied for two months before learning that the rug had been pulled out from under them. City Code 3.96 had been rewritten without public involvement or awareness in the last days of 2023 to finalize documents related to the city charter reform mandated by voters in 2022.

Although Civic Life director Amanda Garcia-Snell posed the changes as minor housekeeping, they assigned broad powers to the city administrator. City Council approval—the guardrail protecting the neighborhood program from hostile forces in City Hall for the past 10 years—is no longer necessary.

Current City Administrator Raymond Lee had nothing to do with the 2023 revisions, which were made more than two years before he came to Portland. But he is aware of Garcia-Snell’s plans, which—though vaguely stated so far—include staffing coalitions in a package deal through nonprofits bidding on a contract, a process so foreign to the system that it has only once been suggested in 52 years since the Portland neighborhood program was established. That exception came from a city commissioner in 2000, and it was abruptly withdrawn.

If Lee found anything alarming or hasty about Garcia-Snell’s handling of the issue, he has kept quiet about it, turning down several requests to comment for this story.

His only response came indirectly from his senior adviser, Katie Meyer, who in April told the NW Examiner, “City Administrator Lee has been briefed and is tracking the issue.”

Finally, city spokesperson Cody Bowman spoke for him: “City Administrator Lee is open to a conversation once next steps have been determined, and we will follow up as soon as that timing is clear.”

The Northwest District Association attempted to open a dialogue with Lee but received only confirmation that its letter had been received.

Meanwhile, reactions from neighborhood leaders are bubbling up.

“The city’s current position appears to be that this language grants the bureau the overarching administrative authority to update the standards internally, without the specific multi-stakeholder committee process or the final City Council vote mandated by the original 2005 standards,” wrote Todd Zarnitz, president of District 4 Coalition and the Northwest District Association.

“It’s a completely different ballgame now. I really don’t know how the neighborhood system can survive if the governing standards are subject to the whims of an unelected bureaucrat who simply needs the nod of a city administrator,” Zarnitz wrote.

Presidents in the District 4 Coalition neighborhoods signed a letter asking for “an immediate hold on the planned release of the revised ONI (Office of Neighborhood Involvement) standards draft.”

A similar letter was sent by the three other coalitions in the city seeking a City Council resolution to “reassume their authority by restoring the original definition of the standards as “‘regulations adopted by City Council.’”

District 4 Councilor Eric Zimmerman got the message and is prepared to challenge the Civic Life proposal, even to pull the neighborhood program from the bureau if necessary.

“When I got a whiff that this was going on, it was alarming,” Zimmerman said at a special NWDA meeting on May 7.

“I’m just deeply skeptical. … You’ve got to remember that the Office of Civic Life is the place that for 10-plus years, there were commissioners in charge—like Chloe Eudaly—who were just at war with the neighborhood associations. Over and over, they have been trying to dismantle that system.

“I’m not sure what problem they’re seeking to solve,” Zimmerman said.

District 4 Councilor Olivia Clark agrees, promising neighborhoods her “support and advocacy”:

“Portland’s neighborhood system has survived despite continued challenges brought on by past city commissioners,” Clark said. “As a strong advocate for our neighborhood associations, I rely on these organizations for two-way communication.”

District 4 candidate Eli Arnold, who narrowly missed election for a seat two years ago, said, “I’m concerned that we are once again undervaluing neighborhood associations. They are the city’s eyes and ears on the ground and provide valuable local knowledge that leaders should benefit from.

“City Hall is too often detached from the experiences of residents, and neighborhood associations are a check against untethered ideology.”

The ideology referred to is embodied by the socialist-dominated Peacock caucus, which held half of the council’s 12 seats last year. That caucus has included Democratic Socialists of America member and District 4 Councilor Mitch Green, who did not respond to invitations to comment for this story.

In a cover profile in the April Examiner, Green did not mention neighborhood associations, but said he was “proud to be part of an organization … having pretty unabashed pro-working class politics.”

