Grand Canyon

Portland Parks & Recreation looks to build new assets as it fails to maintain existing ones.

BY SOPHIE PEEL speel@wweek.com

Two months before his death from cancer, City Commissioner Nick Fish issued a warning about Portland’s most cherished gems: its parks.

It was November 2019, and a grizzled Fish—who joked that he hadn’t shaved that morning because he was so excited to talk about parks—described a dire financial situation at Portland Parks & Recreation. The bureau was rapidly expanding, but lacked the resources to maintain its existing properties.

If funding didn’t increase, Fish warned, the city would need to stop building new parks—or it would have to begin to close those it already had.

He used the beloved Columbia Pool in North Portland as an example. The city had warned it might need to shutter the indoor pool—temporarily, it promised—because of a shortfall in the parks bureau’s operating budget.

“How on earth can we be contemplating a new pool if we can’t maintain an existing pool? There is a contradiction, and I do want everyone to understand that,” Fish said. “Here we are talking about our inability to maintain Columbia Pool, but at the same time we’re talking about building a state-of-the-art pool. It’s one of the structural problems that continues to hold us back.”

Four years later, the bureau is under new direction—by City Commissioner Dan Ryan—and still trapped in the paradox Fish described.

In 2019, the deferred maintenance gap—that is, the cost to repair all the deteriorating infrastructure across the city’s parks— was $450 million. It is now $600 million.

The core problem is unchanged: The parks bureau has funds to build new facilities, but can’t afford to operate and maintain existing ones. In fact, nearly half of the bureau’s $498 million budget last year—$241 million—could only be spent to expand existing infrastructure or build new facilities. (And much of that is already committed to projects.) State law binds how certain parks revenues, such as one-time charges paid to the city by developers for new construction, are used. So the gap keeps growing.

Meanwhile, it’s rumored that Ryan is also mulling a run for mayor, and would like to be able to show voters a track record of achievements.

Which explains why the city is doing exactly what Fish warned would happen: planning to build a $50 million aquatic center in North Portland even as it plucks unsafe light poles out of nearby parks.

Former City Commissioner Amanda Fritz says that’s the logical outcome of a conversation about parks funding that died with Fish.

“I don’t think we had the capacity to look into what Nick had suggested,” she says now. “And then we were in the pandemic. It was a series of events that couldn’t have been foreseen or helped. And that conversation just dropped.”

The conversation Fritz describes intensified in 2019, after a budget shortfall that led to layoffs and shuttered community centers. WW examined the problem that summer in a cover story (“Parks and Wreck,” July 17, 2019).

Four months later, a Parks & Recreation staffer explained to the City Council that it would have to find more funding or watch existing assets crumble.

“In that scenario, because our operating gap will continue over time, we will see declines in our daily maintenance of the parks,” Sarah Huggins solemnly told the council. “We could be looking at closing 1 in 5 assets in the next 15 years….Without additional operating dollars, our entire system will see service cuts to accommodate the needs of the new parks.”

Fritz called that future unacceptable.

“Could we just take scenario one off the table right away?” Fritz said, to applause from the gallery. “I can’t imagine being the council that would preside over the demolition of Portland’s parks. For me, it’s not whether to fund our parks system properly, it’s how to fund it properly.”

Since then, the parks bureau has been in the portfolios of three different commissioners: Mayor Ted Wheeler, Commissioner Carmen Rubio and now Ryan. And the maintenance backlog has grown by another $150 million.

“How on earth can we be contemplating a new pool if we can’t maintain an existing pool?”

Mark Ross, a spokesman for parks, says Ryan and the bureau are keenly aware of its financial distress and are exploring ways to decrease the funding gap. (Ryan co-signed the bureau’s responses to WW’s questions.)

“The parks system has been significantly underfunded for decades, and those public assets are aging. In recent years, a number of assets have failed and had to be closed or removed to protect the public,” Ross says. “[Parks] continues to work with Dan Ryan about supporting maintenance at the levels needed to prevent future closures.”

