Given Commissioner Nick Fish’s letter to Occupy Portland this afternoon—in which he frets over damages to Chapman and Lownsdale squares and demands help from occupiers—I had one major question when he and I finally spoke this afternoon: So, are you going to ask Mayor Sam Adams to make the occupiers move?

“I don’t think this is the right location for the long term,” Fish told me, after praising a very polite and reasonable reply (pdf) sent by the Occupy Portland green stewardship people.

“But ultimately the mayor will make that decision with the police chief.”

Which then led me to call the mayor’s office. And Adams’ spokeswoman Amy Ruiz trotted out the same line Adams and his people have been riding hard for nearly two weeks.

“We’re continuing to make decisions on a day-to-day basis. The big-picture situation has not changed.”

My speculative, but reasonably well-informed translation: No one’s going anywhere for the foreseeable future—because a ripped-up Chapman Square is still way better than having a few hundred occupiers deciding to pick up and head for places like, oh, say, Pioneer Square. What may seem like a growing pile of nuisances and complaints still isn’t worth the PR headache of actually rousting anyone. Yet. YET.

Good thing I already asked Fish what would happen if and when the mayor picked the status quo.

“I’ve put down a marker,” said Fish, who later went so far as to say “we’re at a tipping point with these two parks.”

He continued: “There are a lot of challenges here, and I think the city has been trying to strike the right balance between allowing people to express themselves and their First Amendment rights while also trying to minimize the negative impacts.” Like clogged toilets and mangled trees.

So why the muscular letter from Fish? Well, he’s in a bit of a pickle.

He’s the parks commissioner, so, as he put it, he’s the voice of the parks—because “the parks don’t have a voice.” He can’t just sit by while, on his watch, thousands of dollars in damage accrue to a piece of public land. Also, Budget cuts are looming, so he has to speak up and look fiscally responsible. He’s also just hired a new parks director, who started today, so he has to stick his neck out for his new hire.

And while Fish is a self-described “proud progressive” who says he really and truly wants to see the movement mature and make an impact at the ballot box, he also eventually wants to hold some kind of higher office in Oregon. All the more reason to awkwardly straddle the line between accommodation and responsibility.

Fish reiterates one of the main points in his letter: that the grievances of the Occupy movement don’t actually have anything to do with the parks they’re camping in. He also says he and his arborists have personally toured the encampments and spotted potential problems that “people instinctively understand when they’re in the wilderness camping.” And ultimately, someone will pay the price—even if the occupiers are serious in their offers to help out.

“People have been cavalier in this treatment of this public space,” he said. “I also just think it’s inherently inconsistent with the populist message they’re expressing.”

The mayor’s office didn’t seem surprised or irked by Fish’s letter, calling it “consistent with a lot of information we’ve been sharing.” Ruiz says the fire bureau and others have been helping the occupiers solve potential issues, if not quite cracking down on them.

Where else, then, should the occupiers go?

“The easy answer is it’s not for me to say,” Fish said. “I would be open to discussing an appropriate location. But it’s increasingly clear that Chapman and Lownsdale squares are not appropriate places for long-term encampments.

“Frankly, I hope we shift past the point where to make our point we have to camp. It’s time to focus on the political side of the ledger. If the story becomes “damages to the park” and other problems occurring within, it takes away from the message the occupiers are trying to send.”

One other interesting note: Ruiz confirms that the police have begun assigning two cops to the camp at all time, a shift from its early days when on-duty resources—with no overtime—was being used to control the camp. (The cops will work with occupiers to help with, among other things, the encampment’s tightened policy frowning on drugs and alcohol.)

How much will that overtime cost? We may not know for several days, Ruiz says. But when we do, will pressure start mounting on Adams not only from his colleagues but also his handpicked police chief, Mike Reese?

Denis C. Theriault is the Portland Mercury's News Editor. He writes stories about City Hall and the Portland Police Bureau, focusing on issues like homelessness, police oversight, insider politics, and...

24 replies on “Fish Says “We’re At a Tipping Point”; Mayor Still Taking It “Day-By-Day””

  4. Can you ask Fish how much it costs to restore Waterfront Park every summer after Cinco De Mayo, the Rose Festival, the Blues Festival, the Brewers Festival, and so on? Of course, I guess it’s ok because there people are spending money. Occupy Portland are just exercising their civil rights, so by all means, lets get Fish his $19,000.