Garcia-Snell’s proposal, having faced the rigor of other viewpoints, has lost momentum. She told the Examiner she had “quickly realized” that a July 1 deadline was not realistic and is now aiming for the end of the year.

Did Lee have a hand in slowing things down and perhaps finding a better result? We may never know.

By Dave Paull

Sometimes a Friday night is more than just a Friday night. Much more.

It all started with pizza and Portland wrestling — those sweaty men in their tights. I was a mere lad, all of 14 years old, dazzled by the raucous world of local wrestling matches on TV every Friday night.

Earlier in the evening, I would begin preparing the ideal snack to eat while watching the epic battles: Chef Boyardee Pizza. It came in a box, complete with a packet of pizza flour, a packet of yeast, and a can of tomato paste with separate cheese topping.

Pizza was still a novelty in Portland then. Chef Boyardee was bringing it to the suburbs, one box at a time.

I would mix the pizza crust flour with water and yeast, knead it and put the covered bowl on a heat register to rise. Once suitably puffy, I’d roll out the dough, bake it and sprinkle on the toppings. Ah, the yeasty smell of freshly-baked pizza. Served with chilled apple juice, it was a meal fit for wrestle mania.

Then came the technical part—setting up a reel-to-reel tape recorder next to our black-and-white Motorola TV, ready to record the wrestling broadcast on local CBS affiliate KOIN.

Capturing sound felt almost miraculous—instant playback, no waiting, unlike developing film. And the box the tape came in showed how to cut and splice tape.

Mmmm. Maybe someday I’d learn how to do that.

At last, I was ready for my private viewing party.

Roll the opening music. Cue the announcer:

“Good evening sports fans and welcome to another evening of Portland wrestling brought to you direct from the Portland National Guard Armory. And now right to ringside with Bob McAnulty and Barney Keep.”

Bob was a local DJ and Barney was quite popular as the morning man at KEX radio, where he ‘ruled the roost’. He labeled himself SLOB—‘sweet lovable old Barney.’ Their friendly banter gave the brutish antics of the wrestlers a family-friendly vibe. The broadcast booth was called ‘the crows’ nest,’ overlooking the wrestling ring below.

The armory had stone walls and looked like a fortress—or a castle, with a vast open arena inside for sporting events. Before each match, promoter Don Owen stood in the center of the ring with a microphone dangling from an overhead wire, introducing the hairy wrestlers about to pound each other senseless.

DING DING. The oven timer rang and I hustled into the kitchen to get my hot slices of pizza and pour a tall cool one—a sparkling glass of apple juice.

Bob was doing the play-by-play as two hairy men wrestled. One of them was slammed to the mat. “We’re watching our semifinal with approximately five minutes to go” Bob said. “We’re watching Kurt Von Poppenheim with a reverse chin lock.”

Some of the wrestlers had sounding odd names, including Shag Thomas, Dutch Savage and Tito Copa. One guy stood out as a villain: Tough Tony Borne. That’s who Bob McAnulty interviewed during the TV show:

“Tony, before you go, I know that last Friday night, Shag Thomas really put some scars on you. You’ll be ready for him at the main event tonight, huh?”

Tony grimaced and said he would definitely be ready - to make creamed corn out of his opponent.

Then Barney did a live product endorsement - a commercial for Heidelberg beer:

“This is the beer that they make right up there in Tacoma, Washington, the Carling Brewing Company. And believe you me, when Carling sets out to make a good beer, they make one. And Heidelberg is it. What a wonderful beer.”

I took another sip of cold apple juice - plenty good enough for this wrestling fan. Just then my dad arrived home from work. He sometimes worked late and wanted a snack from the kitchen. As he walked past the glowing TV set he smiled and said “you know that’s all fake, don’t you?”

