Vera!

The health travails of Her Honor the Mayor of Portland has been much in the news lately. Not only does she have a recurrence of cancer (if I read correctly, a rare form that attacks the female reproductive system) but the ongoing treatment of such means she has kidney failure and also has to undergo dialysis three times a week.

I am glad I'm not her. Once again I am reminded that I only think I have health concerns. At this point all signs point to that if I just got off my teller butt and got some exercise I'd be about 100% better off. The Wife[tm] and myself in fact took a nice walkabout in our new neighborhood last night, but that's a digression.

Of Vera Katz, I have always been of two minds. That she is a motivated public servant there is no doubt. Her service in the Oregon Legislature was legendary. While no achievements come to mind (my fault, I really wasn't paying attention (like many in Oregon (which is why things are in such a sorry condition))) she acquired a rep as a master of coalition-building and getting-things-done.

The same vision that she had in Salem just never fit the streets of Portland though. The best example of this was, I feel, when she proposed capping I-405 a few years back. For those who don't know Portland geography, I-405 (also known locally as the Stadium Freeway (for its apparent proximity to Civic Stadium a/k/a PGE Park) and by even more serious locals as the Foothills Freeway (because it runs along the base of the range of hills that hem the city in on its western rampart)) brackets the city center on its west side. It was built between SW 13th and 12th Avenues, then jinxes to the west just a block to run between NW 14th and 15th Avenues north of West Burnside street. At its south end it sweeps to the south and east to join the I-5 at the south end of downtown, where the Marquam Bridge carries that slab over from the east side of the Willamette; at the north it it soars onto the beautiful Fremont Bridge to rejoin I-5 on the east side. It's scarcely more than three miles long.

To forge this freeway link all those urban blocks were vacated and excavated; the freeway itself is below grade. The freeway was left open to the sky, the result being that there is a great trench defining the western edge of the city center, separating it from its close-by densely-packed residential areas that fill the remaining gap between it and Portland's West Hills.

Whilst us Portlanders were dithering over funding urban services and schools, Vera comes up with an initiative to cap that trench, putting I-405 in a long tunnel, and re-completing the urban landscape. The problem was timing. Many Portlanders (myself included) thought that the most appropriate posture for our leaders was to exhibit vision and courage in the current urban problems, which are still our urban problems, and which have more or less been splashed across the national news.

Not that it was a bad idea. It would no doubt have improved the urban fabric (though I pretty much like it the way it is). But it made her look distracted by big-vision dreams when what we actually needed was someone who was hard at work making our "City that Works" (but wasn't) work better.

That, to me is pretty much the story of the Katz mayoralty; she hasn't ruined anything, the city is still up and running, but it could have been better. I never voted Vera; I voted Blumenauer in the first run, and until Potter there really hasn't been anyone worth voting for.

One year I wrote in "Tom Peterson, and Gloria too." Locals will understand who they are.

And Francesconi isn't really worth it; he's a cynical time-server who thought he could buy the mayorality whe a slick campaign and was still bested by Potter, though only by a few votes; runoff necessary.