In February of this year, the parks bureau announced it had begun removing 243 light poles from 12 city parks due to structural deficiencies found in their concrete bases. (The city commissioned an assessment of the poles after a woman strung her hammock between a light pole and a tree and the pole fell over, badly crushing her legs.) Only two parks would get new lights—in 16 months’ time.

The bureau said it had no money to replace the lights in the other 10 parks, citing hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance.

Ryan and the parks bureau received intense backlash over the light pole removals this spring. In late March, the bureau abruptly halted the removal less than a month after it had started tugging the poles out of the ground. The city had uprooted 116 light poles. The City Council scrambled to find the $11.5 million necessary to eventually replace the lights, securing some funding from the regional government Metro and setting its sights on another couple of million from the federal government.

To reduce its legal liability of a light pole injuring someone, the city made it clear that it was unlawful to attach anything to light poles in parks. (It’s unclear why the city didn’t see this as a viable solution sooner.)

“The bureau heard from the community,” spokesman Ross says, “that darkened parks represented a higher safety priority.”

It will be another five months before the uprooted light poles are replaced.

But while 12 parks were well on their way to lights out, the city was planning a $50 million aquatic center in North Portland. Its aim: to provide much-needed water access to communities of color in North Portland, who’d long been without a public pool on hot days.

The Oregon Legislature had just passed twin bills, championed by Rep. Travis Nelson (D-Portland), that allocated $15 million to the future center. In the two years before, Commissioner Rubio had pledged $16.7 million in system development charges to the future pool.

Meanwhile, the only remaining pool in North Portland had been shuttered by the parks bureau in 2020 due to structural deficiencies. Neighbors were irate and said they didn’t understand why it made more sense to build a new pool that wouldn’t be ready for another decade, when the city could just fix an existing pool.

System development charges—fees paid to the city by developers—can only be used for new projects, such as to build new parks. Much of the $241 million available only for capital projects in the parks budget last year came from years of built-up revenues that the city couldn’t spend as quickly as it collected them. (Though much of that accrued money is already budgeted for specific projects.)

That befuddled onlookers. “The sentiment was a little bit like, why are we spending all this money on this massive center— wouldn’t it just be cheaper to fix what we already have?” says Megan Ewing, who often swam at the Columbia Pool. “How are they going to keep it maintained? Because clearly they couldn’t maintain the Columbia Pool.”

Rep. Nelson, who secured the state funding for the aquatic center, also tried to pass a bill this session that would have allowed Portland to create its own parks district. But the bill died in committee, opposed by the Special Districts Association of Oregon and Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District in eastern Washington County. (The former argued a new parks district could open the floodgates for tax-happy governments; the latter argued it would be a tool easily abused by the City Council, which would oversee it.)

The parks bureau, in conjunction with Ryan, says it’s explored a variety of funding mechanisms, including a voter-approved ballot measure for capital funding, a new request for more city dollars, a campaign for private donations, and a reallocation of existing bureau resources. Ross says the bureau will not pursue a parks bond measure this year, nor is it actively working on a private fundraising campaign.

Fritz says she’s disappointed the parks bureau now finds itself in the one scenario that she and her City Council colleagues brushed off in 2019 as impossible. “Whether it’s this council or the new council,” Fritz says, “someone is going to have to figure this out.” ast week, a photographer on assignment for The New York Times rolled up to the city’s newest tourist attraction.

The journalist rode in an unmarked silver squad car and had come to document the open-air fentanyl market operating on Southwest 6th Avenue. She jumped out of the cops’ rig with a camera and began snapping pictures of the tinfoil brigade on the corner.

This was the third time cops had shepherded the Times through downtown Portland in recent years.

Portland Police Bureau Central Bike Squad Officer David Baer said his team had been out with journalists all afternoon. KATU-TV was on the scene earlier. The Wall Street Journal was supposed to visit the day before, but the reporter’s flight got canceled.

Portland is on a short list of destination cities for national media. Rather than a model, however, we have become a cautionary tale.

