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street roots
Dec. 9, 2011
X ifc J
Charlie Hales
The form er city commissioner hopes his
experience and ‘sm arter solutions’ will
win over voters next spring
BY JAKE THOMAS
STAFF W R IT E R
ore than 30 years ago, Charlie
Hales, a newly minted graduate of
the University of Virginia, packed
up his car and left for a city he had heard
great things about: Portland. After falling in
love with the city, he launched a career and
got involved in Portland’s civic life, serving
on the Hayhurst Neighborhood Association
board and getting elected to City Council in
1993.
While on City Council, Hales became
heavily involved with rail transit projects,
particularly the streetcar line that runs
through downtown and Northwest Portland
and has drawn national attention for helping
transform an old rail yard into a vibrant
neighborhood. In
2002, Hales left City
Council to take a ,
Street Roots is
position with HDR
conducting a
series of interviews Engineering, where
he worked on other
with the candidates
rail projects in
for mayor and City
different parts of the
Council. If you
country.
missed an edition,
Hales is hoping to
you can catch up
return to City Hall,
at www.streetroots. this time as mayor, to
wordpress.com
a d d r e ss c o m m u n ity .
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policing, water arid
sewage rates,
improving East
Portland and other issues.
He talked with Street Roots after
spending a morning volunteering with
Friends ot Trees, a nonprofit that seeks to
expand Portland’s tree canopy.
“I’ve been at it for years. It’s really fun/
says Hales of working with the organization,
where he has volunteered for 20 years and
currently serves on its board.
J.T.: Some of these streetcar and other rail
Project that you’ve been associated with have
significantly raised properly values in nearby
neighborhoods. The Interstate Corridor Urban
Renewal Area was created, in parti for the
MAX Yellow Line. There have been reports
that a lot of people have had to leave Northeast
because it’s too expensive. How do you make
sure urban renewal works for everybody?
C.H.: Urban renewal is a tool. How you
use that tool matters. I think now we’re
going to try and make sure that our Urban
renewal strategy is about small-scale
neighborhood redevelopment, not grand-
scale downtown redevelopment We’ve done
some grand-scale downtown redevelopment ,
really well. I’m really proud of what we’ve
done with the Pearl District and the whole
west end of downtown that has been
renovated. There’s a lot more affordable
housing than there was before in downtown,
there’s a lot more market-rate housing in
downtown than there was before, and there
are 12,000 people a day riding the streetcar.
So we’ve done a great job with that tool
downtown, but now we have to look at the
rest of the city and say, how do we help
those neighborhoods achieve their goals on
a more modest scale? What people want to
do on Sandy Boulevard or Foster Road are
on a different scale than what we
accomplished downtown, and it ought to be
more about helping the existing businesses
grow and improve their buildings and
improve the number of employees they have
rather than replacing them with something ,
else. I’ve always been a big believer in
basing the city’s work on what the
neighborhoods come up with for their own
plans.
A good example is we’re finally building
the Sellwood Bridge.Ten years after
starting to talk about it, we’re finally
building one. When I was in charge of the
transportation bureau, the neighborhoods
along Tacoma Street and the Sellwood
Moreland Improvement League came to me
and said, we’re worried that this is going to
become a freeway through our
neighborhood for Clackamas County
commuters. So I held thé line against the
Oregon Department of Transportation and
lRfr?kamas C o u n ty , a n d
in s is t^
with better bike lanes and wider sidewalks.
The neighborhood’s livability trumped
regional auto convenience, and that’s the
principle that’s actually held, and the new
bridge is finally being built to that standard.
That’s the right way to do i t Neighborhood
livability first, engineering considerations
second.
J.T.: Every year public transportation gets
more expensive. Riders of the free zone
downtown are seeing it steadily chipped away.
TriMet is beyond the purview of City Council,
but I was wondering if you had any ideas on
how to preserve the free rail zone? /
C.H.: This is one of those issues that
illustrates my strength as a candidate. The
big difference between my opponents and
me is that I’ve had 10 years of experience,
working in city government, and I have a
collaborative style of leadership in city
government, which is how you get things
donè. Candidates talk about, ‘I will do this. I
will do th a t’ That’s actually nonsense. No
one does much in City Hall by themselves.
You do things by walking down the hall and
building a coalition with other members of
the City Council because they have the *
same vote that you have. You’ve got to have
partners at TriMet and Metro and ODOT
and Multnomah County and Washington
County and the private sector and the
nonprofit sector.
Friends of Trees — I’m on their board. We
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P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F C H A R L IE H A L E S F O R M A Y O R
T -
bridge be designed to be a two-lane bridge
would have never planted 415,000 trees in
Portland if it was a city initiative alone. So
the way you get things done in city
government is by being a-creative, effective
and reliable partner with lots of other
people. I’ve been that partner with TriMet^
H the past. That’s why we have airport light
rail. That’s why we have interstate light rail
because we built that good partnership
between the city and TriMet and I was
personally involved in making those projects
happen. So I’m confident that we can work
with TriMet to keep that free rail zone, and
if we don’t find it we’ll find a way for citizens
who need transit and don’t have the means
to pay for it to get around.
One o f the most amazing conversations
I’ve ever had about transit was with Susan
Emmons, who runs the Northwest Pilot
Project, who came up to me in a coffee shop
and said, “Hey Charlie, when you were a city
commissioner and were making the
streetcar project happen, I really didn’t like
i t I thought it was a toy for yuppies. But
now, our clients, these formerly homeless
people who are making their way back into
the economy, getting housing or job training
to enter the workforce, the last thing they
can afford is a car, arid they are riding that
streetcar. I was wrong about it being a tool
for yuppies. It’s a service for everyone.”
Transit should do that. Transit should not
just make Portland a model city, it should
allow people across the economic spectrum
to live good lives.
-So the fare-free zone has been a way to
do that. But there are other ways. Another
strategy at risk is the student pass program,
where every student gets to got to school on
transit. It would be crazy to loose that and
make parents drive kids or not allow kids to
go to school reliably. Those strategies that
allow everyone to get on the bus or the
streetcar or the light rail are really
important. The fare free zone was one of
those tools, but not the only way to get to
that same result
J.T.: Speaking of collaboration, how will
you work with county and state officials to
develop better strategies to meet the needs of
people living in poverty?
C.H.: That’s really a high priority for me.
One of the things I’m excited about is the
opportunity to work with Multnomah
County Chair Jeff Cogen. I think he’s a great
partner. Multnomah County’s budget is in
tough shape right now, but they’re good
partners and willing to work on innovative
ideas. So I think it’s time to reconsider what
the city does, what the county does.
There’s a lot of overlap and patchwork in
that relationship, so I think we take that
goodwill we have, and look at that crazy
patchwork, and say can’t we do better than
this? Can’t we do better than this patchwork
of the city paying for part of mental health
services, and the county the other? Or the
See HALES, page 5
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