JUST BECAUSE it's New Year's, or something, all the other news outlets in town are working their hardest to bore you with big "year-end" soliloquies and "important" think pieces reminding you about stuff you never forgot in the first place.
(We're looking at you, fluoride, Jeff Cogen's pot smoke, sick time, federal police reform, same-sex marriage, TriMet, and Right 2 Dream Too. Among way too many others.)
But not us! It's the holidays! Why do any work at all?
So we're doing what we always do this time of the year: combing through our archives and dredging up all the awful, depressing (and occasionally uplifting) stories from 2013 you'd already decided not to remember. And though we said this last year, it bears repeating:
The beauty of being forced to remember something terrible is the relief of getting to forget it all over again. Enjoy!
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Pee Is for Policy Goals: We can't say it conclusively, but 2013 may have been Portland's best year ever for urine measurement. The city, trying (without much success) this summer to tamp down on unruly behavior at Alberta's popular Last Thursday events, sent workers out to chronicle the mayhem. Among the problems staffers tallied: a decent amount of public urination. And later in the year, when the city was trying to make a case for extending controversial weekend street closures in Old Town, an impressive figure emerged: 370 gallons of urine collected in outdoor urinals posted in the neighborhood during peak bar times. Congratulations, pee wonks, you're finally mainstream.
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You Won't Like Charlie When He's Angry: This year's city budget was among the roughest in memory, closing a $21.5 million deficit and promising cuts to lots of popular programs. True to his word that nothing would be sacred in that calculus, the mayor matter-of-factly proposed cutting thousands from programs that help fight sex-trafficking. In the weeks that followed, blindsided advocates flooded city budget hearings with potent testimony about why their programs should be spared. It kind of worked. Charlie Hales relented and offered to restore some money. But only after he called several advocates into a meeting the Monday after one of those hearings and angrily laid into them for embarrassing him in public.
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Waiting to Exhale... Grandma: Early in the year a quiet, odor-free funeral home on NE 80th became a rumbling, smoking crematory—and a new strain of Portland NIMBY-ism was born. Neighbors of Gable Funeral Chapel and Cremation Services say the crematory operates at all hours, disturbing the once-peaceful swath of Montavilla. And they're worried harmful particulates like mercury might be making their way into the soil. But not only is the crematory legal under city zoning law and okay by state regulators, a soil study done at nearby Vestal School came back clean. Legislation may be in the works, but for now? All neighbors can do is seethe and breathe.
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Another Lull in Police Shootings: You probably had no clue this was the case—we certainly didn't—but November 27, 2013, marked a modest milestone for Portland. It was the city's 268th consecutive day without an officer-involved shooting—the third-longest drought since 1992, when Portland Copwatch began keeping records. If the cops make it to February 18, says Copwatch's Dan Handelman, it'll be the second-longest stretch. If we get all the way to June 14 next year, we'll officially be in the longest shooting-free span since 2008-2009. Both of 2013's two shootings came within a few weeks last winter. Officers shot Merle Hatch on February 17, while despondent Iraq War vet Santiago A. Cisneros III was shot on March 4 atop a Lloyd Center parking garage.
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Hitler Hates the Mounted Patrol: Every year when there's big budget cuts on the table, the Portland Police Bureau sighs and says it guesses it can cut its horse cops and their gentle, noble steeds. But it never happens. People like the horses—never mind that they crap and piss freely and sometimes menace protestors and the homeless. This year, however, seemed different. The mayor was going to call the cops' bluff. And he'd lined up the rest of his colleagues on the city council to back him up. That's at least what city hall thought—until Hales blindsided everyone with a surprise reprieve that gave wealthy Portlanders the chance to raise $400,000 to keep the program going. Someone in city hall even made a Hitler meme video based on the affair, passing it around the building. "Everyone loves horsies even though they have no functional value," Hitler screeches in the video, perfectly reasonable for the first time ever.
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The Triumphant Return of Beatrice: Portland's big-city transportation director, Leah Treat, finally had a proper baptism into the city's bike culture this summer when her cherished beater bike, a blue hodgepodge nicknamed Beatrice, was stolen from outside the Portland Building. And it was totally her fault. She'd committed the cardinal sin of relying on a cable lock to keep her precious rig safe. Almost a week later, however, all her sins were washed away. Police officers patrolling homeless campers at nearby Chapman Square noticed someone riding by on a bike that looked exactly like the one in the picture Treat helpfully provided investigators. Treat confessed a bit of luck afterward. This was the third time in three cities—Chicago, Washington, DC, and now Portland—that Beatrice had been ripped off and Treat's property was miraculously recovered.
