While you’ve been in an Obama bliss for the past week—giggling over the president-elect’s clap on Bush’s back, drooling over the potential executive orders that’ll be signed on January 21, and wondering what kind of dog the incoming first family will adopt—there’s been plenty of local action happening under the radar. Here are a few highlights.
On November 4, Amanda Fritz walked away with a decisive 71 percent of the vote, landing her a seat as the seventh woman ever elected to Portland City Council.
The commissioner-elect has spent the past week wrapping up her campaign, including cleaning out the campaign office, thanking volunteers, and having her campaign office phone number redirected to a cell phone so people can reach her. She’s also keeping up her hectic meeting schedule, with “six appointments yesterday and five today,” she told the Mercury on Veterans Day. The campaign may be over, but she’s “going to continue to be out and about” during the transition (and, no doubt, as a commissioner).
Mayor-elect Sam Adams is expected to announce bureau assignments by the end of the week, and Fritz is waiting for that news before she begins to hire staff. On the campaign trail, she made it clear she’d like to run the Office of Neighborhood Involvement. It’s a small bureau, as a percentage of the city’s general fund, but it has “the potential to help bring everybody together and work on things in a much more efficient way,” Fritz says.
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On election night, the race for US Senate was a nail biter. After almost every other race had been called, Oregon House Speaker Jeff Merkley—who had challenged incumbent Republican Gordon Smith—still hadn’t spoken to the crowd gathered at the Oregon Convention Center. On Wednesday, November 5, there was still no definitive news, but with tens of thousands of ballots left to be counted in left-leaning Multnomah and Lane Counties, Merkley held an optimistic press conference in his East Portland driveway. “I don’t want to claim victory before the time is due,” he said. But he added that should he win, his victory “may be the factor in this nation moving forward.”
The next morning, when it became clear that Merkley would win the race by tens of thousands of votes, he held a victory rally at Portland State University. Merkley is now the 56th Democrat in the US Senate, with three senate races still up in the air. It’s not a filibuster-proof majority, but it’s still a strong majority that can help see Obama’s agenda through. Senator-elect Merkley is already digging into the issues he’d like to address, like affordable health care, living wage jobs, education funding, and shoring up our nation’s infrastructure.
“These issues that we’re talking about are the same whether you live in rural Oregon or urban Oregon, whether you have an R after your name or a D after your name,” Merkley told his supporters. “It is time for the problem-solving, bipartisan approach that worked so well for us last year here in the Oregon legislature.”
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Another unknown on election night: Whether the slate of statewide measures that Defend Oregon was fighting would fail or not. By Thursday, November 6—after those pesky Multnomah County votes were tallied—it was clear that Defend Oregon had a 9-0 record this year.
“Oregonians have shown that they are not interested in these terrible ideas from Bill Sizemore, Kevin Mannix, and their Nevada millionaire friend Loren Parks,” says Defend Oregon spokesperson Scott Moore.
Sizemore’s Measure 64, an anti-union measure that would have prohibited payroll deductions from public employees for groups that do political work (like unions), was the nail biter. Defend Oregon didn’t know until Thursday morning whether it would fail. By then, it “became really clear that it was just a matter of counting every ballot. All the votes were there for us, they just needed to be counted,” Moore says. On Thursday night, Defend Oregon staff and volunteers finally celebrated at Rontoms on E Burnside.
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And now, back to Obama, sort of. With rumors swirling that the president-elect might tap our own US Representative Earl Blumenauer for his cabinet—local political activist and former US Senate candidate Steve Novick has been handing out buttons that say, “Earl Blumenauer for Secretary of Transportation”—there’s speculation about who might step up to run for a vacated Blumenauer seat. Novick’s name has been floating around. But there’s another potential candidate who’s been “doing some seed sowing, and having conversations, strictly in speculation.”
Ed Garren, who ran for city council earlier this year, is the one with his eye on the seat—maybe. His interest is contingent on Blumenauer’s selection as secretary of transportation. “If that happens, and I can get some meaningful support and endorsements, then I’m interested in running. So that makes three ‘ifs’ and counting,” he tells the Mercury. “Much of the next decade will be spent working on education, health care, employment and training, and social services. I’ve spent most of my adult life working in those arenas, and I think we already have enough lawyers in Congress.”