Politics

Tom McCall's Way with Words

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:29:00 -0800

Image: Courtesy Oregon Historical Society, Image #bb010260

Many hands shaped Oregon’s green image, but no voice lent that aura a more verdant glow than that of Gov. Tom McCall. Born 100 years ago this month, the Massachusetts native and maverick Republican preserved beaches, fought polluters, and curbed urban sprawl in his two terms (1967–1975) and beyond. In the process, he turned Oregon political history’s most pungent phrases. Some of his best:

“... Oregon is demure and lovely, and it oughta play a little hard to get. And I think you’ll all be just as sick as I am if you find it is nothing but a hungry hussy, throwing herself at every stinking smokestack that’s offered.”

—from a 1982 event, after critics claimed that mccall’s environmental policies hurt the economy

“Sagebrush subdivisions, coastal condomania, and the ravenous rampage of suburbia ... threaten to mock Oregon’s status as an environmental model....Oregon ... must be protected from the grasping wastrels of the land.”

—from a 1973 speech demanding tough new land-use law

“I sense that I’m headed for Valhalla like a bat out of hell.”

—to reporters after a hospital stay in 1982

“On some mornings, when the city should sparkle in the sun, guarded by the clean silver cone of Mount Hood, Portland is shrouded as if by the murk of some filthy twilight in a shadow world.”

—from Pollution in Paradise, a 1962 KGW documentary narrated by McCall

“Some highway engineers have a mentality ... that would run an eight-lane freeway through the Taj Mahal. That is our problem.”

—from a 1970 interview

This activist loves Oregon more than he loves life.... But if the legacy we helped give Oregon ... goes, then I guess I wouldn’t want to live in Oregon anyhow.”

—From a successful 1982 campaign to save the land-use laws he championed. McCall died months later.

Nike Comes To Town?

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 17:13:00 -0800

Image: Patrick Leger

Merle Thorud still recalls the day in 1996 that Agent Orange called. Then a 65-year-old janitor at a middle school, Thorud had owned a house on a two-thirds-acre lot on SW Walker Road for over 50 years. His neighbor, Nike, needed 19 feet of the property to widen the road to its new campus expansion. Nike offered him $130,000 for the house and land. Thorud wanted $164,900. Then came a call from Howard Slusher, one of Nike cofounder Phil Knight’s closest advisers, and a man whose carrot-colored hair and defoliating negotiating style earned him his nickname.

The two men got to within $8,000 of a handshake, according to reports at the time (Nike up $2,000; Thorud down $24,900). Slusher’s last offer: bring in the county to condemn Thorud’s land. The janitor eventually sold the property for $135,000 to his real estate agent, who negotiated a final deal. “I hate his guts,” says Thorud today of Slusher. “That guy was so nasty.”

In December, at Nike’s sole behest, Gov. John Kitzhaber summoned Oregon’s legislature for a rare one-day session, slamming through a new law that gives the guv power to cap taxes for companies promising expansions of at least 500 jobs and $150 million in investment. Now comes the next play: where will Nike expand? Nike remains mum on the subject, but insiders think there are two potential spots: Beaverton, near the company’s current 200-acre campus; or more tantalizingly, downtown Portland’s South Waterfront, where the Zidell barge-building dynasty owns 33 acres of shovel-ready riverside land, most of it dubbed a tax-abatement “enterprise zone” by the Portland City Council—the day before the legislature’s special session.

But for a city that rests much of its international reputation on its meticulous planning and highly inclusive public processes, the prospect of a center-city win of Nike comes with the knowledge the company knows how to tussle.

“I think we can play together,” says Portland Mayor Charlie Hales of the potential development. “I hope that Nike understands that the deal is not just an urban location but an urban form.”

No Oregon company has devoted more time, money, and care to its architectural image than Nike. Inside its famed grassy berm, Knight and Slusher have played Medicis, powering a single architect—Robert Thompson—to realize 19 buildings in a lush corporate nirvana inspired by Stanford University’s campus and the old towns of Zurich and Rotterdam.

Beyond the berm, the duo has been just about as mighty, and unfettered. In Eugene, Knight’s money and Slusher’s drive have transformed the east side of the University of Oregon into an athletic dreamland for coaching, training, and tutoring, anchored by the temple-like John E. Jaqua Center. By leasing the land from the university, building the facilities, then giving them to the university, Slusher has made the architecture bold, kept the building budgets secret, and brushed aside decades of historically styled campus planning.

“The generation that we’re trying to hire thinks and lives urban.”

—Portland Mayor Charlie Hales

On its likeliest Beaverton expansion site—84 acres to the south of its current campus—Nike has been throwing elbows for 15 years. In 1994, as TriMet laid the tracks for MAX trains to Hillsboro, Metro and the city of Beaverton planned the kind of “transit-oriented” development promised for the more than $600 million the federal government contributed to build the line. But before the MAX trains arrived, Nike bought the land and quickly swatted away the vision. When then–Beaverton Mayor Rob Drake tried to stand tough on the region’s and the feds’ goal of at least some housing next to light rail, Nike threatened to move its next phase of “5,000 employees” to another state—and sent saber-rattling letters to six western governors to prove it. “We hope that Oregon would want to see more expansion,” said Nike’s then-president, Tom Clarke. “There’s no way the state of Colorado isn’t going to be excited.” Drake deferred.

Hales is upbeat about Nike in Portland, comparing the apparel giant to companies like Amazon and Microsoft in Seattle, which built major urban satellites of their suburban enclaves. South Waterfront’s mix of transit and riverside recreation could be a dream location for so-called millennials. “The generation we’re trying to hire,” says Hales, “thinks and lives urban.”

