8
street roots
r
iJ c J
O ct 28, 2011
The council
incumbent
Amanda Fritz sets new goals
in run for second term
-
BY JAKE THOMAS
ST A FF W R IT E R
jfc. «
,
n 2008, Amanda Fritz, a psychiatric
nurse and neighborhood activist, became
the first ever non-incumbent to win a
seat on Portland City Council through
Portland’s Voter-Owned Elections, which
provided public campaign financing to
qualifying candidates. Since then, she’s
carefully scrutinized how the city spends its
money, sometimes to the chagrin of other
city commissioners, and hasn’t shied away
from being the lone dissenting vote on the
council. With Portland’s public campaign
financing dismantled, Fritz now has to raise
private funds to keep her seat, which is also
being sought by State Rep. Mary Nolan and
Teressa Raiford.
I
Street Roots Is
conducting a
series of interviews
with the candidates
for City Council. If
you missed an
edition, you can
catch up at www.
streetroots.
wordpress.com
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Jake Thomas: You’ve run as a publicly
funded candidate in the past. Now you’re
running with private funds. There’s a
perception out there, true or not, that if you \
run with private funds you’re beholden to ,
Private interests. As someone who’s done both,
what do you make of that perception? How
much influence does private money have?
Amanda Fritz: I remember when
someone gives me $5, and I would certaiftly
’TAfne/nber’ if sdrrteontt'gave 'me $3’T)00J.rT>nT'''
actually continuing to run with public
campaign financing. Even though we don’t
have the system in Portland, we still have
the $50 tax credit, which you can take
straight off your taxes each year. So that’s
the limit I’m taking. I’m not taking money
from corporations ox other groups. It’s been
really meaningful. It’s been really important
to me to be the publicly funded
commissioner who has to consider every
one of our taxpayers and ratepayers as
constituents, and it’s not that my colleagues
don’t do that. It’s just that I don’t want to .
have a situation where one of my big
campaign donors wants special access. So.
all of my big campaign donors are the
citizens of Portland and everyone gets
access to me in this office.
J.T.: So you’re hoping to not even create
that perception?
A.F.: Right So the flip-side to that is I
need 3,000 $50 donations to raise the
$150,000 I had with public campaign
financing. So. I need a lot of people to step
up and send me their donation. If they don’t
have $50,1 would be very honored to get a
thousand donations of $5.
I’ve had people come to me when I’m in
office with that real sense of pride that they
made a difference, which they did. If I get
more than 3,000 people wanting to give me
$50 I’m not setting a ceiling for my
campaign fund raising. It’ll be a huge
challenge to get 3,000. The decision will
probably be made in May with the primary.
So people are starting to think, it’s •
November of next year, I’ll give money in
the summer. No, I need people to give now.
I need people to go to my website and give
right now, which is www.amanda2012.com.
J.T.: You were in charge of the Office of
Human Relations, precursor to the newly
created Office of Equity and Human Rights.
What sort of success came out of it, and what
lessons did you learn from it that you’re
hoping to bring to the current office?
A.F.: So the Office of Human Relations
was very much community oriented and had
a community focus. This new office is
different. It’s definitely a collaboration
between the community and the city staff,
but it’s very definitely a city bureau
responsible to the commissioner. I think
some of the major successes are the New
Portlander Program, which Polo Catalani is
in charge of. The whole office of Human
Relations was started by Mayor Potter, and I
feel a great responsibility to continue his
legacy. The staff and the work of the office
didn’t really do much in terms of helprng
city bureaus understand much in terms of
equity and human rights and what bureaus
need to do differently.
We saw the State of Black Oregon Report
and the Communities of Color Report
showing the horrible disparity that we have
in our community. The mayor and I
recognized that we needed to do something
different from what we’ve done in the past.
Community leaders and bureau staff all
agreed that we need to start looking
internally at what the city does, how our
employees operate, how we spend billions of
dollars of our budget every year, and we
need to start being intentional as to what
our bureaus do rather than expecting four
people in a remote office to change the
world. It has to be a partnership. So that’s
the difference, but it’s definitely building on
the Office of Human Relations and making it
more integrated.
J.T.: Are there any issues in particular that
you’re hoping to tackle with the new office?
A.F.: We agreed to lead with race and
ethnicity as our primary focus and also
people with disabilities. The race and
ethnicity work has been done in the
community with the research and the data,
so we have a very firm foundation of where
we start from so that we will be able to set
some measurable benchmarks of where we
need to get on a year-by-year basis.
The Portland Commission on Disabilities,
which started during my first year of office,
has done tremendous work looking at what’s
needed for their community, but they
haven’t had the assistance of staff to
establish the data quite as well. So for the
disabilities piece, it’s very clear that the
first thing we need to. do is research.
On race and ethnicity, one of the first
things we’ll start doing is establishing an
equity lens tool for the City Council. When I
first started there was a financial impact
statement that established what this costs,
who is paying for it, where was that money
allocated and what are the expected costs
moving forward. In the past two years we’ve
added the Public Involvement Advisory
Committee’s recommendation to have a
public involvement advisory statement so
that every time something comes to council,
the bureaus, are required to say what public
outreach was done and if the input made a
difference. It’s trying to make it easier for
bureaus that haven’t been engaged in
inclusive public outreach. It’s really not
rocket science. We can establish a Portland -
equity lens that will ask the right questions.
One of the things I’ve noticed from being
on the council for almost three years is I
think like a woman, Ithink like a nurse, 1,
think like a mother. I’m the seventh woman
on the City Council in 162 years, and it’s not
that my colleagues on the council don’t
want to consider issues the way I think .
about them, its just not what pops into
their heads. But the more I start asking the
questions, others are starting to ask these
questions as well, in fact, taking the lead in
some cases. We’ve only had two people of
color on the council in 162 years, and it’s .
not that those of us. who count ourselves as
white allies want to ignore the questions
that would be asked by communities of
color, it’s just that we don’t naturally think
about them, but we can be trained to do so.
It’s not as concrete as some would like.
The State of Black Oregon showed that
for African Americans, things are worse
than they were 16 years ago. We’re not
making any progress. We need to do things
differently. We need to do things
intentionally. We need to involve the
community so we can find out what that
means.
See FRITZ, page 9
P H O T O BY
JA K E T H O M A S