It wasn’t long ago that the nation’s leading newspapers and magazines regularly wrote the same glowing profile of the Rose City—a lovably weird outpost wedged between the Cascades and the Pacific where colorful (but mostly white) residents pedaled tall bikes while playing the bagpipes, eating Voodoo doughnuts, and slurping elderflower-flavored kombucha.

A 2009 New York Times story headlined “Frugal Portland” captured Portlanders’ “dedication to the things that really matter: hearty food and drink, cultural pursuits both high and low, days in the outdoors and evenings out with friends. It’s the good life, and in Portland it still comes cheap.”

Now, it’s mostly fentanyl that comes cheap. Instead of IPAs and doughnuts, reporters from elsewhere come to chronicle Portland’s drug market, our tent cities, and hapless elected officials. No longer a forward-thinking burg known for recycling, land use planning, and an indie vibe, we are now being characterized as a proto-Detroit, with high-income earners taking their Teslas to the ’Couv, Bend or Idaho. Even Damian Lillard wants out.

T here have always been haters. It’s no secret that Fox News delighted in the violent street theater that followed Portland’s civil rights protests over George Floyd’s murder. What better proof of lefty fecklessness?

But the glum press coverage of Portland’s ills is also rooted in painful truths. (Indeed, much of the national coverage repeats stories WW first reported.) Amid a zeal to level the playing field for people who didn’t partake in the granola utopia, Portland’s leaders neglected basic obligations: housing supply, mental health and addiction services, and public safety. Combine that with the seeming inability of county and city governments to work together and yes, this region really is a mess—it’s little wonder that outsiders want to rubberneck. Success has many fathers. Failure draws cameras to photograph the orphan.

The media attention ranges widely, from sober publications, such as Governing magazine to the left-leaning Verge, with all of the country’s big dailies also searching for an answer to the same question: How did a city with so much going for it screw things up so badly?

“The puzzle,” Governing wrote about Portland in May, “isn’t so much a question of what is happening, but why it is happening.”

Over the past several weeks, our staff has been reviewing what others have said about us recently. We combed through press clippings published since last fall and identified 10 pieces that show how outsiders see us.

It echoes a roundup we published 15 years ago, back when national outlets were trumpeting Portland’s virtues rather than its failings (“PDX Inked,” WW, Oct. 24, 2007). Then, too, we tried to identify the moments when others saw us more clearly than we see ourselves, as well as the places where reporters were waxing profound about what they saw out the Radio Cab window.

We’ve rated each story on a sliding scale: How bleak is the portrait, how much pleasure does it take in our comeuppance, and how obviously is it pandering to an audience in MAGA hats?

Here’s what they’re saying about us behind our backs.

Anthony Effinger, Nigel Jaquiss, Lucas Manfield and Sophie Peel contributed reporting to this story.

Let’s start with a double feature. In October, The New York Times sent a reporter to weigh the odds of a Republican takeover of Oregon. Two weeks later, Michelle Goldberg, a reliably liberal Times op-ed columnist, followed up with analysis.

“How a Republican Could Lead Oregon: Liberal Disharmony and Nike Cash”

The New York Times, Oct. 16, 2022

“If Oregon Turns Red, Whose Fault Will That Be?” The New York Times,

How do they introduce Portland?

Oct. 31, 2022

The photo atop Goldberg’s column says it all: a homeless woman wrapped in a blanket, under a blue tarp, a fire burning in a toppling fire pit, with three shopping carts in the frame. And it’s raining.

Who was interviewed?

Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike. The two stories both arrived in the few weeks when polls suggested Republican nominee Christine Drazan could seize the governor’s mansion (she didn’t). So the Times talked to a who’s who of political insiders, from Democratic Oregon Congressman Kurt Schrader, who’d lost in the May primary, to An Do, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon. Plus, it looped in Guy Randles, “a Democrat from Portland” (more on him below).