But Portland is a city that plans, with few more ardent enforcers of those visions than Hales. In 1997, as a city commissioner, he stopped a California developer, Pegasus, from building a 10-acre South Waterfront apartment complex with private streets and a gated entrance, blasting it as “alien to the Portland environment.” Fifteen years—and many millions of dollars in streets, rail, and parks—later, anything similarly insular would be even more foreign.

The stakes are high. Nike’s promise of 500 jobs paying an average $100,000 has the city salivating. But one need not look far for the wounds of the last joust between sports giants and planners. When the city tried to impose a more urban vision for the Rose Garden, Paul Allen threatened to move his Blazers. Allen got his way. We got the moribund Rose Quarter.

A Hales/Slusher bout? “We’ll put on a show,” the new mayor chuckles. “But we’ll be able to get to ‘yes’ on the details in a way that works for them as a work environment for their employees but also works for an emerging neighborhood.”

Sam Adams Exit Interview

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 09:55:00 -0800

Image: Kate Madden

When Sam Adams filed to run for mayor in early 2008, both he and Portland seemed on the
verge of a triumphal march. The economy was rocking. As the veteran of 15 years at city hall cruised to victory, he set a civil-rights precedent as America’s first openly gay big-city mayor.

Instead of a brass-band jubilee, however, Adams’s term turned operatic with the Great Recession and his own Great Transgression (his lie about a relationship with a teenager—former legislative intern Beau Breedlove). As 2012’s political season approached, instead of battling for a second term, Adams opted out.

But as Adams, now 49, leaves office, Forbes ranks Portland among the top 10 cities for job prospects. He has reshaped city policies on everything from economic growth to racial equity while, in his final weeks, cutting deals for new development and taxes. Whether you love Adams or dismiss him (few people are ambivalent), rest assured the next mayor is unlikely to be as interesting. And so, in the waning days of his tenure, I invited Mayor Sam to answer a few questions, fast. Over two Cape Cods at Nel Centro, he was, as always, game.

After 31 years of political life, what do you most want to do?

Lose another 30 pounds

What are you most qualified to do?

Lion tamer

What was the most potent political force when you entered city hall in 1993?

The Oregonian editorial page

What is the most potent political force as you exit in 2013?

That doesn’t exist, and that might not be a bad thing.

Who or what is the most potent political force not based here?

Whoever becomes the CEO of Intel, which accounts for 50 percent of
all exports from the region

Whom in the media do you most fear?

The Oregonian columnist Steve Duin

Whom in the media do you most respect?

The Oregonian writer Scott Learn. He writes stories that are tough, but are actual
in-depth stories, not just shitty stories pretending to be in-depth.

Had Beau not happened, what could you have gotten done?

Not answering that question

Had the recession not happened, what could you have gotten done?

Exponentially more public-private development across the city.
We lost our private partner.

What was the best thing about the recession?

I got to help reinvent economic development and education. Sixty-five percent of the cuts we made came from administration, so I made the city leaner in ways it should be.

What was the most difficult thing about being a gay mayor?

Being asked that stupid question

What was the most difficult thing for a gay mayor’s partner?

Sharing me with 585,000 other people

What was the worst day of your tenure?

Two in the morning at the scene of a gang shooting outside Season’s bar,
when I had to restrain a mom from crossing the police lines to see her dead son.
I knew her. She knew me. Legally it would have poisoned the crime scene.
I tried to hug her and stop her, and she just started wailing and beating on me.

What was the moment as mayor in which you were most nervous?

When Storm Large got completely naked in a dressing room we shared—because I found her very attractive. I was even more nervous than when I met President Obama.

What does the world get most wrong about Portland?

That this is the place “where young people go to retire.” We’re one of the nation’s top cities for job growth, and we’ve had a 6 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions.
As someone recently put it, Portland is laughing all the way to economic success.

What do Portlanders get most wrong about Portland?

That we’re a city of racial equity. We are not. Not even close to Seattle or
San Francisco, and nowhere near our values.

Who is Oregon’s most underrated politician?

Congressman Kurt Schrader

Who is Oregon’s most overrated politician?

Might be my next boss, so no comment.

A few words of advice to Charlie Hales?

Be a leader of the city, not just city government.

Words of advice to those working with Charlie Hales?

We only have one mayor; make sure he’s successful.

Of those who have never run for the office, who would make the best mayor?

Scott Andrews, chairman of the Portland Development Commission

Why won’t he run?

He has a stable and balanced personality.

What’s the dumbest Portland idea that won’t die?

That nonfluoridated water is somehow good for you

If you could pick one failed initiative to succeed, what would it be?

The Living Building (Oregon Sustainability Center). Portland can’t remain
on the cutting edge of green building by reputation alone.

What criticism of you stung the most?

That I wear a toupee.

What are the odds you’ll do another, nonconsecutive term (à la Kitzhaber)?

I’m flattered you’d ask. I wouldn’t bet on it.

City Council Astrology

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 12:02:00 -0800

As Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner Steve Novick join three veteran city council members this month, we asked Emily Trinkaus, a Portland astrologer and relationship expert, for insight on how personae might mesh—or mash. “They show a general tendency to put aside personal concerns and small-mindedness,” Trinkaus notes, hopefully. But one on one, watch out.

HALES & NOVICK

Conflict risk: Medium Hales’s Mercury is opposite to Novick’s Mars in Leo. Hales and Novick share idealism, rebelliousness, community-mindedness. “But,” Trinkaus says, “they may have shifting senses of identity that make it hard for them to even know who they are.” Novick, she adds, may oppose Hales’s ideas simply to grandstand himself and his ideas.

