The city of Portland is hosting a public conversation on the planned return of the Abraham Lincoln monument at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 8 at the Portland Art Museum's Mark Building, 1119 SW Park Ave.

Admission to the public forum is free, but registration is required.

According to the city website: “The conversation will feature nationally known subject matter experts in public art, conservation, history and place-keeping and include brief presentations, a panel conversation moderated by Adam Davis of Oregon Humanities, and … audience questions.

“The city plans to reinstall the restored statue in 2027 on a lower base rather than its original tall pedestal to increase accessibility and spark reflection.”

Why is it taking seven years to restore public art toppled by vandals?

The city website has a different way of describing that act: “The historic Abraham Lincoln statue was pulled down during racial justice protests in the South Park Blocks in 2020.”

In May, Darion Jones, assistant director of the Portland Office of Arts & Culture, explained the long process of restoring the statue on KOIN TV:

“We hope to add some of these additional narratives. We know that the current Lincoln monument doesn’t talk about the Dakota 38 or any of the connection in Lincoln’s history toward Oregon and tribal communities in the extent that we’d like to. And so we’re hoping that when we are ale to do this installation, we’re able to reflect a fuller version of history.

“We are hoping to also bring the sculpture closer to the public. We have a proposal right now to site Lincoln on the ground on a smaller base that will be brought closer to folks so that they can actually experience the art.”

The city promises, “Attendees will leave the event having a greater understanding of the city’s relationship to public art, monuments and history.”

The bigger question is: Will city officials leave the event with a greater understanding of that relationship?

The annual Wallace Park Fall Festival, sponsored by Friends of Wallace Park, is coming this Saturday, Sept. 12.

For more information, visit:

https://wallaceparkpdx.org/fall-festival-2026/

I filed testimony with the Portland City Council on Sept. 2. The full discussion paper behind it, “Before Portland Builds the Blacklist,” is in the sources at the end of this article. My argument was that ethical investing, stripped of upfront universal rules, can become a mechanism that finds its way to one target no matter how neutral the language sounds.

The hearing happened on Sept. 3. No vote was taken. Both agenda items were “placed on file,” meaning heard but not decided. Resolution 37723, adopted last December, still governs. On the surface, nothing happened.

But the city also posted 72 written testimonies and a staff presentation describing how an ethical-investment policy could actually be implemented. I read all of it and went back through the record from the beginning. That record corrected something I had previously misunderstood about the voting math. The six councilors who signed the original pledge did not need a seventh vote to establish the destination. They needed additional votes to create a governmental vehicle capable of reaching it.

The target came first

This did not begin as a general review of the human-rights consequences of Portland’s investments. On Oct. 17, 2025, six sitting councilors signed a pledge written by the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America: Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal, Candace Avalos, Jamie Dunphy, Angelita Morillo and Tiffany Koyama Lane.

The pledge commits its signers to investigate the city’s “complicity with Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid or genocidal violence against Palestinians.” It specifically identifies weapons manufacturing and transportation for the Israeli military, city investments and contracts with allegedly complicit companies, and other municipal relationships with Israel. This was not a general human-rights pledge. It named one country, one conflict and one political objective.

The DSA’s own frequently asked questions make clear that this was intended as an ongoing political project. Signers are asked to open formal or informal investigations, coordinate with other councilors, support related campaigns and lay the groundwork for further action. There is no fixed definition of what an investigation must entail. Even a small step counts.

The signing therefore did not complete the project. It did something more important for understanding everything that followed: it fixed the destination in public before the “neutral” policy existed.

Then came the neutral vehicle

Six weeks later, the same six-member bloc was joined by Councilors Loretta Smith and Steve Novick, neither of whom had signed the DSA pledge. On Dec. 3, the council voted 8-3 to adopt the Kanal 1 amendment to the annual Investment Policy resolution. The amendment directed staff to develop options for an Ethical Investment Policy. The amended resolution then passed 10-1.

The country-specific language had disappeared. In its place were universal categories: human rights, war, armed conflict, genocide, slavery, torture, arbitrary detention, war crimes, crimes against humanity, labor, environmental and consumer impacts.

Those are legitimate subjects for public policy. The problem is not that the language became universal. The problem is that the universal language arrived only after six councilors had committed themselves to a country-specific project, and without the resolution supplying the evidentiary safeguards that would make universal language genuinely universal in operation.

Councilor Green later acknowledged at a Hillsdale Neighborhood Association meeting that he had agreed to make any new investment policy non-specific as to country. When asked what other countries the policy would realistically address, he could not identify one. That does not prove that every supporter of Resolution 37723 shared the original pledge’s purpose. It does establish the sequence: the specific target came first; the generalized policy came afterward.

The political logic is not complicated. A six-person pledge can express a commitment, but it cannot direct treasury, allocate staff time, hire a vendor or prohibit an investment. Those acts require government authority and a council majority. “Investigate and act on Portland’s complicity with Israel” was too narrow to attract the broader coalition. “Develop a human-rights screen” was broad enough for councilors with no particular Israel agenda to support in good conscience.

That does not make Smith, Novick or the other final-resolution supporters participants in a hidden conspiracy. It makes them the necessary votes for a mechanism whose documented political origin they should now be required to confront.

What the 72 testimonies reveal

I coded every written submission for its position, named companies, geopolitical referents and asserted categories of harm. The categories overlap, so the counts below do not sum to 72.

One repeated line says that the council approved the idea of a human-rights screen in December “by an 8-4 vote.” It appears nearly verbatim in at least nine submissions. The official record shows an 8-3 vote on the Kanal amendment, with one member absent, followed by a 10-1 vote on the amended resolution. Call-to-action templates are normal advocacy. They do not make an individual signer insincere. But a mistaken number traveled through at least nine citizens into Portland’s permanent hearing record without anyone checking it.

More important is what happens when the abstraction gives way to names. Several supportive submissions identify the same cluster of intended corporate targets: Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia and Alphabet/Google, all represented in the city’s large-cap technology holdings. Other submissions refer to cloud computing, artificial intelligence, data processing, ICE, fossil fuels and labor practices. Israel is the dominant geopolitical referent on both sides of the record. The United States appears once, raised by an opponent as a consistency test rather than proposed as an actual target.

One submission calls Israel “the genocidal Israeli state.” That characterization now sits in the city’s official hearing record with no evidentiary standard, no formal finding, no opportunity for a named company to respond and no requirement that the same standard be applied to every government or conflict.

Public testimony is allowed to be passionate, partisan and even wrong. Government designation cannot be. The unanswered question is how allegations in testimony become criteria, and how criteria become a list of prohibited companies.

Who writes the list?

The Sept. 3 staff presentation describes three implementation paths, which may be combined: Use the existing Bloomberg ESG Disclosure Score at no additional cost; have Treasury develop and monitor screening parameters internally, requiring roughly three-quarters of a staff position; or contract for a bespoke ESG rating or monitoring service at an estimated cost of $17,500 to more than $250,000 a year.

The internal option expressly contemplates monitoring a prohibited-corporation-name list and adopting partial or complete prohibition lists used by other jurisdictions. The customized approach would produce what the presentation calls a “Divestment List,” updated annually under criteria treasury would need to establish.

This is the institutional danger. The structure could allow council to approve broad moral categories once and leave the consequential decisions to staff, another jurisdiction or a contractor: what evidence counts, which conflicts qualify, which companies are implicated and when a company comes off the list. Council members might never have to cast a recorded vote naming Israel, Amazon, Microsoft or any other target.

That result is not inevitable, and the presentation is not a final policy. But it is plainly possible under the options now being considered. The answer is not to speculate about the private motives of every councilor. The answer is to close the accountability gap before the machinery is adopted.

What I am saying, what I am not

I am not saying every supporter of an ethical-investment policy is executing a DSA script. Several self-identified Jewish Portlanders invoked tikkun olam, tzedek and their own family histories in sincere arguments for a standard applied “no matter where in the world” abuses occur. They deserve to be answered on their own terms.

I am not saying every opponent has engaged the policy honestly. Some opposition testimony simply labels the proposal anti-Israel without examining how the mechanism would work. The most persuasive objections are procedural: Write the rules before naming companies; require evidence before designation; apply the same standard to every country, including the United States; permit a company to respond; establish removal criteria; and require elected officials to vote publicly on any resulting list.

Nor am I claiming that the December resolution proves a conspiracy. The record proves something more useful. An Israel-specific political commitment preceded the neutral policy. The neutral policy supplied governmental authority that the pledge lacked. And the proposed implementation structure could turn broad language into named exclusions without requiring the council to own each decision in public.

Born at night, but not last night

This is why the whole exercise makes me angry in a way that goes beyond Israel or investment policy.

For 18 years, I was in business with Max Baer Jr., who played Jethro Bodine on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” The role made him famous and then imprisoned him. He was forever typecast as Uncle Jed’s naive foil, and his on-screen acting career effectively ended. Baer was anything but naive. He became a successful movie producer and made millions.

I once asked him whether it bothered him that people still treated him as if he were Jethro. He gave me the line I have never forgotten: “I always remind myself that I was born at night, but not last night.”

