BY ISRAEL BAYER
S T A F F W R IT E R
ayor Sam Adams has spent the majority
of his life serving the City of Portland.
Love him or not, Adams has helped
build a foundation for Portland that will last well
into the future. Street Roots recently sat down with
Mayor Sam Adams for an in-depth, hour-long
discussion about his leadership style, technology,
poverty, cycling, the police and the future of the
city we love.
M
Mayor Sam
Adams reflects
on his time at
City Hall and
Portland’s
future
Israel Bayer: What more are you working on
through the end o f your term?
Sam Adams: There is a lot. What probably is
less known to most folks is that a lot of the
projects that my team and I work on take years to
come to fruition. Between now and the end of the
year there is a lot on the docket because there has
been a lot in the hopper for the past three or four
years. This includes everything from coming up
with a good, solid, meaningful plan to improve the
Portland Police Bureau with the Department of
Justice Civil Rights Division findings, to getting
council approval to make it exponentially cheaper
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for folks who live on gravel or dirt roads in the city
to be able to pave their streets. Those are two
bookends, but they are big issues, and there is a
lot in between.
I.B.: Portland continues to reinvent itself Where
do you see Portland in the next 50years?
S.A.: We’ve had a chance to put our fingerprints
on the next 25 years with the Portland Plan.
Portland has to become more prosperous. The
strength of our economy does not match, for
example, our quality of life. We have to become a
more successful and stronger economy.
In the four years that I’ve been mayor, we went
from losing 25,000 jobs a month in the region to
being declared by Forbes Magazine, two weeks
ago, as one of the top 10 hottest places for job
creation. We still have a long way to go.
In the next 50 years we have to be one of the
best-educated cities on the planet. For the same
reason we need to be scrappier and economically
viable, we need to be the inventors of products and
services that people want to buy around the globe.
You don’t have to go to college, but you do have to
have a skill that people find valuable enough to
pay you for.
We have to be healthier. This is a city, if you
look at the numbers, that has the top-strata of
Portlanders who are healthier than the nation as a
whole. The bottom half is sicker than the average
ill person in the United States. We have two cities
when we talk about health.
We have to become a global city concerning
equal opportunity. For several reasons, not only is
it the moral and ethical thing to do, it matches our
stated values to be a city that is equitable.
Right now, compared to Seattleites of color and
San Franciscans of color, Portlanders of color are
in a worse place today than they were 10 years
ago, economically. We have made improvements in
education, but economically, things have gotten
worse.
If the issue of equity doesn’t move people on a
moral basis, it should move you on an economic
basis. We have to be one of the smallest, scrappiest
cities in the nation to be successful. We are the
29th largest city in the United States. We have to
fight above our weight class. We doubled our
exports in the last 10 years. We are going to double
our international exports in the next five years. No
one is going to think of us an international city if
See Adams, page 10
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Indigo Girl
H e a lth c a re
Street Roots asks
local candidates
housing questions
Am y Ray talks
about her career
and advocacy
Dr. Sam uel Metz
continues a series on
health care reform
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