NOVICK & FISH

CONFLICT RISK: Medium Nick Fish’s Sun and Mercury in Libra form a challenging square to Novick’s Venus in Capricorn. Fish’s chart indicates a tendency to value being nice over being right—at odds with Novick’s pragmatism.

NOVICK & FRITZ

Conflict risk: High Novick’s Mars in Leo forms a tense square to Amanda Fritz’s Taurus Sun. A relationship ripe for frustration. Fritz’s Taurus nature makes her humble and low-key, which, Trinkaus says, is in stark contrast to Novick’s penchant for the dramatic.

NOVICK & SALTZMAN

Conflict risk: Low Dan Saltzman’s Mercury and Venus form a supportive angle (sextile—60 degrees) to Novick’s Sun. But these two may want to postpone the postwork beers. “They may think they’re in agreement on some point,” Trinkaus says, “only to find that they’re not.”

HALES & FISH

Conflict risk: Very Low Hales’s Aquarius Sun forms a harmonious trine to Fish’s Libra Sun. Hales and Fish are likely to work together easily, showing groovy angles in Mercury (communication) and Venus (collaboration).

HALES & FRITZ

Conflict risk: High Fritz’s Sun in down-to-earth Taurus forms a square to Hales’s Aquarius Sun. Grab the popcorn. Hales’s tendency to want to act quickly will find no support in Fritz. “Their signs indicate clashes about how to go about achieving their goals,” Trinkaus says.

HALES & SALTZMAN

Conflict risk: Low Saltzman’s Mars and Saturn are square to Hales’s Sun. Saltzman and Hales will probably cooperate effectively, though Hales could feel tethered by the pragmatic veteran. “Saltzman will try to pin down Charlie’s fluidity,” Trinkaus says.

Q&A: NPR's Ari Shapiro

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 10:14:00 -0800

Not many people know Ari Shapiro, National Public Radio’s White House correspondent, grew up in Portland. Even fewer know that when he isn’t reporting from the Romney campaign trail—where’s he’s been for more than year—he moonlights as a singer for local lounge band Pink Martini. Shapiro has performed live with the group and lent his familiar voice to its last two records; he’ll visit Portland this weekend to record tracks for a third and appear on the radio variety show Live Wire! Saturday with Pink Martini bandleader Thomas Lauderdale.

Culturephile talked with Shapiro about the secret likeable Romney; the difference between speaking on NPR and singing at the Hollywood Bowl; and the responsibility that comes with a soapbox.

Culturephile: You must be exhausted. How long were you reporting from the campaign trail for?
Ari Shapiro: Since the very beginning. The Iowa caucuses were January 3rd, and I was on the campaign trail with [Romney] even before that…But it was really toward the end that it was, like, a five-states-a-day, nonstop, constant marathon.

In your recent NPR story looking back on the campaign, you talk about how Romney was a likeable guy off the record, but got stilted when tape recorders and cameras were rolling. How much of that likeable guy did you personally get to see on the trail?
Not a lot. He did very little off-the-record stuff with the press—he did very little on-the-record stuff with the press, too, which is unusual for candidates. There are people who would trace that to a secrecy in all manner of things that Romney did, whether it was choosing not to release his tax returns or wiping the computers before he left the governor’s office in Massachusetts, but I think the reason for his personal privacy was that every time he did speak off the cuff, he just said things that came out sounding so wrong, and that distracted from the message, and that made him sound like the worst stereotype that everybody was trying to portray him as...

He did give an off-the-record chat at the back of his airplane as he was flying from Indianapolis to Tampa to give his speech for the Republican convention. He came to the back of the plane and talked with us for, like, 20 minutes about a wide range of things. Afterwards, I said to the aides who had set it up, “I’ve never seen this side of Romney before. You’re doing him a disservice by not allowing us to film that and tape it and record it.” And the aide said to me, “You don’t understand; if the cameras came out, that side of him would disappear…At some point, I’m going to have to tell him that a session is off the record and tell you guys that it’s on the record, because that’s the only way we can capture this genuinely likeable guy.”

Does covering a presidential race make you feel icky about America?
Not at all. It was amazing just getting to know America over the course of this race. At every rally, I would talk to a few people for a few minutes…and I would ask them about their lives, about what was important to them, about what worried them, what was on their minds, why they decided to come to a political rally. And I realized that most people, myself included, get a sense of America from fiction, whether it’s Faulkner and Steinbeck novels or Real Housewives shows, and by actually having conversations with people—thousands of them, collectively, over the course of the campaign—I feel like I got a sense of America that I didn’t have before—how people in Colorado are not the same as people in New Hampshire, and the issues in Florida are not the same as issues in Ohio.

OK, enough politics. How did you get involved in Pink Martini?
I was a fan when I was a kid. I used to go to their shows at La Luna and Berbati’s Pan; I would sneak in before I was 21...

I became friends with them, like, a decade ago and started throwing parties for them whenever they would pass through D.C. for shows. I would do a brunch or a dinner and have them over to my house. Then, three years ago, they came through D.C. and I threw a sort of backyard barbeque that ended up going late into the night and turned into a sing-along around my piano until, I don’t know, three in the morning, or four. The next morning, I was at my desk at NPR and Thomas [Lauderdale] called and said, “You know, we have this concept for a song on the next album that we want a man to sing; why don’t you sing it?” And I thought, "Well, that’s crazy, and it’s never gonna happen, but sure.”