That is what is insulting about Portland’s process. We are being asked to act as though we cannot read a calendar. The Israel-specific pledge came first. The generalized policy came six weeks later. The testimony identifies the expected companies and conflict. The staff proposal now explains how a prohibited-company list could be created and maintained without a separate public vote on every name.

Perhaps the eventual policy will be genuinely universal and procedurally fair. If so, its sponsors should have no objection to proving it: published standards before designations, consistent application across countries and conflicts, an evidentiary record, notice and an opportunity to respond, objective removal criteria and a recorded council vote on the final list.

I was born at night. Portlanders were not born last night. A neutral policy does not become neutral because the original target has been deleted from the final draft. Neutrality has to be built into the rules, the evidence and the accountability for the result.

Where this leaves Portland

Nowhere official, yet. Staff’s timeline calls for an options report this month, a process report in November, work sessions extending into next spring and possible adoption alongside the FY 2027-28 budget. That is time enough to build safeguards, or time enough for a broad coalition, a mobilized advocacy campaign and an outside vendor to assemble a mechanism that no individual elected official must fully own.

My testimony asked for the safeguards: rules before names, evidence before designation, one standard for every country and a public vote attached to any list that results. I do not know whether one written page changes anything against dozens of organized submissions. But I would rather be the voice on the record asking who gets to write the list before Portland discovers that the answer is someone who never has to stand for election.

Sources

• “Before Portland Builds the Blacklist” (author’s discussion paper):

Robert S Miller

Before Portland Builds the Blacklist

I’m not sure how I got here. My working knowledge of Portland ran three items deep: great airport, kale in the gumbo, and don’t hit the bicycle riders with my car. Then the man bun went into the dustbin, and the cool du jour became the DSA…

Read more

5 days ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Robert S Miller

• Portland DSA, “National City Council Pledge”: https://portlanddsa.org/national-city-council-pledge/

• Portland Mercury on the pledge: https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/2025/11/14/48120998/with-a-tenuous-ceasefire-in-gaza-portland-councilors-pledge-to-investigate-the-citys-links-to-israel

• Willamette Week on the pledge and Council math: https://www.wweek.com/news/2025/10/29/a-pledge-signed-by-peacock-reopens-a-rift-on-the-portland-city-council-even-as-details-remain-vague/

• Councilor Green’s official statement joining the pledge: https://www.portland.gov/council/districts/4/mitch-green/news/2025/10/16/portland-city-councilor-mitch-green-joins-pledge

• Hillsdale News PDX, “At HNA Meeting, Green Pressed on Pledge”: https://www.hillsdalenewspdx.com/post/at-hna-meeting-green-pressed-on-pledge

• Resolution 37723 and official vote history: https://www.portland.gov/council/documents/resolution/adopted/37723

• City written-testimony archive, item 2026-304: https://www.portland.gov/council/documents/public-hearing/investment-policy-update-public-hearing/testimony

• September 3 staff presentation (PDF): https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/council-documents/2026/Investment-Policy_COTW-Pres_September-2026.pdf

• Investment Policy public-hearing page: https://www.portland.gov/council/documents/public-hearing/investment-policy-update-public-hearing

Robert Miller is a Portland-based investor and gaming-industry executive. He writes The Center Held on Substack.

A potential legal threat landed on the desk of Portland Mayor Keith Wilson just days before the city attempts to justify its proposed demotion of the Abraham Lincoln statue from its historic pedestal in the South Park Blocks.

A letter from Portland attorney Carrie Richter, a land-use and historic preservation specialist, says moving Lincoln to ground level could violate state and city regulations concerning protection of historic properties.

“Installing the restored Lincoln statue separate from, and below, its original base will directly violate its statutory obligation to ‘conserve the property’ and ‘assure that such property shall not substantially altered.’

“Whether these actions are intentional or based on willful ignorance, the fact remains that the city’s practice with respect to monuments going back to the Thompson Elk Fountain, has been nothing short of a disgrace. The city’s clear conservation obligation is to restore the sculpture atop its historic base, where it has peacefully kept watch over Lincoln Square in the Portland South Park Blocks for nearly 100 years.”

Richter’s clients are preservation advocates William J. and Kit Hawkins and Aubrey Russell. All three played key roles in convincing the city to restore and return the David P. Thompson elk statue and fountain to its historic location earlier this year.

Richter wrote, “Both state and local regulations require the city to prioritize conservation of its historic properties over unsupported claims of public preference. The public, including numerous historic architects, preservationists and stakeholders, has tried tirelessly to engage with city staff and have been stonewalled in those efforts.

“The public is desperate for a forum where alternatives to demolition can be discussed and where public opinion can be made known. Please instruct your respective bureaus not only to comply with state law and local preservation program requirements, but also to be transparent and forthcoming about their intentions with respect to the protection of historic resources.

The city Office of Arts and Culture has scheduled a public meeting from 6-8 p.m. on Sept. 8 at the Mark Building, 1119 SW Park Ave., to discuss the statue’s placement. It is not clear how much time will be available for public comment.

Richter noted that returning the statue to its pedestal does not eliminate potential changes. “For example, additional interpretive signage could provide greater historic context, offering a more complete picture of Abraham Lincoln’s life and of the social protests that led to Lincoln’s toppling in 2020.”

The letter does not include any legal threat, but invocation of the city and state preservation rules suggests that judicial review could be possible if the city persists in making a mistake.

No AI is used in creation of this blog. You can join Building on History’s email list by writing “add me” to faroverpar463@gmail.com.

Some would have us believe that the current Portland City Council is strong on diversity. Half of the 12 are women, five are defined as people of color and three identify as LGBTQ+.

If that’s how we measure diversity, we may lead the nation. But is that the kind of diversity that matters most in a democracy?

Biodiversity, which still means what it did when I was in school, is about a wide range of species, genes and habitats coexisting to the benefit of the entire ecosystem. Domination by a single element of the biosphere weakens the whole, undermining its resiliency and capacity to adapt to change.

The “diversity” of this council goes in such a direction, a so-called progressive caucus of six trying to dominate through cunning, cliquishness and all means necessary. Rather than considering a variety of viewpoints, it devolves into us-versus-them showdowns. In the first year under this cohort, it took four hours and 10 votes to elect a chair. This year, the process stretched to three days and 13 votes. With that revealing annual chore behind it, the council often deadlocked 6-6 along the same lines on other items of business.

There’s a saying that goes: The only thing better than finding a solution is having someone else to blame for the problem.

This is at heart a power struggle between a unified ideological group known as Peacock—guided by four members of the Democratic Socialists of America—and a more diverse remainder coalescing in defense. The result is a rigid and fragile body playing brinkmanship instead of taking care of the business of the city.

Diversity of thought has no place in DSA’s world. As in war, unifying the troops and enforcing discipline becomes paramount.

The socialists on the council understand this. A Portland DSA questionnaire outlined expectations of candidates they endorse:

• Do you agree with the DSA National platform? Will you fight for the demands in the platform?

• Will you pledge to form a Socialist Caucus with other DSA-endorsed candidates?

DSA-backed council members are not free to consider better ideas or adapt to changing circumstances. They are to be loyal foot soldiers who accept DSA ideology out of hand.

The tightly controlled cabal holding half the seats on the Portland City Council—none of whom would even have been serious candidates before charter reform—understands how it attained disproportionate power. If it doesn’t, DSA leaders will remind them. In a system requiring only 25% of the votes to win, the organization perfected a campaign strategy directed toward hardcore believers rather than a broad message acceptable to a majority of voters.

This path does not instill victors with a deep faith in the general public or in mainstream voters unattuned to the logistics of the new electoral system. This path does not need to waste time persuading the masses who do not already agree with their assessment of capitalism’s fatal flaws. Neighborhood associations are seen as tending to minor livability annoyances, matters unrelated to the exploitation of the working class.

DSA’s name includes “democratic” because so many socialist regimes around the globe in this century and the last have devolved into autocracies. But appropriating the term does not overcome the inherent authoritarianism in radical socialism’s core critique of society or its plan to remake it.

Last November, the Peacock bloc on council thought it had secretly lined up seven votes to cut funding for homeless camp sweeps. The gambit, made without public input and only five days warning, failed when the expected seventh vote fell through. The peak of DSA power may have passed at that juncture; after the election in November, we may know for sure.

Socialism is not a dirty word. It is an element in all modern governments. But socialism not rooted in respect for democracy—and a diversity of opinion—is not American. I don’t believe it is even Portlandian.

Annie Meyer, 73, has been showing her artwork at Art in the Pearl for 30 years, and she’s Art in the Pearl’s longest serving board member, joining it in 2000.

“When I moved to Portland in 1980 I was 28 years old, and there was ArtQuake in the Park Blocks,” recalls Meyer. “ArtQuake sort of blew up, all the way from Burnside to Jefferson Street, and several of my ceramics friends were selling their work.” It made Meyer think she could do the same.

ArtQuake ended in 1995, and Art in the Pearl began the next year. Thirty years ago, when it started, the Pearl was a bit different. “First Thursday was happening then but nothing else was really there,” Meyer recalls.

