Hall Monitor

Mayor Sam Adams drew scrutiny this past weekend for taking
off on another business trip—this time to Japan to woo
Nissan and Mitsubishi by talking up Portland as a place to invest
heavily in electric cars. While there he’s also been tweeting up a
storm, pitching frozen food companies to expand their
headquarters to Portland, and meeting with anyone else who might be
interested in bringing their commercial dollars to the Rose
City.

Last week’s council session provided an update on the mayor’s new
economic development strategy for Portland, too. “Members of city
council have rightly picked up on it when our job creation efforts were
more rhetoric than substance,” said Adams. “The honing of this
strategy continues at the same time we’re out there hustling for these
jobs.”

In a recessionary environment, Adams has lured Swiss battery
manufacturer ReVolt to Portland, creating up to 250 jobs. The city has
gained a $100 million stimulus grant to bring 1,000 electric
cars here on a pilot program, and the state has gained $600
million for wind farms. A clean energy works program aims to
retrofit 500 homes. We still need to make progress on activewear and
software, but with the strategy only launching in July it seems the
mayor is more engaged than any of his predecessors in economic
development. His goal of creating 10,000 jobs in five years doesn’t look unrealistic.

So rather than bitching when the mayor gets on a plane to
solicit investment (good morning, Oregonian), I think we should
collectively shout hurrah. Portland, as I’ve written here recently,
tends to operate in a bubble of its own self-adoration. But to create
jobs, we need to burst that bubble and drag profitable businesses here,
as well as support the businesses we already have.

By any measure, Adams is doing a good job of talking us up elsewhere. Since taking office in January, he’s been around North
America (Washington, DC; Vancouver, BC; Chicago; San Francisco;
Toronto; New York City; and Minneapolis) doing exactly that. And he
went on international trips to Brussels in May to speak at a bicycle
conference, and to Taiwan in July to pitch Oregon beer.

So Sam, the next time the haters start hating for doing the job we
hired you to do, why not grab a bottle of champagne from the hotel
mini-bar and charge it to the city’s credit card? Issue a nasty press
release, too, saying, “I deserve it.”