Most memorable quotes:

“One of the political cartoons after our legislative session had a person snorting cocaine out of a mountain of white. It said, ‘Which of these is illegal in Oregon?’ And the answer was the plastic straw.” —Phil Knight

“Portland, which used to be kinky and weird and a very liberal community, became a very dangerous community where people are no longer enjoying it.”

—Kurt Schrader

Least authentic moment:

Quoting Guy Randles and presenting him as an everyman, even though he’s a retired partner at Stoel Rives who got a law degree from Berkeley. “I was picked as a proverbial man on the street for the interview,” Randles says in an email. “I was jogging along the waterfront when the Times reporter, Mike Baker, approached to ask if we could talk. We had a nice chat.”

Most perceptive observation:

Goldberg understood that, to win the governorship, Tina Kotek had to thread a needle. She couldn’t throw Gov. Kate Brown, her predecessor, completely under the bus, but she had to get most of Brown under there to win. “The two biggest issues right now are housing and homelessness, and mental health and addiction,” Kotek declared to the Times. “And I’ll be honest, she’s been absent on that topic.”

How apocalyptic are they?

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“The Portland Van Abductions”

The Verge, Oct. 19, 2022

How does it introduce Portland?

This piece is a bit of an outlier for a national news outlet. For one thing, it’s written by two journalists—Sergio Olmos and Sarah Jeong—who lived in Portland at the time they write about. For another, it’s not about then-current conditions but the time in 2020 when President Donald Trump sent federal agents to quash what had begun as civil disobedience post-George Floyd. As such, it starts on a noir note: “An uncannily desolate city intersection between the back of the federal courthouse and a Starbucks. The headlights of the van are a harsh note in the dim monotones of gray concrete and the brown particleboard that was often boarded up over windows in downtown buildings.”

Who was interviewed?

Mark Pettibone and Evelyn Stassi, protesters who describe being abducted by federal authorities in unmarked vans in 2020.

Most memorable quote:

“If I hadn’t been radicalized at Reed College, I certainly had been by the time I had gone out into the street, as many times as I did, and seen the things that I saw.” —Mark Pettibone

Most perceptive observation:

Portland will always live in Seattle’s shadow, even when the Rose City is on Fox News and Trump’s hit list. “By late June, four people had been shot inside the [Seattle’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest], with two dead, while Portlanders were busy setting small fires inside garbage cans and playing Frisbee.”

What’s the diagnosis?

Trump’s sending in the shock troops was the root cause of Portland’s ongoing malaise. The president set out to make an example of the city, and succeeded in both traumatizing and fracturing its residents.

What’s the solution?

Local solutions for local problems. “The feds had done the exact opposite of quelling the protests, and their departure ended up being the most effective crowd control they ever tried.”

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city”

Fox News, Jan. 3, 2023

How does it introduce Portland?

Fox News characterizes Portland as a place where everyone, including people who cannot afford the city’s stratospheric rents, likes to eat and do drugs. “Many among the homeless population wake up and proceed to repeatedly eat and get high throughout the day,” notes the reporter.

Who was interviewed?

No one. Instead, the Fox News reporter watched a video on Twitter taken by outreach worker Kevin Dahlgren, in which he interviews a former hairdresser living on the streets of Old Town. Dahlgren is the former president of We Heart Seattle, a nonprofit whose controversial street cleanup tactics have generated significant backlash. The story does recycle a prior interview with a North Portland man who told Fox & Friends that businesses and residents are fleeing the city due to homeless encampments.

Most memorable quote:

“It’s a piece of cake, really,” Wendy, the hairdresser, tells Dahlgren about living on the streets of Portland. “They feed you three meals a day and don’t have to do shit but stay in your tent or party.”

Least authentic moment:

Dahlgren says the “piece of cake” quote struck a chord with national media outlets, but much of the attention missed the point. “I’ve never believed it’s ‘a piece of cake’ to be homeless,” he tells WW. “There was more to the story.” Wendy grew up in a conservative family, Dahlgren says, and was frustrated with Portland’s “enablement” of people living on the streets. The story has a happy ending, Dahlgren reports. After the interview went viral, Wendy was reunited with her family and went into detox in Utah.

