About Portland: Mayor Hales - The Exit Interview

“We’re weather wimps,” Charlie Hales says, getting ready to head to work Thursday morning. “There’s no way around it.”

It’s already after 9:00 but there is still snow on the ground so The City of Portland is opening its offices late. At least those offices will be opening. For the third time in a week, schools are closed.

Snow is the city’s kryptonite, a fact that Hales - the city’s mayor recognizes.

“People back east hear that we’ve shut down and ask, how may feet of snow did you get?” he says. “And I have to tell him less than three inches and you can hear them shaking their heads.

“We’re supposed to be an area filled with people who love the outdoors. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

Hales is more than a little reflective. In just about two weeks he will be walking away from his job as the mayor of Portland - the third straight mayor to leave after one term.

“More than a year ago,” he says. “I was with a close supporter and we were talking about whether I should run. He looked me in the face and said, You can either be a great mayor or a great candidate. But not both.”

Hales says that he spent that weekend talking with Nancy, his wife, weighing the options. And the answer was that he wanted to try to be a great mayor.

“If I had run for office, I would have never had days like yesterday where we got so much done,” he says.

Without question Wednesday’s city council meeting had been filled with accomplishments: in one day, they approved spending more than $50 million on an affordable housing project, banning fossil fuel terminals, requiring home energy scoring, approving a new electric vehicle strategy, and approving a new campaign financing program.

Hales says that while that has the appearance of trying to cram things under the wire, “the fact is each of these things took time. Each was months, if not years, of work.”

He says that choosing not to run for reelection, made it easier to get them done.

“By taking re-election out of the equation, by not running, there were still plenty of times people disagreed with me but they couldn't question my motives,” he says. “I deprived people of a major reason to question my motives.”

While there is a logic to that, it sidesteps the fact that much of the support he had received when first running in 2012, had evaporated. Th3e city’s past three mayors - including Vera Katz, the last two hold more than one term - all of whom had supported Hales, switched their backing to Ted Wheeler, who takes office in January.

Katz and others expressed disappointment with what they thought was a lack of accomplishment by Hales, something he disputes.

He points to a series of accomplishments including dealing with zombie houses, addressing infill development, more programs for youth, paying more attention to Lents, and negotiating the sale of the post office in the Pearl District.

The announcement last week that the city and county have brought the number of homeless veterans in the area down to what’s called “functional zero.”

Most notably, what he calls a changing of the culture of the police bureau.

“There is a lot of positive to be said - from the fact that not one black person has been shot by an officer since I took office, the efforts of the Gang Enforcement Team, the outreach to the youth of the city - the bureau is different from the days of days of Aaron Campbell and James Chassie,” he says. “The bureau responded to 1,500 suicidal calls in the past year and not once used a taser.

“We have changed our outlook on how force is used. The 48-hour rule is gone.”

Hales recognizes not everything has gone smoothly and there are still changes that need to be made. Looking back, he understands that he could have handled the situation with Chief Larry O’Dea - who was forced to resign after accidentally shooting a friend while on a hunting trip - differently.

“I am very loyal to people,” he says. “And there are many good things he did as chief. At the same time, I really thought the investigation would be completed much quicker than it was. I wish the media had given the chief a fair shake but they didn’t.”

That is reflective of a frequent theme of Hales - an adversarial relationship with the press.

“They are generally more interested in covering things that generate clicks and page views than they are in reporting things that affects people’s lives,” he says. “I understand the need for accountability and there are times where we needed to have our feet held to the fire. At the same time, it’s not worth sacrificing coverage of the things that really are important to people.

That, said, Hales adds:

“Looking back, we should have come out immediately with what had happened. I would say one of my major failings has been able to come to grips with the real power of social media. We have not been as effective as we could in using it to get our story out. We have allowed others to define the story.”

Hales says that one major shift has been putting more officers on the street, which has led to more interactions with people in the communities; the more interactions the better the relationships that evolve over the years.

“Sadly there is no way to measure the number of bad things that did not happen. All you can do is look at the facts - yes, people have fired 1,000 shots, 45 people have been wounded, 19 killed - only three of whom were gang-related - and then take a sidelong glance at Chicago and wondering what might have been here had we not taken steps.”

For Hales, the crowning achievement to his term - what he hopes will be his legacy - will come Wednesday when the city council is expected to finally approve a new comprehensive plan t- an eight-inch thick document that will guide development of the city over the next 20 years.

“It’s not the same city that I moved to in 1979, arriving from Washington. D.C. in a Plymouth Valiant,” he says. “We are going to be growing into a city that will have 850,000 people, which is a scary number. And we need to be careful about how we get there.

“The city has changed so much - and, in so many ways not nearly enough. It used to be three basic groups: a stuffy, establishment group, blue collar, working people, and a small group of people of color.”

Hales says the city did not do enough to block gentrification, to stop the black population from being driven from the city. At the same time, Portland has seen the Asian and Hispanic populations grow.

“And we have seen those groups become more active,” he says. “We need to keep working to establish that Portland is a welcoming city. It clearly has not been all happiness. There is a very real economic struggle for refugees, there has been displacement by gentrification.

“It’s definitely possible that we have too many white men looking like lumberjacks drinking coffee and riding their bicycles and the rainbow Portland that some people think is here may not exist.” I know that might not be a very political answer but I am gone in two weeks, not planning on running for office ever again.”

Hales says that on a certain level he should have never been deleted to office.

“I am a 60-year-old white guy, a professional,” he says. “And that’s why I have worked very hard to get to know people on a personal level.”

One area where he did not work as hard to get to know people on a personal level was on the city council. Hales started is mayoralty by stripping his colleagues of their assignments overseeing city agencies and keeping that way for more than four months.

And when he did start sharing power, he did not pay a lot of attention to what there members of the council wanted to focus on.

‘i am who I am,” Hales says. “Are there things that I wish I had done differently? Absolutely. Did I make mistakes? Yes.”

One that Hales says that he wishes he could get a do over on was the proposed fee to help pay for repairs to the city’s roads.

Along with Commissioner Steve Novick, Hales presented a proposal expecting the council to pretty much just sign on it. Instead, there was a full-scale revolt. They pulled the proposal and re-introduced it six times - finally just pulling it.

“I would love to have a do-over on that,” he says.

Earlier this year, Hales’s chief of staff at the times, Josh Alpert, suggested to Patch that it might be time for the city to consider changing the city charter to make the mayor a one-six-year-term and out office.

“I think there’s a lot of merit to that,” Hales says. “Right now, you only have so much time to try and get stuff done before you have to start thinking about re-election. By taking that out of the equation, people may discover that they get more done.”

Hales has had other thoughts about whoever holds the office - not just his immediate successor.

“You have to really want it,” he says. “You have to really want to be there, focusing on 100 different details all the time, everyday. A couple of years ago, I was talking with my friend, Thomas Lauderdale. And he was thinking about running.

“I have him three documents and told him to read them. And that if he loved reading them and wanted more, then being mayor was for him. The documents were the city budget, a decision in a contested land use case, and a police disciplinary letter. I never heard from him again about wanting to run.”

For now, Hales says he is focused on what’s next.

On January 2, he and nancy are headed off on an 18-month vacation.

“We are taking the boat and planning to sail to some 25 counties from South and Central America to the Mediterranean,” he says of the plans for their 44-foot long sailboat. “It’s going to be adventures in ship repair in different countries around the world.”

Hales says they will be joined by friends and family for different stages of the trip.

And when he comes back?

“I think it will be something along the lines of a not for profit focused on how cities grow,” he says. “But that’s a ways away.