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Talking Story  by Polo

 From The Asian Reporter, V18, #9 (February 26, 2008), page 7.

Please note: The Asian Reporter does not endorse candidates for political office. Our responsibility is civic engagement. Portland mayoral candidate Sho Dozono discussed his leadership and his values in this column on January 22, 2008.

There was a time not so long ago — for Asians and Islanders, for Arabs and Africans and families from Soviet societies — when government did what governments do, and we did what working dads and worrying moms do. And with a little luck, the authorities’ doings and our doings didn’t intersect.

It was not so long ago.

Then those governments failed. Then our motherlands began devouring their own children. So we swam and ran away as far as we could. Over a hundred thousand of us live here now. Immigrants and refugees.

We work a lot harder here. We stay awake nights over a whole other universe of worries, now. In Portland, Oregon.

Many things are very different here. Some things are much-much better. Take government. Those doings downtown our big faces used to do back home, don’t happen here. Not now. As a matter of fact, since Mayor Vera Katz’ administration and now, extraordinarily, with Chief Tom Potter as Mayor, City Hall has asked us to lend a hand deciding how Portland should be. An invitation to govern ourselves.

Of course, our just-arrived families often say they’re not quite ready to participate in democracy. We’re not likely to believe, not right away, in elected leaders’ invitation into our city’s political processes.

But it’s better we believe it. This election year is worlds away from all those awful politics that expelled us not so long ago. These downtown guys are good. Take Sam Adams.

Mr. Adams is one of Portland’s City Commissioners. Four Commissioners, a Mayor, and a City Auditor (the man charged with keeping all their doings honest) are all elected by us to lead our city of a half million people. Portland sits on the shores of two generous river systems; we are a vigorous port in the grand Pacific economic community. If you stir the numbers and stretch your imagination — about one out of five Portlanders is an immigrant. Every year, Portland government invests about $1.5 billion into keeping our homes safe, our water and streets clean, our parks pretty, our neighborhoods peaceful, our commerce energetic.

Mr. Adams has had a prominent presence in all that. He was Mayor Katz’ Chief of Staff from 1992 through 2003. He was elected to Portland’s City Council in 2004. Today he’s responsible for the Office of Transportation and the Bureau of Environmental Services. Among other duties, he is local government’s connector to our city’s arts and culture organizations, and to our neighborhood business associations.

He does it all with amazing energy. He is bright, some say brilliant. Above all, he is totally, simply sincere about leading by serving. About inviting us to help leaders lead. Ask anyone. Watch him bike to work. Sixteen miles back and forth, rain or shine, because cars clog our streets, stink our air, warm our world, and create killer storms in many of our homelands.

When Commissioner Adams began his term in his first floor City Hall office, he spent 100 hours in Portland businesses, then he spent 100 hours with Portland’s lowest paid workers.

"I worked alongside a Cuban, a Filipino, a Russian …" he recalls thoughtfully. "Hotel maids, Burgerville employees, Fred Meyer box boys." The kinds of long-hour, short-on-salary jobs he also did during college. "They work so hard and get paid so little. They take a bus from Gresham or a train from Beaverton, where they can live cheaper." Mr. Adams often talks about City Hall’s responsibility to provide affordable homes to families like these. Families a lot like the one he was raised in.

"If my mom didn’t have access to subsidized housing, to food stamps, to grants and loans, it would’ve been impossible to raise her four children and educate herself." Mr. Adams’ mother parented alone and eventually earned an architecture degree at the University of Oregon.

"These people are smart," says Commissioner Sam Adams, maybe thinking about his ma, surely talking about all those folks muscling better lives out of what’s given them. Portland’s working poor. "Very smart," he nods. "Everyone I worked with. So much talent, held back by self-esteem issues, by language barriers, and by bigotry."

Commissioner Sam Adams says he wants to unlock all that human potential for their families, for a bigger Portland. Mr. Adams says he wants to be elected as our next Mayor.

Public schools are at the top of Commissioner Adam’s concerns. We have Oregon’s best and worst. And the academic break, he says, falls shamefully along our city’s race and household income lines. While this phenomena is true for all big American cities, Mr. Adams insists on building a community that will not conform with this kind of urban norm. "Portland is different. Many of us will not reside apologetically."

Closely related is the issue of our city’s working poor. According to the Commissioner, 21 percent of Portlanders (compared to nine percent of Seattle residents) work for wages so low that, despite their long, hard, hours on the job, they stay poor. Again, while all U.S. cities have this lowest rung of entry-level jobs, and again, while this feature disproportionately captures our ethnic minorities, Mr. Adams says he’s committed to constructing "an economically healthy city in which that last ladder rung of local jobs is the beginning step of family prosperity."

The third challenge Portland must face, according to Commissioner Adams, is the inevitability of our community adding another million residents in the next two decades. Mr. Adams says if he’s elected Mayor, as he’s demonstrated as a Commissioner, he will lead our city in "truly embracing the positive reality of a more diverse city. To make Portland a more vibrant, strong, and interesting city."

Current efforts he has supported to make positive our population shifts include City Hall’s intense efforts to include ethnic minority residents and immigrant communities in the visioning process — an urban planning strategy, according to Mr. Adams, intended to "truly embrace everyone as a full-fledged citizen of this city."

As visionPDX turns into action, Commissioner Adams actively supports creating and funding two city agencies responsible for proactively integrating and energizing Portland’s demographic inevitabilities — an immigrant and refugee affairs office, and a city human relations office.

There was a time not so long ago, for many-many Portlanders, when government did what it wanted and we wanted only to stay out of government’s way. That was then — this is Portland. This City Hall hums and we new Portlanders will thrive so long as our new civic leaders look and act nothing like that. Like all that bad past.

Now here we are. A couple hundred thousand new Americans in cool Portland, Oregon in a hot election year. Our leaders are inviting us to lead, democracy is calling.

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