Most perceptive observation:

“The city’s developing homeless crisis is believed to be a byproduct of a cocktail of other problems, including recreational drug policies implemented in The Beaver State.” It is true that people believe this: 60% of Oregonians surveyed in April said they believe mental health and drug addiction, and not a lack of affordable housing, are the leading causes of homelessness. Whether they believe this because the TV said it is another question.

What’s their solution?

More police. “If you get hurt, you’re screwed because they’re not helping anybody. You don’t see them anywhere,” the story quotes Wendy telling Dahlgren.

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“What’s the matter with Portland? Shootings, Theft and Other Crime Test City’s Progressive Strain”

Los Angeles Times, Feb. 10, 2023

How does it introduce Portland?

With a regular person who knows the score, and some blight porn. “If you want to understand the schism that dominates the political and social landscape in this famously liberal city, a walk down Southeast Rhine Street might be a good place to start. Flora Gonzalez, who lives on the north side of the street, is distressed about conditions in the historically blue-collar neighborhood. The 40-year-old package handler for FedEx said that people have openly dealt drugs and urinated on the sidewalk outside her family’s duplex. They’ve dumped feces and used syringes in her manicured yard, played booming music at 3 a.m. and stripped stolen cars for parts. Shots have been fired behind her children’s bedroom.”

Who was interviewed?

City Commissioner Mingus Mapps; John Toran, founder of Toran Construction; Chet Orloff, an adjunct professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University; Daisy Quiñonez, former Portland planning and sustainability commissioner; and Josh Lehner, a senior economist at the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis.

Most memorable quote:

“You don’t have to watch Fox News to look around Portland and say, ‘This is not cool.’” —Mingus Mapps

Most perceptive observation: An anecdote that speaks to how beleaguered Mayor Ted Wheeler is: “A mayor who began his first day in office biking to work was now accompanied by bodyguards.”

What’s the diagnosis?

The Times doesn’t offer one, but it makes clear that moderates are on the rise while the liberals who ran Portland for so many years are on the ropes.

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“Oregon decriminalized drugs 2 years ago. What can B.C. learn from its rocky start?”

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Feb. 26, 2023

How does it introduce Portland?

With British Columbia decriminalizing small amounts of hard drugs beginning this year, Canada’s public broadcaster (think NPR, but somehow more polite) came to Portland to get a sense of B.C.’s own future. The picture was bleak. “Oregon had more opioid overdose deaths in 2021, the year decriminalization went into effect, than the two years prior,” the CBC notes.

Who was interviewed?

There are glamour shots of both Tera Hurst of the Health Justice Recovery Alliance (“we can be used as either a model for why you should do it, or a model of why we can never do that”) and Portland’s Instagram-famous bike cop, Officer David Baer (“you’re going to see an increase in public drug use”).

Least authentic moment:

When Charles Laprain, an unhoused Portlander, is given a citation for smoking fentanyl, he says he’s “50-50” on calling the treatment hotline. If he does, he’ll be one of the very few. WW found that out of the hundreds of $100 citations handed out by police in Multnomah County, only five people as of May had managed to get the fine waived by calling the hotline.

What’s the diagnosis?

The CBC compares Portland unfavorably to Portugal, which noted a decline in overdoses after it decriminalized hard drugs back in 2001. Portugal, of course, has universal health care. “Oregon still rates 50th in the U.S. for access to treatment,” the CBC notes.

What’s the solution?

British Columbia has its own problems. There, it can take up to four weeks for a person to get into detox, a doctor told the CBC. Canada has a “Minister of Mental Health and Addictions” and she came down to Oregon to tour last August. The minister, Carolyn Bennett, tells the CBC that the province can take some lessons from Oregon, mainly “funding a variety of community-based treatment organizations ‘to develop the kind of trusting relationships that allow people to think about a different life,’” the CBC says. So, keep doing that?

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