businesses, that create primarily skilled jobs, and that provide for a community or employee stake in the enterprise through profit-sharing, cooperative ownership or other means. An example of this approach being put to work in St. Paul is the “growhouse” operation for raising fresh produce within the city. Though located in the heart of a rich agricultural zone, the City of St. Paul has been importing fully 85 percent of its produce from outside the state — a clear economic loss to the area. The growhouse venture addresses the need to decrease the city’s costly food imports, and makes use of otherwise wasted recycled energy; hence becoming a prime candidate for the city’s assistance under the criteria of its Homegrown Economy Project. In their attempt to stimulate the local economy from within, the City of St. Paul has created a support system of technical and financial assistance for local businesses that includes the following services: • underwriting the training and placement of workers in small, local businesses through a McKnight Foundation Fund of $1.25 million, a subsidy those businesses are expected to repay; • setting up a program by which large corporations can identify and utilize small local businesses as suppliers of products and services; • helping small businesses get on bid lists with federal agencies and providing assistance in preparing contract applications; • providing financing tools to assist entrepreneurs not able to get start-up or operating funds from private banks; • providing an “incubator facility” where new businesses can receive management and technical assistance from the city aimed primarily at cooperatives and worker-owned companies. “The self-reliant city views itself as a nation,” writes David Morris, a consultant to the City of St. Paul for its Homegrown Economy Project and author of the book The Self-Reliant City (Sierra Club Books, 1982). And it is their emphasis on a sense of place over the unhindered mobility of capital that stands behind St. Paul’s commitment to retain as much economic value as possible within the city’s borders. “Stop the Leakages," Morris says, “has become a rallying cry for those demanding local self-reliance. Whether the leakages are raw materials dumped into landfills, or branch stores that take the majority of their earnings out of the community, or retired people who can’t find places to offer their time and skills, the result is the same — the loss of valuable resources.” What It Means f he development program designed to transform St. Paul’s municipal services really does offer an opportunity to build new economic institutions which may well create the seeds of a better future within our present society. What is being attempted is a completely new role for a city government. As Morris puts it, “the city is beginning to emphasize production, rather than merely ameliorate the effects of consumption to promote the general welfare.” This new role for the city, he points out, defies traditional political categories: “The liberal thinks people want services,” he says, “the conservative believes we want commodities. Each agrees that the individual citizen is not the actor but the acted upon. Those encouraging local self-reliance . . . see the individual as a producer of wealth and an active participant in the political process of resource management." Stripped of the abstract language that often makes these crucial economic issues inaccessible to the layman, in effect leaving decisions to technocrats and career government servants, St. Paul’s program for a Homegrown Economy can be summarized, this way: Rather than looking outside their area for partners to revitalize their economy, they are taking what federal money is available and looking within to favor the local and the small. CAN PORTLAND’S MAYOR MAKE A DIFFERENCE? By Terry Hammond “TI he election of Bud Clark is the biggest upset in the entire 133 years of mayoralty races here,” asserts leading Portland historian E. Kimbark MacColl. What difference will it make for the city? Portland is notable as the largest city in the country with a “weak mayor” form of government, where the city's departments are portioned out to the autonomous authority of several commissioners. In one sense the mayor here is merely an equal fifth of a segmented power structure. Yet the mayor stands out as a figurehead, representing an image of what the city is and wants. Bud Clark’s predecessors have found that personality and ceremonial decorum are the important tools of readership in the office of hizzoner the Mayor. The popular George Baker (1917-33) began his first career in Portland working in theaters, finally owning the now-renowned Baker Theater.- He was first known for the performers he brought to town and, during his second career, as mayor, he retained all the flair of the showman. By joining every organization that approached him he demonstrated his accessibility, and with his jovial nature exercised a remarkable degree of influence. As the Oregon Voter put it in MAYOR RILEY HAD A SAFE BUILT NEXT DOOR TO THE MAYOR’S OFFICE ESPECIALLY FOR GRAFT MONIES, WHICH RAN INTO SEVERAL THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS EACH MONTH. 1924: “Mr. Baker has supplied the color and dash which a more prosaic but nevertheless efficient business man might not possess.” For growing little Portland on the West Coast, colorful public relations was just what the city felt it needed. With union strikes, racial segregation, a thriving criminal element fed by the years of Prohibition, and a massive influx of people requiring housing and services, any mayor had a job keeping an unblemished reputation. Mayor Baker was notorious for his tolerance of the Ku Klux Klan. Payoffs from gambling, bootlegging and prostitution filtered toward City Hall through the police department from Baker’s time, but a decidedly crooked mayor didn’t appear until Earl Riley took over the position (1941-49). It is alleged that Riley had a safe built next door to the mayor’s office especially for graft monies, which ran into several thousands of dollars each month. Through the war years, citizen and army protests against vice met an unlistening and less than charming response from Mayor Riley. Vice? What vice? The mayor’s office has two important powers: appointing the Chief of Police, and distributing the departments of the city to the commissioners. Riley, in keeping with