Randy Leonard

The former city commissioner won’t stand for anybody badmouthing the Rose Festival.

BY SOPHIE PEEL speel@wweek.com

If you find space on the sidewalk to watch the Grand Floral Parade this Sunday, thank Randy Leonard.

No city official in recent memory has cared more about the Portland Rose Festival than Leonard, or spent so much energy fighting the suburbs over who should get dibs on viewing spots along the parade route.

As a kid, he went to the parade every year with his grade-school friends, subsisting on cotton candy and corn dogs from stands along the boardwalk. As an adult, he gave up the upside-down rides for policymaking. In his three terms on the Portland City Council, from 2002 to 2012, the former firefighter championed critical changes to the Rose Festival’s operations and, some argue, saved it from financial ruin in the mid-aughts.

Leonard, now 70, thinks the Rose Festival is as important to the city today as it was 60 years ago, when he stood on his tippy toes to reach the height threshold for the roller coaster—and Leonard thanks cotton candy and corn dogs for the recent accolades from his cardiologist that he has the heart of a 20-year-old athlete.

Taping off parade spots is now banned thanks to an ordinance you passed in 2008. Tell us what happened.

I was contacted by a number of people, mainly elderly people, who were upset that this pattern had started where they would show up to watch the parade, and sometimes get there as early as 7 am, and then somebody would come up some hours later and say, “Hey, do you see this tape here? This is mine, you have to get out.” They would literally kick people out who [were] waiting for the parade to start for hours.

My God, I got more emails on that issue by far than any other thing I worked on. I literally received thousands of emails. And 90% of them were people who lived in Gresham and Vancouver who were outraged that I would have the temerity to say they couldn’t tape off their spots because their fathers had done it, their mothers had done it.

Was it ever a Rose Festival policy that you could reserve a spot with tape?

No. It was just benign neglect. It was more that people from the Rose Festival just ignored it. No one understood that it had evolved into this reserved-only seating thing for the last 15 to 20 years.

By the time that grew into a thing, I was an adult, and if I watched the Rose Festival, it was on television. If someone would’ve tried to evict me, I wouldn’t have let them. There were altercations occasionally between people.

In 2009, you convinced your colleagues on the City Council to sign a 25-year lease to rent McCall’s Waterfront Cafe to the Rose Festival Association for $1 a month. That’s now a prime piece of real estate, but it’s hardly occupied most of the year. Was that the right decision?

It’s not unoccupied. It’s occupied year round by the Rose Festival Association. When they expressed interest in it, it was vacant and boarded up and in a state of disrepair. It was an eyesore, more than anything. My thinking was, the Rose Festival was running short on funds. Then-director Jeff Curtis said he could envision it going out of business due to lack of revenue. I knew of the building sitting there and doing nothing, attracting vandalism, so I thought a perfect marriage would be for them to move into that spot.

Market rent for that building is estimated at $21 per square foot, but instead the city gets $1 a month. In retrospect, was signing that lease the correct move?

I have to challenge your assumption. It sat there vacant for two years, nobody wanted it. It was dilapidated, so no one would lease it. That building would’ve been torn down. There was no justifiable reason to keep it, because nobody wanted it. We took a dilapidated building that has historical significance, rehabbed it, and had the Rose Festival—the identity of the city—attract people to the area. It accomplished all that.

I ’m more pleased with that than anything else I did while on the City Council.

What’s the second thing you’re most pleased about?

The “Portland Oregon” sign is second.

Do you think the Portland Rose Festival still has a place in Portland today?

Absolutely. If you think about it, it’s the one thing that celebrates Portland ubiquitously year round. I was watching a news account just a couple nights ago: They interviewed people that said they wouldn’t come downtown save for the Rose Festival.

When’s the last time you went?

I drove my bicycle down a week ago and locked it up and walked around the waterfront the day after it opened.

I grew up three blocks from Lloyd Center, and when I was there, the Rose Festival was where that big theater was, Holladay Park. We’d get out of grade school and walk or run from there to get to the Rose Festival and ride on every ride that we qualified to ride on. They had those little, you know, “you have to be this tall” signs. We rode the Mad Mouse, hour after hour. I spent every day at the Rose Festival.

What did you eat?

Cotton candy and corn dogs. Nothing else. Now I’m 70, and I just had a stress test, and my heart is in superb shape.