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Aptly Named: Sometimes a person's evocative last name works in concert with their actions, and it's the best. Such was the case in June, when a Portland police officer named Kevin Macho formally threatened to sue the city because it had promoted "lesser-qualified females and others" to sergeant, but not him. According to a notice Macho (pronounced Mock-oh) filed with the city, he'd been repeatedly passed over for a promotion, which amounted to discrimination. One other potential reason Macho might have been skipped: He was accused of roughly groping a transgender motorist in 2010, an allegation that led the city to settle out of court.
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Busy Year for Oregon's Equality Act: The apparently successful push to get marriage equality on next year's ballot has maybe been Oregon's most resonant LGBTQ news story of the year. But 2013 has also been a watershed year for something already on the books: the Oregon Equality Act of 2007. Under that law, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) either fined or investigated a handful of businesses accused of discriminating against people just because of their gender or sexual orientation. In September, BOLI announced a probe of Broadway Cab driver Ahmed Egal, accused of booting out two women who'd been holding hands in his cab—forcing them to call the cops and hike up an embankment along Interstate 84. (City regulators already pulled Egal's permit and fined Broadway $1,000.) BOLI also fined North Portland's Twilight Room Annex $400,000 after the bar told a group of transgender women to stop showing up. And the agency's digging into the now-closed Sweet Cakes of Gresham, which refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple last winter.
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The Senator and the Stripper: For a few days this September, political reporters near and far were fascinated with a dancer at the most "Portland" of strip clubs, Casa Diablo. And it was all because this dancer, Lynsie Lee, had taken to Twitter with screenshots proving she'd carried on a mildly flirtatious "direct message" relationship with Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey. No big deal, maybe, except Booker just happened to be a Democratic candidate for the US Senate at the time, and everyone was still obsessed with Anthony Weiner and Carlos Danger and dick pics. BuzzFeed broke the news, highlighting a message exchange where Booker told Lee the East Coast loved her, "and by the East Coast, I mean me." She demurely said she was "blushing." And it was pretty much as boring as that.
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Conservative Punditry and Sex Rap: Turns out the hawkish conservatives down at Portland's KXL radio are big 2 Live Crew fans. And to prove their allegiance to Uncle Luke and the rest of the gang, they alienated an entire area of the city this year. The radio station faced outcry after purchasing a billboard that read "We love you long time," near NW 3rd and Couch. The ad was meant simply as a reference to the 1989 hit "Me So Horny," the station said in the face of intense criticism, and with no thought to what the broken-English pleading of a fictive Vietnamese prostitute (from the film Full Metal Jacket) might suggest in historic Chinatown. The station pulled the ad soon after critics cropped up, replacing it with a gramatically problematic billboard that read, "Stay connected my friends."
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"I'll Research if Auschwitz Is in Need of a Police Captain": Police Chief Mike Reese lost one of his best friends and most trusted aides this year (and the bass player in his dad-rock band) after a text-messaging scandal that aired a bunch of dirty laundry in the bureau and led to major staffing shakeups among senior commanders. Out was Mike Kuykendall, a vociferous sit-lie defender for the Portland Business Alliance before taking a job as Reese's civilian director of services. Kuykendall got caught exchanging texts with a lieutenant complaining about harassment from her boss. Except her boss wasn't just any cop. He was Captain Mark Kruger—infamously punished a few years ago for curating a shrine to Nazi-era German soldiers. Kuykendall couldn't help himself, riffing about Nazis and Poland. But he shouldn't have been riffing on anything. As director of services, he was in charge of misconduct investigations—and, thus, expected to remain impartial.
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Bike Share. Not Rolling. Not Yet: The big news in bike share this year was that there was no news. While cities around the country—New York, Chicago, San Francisco—got the ball rolling on the nation's hottest transit trend, Portland had exactly zero developments. That's surprising. When the city first hired Portland-based Alta Bicycle Share to implement a system, officials set a target date of spring 2013 for rollout. But that season came and went, and no bike kiosks emerged. Instead, a new rollout date was quietly set: spring 2014. The problem, officials say, has been finding the sponsorship dollars that are intended to purchase and prop up the system. While Commissioner Steve Novick, who oversees the Portland Bureau of Transportation, recently told the Mercury the city's secured "significant commitments," none have been announced and another delay seems likely.
