City Club sold out today for Mayor Sam Adam’s State of the City speech. The crowd was a lot of city planners and gray haired types (actual fur coat spotted in the audience) and Matt will post later about how the speech went. But I wanted to get up real quickly one of the questions someone from the public asked Sam after the hour-long speech wrapped up. Remember earlier this week when the BTA and BikePortland commenters were freaking out because PDOT is cutting the Safer Routes to School funding by 40 percent? Well…
Guy with soul patch: Thinking about the economic situation and trying to make Portland the most sustainable city in the world, are you still committed to funding Safe, Sound and Green Streets and other bike programs?
Mayor Sam Adams: Yes! … The city will backfill some of the cuts, like Safer Routes to School… Biking is the most affordable form of transportation so now is the time to be investing in bike funding.
Sam’s new slogan? —> Helping Zoobombers stay gainfully employed in 2009.
Sarah,
I would really appreciate it if you, and other Mercury reporters, would stop characterizing me and/or BikePortland as “freaking out” about anything. Commenters might be freaking out but it is very important to me that people realize BikePortland is an objective news source that does not “freak out” about issues.
Yesterday Matt Davis incorrectly stated that I was “disappointed” in Adams about the CRC and the headline of that story says “Biggest Fans” (therefore when people see my inclusion in that story they perceive I must be a “biggest fan” which is not an accurate representation of me or BikePortland).
thanks for your attention to this.
hey Jonathan, by BikePortland, I meant the BikePortland commenters, not you. I’ll add that in to the sentence to make it more clear.
for the record:
old sentence – “Remember earlier this week when the BTA and BikePortland were freaking out…”
new sentence – “Remember earlier this week when the BTA and BikePortland commenters were freaking out”
The Portland bike community is made up of many individual communities, Zoobombers are only one. Even the Zoobomber community is just about as diverse as can be. City programs don’t support the Zoobombers, and they wouldn’t have it any other way.
It would be a blast to have them bomb into the Starlight Parade though.
It is good to see the Mercury covering city issues, though perhaps overly shrilly on anything concerning the Mayor.
Jonathan, why don’t you try chilling out? Your attempts to be taken seriously are making me take you less seriously.
Yup, I’m with Jonathan on the “biggest fan” thing. I’m not a “fan” of Sam. I support Sam as long as he proves himself worthy of being supported, but that’s not colored by the lack of objectivism that characterizes a “fan”.
hi Jobby,
i’m chilled. sorry you don’t take me seriously.
i make my living doing bikeportland and how people perceive that site is of great importance to me.. that being said, I will continue to take very seriously how it’s represented in the local media.
cheers.
Jonathan, I take bikeportland seriously, but you’re coming off as sarcastic, overly defensive, and unable to accept criticism. You should realize that your behavior reflects on your site.
Jonathan,
While I’m as big a supporter of bikeportland.org as there is, you also should probably accept that it is difficult to accept bikeportland as “objective” when there have been so many posts on the site that are personal reflections or thoughts. I don’t think that there’s a correlation between a lack of integrity and subjectivism, but if you want to be objective, you should talk the talk and walk the walk, as it were.
Might I suggest that someone please make some biscuit related posts?
Although this is rather off-topic from the original blog post, I do have to say that my support of and respect for BikePortland has taken a serious dive over the past year and a half. There have been several times I have read a sensational-sounding headline that implied one thing, and when I read the post, the very opposite is said. There are often really basic spelling and factual errors, which only seem to get changed if someone calls attention to it. As time has passed, I have started regarding Jonathan as a “journalist”–my term for writers who are more about deadlines and readership than quality or thoughtfulness.
I would comment directly on the site itself, except a) a few people who comment have made the comments feature mostly a joke and waste of time, and b)Jonathan can track IP addresses, and I’d rather remain anonymous.
What is this, ‘attack Jonathan’ day? Jobby, Sarah didn’t criticise Bikeportland or Jonathan, she *characterized* them in a inaccurate way, which he politely asked her to correct.
In my experience, Jonathan has always carefully considered any criticisms offered about the site whether or not he changed his behavior because of it. And isn’t that all you can really ask?