So I came out to Portland to record that song with them—“But Now I’m Back,” which is on the album Splendor in the Grass—thinking that would be a one-off thing. Then [Lauderdale] said, “Well, we need to find a time for you to perform it live. How about the Hollywood Bowl?” So…the first time I performed live with the band was in front of—God, I can’t remember how many people it seats, 10,000? [18,000 – Ed. and onetime Hollywood Bowl usher]…Since then, I’ve had the amazing privilege of touring all over the country with them, and I spent a couple weeks in Europe with them last summer, and this is going to be the third album that I’ve recorded with them.

What kind of songs are you recording on this album? Anything different?
We’re going to do a Hindi song from the 1950s, an old Bollywood song, that we started doing this summer in Europe. And I think we’re going to do an old Spanish song that we have been doing for the last couple of years.

Had you sung before performing with the band?
Yeah, I sang in high school and college. I did musical theater, and I did choir, and I took singing lessons, and things like that, but by the time I started singing with Pink Martini, I had not sung for 10 years or more.

How comfortable are you in that public setting, as opposed to your usual public setting?
Well, NPR doesn’t feel public. You’re kind of by yourself in a studio, in front of a microphone, and you can’t tell whether two or two million people are tuning in. So, it’s very different to be live in front of an audience, and hearing and seeing their reaction in real-time…There’s a thin line between stress and excitement. Do I feel nervous? Yes. Do I feel stressed? Yes. But that nervousness and stress feed into what makes it such a rewarding experience.

What do you like to do when you’re home in Portland?
Eat—a lot. I like to ask my local friends which neighborhoods have become newly interesting since the last time I was in town, and then just go walk around those neighborhoods. When I was in high school in Portland, it was like, there was Hawthorne and there was Northwest 23rd. There was nothing interesting happening in North Portland; there was not a whole lot to do in all of the interesting corners of the city that have made Portland such a richly textured place in the last couple of decades. So, I love to see what’s new…Unfortunately, I’m not going to have time to do any of that this time around...but recording with Pink Martini is a pretty great way to occupy that time.

You’ve received a decent amount of attention for being a relatively young, openly gay successful journalist [The 34-year-old Shapiro was the youngest NPR reporter ever to become a correspondent – Ed.]. Do you consider yourself a role model?
Every person, in everything that they do in life, is in all likelihood being watched by somebody younger, whether they’re a public figure or just somebody with a niece or a nephew. So, every one of us is a role model in some way. I appreciate that as somebody who has an audience…more people are watching me than might be watching me if I had a different job, so I try to live my life accordingly. I feel very lucky to have such a big platform, and to have the ability to reach so many people, but I hope that I would be living my life in the same way whether I did or not.

Shapiro will appear on Live Wire! Saturday with Thomas Lauderdale. For more information, visit the show's website.

For more about Portland arts, visit PoMo's Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter, or follow us on Twitter @PoMoArt. Blog content reflects the views of the individual author and not necessarily SagaCity Media, Inc.

PDX Index: The Big Campaign

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:57:00 -0700

Image: Michael Novak

Slide Show: PDX Index | The Big Campaign

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 17:08:00 -0700

Smith and Hales: Two Questions About Character

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:18:00 -0700

Click here to see the full-length video featuring the candidates' responses to some of the most-pressing questions facing Portland's next mayor.

Tilting at Landfills

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:43:00 -0700

Image: William Anthony

In the heart of Oregon’s picturesque farm and wine country, an 18-story mountain of trash rises next to the Yamhill River.

For two decades, Fifth-generation farmer Ramsey McPhillips and a motley crew of neighbors have waged a quixotic battle to stop north america’s largest garbage company from growing even bigger.

Who wins matters.

•••••••••••••••

Image: William Anthony

Farmer and anti-landfill crusader Ramsey McPhillips

FOUR MILES past McMinnville on Highway 18, a couple of ramshackle barns and two rusting silos stand amid wheat and grass that glows golden-green in a setting spring sun. In one of the smaller buildings, Ramsey McPhillips feeds his five bearded Toggenburg goats before locking them up for the night.

“Hello everyone, who’s hungry?” he asks, swinging the stall door open. Bernadette, one of the three babies (alongside Bernardo and Bridgett—next year all the names will begin with “C”), bounds into his arms.

Locking the stall door, McPhillips steps out. To the east, Mount Hood shimmers above the trees. To the west, Coast Range foothills roll gently beneath a cape of vineyards. And to the southwest rises a mountain of garbage that sprawls over 85 acres and towers 135 feet tall.

McPhillips wears his customary flannel, corduroy jacket, and the battered felt Pendleton hat he’s rarely without. (Even in a suit, he has the hat.) His wild, untrimmed mustache looks like a marmot clinging to the bottom of his nose. He’s the fifth generation of the McPhillips family to operate the farm, which turned 150 this year; nevertheless, his life has been far from pastoral. McPhillips, now 54, has wandered widely, working as everything from a Central Park ranger on a horse named Devo to a combination horticulturist/therapist for the COO of the World Bank.

