After months of heated debate and with the firm support of the
mayor, Portland immigrant rights organization VOZ has opened the city’s
first day-laborer hiring site. On opening day this Monday, June
16, Spanish-speaking workers began arriving at the chain-link fence
surrounding a parking lot on the corner of NE Davis and MLK. VOZ
outfitted the parking lot with a trailer office, Honey Buckets, and
benches—it hopes to provide a safe and humane place where day
laborers can meet up with employers.
The site was delayed due to vocal opposition to the whole
project. Neighboring business owners were some of the
critics—complaining that day laborers were responsible for “human
feces and syringes” found along MLK.
Monday morning no syringes or feces were in sight, but also no
employers. By 11 am, only two laborers had been hired. “It’s kind of a
spectacle right now,” said VOZ organizer Justin Shear. “A lot of
the people that hire on the street might not want to hire in front of
five news channels.” SM
***
The Waverly Landing Condominiums border a gorgeous stretch of
the Willamette River near Sellwood, a small stand of spruce trees, and
soon, residents fear, a sewage pump station. The Bureau of
Environmental Services (BES) is building sewage pump stations around
the city to control river pollutants into the Willamette.
This week city surveyors placed wooden sticks and pink flags 16 feet
from the condos, marking the edge of a proposed half-acre sewage pump.
While BES and project engineers say there will be no sewage odor from the project, the condo owners don’t buy it. The group of neighbors
is also worried about the noise of the pump and, of course, a potential
drop in their property values.
Mostly, though, the condo owners are irate about what they perceive
as their exclusion from the public meetings planning the station. BES
could not figure out how to deliver meeting notices to the gated
condo complex, and messages left with the property management firm
apparently did not get through to the actual residents—so the
Waverly Landing Condo owners say they found out about the public
discussions after they had already occurred.
One owner complained to the city council last week. “It may be as
little as 50 feet from my bedroom window and I got no notice of a
meeting.”
BES Communications Director Linc Mann was sympathetic, but
stressed the pump won’t have a disastrous impact on the condos. “It’s a
process, and the city is sensitive to the concerns of neighbors. But
there comes a point when you have to pursue your construction and just
make it as unobtrusive as you can,” he said. SM
***
The queer community had plenty to celebrate at last weekend’s
Pride Festival. On Friday, June 13, David Crowe of Concerned
Oregonians—one of the groups pushing to repeal the state’s new
domestic partnership and anti-discrimination laws—waved the white
flag.
Noting that the Oregon Supreme Court had yet to rule on the attorney
general’s certified ballot title for Initiative Petition 145 (a
repeal of the anti-discrimination law), which was submitted more than
seven weeks ago, Crowe conceded that his group and other initiative
supporters wouldn’t have enough time to collect 82,769 valid
signatures by the July 3 deadline. (Two initiative petitions about
domestic partnerships are also awaiting circulation approval.)
“Insufficient time remains now to create, print, distribute
petitions, and collect over 100,000 signatures by July 3,” Crowe wrote
in an email to supporters. Crowe claimed the judicial body is slow to
act on “culturally important moral and constitutional issues, as
well as matters of conscience, preferring instead to
expedite decisions for those whose objectives are monetary and
secular.” AJR
***
This week the Port of Portland wrapped up seven years of
field investigations into the Willamette River’s Superfund-sized
environmental problems. The Port coordinated the $60 million
project studying the river’s sediment, which snagged 1,800 samples of
river mud and 2,000 samples of fish and invertebrates. The team used
some creative strategies to get all the data, like dropping a giant
metal camera onto the river floor to photograph mud, and asking for the
help of the local bass fishermen’s club when the scientists routinely
failed to catch any fish.
The results show that the 10 miles of river around Portland flow
with over 200 chemicals from 150 years of industry and agricultural
waste. The main contaminant is PCBs, an industrial toxin that
was banned in the 1970s.
The next step of the rehabilitation process promises to be as
overwhelming in its details as the first: Before cleanup actually
begins—it could be two years out—hundreds of stakeholders,
including private companies like Chevron, a slew of government
offices, and several Native American tribes, will review the plans.
SM
***
David Colton, a counselor at Madison High School who was
involuntarily transferred earlier this month, has filed a tort
claim against Portland Public Schools for defamation and invasion of
privacy.
School administrator David Hamilton allegedly brought
together students—who had been protesting Colton’s
transfer—and said: “I can’t tell you what Mr. Colton has done,
but you need to know that there are things you don’t know about Mr.
Colton’s actions. There are things that only the four
administrators know.”
Colton’s attorney Michael Schumann writes: “Mr. Hamilton’s
remarks implied that Mr. Colton had committed some heinous act or some serious breach of his professional responsibilities. These
remarks were untrue, defamatory, highly offensive, not of a legitimate
concern to the public, and a breach of Mr. Colton’s rights to
confidentiality of his personnel information.”
According to the claim, Colton was a fierce student advocate who had fought against changes being made at Madison over recent years,
including the impact of an initiative sponsored by the Gates Foundation
to split the school up into separate small schools. MD