Two items struck me in today’s Oregonian. One was the City Club debate between Randy Leonard and six of the candidates who are running against him — the six who are coordinating their campaigns. The other was a vote of Portland State University students to finance a $30 million fitness center through student activity fees.
Candidate Mark Lakeman said that Commissioner Leonard is “blatantly hostile to civic involvement.” (Lakeman’s words.) Leonard replied that (in the Oregonian’s words, not his) he is “looking out for Portlanders so busy with jobs or raising families as single parents” that they can’t go to neighborhood meetings or the City Council, to which candidate Frank Dixon said that citizen activists speak for everybody in their neighborhoods.
I like neighborhood associations as much as the next plutocrat does, but I don’t agree with Dixon. Anyone who used the argument in the 1980s that Ronald Reagan was a president of the minority because only X% of the population was registered to vote, only Y% of the registered voters voted, and only Z% of them voted for him, must also agree that only X% of the neighborhood knows about the association, and only Y% of them go to the meetings (and in most areas Y is a very small number, maybe 1%). I don’t hear citizen activists say to the Council, “Although I’m personally opposed to this project, most of my neighbors are in favor of it, and so I’m asking you on their behalf to vote for this project.”
The connection with the PSU item is this. 912 students voted in favor of spending $30 million on the fitness center. 900 voted against it. 187 students voted in the student election, but not on this question. The 1,999 voters were about 9% of the student body, which means the votes in favor were about 4.5% of the student body.
Neighborhood associations are a good thing, but they’re loya jirgas and not Athenian assemblies.