Garbage by the Numbers

1,006,844 TONS OF GARBAGE HANDLED BY METRO (2010)

550,000 TONS OF GARBAGE PROCESSED ANNUALLY AT RIVERBEND (2011)

32 RIVERBEND’S PERMITTED 13.3 MILLION CUBIC YARDS VOLUME, AS EXPRESSED IN US BANCORP TOWERS

2.9 MILLION CUBIC YARDS (OR 7 MORE US BANCORP TOWERS)—ADDED VOLUME OF PROPOSED RIVERBEND EXPANSION

1.5 MILLION TONS OF METHANE RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE EACH YEAR BY LANDFILLS IN OREGON

1 MILLION TONS OF METHANE RELEASED EACH YEAR BY OREGON’S NEXT LEADING SOURCE, PAPER AND PULP MILLS

$325 MILLION TOTAL ESTIMATED COST FOR THE COLLECTION, TRANSPORTATION, AND STORAGE OF PORTLAND’S REGIONAL GARBAGE

85 ACRES THE PERMITTED FOOTPRINT OF RIVERBEND LANDFILL

30% PERCENTAGE OF FOOTPRINT THAT IS NOT LINED WITH HIGH-DENSITY POLYETHELYNE, WHICH MEANS LEAKAGE CANNOT BE PREVENTED

Looming above a nearby stand of Oregon white ash trees that separates his farm from the dump, the Riverbend Landfill is also closing up for the night—the machinery shutting down and the birds, racoons, and coyotes arriving for what McPhillips and neighbors call “the moonlight buffet.” Started as a small mom-and-pop dump in 1982, it has grown into one of the largest man-made structures in the state, owned by North America’s biggest garbage company, Waste Management Inc.

Municipal solid-waste landfills pose a general conundrum in a state that prides itself on its environmental standards and farmland preservation practices. Among other things, dumps are Oregon’s number one source of climate-warming methane emissions. But Riverbend is particularly troublesome, starting with the location: a bend in the Yamhill River that’s in hazardous proximity to the entire region’s water supply. Within three miles—and easy sight and smell—sit 500 family farms that grow everything from apples to wheat to hazelnuts. Within four miles, there are half a dozen vineyards and award-winning wineries, including the area’s oldest, Eyrie Vineyards, and the state’s largest biodynamic vineyard, Momtazi.

“Why do Yamhill County farmers have to host garbage from urban centers forever?” asks McPhillips, pointing out the fact that half the landfill’s garbage comes from the Portland Metro area. “We’re not a wasteland. We’re some of the best farmland in the world.”

Nobody has watched the landfill grow—and fought it—for longer than McPhillips. His great-great-grandfather homesteaded the farm in 1862. His grandfather was the first head of Oregon’s Environmental Quality Commission. Having long dreamed of transforming the farm into a horticultural school, McPhillips originally planned to simply wait out the endless caravans of garbage trucks: the landfill was originally scheduled to close in 2014. But in 2008, Waste Management announced a plan to double Riverbend’s size and extend its life by 30 years.

So he decided to fight.

“Basically, my family has always been a steward of the environment and agriculture in Oregon,” he says. “We’ve been here 150 years and want to be here another 150 years. This is really about whether or not Oregon values old, traditional farming on great soil and clean rivers, or whether it wants to export its garbage to the wine country and destroy farmland.”

What has unfolded since is one of the Willamette Valley’s strangest, longest, and most expensive political battles. McPhillips may have started out as an eccentric Don Quixote NIMBY farmer tilting at landfills, but his efforts have brought together a rare coalition of farmers, environmentalists, land use advocates, and vineyard owners who have fought the landfill’s expansion at the ballot box, in the Yamhill County Commission, and all the way through the Oregon land use system. Yet even as the fertile land surrounding the dump has come to epitomize the national farm-to-table movement and become the toast of international oenophiles, Waste Management has unrelentingly pushed to expand.

Now the battle has entered a new stage. One of the landfill’s early engineers has joined McPhillips’ coalition with allegations and evidence that Riverbend Landfill has violated its permits and is possibly leaking toxins into the water table. Other engineers and scientists believe that an earthquake—even a 7.0 on the Richter scale, a quake much weaker than the 9.0 often forecast for Oregon—could turn Riverbend into an environmental catastrophe. Meanwhile, the $13.4 billion Fortune 500 trash corporation has brought in one of its top troubleshooters to soothe the opposition and unveil a smaller, ostensibly more environmentally friendly expansion—but an expansion nonetheless.

“This is what the country’s going through: corporations versus the small guy,” says McPhillips. “It’s very rare in the history of giant corporations that they don’t get their way. But we still think we have achance. We’re not throwing spaghetti against the wall.”

{page break}

Image: Courtesy Greg Perezselsky

A map of the area and contrasting photos from 1991 (above) and 2012 show the landfill’s incredible growth over 21 years

In 1854, Bernard McPhillips drove a herd of cattle from California to Oregon, eventually becoming a leading farmer in McMinnville. His son started the US Bank of McMinnville and cofounded First Federal Savings and Loan. His grandson, Ramsey’s grandfather, pioneered Oregon’s model environmental system, serving under nine governors as a member of the State Sanitary Authority and then as the first chairman of the Environmental Quality Commission. Among many gifts to the city and state, the family donated its beachfront property—a little stretch now known as Cape Kiwanda State Park.

Ramsey intended to carry the family banner by taking on stewardship of the farm upon his grandfather’s passing. Until then, he hopscotched around the world, living what amounted to a Kerouac novel—from stints as a mounted ranger and performance artist in New York, to cultivating Hollywood celebrities’ gardens as a self-described “hortivangelist,” to amassing an array of big-name art world friends. (Pink Martini bandleader Thomas Lauderdale has organized a number of anti-Riverbend fundraising concerts.) But all his paths, McPhillips says, led back home: “This was just preparation for McMinnville.”

When his grandfather died in 1991, he returned with the intention of starting a horticultural school. Instead, he discovered that the small-town dump next door, run by his grandfather’s friends, had been bought by a national company and was growing into a regional landfill that accepted garbage from the Portland area and coastal towns. The change at Riverbend and other small garbage dumps grew out of a new federal regulation adopted in 1991 known as Subtitle D, which strongly tightened environmental standards and pushed many small landfills to become regional operations in order to afford required upgrades.