Over the years the volunteer board members worked closely with Pearl neighbors to build the event. Their support has been 100% and the festival has a loyal fanbase, Meyer says.

In 2010 Meyer opened a gallery in the Pearl that stayed open until 2018. She dialed deeper into the neighborhood and joined the Pearl District Business Association Board.

Stepping outside a gallery and into a casual park setting shifts the perspective for both art buyers and artists, she says.

“Three people bought my stuff at Art in the Pearl who had never even been in the gallery that I had, located on the very street that they lived on. ”

Being successful wasn’t ever mapped out. “I didn’t really grow up thinking I’d sell artwork, I just started doing it. I went to France many times over the years and just started doing landscapes, realizing just working in clay was limiting.”

Art in the Pearl allowed her to see what people were drawn to. “I could try something new, and get a feel for how people responded. I grew with the show as an artist, and I’ve seen that with a lot of the others artists—who have to be able to stand there, and talk about their work.”

An emerging artist show fosters those narrative skills, she says. “We counsel them how to sell their work.”

The artist’s life has been good for Meyer.

“I was lucky. I didn’t grow up with any kind of plan.” But at one point Meyer did need a plan, or at least a credit card. So she got her nursing license and began working at the Oregon Poison Center, where she stayed for about 30 years. “It was very flexible and supportive of me.”

Recently Meyer finished a large commission for OHSU’s new Vista Pavillion Oncology unit.

Over the span of 15 years, Meyer has spent time at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts in Pendleton. Set against the Blue Mountains, it’s the kind of scenery that touches the artist in everyone.

Closer to home, Meyer has a Portland storefront studio at 2507 SE Clinton that the’s worked in for 28 years.

Art in the Pearl is from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 5 and 6, and from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 7 under the elm trees in the North Park Blocks, between NW Davis and Flanders Streets.

It’s rewarding, she says, when people say they’ve been looking at her work for a long time. “Often it reminds me them of a place in their mind,” she says, “and they want to bring it home and live with it.”

Never much of a planner, Meyer was always a hard worker.

“I was not really worrying about it selling or not selling. I knew I should keep my nursing job for health insurance but I’m lucky to have good health, and people who care about me. I’m also lucky to have moved to this city, were people care about art and look at art.”

Meyer credits neighbors like Pearl District resident Judie Dunken for keeping the art scene going. “She said ‘we want Art in the Pearl back, how can we help you, because it’s what we need as a city.’”

Meyer believes that creativity sustains people providing them with a deep sense of purpose. The arts have a big role to play in keeping our city on a positive, productive course.

‘High end’ arts fair works with new boutique hotel

Brianna Luce is helping to get the word out about Art in Pearl this year, saying, “we’ll have merchandise this year with hats and shirts of your favorite artists.”

“All the board members are working artists and volunteers so they’re waived the jury fee,” which is just $40. Luce joined the festival for the community and networking. “We work very closely with the city.”

Asked if the North Park location presents challenges she said, “We could move the show, sure, but instead we’ll just make it better.” Volunteer teams embark on a deep cleaning of the park every year.

Art in the Pearl is not a craft fair, she explains.

“The show is pretty high-end, it’s top-ranked nationwide. It’s competitive to get in. There’s no soap, no candles. Connecting with the artists directly is the appeal, drawing people who care about the process, and want a chance to know the person behind the art. It makes you feel more connected to it.”

This year Art in the Pearl is working with the new Cambria Hotel, perched right on the North Park Blocks. They’ll host artist talks, an artist dinner Saturday night, and discounted rooms for festival visitors.

We are now posting the latest edition of the newspaper on our home page. See the paper as print edition readers have been doing for 40 years. Also, you can click on any ad and go directly to the business’s website.

View September newspaper

Above video shows Brian Libby at Jake’s Famous Crawfish in downtown Portland, the site of many exciting discoveries, such as the Battling Bogarts in his book “In Search of Portland, Exploring a Transforming City.”

When Brian Libby first moved to Portland in 1997, he and his girlfriend lived behind the Portland Art Museum in a leaky apartment building that still remains. Most of the rest of the block has been bulldozed, improved or gone vertical. They spent Friday nights walking around downtown Portland, ending up at Powell’s City of Books. They’d pass the Galleria, the Sentinel Hotel (the Governor, then) and the Ritz Carlton (then the food carts) and the Clyde Hotel. They’d collect books and sort through them in the coffee shop.

These days, Libby is still exploring a changing Portland. He brings 25 years of study, close observation and personal anecdotes to his book comprised of six distinct walks. Walks can be taken individually or in one continuous trek. Walking and reading at the same time is up to you.

Libby hopes bringing the book along is like “walking through the city with a friend.”

Tom Booth of Oregon State Press was a driving force behind the book. In 2018, Booth approached Libby about updating 2001’s “An Architectural Guide to Portland.” But Libby was already busy working on this book, which would end up taking another eight years to finish.

An early publisher was skeptical because the book had too many layers, no clear genre. “Where would it be shelved in the bookstore?” Libby recalled the publisher asking. But Libby fundamentally disagreed and thought the book’s appeal could be that it transcended genres.

“My north star was (the book) is like taking a friend on a walk, and you never say to someone, I’m only going to talk about architecture on this walk, or I’m only going to talk about historical periods on this walk.”

In that spirit, I asked Libby to weigh in on the Keller Auditorium.

“You can’t talk about Keller Auditorium without talking about Keller Fountain,” he said.

Libby grew up in McMinnville, but recalls going to the see the musical “The Wiz” at the Keller Auditorium with his mom in 1979.

“We got there early, and we went to the Keller Fountain, and it was a warm summer day, and there were lots of kids frolicking in the fountain, and I remember thinking I’d rather stay here and play in the fountain instead of seeing this show.”

Internationally significant, the fountain is by one of the great landscape architects of the 20th century, Lawrence Halprin.

“It has been argued that the best work of design in Portland is not a building, it’s the Keller Fountain. So I’m a huge fan of the Keller Fountain,” Libby said. “The way it extrapolates the Cascade mountain waterfall into this modernist, cubist language is amazing. What I also love is the way you descend down into the street, and you get all this white noise and you sort of forget you’re in the city at all.”

I shared how my siblings and I basically learned to swim in it.

One wildly remarkable fact about the Keller Fountain is brought to life in Libby’s book.

“The fountain is credited to this famous landscape architect, but the real designer is a woman from his firm who never got proper credit named Angela Danadjieva, a Bulgarian immigrant.”

Libby interviewed her for the book.

“In Search of Portland” is a must-read for anyone who cares about Portland even half as much as its author.

Libby will be at Powell's later this month in conversation with Richard Speer.

The Portland City Council will hold a public hearing and vote at 2 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 3 on a resolution to fund planning for a 3,000-seat Broadway-capable performing arts venue at Portland State University.

The arts and culture center would be at Southwest Third and Lincoln streets.

Meanwhile, the city would explore the feasibility of remodeling Keller Auditorium and reduce its seating capacity from 3,000 to 1,200-1,800.

Karen Whitman, executive director of the Halprin Landscape Conservancy, is urging a no vote.

“The resolution puts nearly $1 billion in motion with no money to pay for it, no market study to justify it, and no guarantee the Keller survives the process,” Whitman said.

She asked supporters of a future for Keller auditorium to sign up now before spots fill and attend the council hearing.

Tired of predictable Hollywood endings? Well, September is your month to break away from the mainstream. You won’t find the safe and expected in this quartet of foreign films at Cinema 21. Additionally, all the films this month are shot in black and white.

This is our monthly look at coming attractions for Cinema 21’s popular Saturday Morning Classics. Film programmer Elliot Lavine selects a theme every month, and we let you know what’s coming to the big screen each Saturday at 11 a.m. at our iconic neighborhood theater at 616 NW 21^st Ave.

Lavine kicks off September with a film that helps define “avant garde.”

8 ½ (1963) at Cinema 21 on Sept. 5. Director: Federico Fellini

There is no ordinary linear story-telling in “8 ½.”

Lavine calls the film “Fellini’s autobiographical masterpiece.” It tells the story of an Italian film director suffering from director’s block while in the midst of directing his latest film. His artistic struggles are compounded by his difficulties with the women in his life—wife, mistress, actress. Obsessed by the idea of the “ideal woman,” our director is broken, confused, anxious.

“8 ½” changed what movies could do, as Fellini seamlessly interwove the here and now, with flashbacks and surreal dream sequences. Critics have called Fellini’s “8 ½” the work of a magician because it shouldn’t hold together, but it does.

While most reviewers praised the film as a groundbreaking tour de force—even saying it rewrote the language of cinema. Not every critic agreed.

Pauline Kael was biting in her review. The sharp-tongued film critic called the movie self-indulgent, superficial and fake. She even took Fellini to task for the way he portrayed a director’s creative process, blasting Fellini for depicting it as a three-ring circus.

Marcello Mastroianni plays the troubled director, Guido Anselmi. And has any man ever adjusted his dark-rimmed glasses down his nose and made you both smile and sigh? There may be some existential meaning to the flick of that index finger but it just looks like effortless Italian cool to me. Mastroianni as the director is the center of the film’s universe.

