He wasn't Portland Polite

The dude over at the Bike Portland blog, Jonathan Maus, had an interesting post last week about a blunt interaction between Eric Zimmerman, one of the six adults on the 12-member Portland City Council, and one of the young Don Quixotes in the city bureaucracy.

The scene was a hearing of some kind in front of the Finance Committee of the City Council. According to the mighty Maus, Zimmerman cruelly and heartlessly subjected the poor public servant to withering criticism of aspects of her department (the city Bureau of "Transportation") that aren't her responsibility and about which she wasn't prepared to testify. So inappropriate and vicious were Zimmerman's attacks, Bike Portland said, that it wasn't even going to reveal the name of the victim, as if she had been violently assaulted.

Oh, come on now.

The bureaucrat's name is Liz Rickles. She's a Level 2 capital project manager, and has been on the job for more than eight years. She's a grownup. She was in front of a political body. Somebody should have prepared her for the possibility that not everybody on the dais would be throwing roses at her feet. She should have had that Dylan Rivera guy, a lifelong City Hall flack currently nesting in "Transportation," at her side to coach her through, God forbid, a surprise question she might have to answer.

And as for whether Zimmerman was too nasty with her, you can watch for yourself (the agenda item starts at 39:28). To me it seems as though Rickles is uncomfortable with public speaking generally, and wasn't having such a great time even when she was just reading her prepared spiel. When Zimmerman, the chair of the committee, jumped in (at 57:34) with some off-script questions, Rickles seemed uneasy, but no more uneasy than she was the whole time. I wouldn't say he badgered her, certainly not to the point that I'd consider her abused.

At first Maus wrote that Rickles "spoke through sobs," but later he changed that to say she "was unable maintain composure." To me it didn't look like she started out with all that much composure to maintain, and she didn't get any worse as Zimmerman droned on. But to read it on Bike Portland, you would think that somebody should have called poor Rickles an ambulance and slapped handcuffs on Zimmerman.

The more important question, I think, is where is the $265,000-a-year honcho who's running that department, Millicent Williams? If she were good at her job, you'd think she'd now be demanding a chance to sit down in front of the cameras and have it out with Zimmerman on his gripes with her bureau. I doubt that will ever happen. Williams is probably happy to let fragile underlings like Rickles take the heat instead.

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On the merits of the discussion, which Maus doesn't really get into, I think Zimmerman's got a perfectly valid point. It's frustrating to watch the city rip up perfectly good old-style curb ramps and cutouts, replacing them with fancier new ones at $20,000 a pop, when there are still many thousands of curbs that don't have ramps and cutouts at all. Indeed, there are still hundreds of blocks in Portland on which the streets aren't even paved! The city keeps making excuses for the misplaced priorities – it's required by federal law, we got sued and this was part of the settlement, it was what we promised in the grant application, yada yada yada. Yeah, well, whatever the causes are, it's time to stop doing it.

Think of it this way. From a disabled pedestrian's safety standpoint, there are four types of situations at intersections. From worst to best, they are:

1.  Unpaved streets with no sidewalks.

2.  Sidewalks with no curb ramps for disabled people at the corners.

3.  Sidewalks with old-fashioned curb ramps at the corners.

4.  Sidewalks with fancy new curb ramps at the corners. These are the ones with the bright yellow squares embedded in the concrete, with the little raised "domes" on them. I assume they are helpful if your vision is really bad. You can hear and feel yourself coming to the edge of the curb.

The city is spending oodles of time and money converting category 3 locations to category 4 locations, while categories 1 and 2 remain neglected. Zimmerman's tired of the excuses for the twisted agenda. And he's not alone. I'm glad he's calling somebody to account, even if they send the wrong person to look him in the eye.

How about this for a priority scheme? For the indefinite future, we spend half of out street improvement budget getting category 1 locations to category 4; a third of that budget getting category 2 locations to category 4; and only a sixth of that budget getting category 3 locations to category 4. It will take forever to get every corner up to category 4, but in the meantime, where we have category 3, let's live with it. It could be a lot worse.