A year later, McPhillips’s neighbor, Lillian Frease, spearheaded an anti-landfill ballot initiative to prohibit landfills within 500 feet of a floodway and limit the importation of trash from beyond Yamhill County. It won by a 2-to-1 margin. But the landfill’s owner, Sanifill, and Yamhill County successfully appealed to the courts that the ballot measure violated interstate commerce laws. McPhillips went back on the road, deferring his future school until the landfill’s slated close in 2014.

Waste Management Inc, a publicly traded, Houston-based corporation, acquired Riverbend in 1998, and in 2008 applied to double its footprint from 85 acres to 172 and increase the height of its hill of trash from 140 to well over 250 feet—about the 18-story height of the iconically remodeled Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in downtown Portland. McPhillips and Frease quickly drafted a new initiative (written by incoming Portland city commissioner Steve Novick) to prevent the expansion of Riverbend and, this time, to ban any new landfills within 2,000 feet of a floodplain.

“We eliminated the commerce laws and went back to what won, assuming it would win again,” he recalls. But Waste Management wasn’t Sanifill, and McPhillips and Frease were hardly prepared for the titan they’d just awoken with a spitball.

Waste Management took the two to court four times over the placement of a comma in the initiative. The litigation cut the campaign’s available time to gather several thousand signatures necessary to qualify for the ballot from several months to two weeks, but McPhillips and Frease succeeded. Then Waste Management hired a leading Salem corporate lobbyist, set up a political action committee called Neighbors Against Higher Garbage Bills, and bankrolled a barrage of ads, commercials, and mailers. Among the claims: “local ‘hortivangelist’ Ramsey McPhillips” wanted to shut down Riverbend, which would “significantly increase garbage bills for ... residents and businesses.” Quoting a Willamette Week profile, the mailers portrayed McPhillips as an elite Portland-raised globe-trotter with no link to Yamhill County. A number of people complained to the local paper, the Yamhill Valley News-Register, about so-called “push-polls,” a political tactic that involves calling voters and asking them loaded questions to shape the results. A Linfield College professor told the paper that “he eventually hung up in anger because ‘they clearly were trying to push me to a position that I did not hold.’”

“It was an endless blitz of misinformation that polarized the county so much,” says McMinnville city councilor Kevin Jeffries, recalling that some ads predicted rates would more than double, despite legal limits on increases. “It freaked out businesses, thinking their trash rates were going to go up.”

The initiative went before voters on November 4, 2008—and plummeted to defeat by a 60/40 margin. Waste Management’s PAC raised almost a million dollars (and spent about $6 per voter) for its campaign, according to Oregon’s Elections Division. “Waste Management has the deepest pockets you can imagine,” says Ilsa Perse, a local land use advocate and gallery owner who joined McPhillips to collect signatures. “We don’t have a PR firm messaging for us, and consequently we don’t always do the best job.”

Waste Management, according to Jackie Lang, the company’s communications director for Oregon, saw the “resounding rejection” of the measure as “the kind of majority that sends a strong message.”

But for McPhillips, the loss, however lopsided, signaled the beginnings of a movement. “That initiative beat the bushes,” he says, “and everybody came out.”

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Image: Courtesy Peter Ovington

During moderate flooding this year, the South Yamhill River covered much of McPhillips’s farm (foreground) and lapped against the landfill and its leachate evaporation pond (background).

In the picturesque postcards and social-media snapshots from the Willamette Valley’s wine country, the Riverbend Landfill rarely makes an appearance. Yet it rises like a fortress next to the coastal thoroughfare of Highway 18, and the mountainous, plastic-covered heap glows brightly in the morning sun. For vintner Moe Momtazi, the landfill has become an equally looming problem on his ledger sheet.

Momtazi Vineyards sprawls across seven foothills just north of Highway 18. On a late spring day, a battalion of wild turkeys parades between the vines. Momtazi, his thinning black hair graying at the temples, pushes a handful of dried stinging nettles, cut from down the hill, into a large tub of simmering water. He’ll inject the resulting tea into the irrigation system for its medicinal and nutritional properties, part of the holistic biodynamic farming practice.

An engineer by training, Momtazi escaped from Iran in 1982, crossing Pakistan on a motorcycle with his wife, eight months pregnant at the time. He eventually settled in the Willamette Valley, where he’s strived, with the help of his three daughters, to create the largest biodynamic vineyard in the state. Momtazi makes his own wine under the label “Maysara,” but sells half of his fruit to other winemakers to make into their respective wines. “We’ve really tried to take care of the land and grow things holistically,” he says of the biodynamic philosophy, which prizes careful cultivation of the natural properties of a given site. “We don’t import any fertilizer or minerals; we make everything here.”

When Waste Management applied to expand the landfill in 2008, the impact on Momtazi’s business was immediate. His biggest fruit customer, Scott Paul Wines, whose contract was worth over $150,000, dumped him explicitly because of Riverbend’s proximity. Other departing customers implied that it was their reason, too.

“We were selling fruit to 32 different wineries, and right now it’s not even 10,” he says. “I have worked on this project since 1997, putting everything—money, time, and pretty much my soul into it. And then for a big company to destroy that dream for you—it was difficult.”

Even though Yamhill County voters spurned the proposed ban on Waste Management’s expansion, McPhillips and Frease’s nascent group attracted support for stopping the dump’s growth that transcended the valley’s normally rigid lines between farmers, vineyard owners, and environmentalists. They renamed their group Waste Not of Yamhill County, and easily rallied Willamette Riverkeeper, the Yamhill County Soil and Water Conservation District, and the Yamhill County Farm Bureau to their coalition.