Fellini called his film “8 ½” because that was the number of films he had made, one film was a collaboration with another director, so he counted that as one-half.

Lavine says “8 ½” delivers “what people expect of Fellini, the spectacle, the intimacy…”

There is a spellbinding festival-like quality to the film. And the beautiful carnival-like score by Fellini’s favorite composer, Nino Rota, will have you humming and grinning as you leave the theatre.

“8 ½” won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1964.

Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee and Sandra Milo play the women in Fellini/Guido’s head and life.

Tokyo Story (1953) at Cinema 21 on Sept. 12. Director: Yasujiro Ozo

Lavine calls this a “heartbreaking family drama that seems simple and ordinary at first blush.” It is considered Ozo’s masterpiece.

The film is set in post-World War II Japan. Families are separated. Aging parents live modestly in rural Japan. Their children have moved to the rapidly modernizing (read westernizing) city of Tokyo and no longer have time for their parents.

The old rules of family life are rapidly changing and Ozo breaks the old rules of filmmaking, including the supposedly hard-and-fast rules of spatial relationships and screen direction.

Ozo also places his camera only 2 feet off the ground for much of the movie to match the eye level of someone sitting on a traditional Japanese tatami mat. His cinematography is known for its minimalism. His shot-making has been compared to still-life paintings. I read that the camera only moves once in this two-hour-16-minute-long film.

Quiet and complex, film critics say even more than 70 years later, “Tokyo Story” hasn’t lost its power. And Lavine says this mid 20^th century Japanese film resonates in 21^st century America.

When the film was first released, it was thought “too Japanese” for an American audience, and was not shown in the U.S. for a decade.

Ozo’s work may not be well known here, but “Tokyo Story” is considered one of the best arthouse films of all time.

M (1931) at Cinema 21 Sept. 19. Director: Fritz Lang

Another masterpiece by a master filmmaker. “M” is considered Lang’s best movie. German expressionism always makes me uneasy. It should: it’s known for its distortions.

This post-World War I film is a psychological mystery thriller, Germany is a broken nation. The economy is in ruins. The government, unstable. Nazis are on the rise. And in “M”— which stands for murder, a serial child-killer is terrorizing the tormented families of Berlin.

Lavine, a film noir expert, says “M” became “the prototype of the film noir movement,” and he calls the movie a “bone-chilling examination of a soulless killer, hunted by every facet of his society.”

The killer played by Peter Lorre, writes an anonymous letter to the local newspaper claiming responsibility and promising he will strike again. Police use what were then new techniques—fingerprinting and handwriting analysis—to try to catch the madman.

The local criminal syndicate with its known gangsters and scoundrels sets a trap for the child killer as well.

And while the film is about violent crime, Lang does not show the violence. He leaves it to the audience to imagine the murder of a young child.

“M” is known for his cinematic innovations, including long tracking shots and the use of a musical leitmotif. Lang borrowed the leitmotif from opera. This was Lang’s first “talkie,” and he experimented with both sound and silence.

This film was actor Peter Lorre’s first starring role. He later became famous for playing movie villains.

Both Lang and Lorre eventually fled Nazi Germany and continued making movies in Hollywood.

Interesting facts: To prepare for the film, Lang spent time in a German mental institution, trying to understand what goes through the mind of a child-killer. And he hired real criminals as extras. Twenty-five cast members were arrested during the shooting of the film.

Diabolique (1955) at Cinema 21 on Sept. 26. Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

September ends with a French psycho-thriller that made Hitchcock jealous. Hitchcock had hoped to direct the film, but Clouzot got to the writers first.

Reviewers have said Hitchcock later modeled “Psycho” after “Diabolique.” Hitchcock also repeatedly watched “Diabolique” while filming “Vertigo.” (Both “Diabolique” and “Vertigo” are based on novels by the same French writing team of Pierre Bolleau and Thomas Narcejac.)

The story takes place at a boys’ boarding school. The headmaster is a brutal man. The boys hate him. The teachers hate him. His wife hates him. His mistress hates him too.

The wife and the mistress plot murderous revenge on the cruel headmaster. All goes well for the women—not the headmaster—until his corpse disappears. And that’s when the real diabolical plot of the movie begins. What happened to the headmaster? What happened to the corpse? What happens to the wife and mistress? What is really going on? Horror! Or as the French say, “horreur!”

Oddly, with all this calculated and cold-blooded mystery and tension, there is one character who is really funny: the unassuming and rumpled but clever, cigar-chomping Inspector Alfred Fichet. Sound familiar? Peter Falk modeled Columbo after Fichet.

Simone Signouret, Vera Clouzot and Paul Meurisse are the leads.

Clouzot has a curious history. The French filmmaker started his career in Paris, then worked on films in Germany. He was fired because he befriended Jewish filmmakers. Clouzot returned to France and later, broke and starving, worked for a German film company in German-occupied France.

After the war, he was tried and convicted as a collaborator, and banned from making films, though intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre defended him. Eventually that ban was lifted and Clouzot made “Diabolique” and other films.

Neighbors 4 Safe Smart Shelters will host a forum on the future of the River District Navigation Center from 5:30-7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 2 in the Oregon State University Food Innovation Center, 1207 NW Naito Parkway.

Alan Evans, founder and executive director of Bybee Lakes Hope Center, will share thoughts about moving the temporary structure to the Hope Center in North Portland.

Linda Witt, chair of the Pearl District Neighborhood Association’s Shelter Oversight Committee, will report on the crime and safety impact homeless shelters have had on the surrounding neighborhood.

Part two of a series: the people, the money, and the machinery that carried a slate onto a ballot that promised voters no parties at all.

The perfect crime is not the one that goes unsolved. It is the one the law cannot name.

I was a working pollster in Edwin Edwards’s first race for governor of Louisiana. Years later, another man went to prison for money he had given that campaign, the campaign I was working inside, and I never saw a trace of it. I watched Edwards explain the outcome without blinking: it had been illegal for the man to give the money, but it was not illegal for Edwards to take it.[1] The man went to jail. Edwards went back to work.

That is the doctrine this article is about. Louisiana needed another 24 years to reach Edwards, and when it finally did, the case was about casino licenses, in my industry, the one business in America that wrote down what it had learned: stop relying on trust and require the disclosure of every interest in a licensed enterprise. Portland issues licenses too. We call them terms of office.

Every production has a cast. Portland staged one in 2024, it is in rehearsal again for Nov. 3, and the audience, the voters, paid for their tickets without ever being handed a program. What follows is the program the voters never got.

The directors

The first article in this series documented the contract. In March 2023, 20 months before the election, the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America adopted terms for its top-tier candidates:

• meet with the chapter twice monthly,

• form a socialist caucus in the elected body, and

• serve a program to “disrupt the capitalist municipal order.”

Its recruiting page tells candidates, “DSA is your party.”[2] The four oath-defeating marks from the first article bear repeating once: the commitment comes before the oath; the relationship is a standing structure, not an open door; it has teeth; and it never appears on a campaign mailer. In this program a council seat is not a destination. It is a staging area. The national organization says so itself: organizers first, legislators second.[3]

The company

Three structures share one bench: a chapter that declines to be a party, a registered party funded from New York, and the campaigns themselves, and the same people staff all three. In a disciplined formation, people are deployable assets, and resumes become the org chart.

Follow one. Annie Naranjo-Rivera managed the campaign of a DSA member state legislator, then ran that legislator’s office as chief of staff, then moved to direct the Oregon Working Families Party, the registered party whose machinery carried the 2024 council slate. She holds that post today, running the same machinery toward Nov. 3.[4] And one of the party’s own co-chairs directs the farmworker organization that appears in the party’s books as a donor.[5]

Study the map above and notice what is on it and what is not. Every solid line is a documented, cited relationship. The two national organizations never touch in any filing; not one transaction connects them. The bridge between them is made of people. None of these moves is illegal. That is the point of moves like these.

The crew

The DSA is not a registered political party, and that is not an oversight. Not being a party keeps the formation outside the ballot rule that names parties, outside the oath’s party-committee clause, and outside the filings that track parties. So the machinery belonged to a cousin: a real registered party, funded 83 cents on the dollar from Brooklyn, its phones, texts and field staff running while Portlanders chose a council.[6]

Here is what the record shows, because we pulled all of it: 3,348 transactions across 20 years of the party’s filings, and the campaign books of every winner. The party’s support for the slate is filed. Its expenditures are allocated to the candidates’ committees by name on the state’s own pages, and the candidates’ committees reported the support right back, $32,193.82 in-kind across the seven, itemized down to staff time and dial charges.[7]

And above all of it sits the largest donor in the race: the public.

The city’s matching program paid these seven campaigns $1,124,067.00, 35 public dollars for every party dollar, clean money by design.[8] Portland’s charter builds a narrow lawful door for organized money, registration, filings, caps, and the party walked through it. The audit my industry would run on this election comes back clean. That is the finding. Follow every dollar and you will end where we did: the money is not where the secret is.