tradition, retained the Department of Public Safety. Therefore, when the City Club reDorothy McCullough Lee in her first Rose Festival Parade as mayor. leased an investigative report on vice in Portland in February 1948, Riley was directly in the spotlight facing charges of corruption. A grand jury was unable to find enough concrete evidence for an indictment. With the heavy influx of war workers for the shipyards, housing became a critical problem during Riley's terms. A Housing Authority was halfheartedly established in 1941, but its accomplishments were dismal. On Memorial Day 1948, the rising rivers burst through the dike west of Vanport, and within hours the disgracefully shoddy war-built housing project was totally destroyed, leaving 18,700 blacks homeless and 15 dead. The number of flood refugees in Multnomah County neared 25.000. In his typical way Riley refused to respond to the problem. City Hall was picketed. The mayor was finally unnerved by public sentiment. In August he stormed out of a public meeting raving that people were avoiding him. Prominent Portland businessmen displayed a keen lack of ethics by honoring Riley with a splendid party at the Portland Hotel during his final days in office in December, awarding him a $5,000 Packard. When Dorothy McCullough Lee moved into the mayor’s office January 1, she found it empty. The Oregonian’s banner story “Files Found Missing” assured Mrs. Lee that that was simply how it was done and concluded that the affair was “much ado about nothing.” Lee was trained in law, served in the Oregon legislature and as a Portland commissioner, was bright, energetic, and possessed a gift for articulation that made her political poise almost perfect. The press, however, continued to make Portland’s first woman mayor look ridiculous. Her hats were editorialized. Her health was questioned. But Mayor Lee installed a new Chief of Police and began to enforce the law. She put vitality into the Housing Authority, and sought to end segregational practices. Although elected on a reform platform, the city wasn't prepared for her vigor. Kim MacColl comments that Dorothy Lee had no personal warmth and was not a good listener. This worked against her becoming a beloved public figure. She went to the wire in the 1952 election and lost to Fred Peterson with 47 percent of the vote in November. Peterson (1953- 57) had been Commissioner of Finance under Riley. True to form, he spent his last days in office as mayor, along with his Chief of Police, attending grand jury hearings. Corruption was being ferreted out of city government for a long time. The crime syndicates of the forties melted away, but graft continued to permeate the layers of power. The venerable Mayor Terry Schrunk faced a probe by the U.S. Senate and was indicted by a grand jury during his first months in office in 1957. The charges dated from his prior years as Multnomah County Sheriff, and only after months of battle.in court were the local papers able to proclaim “Shrunk Found Not Guilty." The city forgot about it. For 16 years Mayor Schrunk's style, his integrity and sincerity, made him the most popular mayor since George Baker. His re-elections were no contest until failing health forced him to resign in 1972. Reflecting the progressive image of the city during his period, a good listener, a careful talker and hard worker, Schrunk is credited with expanding the Port of Portland, cementing relations with Japan, and being active in housing and mass transit issues. In December 1966, he created a precedent for the mayor's office. Keeping the Bureau of Police, he put the Department of Public Safety into the hands of a commissioner and took over the Department of Finance and Administration. The new post has become traditional now for the mayor, offering an opportunity to oversee the efficiency of all the other departments. Schrunk's legacy, however, was a bulging weight of responsibilities for future mayors. In 1977 Mayor Neil Goldschmidt took, the next logical step and gave away the Bureau of Police, in itself the largest single bureau in the city. There have been subsequent instances where the mayor has found it necessary to reclaim the police in order to administer it to his liking, but at present the bureau remains in the hands of a commissioner. Juggling the city’s agencies forms the primary and special power invested in the mayor, and Goldschmidt attempted to use that power as none had before. Connie McCready, appointed mayor for the interim between 1979 and 1981 after Goldschmidt became Secretary of Transportation in the Carter administration, tells tales effacing off her authority as commissioner against Goldschmidt’s political wiles. Accused of Machiavellian tactics, Goldschmidt found that his delightful personality provided him more influence than his formal prerogatives as mayor. Connie McCready very nearly became Portland's second elected woman mayor, but complains she “had an opponent who was famous for very dirty fighting." While she was working 14 hours a day at City Hall burdened under the mayor's work load, Frank Ivancie abandoned the city’s business and boasted he was campaigning 17 hours a day. Analysts point out that McCready was a victim of the conservative backlash of 1980. “My finest hours," she remarks ironically, “were four totally unrelated death threats in two days.” She was proud to have the support of former mayor Dorothy McCullough Lee. Can Portland’s mayor make a difference? Neil Goldschmidt provided a good example of the outstanding role a mayor could play. The position requires him or her to be active, outspoken, articulate, have a saving sense of humor, and be able to create public pressure for policies being pursued. Most of all, the mayor must be a good listener and a warm, receptive person. Voters see these qualities as much more valuable than stolid business sense. Especially in Portland, the mayor's office does not offer much opportunity for power brokering, ft is an arena where a local citizen may, for personal rather than political reasons, devote him or herself to public service. Once enmeshed in the growing tasks of city government, a figurehead bobbing amongst thousands of people of all kinds, there's little time for anything else.» Terry Hammond has recently returned from Amsterdam and plunged wholeheartedly into Portland history. Clinton St. Quarterly 7
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