“It really became an issue when they wanted to expand,” says David Cruickshank, a Farm Bureau board member and former president, as well as a Republican. “The bureau was pretty unanimous against it, because eventually the county is going to be stuck with this puppy and sooner or later, we believe, something negative’s going to happen. Do you want to eat food that’s being irrigated by leachate and all kinds of heavy metals?”

Momtazi and nearly all of the 180 members of the Willamette Valley Wineries Association also joined. As one of the industry’s most respected vintners, Jason Lett, put it at a county hearing, the growing visibility of the landfill undermines the association’s message: “We grow grapes that taste of the ground.”

For all of the near-revolutionary laws Oregon passed in the ’70s to protect farmland, the fight over Riverbend’s expansion quickly turned to political and legal trench warfare. The anti-dump alliance won an early vote from the county planning commission, but hearings before the Yamhill County Commission itself became long and arduous—one lasted 16 straight hours, until 4 a.m. In the end, Waste Management won a 2-0 vote, with the third commissioner abstaining because, she said, her husband worked for the county’s other trash company. (He was soon hired by Waste Management.)

The neighbors appealed to the state’s powerful land use board, and won. Waste Management then filed a court appeal of its own, and lost. Game over? Waste Management pressed on, applying for an interim fix: build an earthen berm out of rock and wires around the landfill’s perimeter so that its edges can rise high as the middle—allowing an additional 2.9 million cubic yards of capacity, or some six more years’ worth of garbage—while it worked with the county on a new expansion plan.

Dump opponents like McPhillips and Frease see the county government going to great lengths to help Waste Management—and point to the $762,000 in fees the county collected from the company in 2011. “Yamhill County is getting money back per ton,” says Frease. “What’s the incentive for people who’re being funded by the dump to put it out of business?”

For Michael Brandt, director of Yamhill County’s planning department for over 20 years, the battles and legal ins and outs are a simple—if lengthy—procedural story. “What we’re talking about is a private business on private property making a private application,” he says. “When you look at it in the whole scope of things, would I have [originally built a landfill here]? No. Does it make sense now? Unfortunately, yeah it does.”

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Image: William Anthony

Along with his wife and three daughters, Moe Momtazi runs Maysara Winery and Momtazi Vineyards, Oregon’s largest biodynamic vineyard.

At the spring meeting of the Yamhill County Solid Waste Advisory Committee in the basement of the county courthouse, official business turns to complaints. “We’re still getting odor issues, noise, gas,” says Sherrie Mathison, the county’s solid waste coordinator. “We’re getting new complaints about the sign: four phone complaints, all about the word ‘farting.’”

Mathison refers to a 16-foot-long sign McPhillips erected last year in one of his fields alongside Highway 18: “Welcome to Yamhill County’s Farting Landfill Ghetto.”

“All of the property value has dropped, trailers are abandoned—it’s a ghetto,” McPhillips chirps from his seat in the audience. “Why spend money on something that’s being destroyed? I’m not usually a vulgar guy.”

Then the tenor of the afternoon changes as a new Waste Not ally, Leonard Rydell, steps before the committee with his arms full of rolled maps and stapled documents. “I’ve got about 40 years of engineering experience, and I used to be the engineer of record at Riverbend,” he says as he spreads out the original plans for the landfill and the dyke shielding it from the floodway. Rydell quit in 1985, he says, because the landfill’s original owners consistently refused to follow his plans or the environmental specifications to prevent leakage.

Rydell stayed silent for the next 27 years out of respect for client confidentiality, he says. He’s also a self-avowed small-government Republican who’s never been keen on landfill opponents or the restrictive Oregon land use system. But in November of last year, when Waste Management proposed its stopgap earthen berm, Rydell had to speak up.

“We don’t build a big corral and fill it full of garbage,” says Rydell. “Most landfills are not in a floodway. What happens when the wires rust out and the walls fall down? I thought to myself, this is ridiculous. I’ve kept quiet too long.”

So he spent the next three weeks poring over his original documents and comparing them to the current maps. A licensed pilot, he flew over the landfill and took photos to compare its current activities to its permitted ones. Things were amiss: Waste Management, he believes, has been building over property and zoning lines, digging dirt out of the river’s floodway to cover the garbage each night without proper permitting, and failing to comply with numerous other permitting conditions.

“What’s out there now was never anticipated,” Rydell tells the committee, his voice growing more excited as he delivers his final blow: spreadsheets from DEQ (finally acquired by McPhillips after four years of requests) showing that monitoring wells around the landfill reveal toxic compounds. In short: the landfill is leaking.

In response, Jennifer Redmond-Noble, an advisory committee member representing the landfill’s neighbors, insists they need to hear from a neutral party, like the Army Corps of Engineers. “The real story is the county is doing nothing,” she says sternly, shortly before the meeting adjourns with no plans for further action.

Since that meeting, other experts have joined Rydell in opposing the landfill’s growth. Richard McJunkin, a professional hydrogeologist who’s worked on over 150 hazardous waste sites, says, “I’m not an arm-waving environmentalist who wants everything shut down. We need landfills. But you wouldn’t want to live downgradient from this site. What you can’t see, touch, or smell could very much hurt you.”

Most alarming to McJunkin and others is the prospect of an earthquake. “This puppy is going to liquefy,” he says. “And from my interpretation, it’s going to be the largest environmental disaster in the history of Oregon.”

Yamhill County’s planning department and representatives of Waste Management flatly state that the landfill is in accord with all permits and environmental regulations. “Rydell and the landfill’s opponents are taking snapshots of information at moments in time, and they’re not looking at everything,” says Brandt, in the planning office.