The secret is the contract. The chapter’s terms, the twice-monthly meetings, the caucus, the program, appear in no filing, because an obligation is not a contribution, and disclosure law cannot see what is never paid. Across every ledger we pulled, the chapter’s entire financial footprint is $334.50.[9] Disclosure catches money. It was never built to catch conviction. And that is the injury, and it is not written in any statute. No Portland voter was ever asked whether the city should be governed by the program the chapter put in writing; the ballot’s silence made sure the question never appeared on it. The program itself says what comes next: the contract requires a caucus. Four who took its terms sit on the council today, the chapter has endorsed again for Nov. 3, and on a 12-member council the arithmetic is not a prediction. Six is a tie. Seven is a government.[10]

The leads

The audience sees only the leads, so say their names. The machinery carried a slate in 2024; seven of them won: Candace Avalos, Jamie Dunphy, Sameer Kanal, Elana Pirtle-Guiney, Tiffany Koyama Lane, Angelita Morillo and Mitch Green, each endorsed by the Working Families Party, each on a ballot that by law said nothing about it.[11] Four, Kanal, Koyama Lane, Morillo and Green, were the DSA’s own cadre, carrying all four marks. All seven swore Portland’s oath on Dec. 19, 2024, and the party promptly claimed “a historic majority on Portland City Council.”[12]

The audience: you

Every step of this was legal. That is not the defense; it is the design. So let me say the whole of it in the plainest words I have.

Before the election, candidates who wanted the chapter’s top endorsement agreed to a deal in writing: win, and you will meet with the chapter twice a month, join the others who signed, and serve the program. The chapter is not a party, so the oath about parties never touches the deal. The chapter is too small to run campaigns, so a real party ran the machinery, legally, and filed every dollar. Most of the money was not even private: the public paid over a million dollars to fund these campaigns. We checked all of it, and every dollar has a receipt. Nothing was hidden, because nothing needed to be.

Our rules are built to catch hidden money. Nobody ever built a rule to catch a hidden promise. A promise costs nothing, so it appears on no receipt. The voters financed the entire production, and they were never handed the program. Edwards would have admired the workmanship.

I once heard Huey Long’s son, Sen. Russell Long, say that Louisiana’s corruption could be made illegal but never made unpopular. The line was probably not original to him, but no one was born better placed to repeat it. That was the deepest injury there: not any payment, but the shrug, the day personal and public integrity stopped being an absolute requirement and the doctrine became the normal graft of government.[13] Portland’s method runs the other way. It cannot be made illegal. The only court left is the one that sits on Nov. 3, and the only question before it is whether the method can be made unpopular. We know our leaders by the congruence between their conduct and the oaths they have averred.

The production is in rehearsal now: the same machinery, the same director, and new national money reported this month.[14] The election is Nov. 3. This time, you are holding the program.

SOURCES

[1] Lewis Johnson episode and Edwards’s giving-vs-taking response. VERIFIED against KPLC and WWL-TV Edwards career timelines: Johnson, former State Highway Board Chairman, indicted 1975, imprisoned 1976, for illegal contributions to Edwards in 1971, the race the author polled; the lead now states the connection. The clause “and I never saw a trace of it” is the author’s own attestation.

Author’s standing: pollster in the first gubernatorial race; coordinated polling in the second. Edwards’s 2000 riverboat-license conviction: public record, one-clause use.

[2] Portland DSA endorsement policy, March 2023; “Getting a DSA Endorsement” page; chapter slate descriptions.

[3] DSA National Electoral Commission criteria (”organizers first, legislators second”).

[4] WFP’s own announcement of Naranjo-Rivera’s appointment as Oregon state director (July 2024) and May 2026 status. Chaichi campaign manager / chief of staff chain: WFP biography. Chaichi’s DSA membership: the chapter’s own pages.

[5] Lopez dual role (OWFP Co-Chair; PCUN executive director). PCUN contribution of $11,172.70 in 2024: ORESTAR.

[6] ORESTAR, Committee 5528, unfiltered rerun Aug 28: 3,348 transactions confirmed exactly. National transfers Tran 4863654 ($340,000.00, 4/20/24) + Tran 5131768 ($65,660.76, 11/4/24) from Working Families Party National PAC = $405,660.76. Denominator DEFINED: $451,491.24 2024 cash expenditures + $38,254.85 accounts payable = $489,746.09; ratio 82.83%. Verification protocol Steps 2-3 COMPLETE. Minor discrepancy logged: Tran 5221709 export $748.48 vs detail allocation $742.48.

[7]“Two-sided verification, Aug 28. Party side: transaction detail pages carry In-Kind Expenditure allocations naming candidate committees by name and ID. Candidate side (Step 4 COMPLETE): WFP in‑kind on all seven winning committees’ own filings, itemized: Avalos $2,861.45; Dunphy $2,350.01; Kanal $346.42; Pirtle‑Guiney $4,728.91; Koyama Lane $8,150.32; Morillo $3,756.71; Green $10,000.00; total $32,193.82. The $7,000.00 gap between the party’s total allocations ($39,193.82) and the winning candidates’ reported total is explained by allocations to non‑winning candidates (such as the Silkie and Ender committees) and minor timing differences between party and candidate reporting cycles. Since the prose concerns the seven who won, the $32,193.82 candidate‑side verified total is the operative figure. The export’s purpose/description fields do not name the seven (the sole “Portland” purpose hit is a 2008 Portland Mercury ad); that narrow fact is retired from the prose because the detail pages and the candidates’ books do name them.”

[8] City of Portland public matching funds, from each committee’s own ORESTAR filings: Koyama Lane $320,000.00; Morillo $263,048.00; Green $235,829.00; Avalos $116,430.00; Dunphy $80,000.00; Kanal $68,760.00; Pirtle-Guiney $40,000.00; gross total $1,124,067.00; approximately $9,435.07 returned to the city as unspent funds (net about $1,114,632). Payer labels vary with the program’s names over time (Open and Accountable Elections, Open & Honest Elections, Small Donor Elections); all are the same city program. Ratio to party in-kind: $1,124,067.00 / $32,193.82 = 34.9 to 1. IBEW Local 48 Small Donor PAC contributions ($500 entries in three committees) are separate and excluded from these totals.

[9] Chapter ledger footprint: Portland DSA in-kind on candidate filings, 2026 cycle: Morillo Tran 5767817 ($84.50) and Tran 5775505 ($125.00); Green Tran 5775503 ($125.00); all “staff time, democracy-building activities”; total $334.50. Scope: the party’s full 5528 export plus the seven candidate committees’ exports; the chapter’s donate links route individual contributions, which appear as individual donors, not chapter money.

[10] Caucus arithmetic, documented facts only: 12-member council (city records); the chapter’s March 2023 terms require a socialist caucus; four cadre members seated (fn 11); chapter 2026 endorsements (portlanddsa.org endorsed-candidates page); all six District 3 and 4 seats on the November 2026 ballot (county elections calendar); a seventh aligned seat permits passage of ordinary legislation (charter math).

[11] OWFP 2024 endorsement announcements: first slate announcement (July 2024); second round (September 2024). The machinery also carried candidates who lost (allocations to Silkie and Ender committees in the record), hence “carried a slate; seven won.”

[12] Oath: Portland City Code 3.74.020; ceremony Dec. 19, 2024 (part one sourcing). “Historic majority”: source URL identified (WFP November 2024 “record 33 races” page).

[13] Made-illegal-never-unpopular: author’s firsthand recollection; Sen. Russell Long said it in the author’s hearing, and per the author was probably repeating an older saying. Runs as attributed personal recollection, no print source required; no quotation marks unless the author is confident of the exact wording. Verified lineage if wanted: descends from New Orleans Mayor Martin Behrman’s remark on vice (per “The Long, Long Trail,” American Heritage, Aug. 1966, Vol. 17, Issue 5); Louisiana usage extended it from vice to corruption. An Earl Long attribution circulated by another research source is UNVERIFIED and contradicted by the Behrman record.

[14] ORESTAR 2026 through Aug. 23: $94,099.05 cash plus $83,069.85 payable; $64,344.92 national in-kind, 8/11/2026. The v10 “same hands” clause is DELETED per fn 5. Charter-door legal cites retained internally (Charter Art. 3 Secs. 3-301, 3-306, 3-308(m) and (p); City Elections FAQ $613 for the 2024 cycle; SDE FAQ $350).

Contenders for leadership positions in troubled institutions might be expected to have a plan—a diagnosis of past failures, a theory as to how things should work and the critical steps needed to get there.

Multnomah County chair candidate Sharon Meieran has been making plans to reverse the county’s wasteful, ineffective and unpopular approach to homelessness, addiction and chronic mental illness since her first term as a county commissioner 10 years ago. She brought potential partners together, drafted documents and tried to push an evidence-based strategy uphill, all to little effect.

Meieran is running for the county’s top seat based on a conviction that—in a system in which the chair administers all city departments and controls the commission’s agenda—it’s the only way to bring about the necessary structural change.

“My goal is to fix Multnomah County,” she said, “and I need to be chair to do it.”

Of the three vying for the position, only Meieran has produced a plan. Julia Brim-Edwards and Shannon Singleton have touted their abilities and achievements without explaining why county programs have gone awry or outlining the changes needed to fix them.