It was exaggerated and theatrical—so yes, I knew that. The wrestlers had their roles to play: good guys and bad guys—all bigger than life. They were so different from my polite family in the suburbs.

My pal Pat was also a wrestling fan. In fact, his step dad would sometimes give us a ride downtown to the National Guard Armory building (10th and NW Davis) so we could watch the matches in person. We sat in folding metal chairs a few rows back from the ring, watching the rough-tough rasslers up close.

The crowd was loud and sometimes crude. One middle-aged lady compared a wrestler’s anatomy, outlined through his tights, to a chicken with its head cut off. I had never heard such talk before, to put it mildly.

Pat and I had a trick we pulled during the match, walking along the ring’s apron so we’d be in range for the TV camera up in the crows’ nest. After getting back home we would watch the tape-delayed broadcast and—wow—there the two of us were, young sports fans sauntering by on TV.

After the matches were over, we edged through the crowd and stepped outside the massive armory into the chilly night air. Walking a few blocks towards 10th and Burnside, we came to a brightly lit plate glass window with a DJ inside.

It was the studio for KISN radio, broadcasting teenagers’ favorite rock ’n roll tunes. “Look at all that equipment” Pat said with a freckled smile. It looked like command controls for a space module, all dials and lighted panels.

The young guy spinning the hits nodded at us and took off his headphones.

I noticed he was listening to a transistor radio, so I scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and held it up to the window: WHAT STATION ARE YOU LISTENING TO? He grabbed a pen and held his reply up to the glass: KGW—a Top 40 competitor.

I wasn’t much of a radio listener back then. I knew who The Beatles were, of course, and I liked novelty songs—especially Purple People Eater and Monster Mash. Other than that, I only tuned in once in a while.

Looking at that DJ in the window, I could see my reflection in the glass, looking a bit wide-eyed. It was like seeing show biz in a fish tank. Made me want to go swimming.

That slip of paper—it said KGW. Years later, I’d spend a decade working there.

Dave Paull publishes Beautiful Disasters, misadventures of micro-budget filmmaking from scene to screen.

The Rivkah Ross Quartet plays tonight at Wilf’s at Union Station from 5-7 p.m. Ross is a jazz drummer whose sound has lately been influenced by jazz greats such as Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane and Roy Haynes.

Ross was born in Beaverton. After her parents split up, her mom moved them to Florida, where she lived until she started college, later graduating from the Musician’s Institute in Los Angeles.

An instructor there encouraged what Ross calls her “hyper focus on the drums,” a love that emerged in high school.

“I was a real metal head then,” she recalled. “I loved the band Sevendust and In Flames, a Swedish metal group.” It was at a Sevendust concert in Miami that Ross decided that she would become a drummer.

“Their sound was just so powerful,” she said. “So then I got an old kit a friend was giving away, and I taught myself how to play from books until I started taking lessons. I taught myself as much as I could and then went to college in Florida to study music, and they asked, ‘jazz or classical?’ Jazz just sounded like more fun.”

Ross came back to Portland in 2016 after living in L.A. and touring Europe with a rock band. Now she has an 8-month-old son and a packed calendar of local appearances.

Female drummers are not that hard to find if you know where to look, she says. “It’s not that rare, it’s just the visibility. But we are out there in force.”

Ross’s mom encouraged her early passion for drumming, she said. “So did my elderly grandmother who lived with us. They both helped carry my drums down the stairs from our apartment to the parking lot.”

In South Florida, she was greeted “as an element of surprise. But I was in a lot of projects there, and it was sort of ‘Oh, there’s that drummer girl.’”

For the Thursday series at Wilf's, performers are asked to share their influences. Tonight she’ll play some of her original material as well as Pat Metheny’s “Three Flights Up,” the song that made her fall in love with jazz music.

In her free time she tunes in to Roy Haynes. “I’ve been digging more deeply into Roy Haynes. There’s so much to study there, so I’ve been going through his catalogue and trying to channel him.”