The Adams Family

[May 28th, 2008]

Portland City Commissioner Sam Adams will be a mayor with a mandate next year.

He captured 105,000 votes in the mayor’s race last week, far outdistancing his chief opponent, Sho Dozono, who attracted fewer than 60,000 votes. Adams even got 35,000 more votes than his old boss, Vera Katz, when she easily won her third term in 2000. And Adams received almost as many votes in Portland as Sen. Barack Obama did in Multnomah County.

Come January 2009, though, none of that matters.

“Nobody here cares if he won by one vote or got all the votes,” says Commissioner Randy Leonard.

And if Adams supporters such as Leonard dismiss the lasting effect of Adams’ margin of victory, it’s certain his critics won’t care either.

In City Hall, the only important number is three—the number of votes it takes to pass anything on the five-member City Council.

City Hall is akin to a pre-nuclear family in which siblings, cousins and grandparents all live in the same house, and sometimes sleep together.

Mayor Tom Potter is out of the manse after alienating all his colleagues, except Dan Saltzman—though Potter lingers on for another seven months. Adams grew tight with Leonard, who cruised to re-election this year. Since the fifth vote, Erik Sten, resigned in April, it’s been a mess.

But next year, with two new Council members, alliances will shift—or the de facto coalition system could give way to a free-for-all. Either way, Adams, like Potter, may find he’s unable to get to three.

“That’s the issue I’m raising,” says Katz, who co-chaired Adams’ campaign. “It’s going to be very interesting [to see] whether Sam can bring them all together.”

“I think Sam has some real problems. The biggest problem is thinking his way through issues,” says Jim Lee, a longtime Council-watcher who finished fifth out of 13 last week in the pack of mayoral wannabes. Lee faults Adams for, among other things, sinking into the swamp that was the César Chávez street-renaming debate, and backing away from his $464 million transportation package.

“If he tries to pull that many flip-flops as mayor, he’s gonna be in really, really deep trouble,” Lee says.

For starters, Lee says, “Nick’s not going to give him a lot of quarter.”

He means Nick Fish, the “recovering” lawyer and former public-affairs-show host who, next month, will fill Sten’s seat after easily winning last week’s election. Fish is well-liked in political circles, though he lost to Adams in 2004 and Leonard in 2002. This time, Fish ran with Leonard’s support.

Fish is the only new commissioner who’ll have to work with two very different mayors. “The good news is, I’ll probably be sworn in after the budget deal” in June, Fish jokes. He has already spoken to Potter about taking over Sten’s old bureaus of Housing and Fire, and to Adams about “working together.” “I will support Sam in those areas where we already have broad agreement, and we agree more than disagree,” Fish says.

(Since intra-family feuds are always more interesting than brotherly love, we note they disagree over public campaign financing, for example.)

“The question is, really, not what kind of mayor [Adams] is going to be, but what kind of commissioner Nick decides to be, and who the other person is,” says Len Bergstein, a lobbyist who advised Dozono’s mayoral campaign.

The “other person” will be either Amanda Fritz or Charles Lewis, unless one kills the other first. The two, who feuded regularly in the six-way primary, face each other in November’s runoff for Adams’ Council seat.

Fritz starts that race with a huge edge, having received 43 percent of the vote compared to 13 percent for Lewis. But either could give Adams some trouble.

Lewis, who founded the nonprofit Ethos Music Center, worked under Adams as an intern in Katz’s office 11 years ago—but that’s about all they have in common. Fritz, a nurse and former planning commissioner, ran against Saltzman in 2006 and is, like Lewis, more of a penny-pincher than any of the other commissioners.

“Amanda’s stubborn,” says Katz, “and knowledgeable about issues that, in some cases, nobody else on the Council cares about—which endeared me to her.”

Fritz is “so sharp on details and finances that she could give anybody a hard time,” says Lee.

Through the primary, Lewis showed a MacGyver-like ability to turn paper clips and gum wrappers into political ammunition. He raised Fritz’s hackles, for example, by noting that a brochure of hers pledging to “keep Portland jobs in Portland” had been printed in Eugene.

“Let’s say you’re right, that whether it’s Charles or Amanda, it’s somebody that’s exceedingly stubborn. Everybody on the Council is important,” Leonard says.

But a junior member—well, he or she might be less important, especially if the others get along. That’s what a Council rookie like Potter found.