By contrast, Meieran has been disseminating a 23-page plan, including a county organizational chart so labyrinthine that even a novice can see why the county can’t get out of its own way.

“I’m flummoxed. Frankly, I would have preferred not to run for office in the first place, but I knew the county needed a plan,” Meieran said in an exclusive interview with the NW Examiner.

“I used all of my efforts to work on a plan with the experts, created one and put it out there so that there can be public debate as the county is trying to figure out new leadership and its direction.”

Meieran, an emergency room doctor and former attorney, has worked in arenas where the buck stops.

“I thought, apparently naively, that putting out a plan would get some reaction from someone, especially people who are saying they want to be the leaders of the county … and I got nothing.

“And not only did I get nothing, whether it’s critique, whether it’s these things would be great or here’s how I would tweak it. It doesn’t have to be my plan. Like, what is anyone else’s plan? There’s not even an outline of anything. And so I honestly don’t get it,” she said.

In the county that never plans, signs of mismanagement abound. The chaos and garbage on the streets can’t be missed. Numbers back up the images.

“Oregon is ranked 51st in the nation [counting Washington, D.C.] for prevalence of mental illness,” she said. “Oregon is always near the bottom, and it’s led by Multnomah County, which is supposed to be the local mental health authority for the region, providing the full complement of mental health services.

“So, we are the worst in mental illness and addiction. We have the worst overdose rates, worst addiction rates, worst deaths, especially of youth. Worst youth suicide rate.”

The slide didn’t begin yesterday.

“Ten years ago, we were in a crisis around homelessness and mental illness. That’s why I ran to be at the county in the first place,” she said.

Most county social services are provided indirectly through nonprofit organizations. Meieran said the contracts are renewed year after year without accountability or measurement of results.

“They don’t hold any of the nonprofits they contract with to account,” she said. “The county contracts with hundreds of nonprofits, and what I found out as I worked at the county—one of my biggest frustrations—I could never get just a list or itemized description of what they do. What are the goals? How do they tie into the bigger picture?”

The only reliable thing is the steady flow of funding.

“They would just roll over the county’s budget, fund these organizations, maybe tweak a little bit depending on how much money they had or didn’t have,” she said. “And that was how they did business.”

Took a whistleblower

That loosey-goosey approach led to the scandalous collapse of Sunstone Way, a major shelter provider that misspent about $3.6 million in public funds, much of it on extravagant trips and personal expenses. A criminal investigation is underway.

“It’s only because someone blew the whistle that that came out,” Meieran said. “But it is the tip of the iceberg. If anyone did an actual audit or review of all of the county’s nonprofits … they would be finding this everywhere. The amount of money wasted in that context is unimaginable, and it’s unconscionable.

“The county should not have to rely on the courage and strength of one whistleblower to come up with the reason for all of these things happening, or for telling us they happen.”

That individual was Kate Fulton, the former finance manager for Sunstone. Fulton also made headlines last year as a whistleblower while she was a member of the Food Front Cooperative Grocery board.

Many others inside the system chose not to speak.

“Regularly, I would hear from people who would tell me the truth about what was happening at the county—failing in their contracts, how badly the county was operating,” Meieran said.

“They were all validating each other, and validating what I would see. Then I would say, ‘We need to tell the story.’”

The replies were predictable: “Oh no, I can’t. I can’t come out and say it, because it’ll threaten our funding.”

As a result, Meieran said, the county has received more money per capita for homeless services than any place in the country while “unsheltered homelessness has at least tripled.”

Managers of county programs are fleeing in droves.

“The turnover at the county has been mind-boggling,” Meieran said. “There have been seven health department directors in eight years, seven homeless services directors, six mental health directors, five community justice directors and a revolving door of other senior leaders. That kind of churn is devastating for an organization. No one can move forward with that.”

Budget last straw

Meieran had hoped that Brim-Edwards would carry the reform torch while she enjoyed retirement from public office. That changed when Brim-Edwards supported the county’s 2027 budget, which she saw as a continuation of piecemeal measures in defiance of fundamental change.

Meieran refused to support the budget in her last year on council, explaining: “We have tons of money. We literally couldn’t spend it all. What we lack is a plan and a system that actually accounts for where our money is going.”

She sees Brim-Edwards’ pivotal vote for hiring Nathaniel VerGow as homeless services director as just propping up the status quo.

“[VerGow] spent the past decade in senior leadership in Los Angeles’ homeless services system, a system now being dismantled after a federal lawsuit and independent review uncovered profound failures in oversight, accountability and financial management,” Meieran wrote on her website.

“Los Angeles has one of the worst records in the country,” she told the Examiner. “It was the subject of a federal lawsuit and a scathing independent review that found it had wasted billions of dollars.

“But that’s the person the county brought in, that the chair selected and that three commissioners voted for.”

In an Oregonian interview, “VerGow repeated the county’s usual explanation for homelessness: high rents, not enough money,” she continued. “Addiction? Substance use disorder? Serious mental illness? Not one of those words appeared in his answers. That omission is glaring and defining.

“If the person running the county’s Homeless Services Department doesn’t name addiction and mental illness as central to the county’s unsheltered homelessness crisis, then there’s no reason to listen to anything else.

“Throughout the interview, Mr. VerGow reached for buzzwords like collaboration, efficiency, prevention, relationships, funding and better data for elected officials. While those words matter, they do not add up to a vision.”

After VerGow’s first three months on the job, “We are seeing nothing” in terms of progress or a plan, Meieran said.

What others say

Brim-Edwards, who served with Meieran on the county council for 18 months, often on the same side of issues, gave The Oregonian a stinging assessment of her former colleague:

“Sharon Meieran was a county commissioner for eight years and was ineffective at driving change or improvement,” Brim-Edwards wrote. “This place is less affordable, less safe and the problems bigger because of Meieran’s time on the commission.”

Meieran has not disguised her ineffectiveness as a commissioner—she has in fact emphasized it, basing her campaign on a belief that only the chair can bring about the wholesale change needed. And if commissioners share equal blame for the body’s failures, a dose of it would fall on Brim-Edwards for her three-plus years at the table.

Others see Meieran as the one candidate with a plan that makes sense.

Richard Perkins, a former addict and adviser on recovery programs, trusts Meieran.

“Hopefully, Dr. Sharon Meieran, who has worked consistently over the last six years I have known her on a plan to address our behavioral health crisis,” Perkins said, “will finally get an opportunity to implement that plan, and we will have to put up with the status quo no longer.

“Unlike the other two candidates, she has been vocal about the problem and worked with experts on a plan to address these issues. Is it perfect? Surely not. But it is light years ahead of any alternative. We are starting to see new drugs on the streets more dangerous than fentanyl. It is time to abandon the libertarian goals of letting people experiment with dangerous drugs and help those addicted escape their control and rejoin society.”

Examiner subscriber Marc Green claims no expertise in the recovery field but shares Perkins’ enthusiasm for Meieran.

“I read Sharon’s plan and admittedly did not fully understand it,” Green wrote. “The point for me is that she is a professional, she cares and she is ready to act on day one. I endorse her, and our county needs new blood, decision-makers who are results oriented.”

Not since the 1920s has the Ku Klux Klan inspired crowds of Oregonians to pack public forums. But the standing-room-only crowd of about 200 people at Powell’s City of Books didn’t gather to support the Klan, but rather to learn how the Klan became such a powerful political force statewide just a century ago and how a hate group could become dominant again.

Many Powell’s audience questions related to the Klan’s present-day incarnations and what history teaches us about stopping bigotry. Portland retired journalist Steve Law told stories of brave newspaper reporters and editors like Beatrice Morrow Cannady, who advocated for civil rights in spite of Klan death threats.

“I’m saddened to say, despite all of these heroic critics who risked their lives and livelihoods, that was not what killed the Klan; it was their own internal contradictions: greed, rivalry, corruption,” Law said.

What would inspire someone to write a book about the Oregon Klan in the 1920s? Law started his presentation by showing the view of Mt. Tabor from his home in the South Tabor Neighborhood, where turning back the clock just a hundred years, he would have seen the glow of fires as Klansmen burned six crosses, supposedly in front of a crowd of 2,000 people.

“They tended to exaggerate on stuff like meeting attendance and membership numbers,” Law said.

Exaggerations aside, Law bemoaned how Oregon’s ugly history as a hotbed of the Klan has gotten buried and vowed to do something about it. He joined the Friends of Mt. Tabor Park community association and spearheaded an effort to memorialize the terror the Klan caused at the park in hopes that such vile acts are never repeated. However, a Parks Bureau employee, worried that someone might be triggered by a small image of a burning cross, censored Friends of Mt. Tabor’s informational display, even though no public funds were used in its creation.

Law hadn’t forgotten about the censorship when he heard about German brass plaques that honor people who had been killed or displaced by the fascist state during the 1930s and ‘40s. While listening to a podcast featuring Bryan Stevenson, author of “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” he realized that America not only doesn’t have the equivalent of Stolpersteine embedded in the sidewalks of Germany where Jews once lived. Stevenson contrasted the so-called stumbling stone memorials he saw in Germany with how many sites in the U.S. still honor Confederate officials and/or Klansmen.