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The Morrison Bridge Is Still Broken: The Morrison Bridge's fancy new deck didn't stay fancy for long. Since contractors finished swaddling the span in polymer in March 2012, Multnomah County's bridge department has quietly fretted over the rapidly devolving surface. They just didn't bother to publicly mention a laundry list of defects, from loosening screws to shifting deck panels. That information—and other concerns—eventually came out in a lawsuit first reported by the Mercury. But it's also repeatedly announced daily by the unsettling slapping of the Morrison's shoddy deck every time a vehicle passes over it. Now, the county's going to have to close at least part of the Morrison to make repairs. Just how extensive that work will need to be—and who will ultimately be stuck with the bill—remains to be seen.
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So Much Water Talk: For four sun-drenched days in July, "Camp Cascadia" protestors set up shop on the west edge of Mount Tabor Park—continually threatening to stay past closing, but dispersing in the face of riot police. The group didn't achieve its central goal: forcing city officials to resume a fight to keep Tabor's open-water reservoirs. But the demonstration arguably lent momentum to two newer efforts bent on changing Portland water policy. A measure aimed for the May 2014 ballot that would put the water and sewer bureaus in the hands of a new board. Another, born in the aftermath of Camp Cascadia, would let Portlanders better police city stewardship of the water supply.
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The Cars Rejuvenating Carbon (CRC) Award: State Representative Jules Bailey, now running for Deborah Kafoury's old seat on the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners, has long been seen as one of Salem's leading lights on environmental policy. Which is why some advocates were mighty pissed in February when he voted for the Columbia River Crossing, the multibillion-dollar I-5 expansion and bridge replacement project. A little while after, while Bailey was talking up a carbon tax over drinks with the Oregon League of Conservation Voters, activist Hart Noecker strode up to Bailey and gave him a phony award for "courageously increasing the carbon and car capacity" of I-5. Bailey didn't take the award with him when he left. He also didn't like that we called it a prank. He preferred "sarcastic grandstanding maneuver."
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Walling Off Suicide Bridge: Portland's scenic Vista Bridge has been a hotbed of suicide for years, but a series of high-profile jumps this year prompted leaders to try a new solution. Following the death of a 15-year-old Beaverton girl in June, Hales and Novick decided to place barriers on the bridge to dissuade would-be jumpers. The black fence on the bridge today is only meant as a temporary barrier until millions can be found for a permanent system. And neither are enough to halt someone truly determined to end their life. But it's something.
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The Arts Tax Is Still Here—and Still $35: Little has gone smoothly for the city's arts tax, approved overwhelmingly by voters (and endorsed by this paper) back in 2012. Lawsuits tied it up. (The $35-per-income-earner levy isn't an unconstitutional head tax after all.) It needed refinement—like a minimum income and protections for pension money. (Those fixes mean the tax will raise less than forecasted.) Then the website to pay the thing blew up for a while, pushing the deadline back. Then city council thought about tinkering with the whole thing, maybe making it more progressive, so it did raise more money. But by September, Hales dropped the idea altogether. Making big changes could have meant going back to voters. And this time, no one was sure they'd say yes.
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High-Tech Tamale Carts: Multnomah County's just like you: no fan of food-borne illness, but helpless in the face of cheap tamales. So this year the county took an unprecedented step, using federal grant money to develop a small fleet of temperature-controlled tamale carts for use by the Portland area's increasing number of door-to-door tamale purveyors. You get safe sustenance; the county gets to exert control over small-scale commerce. Everybody's happy.
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More (Dead) People on Our Streets: You can twist yourself into a tizzy in this town thinking about the more-divisive conversations around homelessness: sit-lie laws, panhandling crackdowns, sidewalk "management," and city hall protests. But here's the conversation we should be working harder to have. Last winter's "street count" of Multnomah County's homeless found a 10 percent uptick in the number of respondents who said they were "unsheltered." And it would have been much higher, if you can imagine, without millions in local, state, and federal aid. More sobering? The county's second annual death count, conducted with Street Roots, logged 56 deaths outside in 2012. The year before, the number had been 47. We're still not doing enough.
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Consequence-Free Cab Driving? A cab driver unrepentantly ran down Mercury news reporter Dirk VanderHart while he waited at a stop sign on his bicycle. It hurt, but even more painful was the realization that, despite the gross negligence of a professional driver, there would be no legal consequences. Portland cops frequently decline to cite drivers in accidents with bikes and pedestrians, even when, as in VanderHart's case, there are plenty of witnesses on hand to establish fault. Maybe the next person the cabbie hits will be injured gravely enough to merit a ticket. VanderHart loved that damn bike.