  5. @rth – all those groups you mentioned pay to restore the area when they are done. Every one.
    There was a story on Oregon Live about it when someone else brought up the same question.
    So, is Occupy gonna pony up like everyone else does?

  6. I think Fish is correct when he says it is time to shift things to the “political side of the ledge.” Starting with HIS seat on the council.

  7. OWS raised $300,000, I’m sure OP can drum up at least part of the cost in donations. The city blew money dumping our reservoirs and purchasing a neon sign to keep it from the shady likes of (gasp!) the University of Oregon, I’m pretty sure $19,000 to preserve a peaceful political assembly is not too great a cost.

  9. Good article, but hey Denis, why don’t you arrange to tour Occupy with an arborist from the Parks Dept and one of their restoration staff and the eco team from Occupy. You could get an exclusive, and do some on spot journalism. It would be a shame to loose those big trees. Maybe Waterfront Park would be a better spot?

  11. The Occupiers letter is awesome: they’re using the city’s own propaganda and p/r tactics to tell Fish to blow. Not unlike the way City of Portland bureaus frequently tell average citizens to blow.

    Welcome to the receiving end of a greenwash, Nick.

  12. I agree with you bruce that it is reminiscent of a letter the city would write to an opponent.

    Still, it basically boils down to “we’re hippies, so we know how to take care of a park just as well as professional park staff.” Um, no. The record zuccini harvest from your home garden doesn’t qualify you to restore a city park.

  14. Simple solution: collect the money now for park repair, and just leave it in a city bank account ready to be used when the protestors move on.

  15. How many parks are not occupied? If you want to reflect on all the good citicorp has done you while enjoying the artificial nature of a park, go to one of those parks.

  16. #12 – you obviously do not have a background in arboculture, otherwise you would understand the concerns that Fish is expressing. the continual occupation of the park will have likely long-term detrimental effects on the trees there. compaction of soils and well as starving the trees of oxygen by having tents and tarps over the root structure is already adversely affecting their health. the longer they remain there the more damage they’ll do. if their “Green Guardians” really cared about the parks and the trees in them they would be upping stakes and moving the whole thing to a more appropriate location. IMO waterfront park would be much more suitable.

    and while I’m glad to hear that the OP folks will provide reasonable restoration of the parks following their exit, I have to question whether that will happen if things get ugly w/ the City and people start getting arrested.

  17. The trees in those parks are elms. They are stressed even without Occupy by the Dutch elm disease (which they could catch any time and die – look it up) and by being in an urban environment limiting their root spread. So yes, depriving roots of oxygen and water by covering them in plastic and walking on them is something to think about. Re-Occupy!

  20. I love you guys who still seem to think that a bunch of wastoids singing “fuck the USA” in the rain is going to bring down citicorp. These guys are already hurting whatever cause they claim to support. And it will only get worse.

    This is how this ends. These guys hang out for a few more weeks while every one else in the city becomes even less sure of what it is they’re even trying to accomplish. Finally, everyone else (you know, the 98%) looks at each other and says, why do we now have a huge homeless camp in the middle of downtown? It is broken up by police in an ugly fashion. The protest kids have now “won” because they have fought some minor skirmish with the cops which was always their goal – the rest is just window dressing. They retreat to wait for the next excuse to have a minor skirmish with the cops, because that is their goal.

  21. Blabby–you missed the part about how each rainy/cold day will siphon off a few more of the reasonable protesters, until all you’re left with is the hardcore group of long-term homeless, drug addicts, mentally ill, and anarchist black-booted protest kids. That’s when this thing gets ugly, but I think we’ve got about 2 more weeks until the reasonable/responsible people in the movement say “eh, enough of this.”

  23. Diseases and dreadlocks and how can they oppose the reckless and corrupt influences of globalized capitalism and yet use COMPUTERS and bongo drums and marijuana and black clothing and anarchism and nihilism and granola and they hate america and patchouli and I don’t understand what they’re protesting and Marxism and the people actively protesting are not really 99% and drum circles and twinkles and my intuition tells me consensus decision-making can never work and drum circles and they’re hurting plants even though they’re obviously a bunch of hippies and there are lots of other ways take care of our problems without rallies, like voting for the right candidates and this doesn’t look good for our usually clean-looking city and these people should get a job and shut up and not be drug addicts.
    There, that’s a critique, right?

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