At that point, Law told the crowd at Powell’s, he vowed to continue his quest to increase Oregonians’ awareness of their history, starting with a series of newspaper articles, which became the seeds of the 292-page “Peddlers of Hate,” accounting the Klan’s rise and fall during the decade.

In Law’s view, Oregon has since had many political figures who act in the image of the Klan, even if they don’t wear robes. As an example, Law named Lon Mabon, who gained prominence in Oregon politics for spearheading a series of anti-gay ballot measures.

“A lot of people use hate to build up political power,” Law said.

Law extended the metaphor to present-day Make America Great Again acolytes, referencing a quote from President Donald Trump, who said some supporters of a Robert E. Lee statue were not members of the white nationalist “Unite the Right” group that attacked counterprotesters in 2017.

“Right now, wearing these robes is such a parody; they don’t do it anymore; it doesn’t lend you prestige to wear the Klan outfit anymore, so they come in different guises. Remember the good guys on both sides?” Law said.

Bravery shown by Klan critics, Law said, has parallels with the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach in 2021.

“It’s kind of like being a Republican in today’s Trump World: You take on the leader and you risk retribution,” Law said.

But just as in 21st-century America, the press and politicians helped normalize hatred and made conditions ripe for the Klan’s spread during the 1920s. Law recounted the story of the Klan recruiting public officials and journalists to attend the organization’s “coming out” press conference in downtown Portland. It turned out that the Klan’s real motivation was to get rid of Catholic schools.

“Sometimes they tell the truth, like someone in the White House right now,” Law said.

Law generated uncomfortable laughter and the loudest groans of displeasure from his audience by recounting the Klan’s ridiculous rationalizations for bigotry that still echo among far-right groups today.

“Blacks have nothing to fear from the Klan, unless they preach and teach social equality. Negros must recognize that they live in the land of the white race at the courtesy of the white race,” Law said, paraphrasing a Portland speech given by the Rev. Reuben Sawyer, a Klan orator. “Klansmen didn’t see Jewish people as their enemy either,” Law said, “except those who rejected the teachings of Jesus. And the Klan wouldn’t fight the Catholic Church, he said, unless it injected itself into state affairs.”

Oregon Gov. Ben Olcott issued a strongly worded proclamation when he realized that the Klan was gaining power. Despite Olcott’s warning, the Klan succeeded in taking over the legislature and governor’s office.

The Klan’s anti-Catholic school ballot measure was successful among a majority of Oregonians who bought into the idea that it would be egalitarian to force all students through public schools. St. Mary’s Academy, the oldest continuously operated secondary school in the state, is still extant in downtown Portland, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that made the Klan’s anti-parochial school ballot measure unconstitutional.

But the damage was already done. Dozens of Klansmen were armed and deputized by the Portland and Oregon State police. There’s strong evidence, Law said, that the Medford police chief who was a Klansman attended a “necktie party” to terrorize a man out of town. Law said it’s difficult to determine how many other acts of terrorism could be attributed to the Klan during the 1920s. The Klan did its best to destroy its written records statewide, and court cases involving the Klan proved difficult to prosecute, with many friends of the Klan in high places.

Law isn’t giving up on his quest to help install public informational displays about 1920s Oregon. Next year, Law hopes to travel to Eastern Oregon with Oregon Remembrance Project founder Taylor Stewart to memorialize the lessons of our history.

Fifteen years ago, Portland’s development agency fumbled a prime opportunity to redevelop the five-acre Centennial Mills site. Nothing as promising ever arose again.

The vision of California-based developer Shaheen Sadeghi and his LAB Holding LLC was called SEED, for social entrepreneurship, engagement and development. It was selected over two other out-of-state contenders in 2008 and was moving toward a final development agreement.

His team included the architect behind Minneapolis’ Mill City Museum, the ruins of a 19th-century mill in the heart of the city that became the magnet for a wider urban renaissance.

“Our winning design was not crafted in isolation; it evolved through an extensive series of community and neighborhood meetings,” Sadeghi said.

The Pearl District Neighborhood Association was fully on board.

But Prosper Portland, then known as the Portland Development Commission, drastically changed the terms on Sadeghi at the eleventh hour. Instead of a winning design preserving the array of historic mill structures amid local food vendors and wide public spaces, the agency wanted office buildings and major companies.

Prosper Portland Executive Director Patrick Quinton said the proposal was too local, lacking in “regionally traded sector” industries.

“Why don’t you turn it into offices with a couple of food stalls at the bottom?” Sadeghi recalls Quinton suggesting.

Sadeghi was stunned. Four years devoted to a unique vision attuned to the time and place meant nothing. “I was so flabbergasted I walked out,” he said.

“The selection panel had chosen our concept, reflecting the progressive vision of the city leadership at that time, before the direction shifted.”

Sadeghi eventually extracted a settlement from Prosper Portland and took what he had learned to his home in Orange County, where they helped establish a city identity. His team created the Anaheim Packing District, anchored by the restored 1919 Sunkist Orange packing warehouse—which had sat vacant for three decades—and the adjacent 1920s Packard automotive showroom.

The parallels to Centennial Mills were inescapable. A private park was developed on a site formerly used to stable police horses, which also happens to be the last activity on the Portland site. Two high-end restaurants face the park. A historic 1917 MAKE building now houses local craft breweries, a distillery and artisan wineries.

The Packing House project received five prestigious Gold Nugget Awards (the leading residential design competition in the nation), earned Developer of the Year honors and was selected as the top preservation project in California. It is protected from demolition by listing on the National Register of Historic Places, which was Sadeghi’s intent for Centennial Mills.

LAB Holding LLC has developed about 50 projects throughout Orange County. Ten of them are in Anaheim. All are centered on local food artisans, makers, craft breweries, distilleries and wineries—the essence of its Centennial Mills vision. None of the approximately 50 restaurants are chains, the core philosophy behind the Portland project.

Portland shut out

What did Portland get? A series of demolitions of the 12-building mill complex, beginning in 2015 and estimated to have cost about $19 million, not counting the elaborate takedown of the last Centennial Mills structure this month.

“The step-by-step destruction of the Centennial Mills complex is a tragic loss for preservation, riverfront open space and innovative commerce,” Thomas Meyer told the NW Examiner in the aftermath of the Aug. 2 fire. Now retired, Meyer was a principal founder of MS&R Architects of Minneapolis and part of Sadeghi’s Centennial Mills SEED project.

“The vision of the SEED project would have been a national landmark,” Meyer said.

National, perhaps, but in a very local way. LAB launched in the 1990s as a break from shopping mall conformity, built around independent shops drawing a younger crowd. LAB is an acronym for Little American Business.

A shadow of the SEED plan endures, on paper at least, in the James Beard Market, planned to begin reconstruction next year in the heart of downtown. The market was included in Sadeghi’s plan, but was then pulled into a proposed Morrison Bridgehead project that never came to be.

The market may have been a pawn of Melvin Park Companies, the developer of the bridgehead project and of Scott Andrews, who chaired Prosper Portland’s board at the time. Andrews was simultaneously president of Melvin Mark Properties, a division of MMC.

A 2012 NW Examiner story speculated that Andrews and his company did not want their venture to face competition from another major food-focused attraction less than a mile away. Andrews did not comment on that story.

Modest start

Prosper Portland bought the Centennial Mills property in 2000 with modest intentions to clear the land for a park. But Patty Gardner, a leader in the Pearl District Neighborhood Association for more than a decade, advanced the idea of saving and restoring the Centennial Mills complex as a public attraction, an idea that gained steam at City Hall. The 2008 design competition involving three national developers and a comprehensive community engagement process was poised to make the dream tangible.

“The whole thing to me is completely tragic on many levels,” Gardner told the Examiner. “Tragic does not even begin to describe it. … To say I’m bitter is fair.”

She blames leaders for pitting the SEED proposal against the James Beard Market and for lack of political vision.

“They decided you can only have one thing,” she said. “We could have had both.”

Portland also lost a visionary whose empire could just as well have been planted in the Rose City. Sadeghi had worked for Jantzen swimwear in its Northeast Sandy Boulevard office for 10 years.

“There was a quiet revolution with talented younger people going on in America. It was about localization and personalization. I thought Portland was in the forefront of that movement,” he said.

Portland’s loss was Anaheim’s gain.

“Shaheen’s a great developer, and what he’s done [in California] is terrific,” Gardner said. “He had so much energy.”

Prosper Portland turned down interview requests to summarize its history with Centennial Mills. Instead, it issued this statement:

“Prosper Portland engaged in serious conversations to sell the property to private developers on at least six separate occasions. In each instance, a combination of the existing conditions including site contamination and physical limitations, shifting leadership priorities, federal/state/utility/local site obligations and requests for significant additional public investments led to the decision by the developer to not purchase the property or for the agency to decline to move forward with the proposal.”

The NW Examiner is sponsoring a District 4 City Council candidates debate at 5 p.m. Monday, Oct. 5 at the Armory.

