A gospel ensemble and a cute sixth grader were tough acts to follow today for Portland Mayor Tom Potter, who finished off his week at Jefferson High School this afternoon by delivering his last State of the City speech.
“This has been the best week of my tenure as mayor,” Potter said.
And you had to believe him. He’s certainly seemed more jolly lately.
Content-wise, the speech was a catalog of name-checks and back-pats, concluding with Potter’s plan to save neglected public schools.
Here’s the mayor’s plan: Everyone could volunteer an hour a week as a tutor, and donate $50 to the schools.
It’s not exactly the New Deal, but there you have it.
“I think it would be helpful to have someone on the City Council who’s been in Portland schools more than one week,” said Council candidate Amanda Fritz, who watched Potter’s speech from the back of the room.
Regardless, the mayor got a standing ovation from the weekly City Club crowd that trekked over the Willamette this week for the speech at Jeff. No one was in the mood to pick on Potter at the end of what he was calling his best week in office after three-plus years. He left the room with a bouquet and a smile.
Potter’s theme: “All this good news”—business is good, crime is down, and we got an IKEA—“is not enough.” Particularly when it comes to civil rights.
“Race remains an ugly, open sore on the body politic,” Potter said, “and until we start talking honestly with each other, and listening, it will remain that way.”
The queer community, too, he added, is “still living in the twilight zone of bigotry.”
Which, though terrible, is preferable to living in the Twilight Zone where that creepy omnipotent kid zaps people into the television set and erases their mouths.
Long speeches clearly aren’t Potter’s forte. In Council meetings, he tends to keep his mouth shut. At times today, Potter seemed to be rushing through what were supposed to be applause lines.
Potter may be inspired by social justice issues, but he talks of them with the language of a bureaucrat. A typical sentence: “The Immigrant and Refugee Task Force is showing how we can lower barriers faced by immigrants and refugees…”
During lulls like this, a few Jefferson students and City Club members in the audience took out their cell phones and started sending text messages.
In a brief question-and-answer session after the speech, Potter struggled to articulate an answer to the ultimate softball: What have been your top three accomplishments as mayor?
“The first one is that I get up every morning,” Potter joked.
His real top three: Pulling more disenfranchised people into the political process, something about getting along with the business community (sorry, couldn’t follow), and increasing transparency in government.
True to form, Potter let the kids have their say before he got on with business.
The pre-State-of-the-City speech was delivered by Lane Williams, a sixth grader at Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy for Young Women. Unlike the keynote speaker, she seemed perfectly at ease at the podium.
Williams said the most important issue she faced was staying safe while getting to and from school. She said that recently three of her friends got hit by a car while walking to the city bus. And she suggested improved traffic signals and more crossing guards.
“Portland has problems just like any city, but here, problems get fixed,” Williams said.
Her speech was like a little gift to mayoral candidate Commissioner Sam Adams, who has proposed a $464 million transportation package, much of which will be spent on adding and improving traffic signals and making city streets more pedestrian friendly. Adams’ package would also extend the Safe Routes to School program to every Portland school.
Asked how much he had “paid” that little girl to give a speech on transportation, Adams said, “Wasn’t that awesome? I was like, who is that kid? Sign her up. That’s why we need Safe, Sound and Green Streets.”
Something for us to look forward to in Adams’ first State of the City speech next year?
- Adams Admission Reaction: Mayor’s State of City Address “Gi
- Somnolent State of The City Toward th
- Updated: Adams Repeats Urban Legend as Fact in State of the City Address, Spokesman Calls the Point Debatable There was
- Adams’ Admission Reaction: Ted Wheeler is Worried, Tom Potter is Silent Multnomah
- Gov. Kulongoski tackles “Oregon Challenge” in State of the State Address This afte
Loved that Lane girl! Good job Young Women’s Academy!
“I think it would be helpful to have someone on the City Council who’s been in Portland schools more than one week,” said Council candidate Amanda Fritz, who watched Potter’s speech from the back of the room.
What the hell does that mean? Fritz, you were educated in England not Portland. Guess that disqualifies you for city council.
Fritz is distinguished among council candidates by her having children in PPS. She is very attuned to the problems of inequity plaguing Portland Public Schools, as evidenced by her testimony to the city council on Wednesday.
The fact that she has more than a passing interest in public education is why I’m supporting her, not to mention her serious community organizing bona fides.
Potter’s Legacy:
Chavez Blvd.
Visioning.
FBI Bug Sweeps.
Fresh Del Monte.
Way to plug Adams Corey. Since when does Portland needs someone like you, who writes like an outsider – to write up biased news without a check from readers?
This is the fourth article of yours that I think gives poor form to what Portland needs on political updates.
WWeek, please reassign someone to cover what matters to Portlanders in a more descriptive, accurate way, that reminds us we can all make up our own minds and don’t need Corey Pein’s thesis to make up minds for us.
Maybe the 6th grader I heard at the State of the City speech, you and Adams are all in this together? What do you say Corey?