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January 06, 2009

The Early Days of a Better Nation

First off: hello there! I'm Ben, and I'm the newest contributor here at Preemptive Karma.

When Kevin asked me to join this blog, I was flattered. I've always considered the writers and discussions here some of the most robust and exciting in the Oregon blogosphere.

You can read my bio to get a sense of who I am, but I'll sum it up briefly: I'm a young gun Democratic political operative, former blogger at the now-defunct Witigonen.com, and came to Portland because of the lush green spaces and sustainability (and for the progressive politics).

I'll get this all started, though, by giving you a few thoughts about new Portland Mayor Sam Adams, who was sworn in yesterday and delivered a speech which gives us a lot to chew over.

One line Sam has been using since the inception of his campaign comes from the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray: work like you live in the early days of a better nation.

For Sam, this means working as hard as he can to bring shape and progress to Portland, to have passion for that change, and to never stop trying to improve something we all love dearly.

In his inaugural speech, Sam riffed on this theme in three areas: jobs, education, and sustainability. These are his stated priorities, and he gave us a sense of his vision for each.

For jobs, he wants to build off of the success at bringing Vestas to Portland by putting forward an "economic stimulus package" for the city. I have no idea what form this will take. And it had better be more than throwing money at the problem (like our national government did in the $700 billion stimulus package - which I opposed). But I know Sam: he has the smartest people working on this, and I'm confident he'll surprise with his creativity.

As for education, this one is very, very tricky. The dropout rate amongst Portland 8th graders is something close to 50%. This is an abomination and just so discouraging. But Sam's identified it, and wants to do something about it. An idea he threw out yesterday is to introduce up-and-coming students to the workforce via a jobs/schools/mentors partnership. Sounds good to me - any idea that can inspire a kid to stick it out and give them an eye to the future is fine by me. But this one will be hard, really hard.

And his third priority is sustainability. Portland is already top-notch in this area, but Sam wants us to be the best in the world. With that in-mind, he announced a partnership with Governor Ted Kulongoski and the Oregon university system to begin work on an Oregon Sustainability Center based out of Portland State. The budget money, if I'm not mistaken, would come as a line-item in the Governor's proposed budget.

So there you have it. I'm encouraged by where Sam wants to take our city, but he did stress one thing that really impressed me: he needs our help. He's going to be forming a citizen's mayoral cabinet, he wants us to volunteer our time, and to give back to our city as we can. Indeed, he closed his speech by borrowing from Harvey Milk and saying he was "here to recruit us."

And isn't that the most important part of government, anyway? Without citizen involvement and public participation, government just doesn't work. And I honestly believe Sam (with the help of Amanda Fritz) is going to make it an A-1 priority for our city.

If you want a different take on the events, take a hop over to Blogtown and see what Matt Davis has to say.

Posted by Ben at January 6, 2009 12:20 PM