What would you like to ask them?

What is most important to the future of the city?

What issues in your neighborhood need to be addressed?

What changes in city operations or governance are needed?

What will it take to win your vote?

There will be no questions from the floor at the debate. Your question may be selected by the moderator. It will also help shape the questions asked by panelists.

Please submit questions in “comments.”

You may also email questions to allan@nwexaminer.com

Please reply by Sept. 4.

Every Portland councilor swears the oath in City Code 3.74.020 before taking office. It ends with two promises worth rereading this election season: “I will faithfully, honestly and ethically perform my duties,” and “I am not a member of any committee of any political party.”

I have taken a few oaths and administered a few. An oath is a commitment to a bigger thing, and you do not understand it until you have to fulfill it. It is the thing you strive to be, and then it becomes your most prized possession, the words that define you.

On Dec. 19, 2024, at the Newmark Theatre, 12 incoming councilors swore those words, and took office on New Year’s Day. Four of them had already broken the oath years before they raised their hands. Not in the lawyer’s sense. In the older sense: They arrived with their loyalties already ranked, and the city was not ranked first.

“The Paper Trail” timeline, image attached. Caption: Sources: Portland DSA endorsement policy, March 2023, and candidate recruitment page, portlanddsa.org; Willamette Week, July 16, 2025; Portland City Code 3.74.020.]

The dates above are not my characterization. They are the public record, most of it published by the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America itself. In March 2023, 20 months before the election, the chapter adopted an endorsement policy requiring its top tier “cadre” candidates to meet with the chapter twice monthly, brand themselves as democratic socialists and form a socialist caucus in the body they are elected to. The stated purpose, in the chapter’s own announcement: to “disrupt the capitalist municipal order.” Its recruiting page tells prospective candidates, “Regardless of the ballot line you run on, DSA is your party.”

The candidates won. The caucus followed. Per Willamette Week, the four DSA councilors keep a standing monthly meeting with the chapter’s Socialists in Office Committee, the only outside political group with a scheduled meeting with a third of our council. Chapter co-chair Olivia Katbi described the arrangement plainly: “Our councilors are DSA. So what they are doing is DSA until further notice, unless we say it’s not.”

You know the rest from this paper and others. Hundreds of text messages, obtained by public records request, showing coordination from the dais during the 2025 budget hearings. A five-hour private retreat at City Hall that drew a unanimous vote by the state ethics commission to investigate.

This spring the commission closed the matter and dismissed every complaint, finding no violation of state law. In January, Councilor Dunphy left the Peacock caucus, and Green said he no longer attends its meetings. No record shows any of the four DSA councilors leaving the Socialists in Office Committee or the organization. The caucus could fray. The structure did not. And this year, the chapter campaigns to re-elect three of them, citing as credentials that its councilors “consistently participated” in the committee and “frequently vote as a bloc.”

Every official carries loyalties into the chamber: faith, family, a union card. The oath does not erase them; it ranks them. Influence asks in the open, wins some, loses some. Control is different, and control leaves marks.

The four marks:

• The commitment comes before the oath.

• The relationship is a standing structure, not an open door.

• It has teeth.

• It never appears on a campaign mailer.

Your union’s endorsement carries none of those marks. A statehouse party caucus carries none; it is printed on the ballot line. The arrangement described above carries all four. That is the whole case. And notice what is missing from the four: any question of whether the ideas are good. The offense is never the idea. It is the method.

A fair reader will ask how none of this violates the rules, and the honest answer is that it slips every seam we have. Oregon’s ethics law polices money, and there is no dollar here. The meetings law counts quorums, and when the state commission examined the five-hour retreat, it dismissed every complaint: no violation found. And the oath’s final clause names committees of political parties. While DSA is not a registered political party under Oregon law; it is a nonprofit advocacy organization whose own recruiting page tells candidates: “DSA is your party.”

Three rulebooks, three seams. The dismissals are not the vindication they sound like. The law is not saying this is fine. The law is saying nobody imagined it. My industry, casino gaming—the most regulated business in America—had the same gap once, until hidden owners taught it that every interest in a licensed enterprise must be disclosed. Portland just got the same lesson.

The councilors deny taking direction, and they do govern. This council passed the largest street-funding measure in decades. Nothing here claims their goals are illegitimate or their voters foolish. But I ran Louisiana’s pardon board, and I never met an inmate who did not have a great reason for breaking the law.

A great reason is the most common thing in the world. What I remember from that seat is the other side of the ledger: the victims, the mommas, the children, the communities, the people who were never in the room where the great reason won. When public business is settled in rooms the public cannot see, the people outside the room pay. That is what this is about. Not socialism. Not housing. The room.

The remedy is not a recall and not a purge. It is the fix my industry learned: disclosure. The council could adopt a simple rule tomorrow: Any standing agreement between a councilor and an outside political organization—its meetings, its pledges, its enforcement—gets filed with the auditor the way lobbying contacts are. It could go one step gentler still and pass a resolution reaffirming the final clause of its own oath, the nonpartisan principle all 12 have already sworn.

Neither motion asks anything of a councilor whose only allegiance is the one in the oath. If the arrangement is as benign as its defenders say, filing it costs nothing, and reaffirming it costs less. And where the state’s code cannot reach, the city’s own can: Write the disclosure duty into Portland’s ethics code, where a violation is subject to the same sanctions as any other.

When college football’s most innovative coach kept finding seams in the recruiting rules, the NCAA did not sue him or shrug. It added a sentence to the rulebook. Portland can add a sentence. As of publication, the DSA chapter has not responded to a written inquiry asking which endorsement terms applied to its council endorsees.

Three of the four are on your ballot Nov. 3. You were never in their room. You are, finally, in yours.

Jolene, named after the Dolly Parton song, is a key part of the team at Glow Boutique Salon on Northwest 11th Avenue in the Pearl District.

She comes to work every day with her human caretaker, Tarasina Kacere, who leads the salon’s training program. Jolene is empowered to assist in the salon by keeping the training atmosphere fun and cozy. Jolene, a purebred American Bully, is on the larger side for her breed—Kacere lovingly calls her a land whale—and she’s never far if someone needs a bit of affection.

Jordan White and his mother purchased the salon in 2020.

Jolene’s been here since day one on her green dog bed near the window, where she’s often dozing. “Yes, she sleeps a lot,” White agreed. “The sound of the hairdryers, the gossip around the chairs, the smell of shampoo—it all creates an ambience she finds relaxing.”

She’s an enthusiastic goodwill ambassador. She loves other puppies, treats, kids and even kittens, White said. “People in the Pearl neighborhood are dog-savvy. They can read her body language, and they know she’s a very sweet girl.”

Late in the evening or early in the morning, he added, clients and co-workers at the salon feel safer because she is there.

Jolene is not overly concerned with her own image, usually leaving her tongue out, even on her Instagram account, jojo_thebulltato.

She takes a chair to indicate she’d like to be next in line for a shampoo. If someone mistakenly sits in her chair, she usually climbs onto their lap.

Everyone loved Dolly, but Jolene has quite a following too.

For those who consider the Democratic Socialists of America too moderate, an alternative is rising in Portland. It’s called the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a nationwide organization with nearly 100 chapters, according to its website.

Drawn by a poster declaring “Oregon Says No to Data Centers” and inviting all to a gathering at Wallace Park on Saturday night, I dropped in to hear a series of speakers repeating the theme of billionaire greed to an audience of about 20.

This is the group that tables by the Portland Farmers Market in the South Park Blocks, proclaiming, “For the planet to live, capitalism must end.”

A web search provided more details about this organization.

According to an AI overview:

“PSL states that it relies on member dues, individual contributions and annual fundraising drives … rather than corporate or major foundation money. However, investigative reports and critics note significant financial and organizational overlap with front groups and non-profits backed by wealthy donors, notably American millionaire Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based businessman [who has] funneled millions into far-left media projects and organizations tied closely to PSL leadership.”

The Anti-Defamation League calls PSL “a U.S. political party based on socialist and ‘anti-imperialist’ ideals that runs candidates in local and national elections. It incorporates extreme anti-Zionism as part of its organizing platform [and] justified the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel as a “bold counter-offensive” and has sponsored or co-sponsored over 1,700 anti-Israel rallies since then.”

I left a message at the Portland PSL headquarters Monday but have not gotten a response.

Correction: This is not the group that tables by the Portland Farmers Market. That group identifies itself as communist.

If you live with a cat, the idea that it possesses extrasensory perception isn’t that inconceivable.

This (and more) is the premise of a new feature film, “Dances of Significance” in which an eavesdropping cat helps transport a melancholy folk duo to a better world. The cast includes over 45 Portland-based artists aged 11 to 80 years old.

The artists behind the film are Lindsey and Jordan Plotner, a married couple who often perform in Northwest Portland as the glam-folk duo called Ned and Wendy the Band.

Their 2021 musical documentary short film, “Welcome Home Ned and Wendy,” was a finalist in the Emerging Voices in Film Festival at the Kennedy Center.

Their new film, set to songs from their forthcoming album, will be screened at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 27 at PAM CUT Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division St. Tickets are $15.