But Waste Not hopes the new information will force state regulators to reject both plans for an earthen wall and larger expansions. “We basically kept them at bay for four years, which no one thought we’d be able to do,” says McPhillips. “Now we have to fire our last guns and hope there’s some smoke.”

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Image: William Anthony

Paul Burns, Waste Managment’s Pacific Northwest director of disposal operations, stands in the landfill’s grove of poplars.

In the thick of its battles with angry farmers and environmentalists, Waste Management brought in its own expert: Paul Burns, a 54-year-old engineer who has worked for the company for 23 years, smoothing over political controversies surrounding landfills from Maine to Hawaii. Burns arrived on the Yamhill scene in 2009. Members of the anti-dump coalition say that he’s freely told them that Waste Management sends him to solve its problems. “I used to think of myself as an engineer,” says the ever amiable Burns, “but now I’m a teacher.”

One summer day, Burns offers a tour of the grove of poplars that partly screens Riverbend Landfill from Highway 18. Standing between rows of trees as straight as church columns, Burns explains that the thin black tubes running through the undergrowth irrigate the roots with diluted leachate—the potentially toxic stew created from rain and other liquids that seep through the landfill’s decomposing matter and pool at the bottom—the stuff opponents fear is leaking. But in the grove, which won an award from the American Academy of Environmental Engineers, the tree roots absorb the leachate before it enters the water table. The company then periodically harvests the trees to sell for pulp.

Burns points to this green-design element as evidence of fundamental goodwill.

“I’ve worked on controversial sites before, and the key is communication,” Burns says. “We want to hear what people are saying, change what we can change, and be the best neighbors we can be.”

Beginning earlier this year, Waste Management has held monthly community meetings to give presentations and discuss topics one by one with its hired experts, from water quality and the well-monitoring system to whether the landfill is in the South Yamhill River floodway. And the company, Burns points out, is making concessions, starting with the announcement at a May community meeting that Riverbend would no longer seek an additional 10 feet of height. To McPhillips’s “Thank you,” Burns gave his customary response: “We listen.”

“Paul’s done an amazing job of communication,” McPhillips acknowledges. “The way he’s treated the community has been far more respectful. We really appreciate that they’ve come to the table to inform us what they’re doing, but it’s only furthered our resolve that what they’re doing is not good for the community.”

Each meeting between Waste Management and its opponents is a tensely cordial affair: shared pizza, the occasional release valve of humor. “There is a long way to go with several important Riverbend issues,” says hydrogeologist McJunkin, who tends to be the most aggressive in his technical challenges of Waste Management’s experts. “Waste Management will send as many Ph.D.’s as needed to attack the issues being raised.”

For his part, Burns sees the future of trash in more technology and recycling. In North Portland, he notes, Waste Management is building the first commercial-scale plant devoted to a new process: turning hard-to-recycle and contaminated plastics into synthetic fuels. He points to a site he worked on in Rochester, New Hampshire, as his example for Riverbend: substantial community involvement that produced a landfill replete with parks, wetlands, and even a golf course, plus a gas-to-energy plant.

“Long-term expansion is still where we plan to go,” Burns says flatly of the mountain of trash in Oregon’s farm and wine country. “But it won’t be the expansion everyone saw before, where the idea was to fit as much as we can.”

Meanwhile, the dump’s opponents have convinced state regulators to take a closer look at floodway and seismic issues. DEQ permit engineer Bob Schwarz has asked Waste Management for further data to prove that the landfill is not in the floodway and is not on soil that might liquefy in an earthquake. “If those things can be addressed satisfactorily,” he says, “I don’t believe the regulations regarding a landfill would allow us to prevent it from expanding.”

McPhillips has taken down his “farting landfill” sign. He’s moved into the 1860s caretaker’s house right next to the dump, renting out the family farmhouse to pay legal bills arising from his fight. And he vows to keep fighting.

“My grandfather worked harder than anyone in this state to fight for clean rivers and air,” McPhillips says. “On his deathbed, he told me, ‘Nothing great is ever achieved without Uncle Controversy in control.’ I’m not going to let this be the final chapter in the McPhillips story.”

Power Play

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 05:33:00 -0700

DURING a 2009 trip to Portland, New York performance artist Aaron Landsman did things you’d expect a member of the culturati to do: he hobnobbed with local scenesters and toured potential sites for an avant-garde performance. But then the most unusual thing happened. City Commissioner Nick Fish dragged Landsman to a city council meeting. And art was born.

“I didn’t want to go,” says Landsman. “But Fish said, ‘It’s going to be hot. We’re talking about zoning.’”

City Hall’s most loquacious commissioner prevailed, and Landsman found himself rapt for two hours as citizens bombarded the council on the potential effects of a proposed zoning change on litter and child health. The meeting’s climax arrived when an activist challenged the council to “live in the kid zone” as he dumped the contents of a plastic bag all over the table used for public comment. “We’re talking syringes, condoms, crack vials, dirty diapers ... the room just goes dead,” Landsman recalls.

Landsman, struck by the moment’s theatricality, created City Council Meeting, a participatory performance that he plans to unveil in four cities (but not Portland) this year. Not so much a play as an interactive experience, City Council Meeting will evoke local government in all its glory, right down to the uncomfortable chairs. Meeting will mix actual actors with audience members, and use scripts based on real council meetings in Portland and other cities.

Landsman hopes his “social sculpture” spawns plenty of awkward moments. “It’s better when people appear confused and uncomfortable,” he says. We may have to wait awhile to check out the piece, but those lacking entertainment should rest easy: the real Portland City Council meets nearly every Wednesday.

See portlandonline.com and citycouncilmeeting.org