Randy Leonard and the Police/Fire Pension Fund

The Oregonian leads today with a long report detailing City Commissioner Randy Leonard's involvement with the city's police and fire pension and disability fund - as city commish, state legislator, union president, fund board member, and injured firefighter.

As an injured firefighter, Leonard relied on the fund for disability checks. As a fire union president and a fund trustee, he successfully boosted pensions and dominated the fund's board, at times pushing through controversial disability claims. And as a state lawmaker, he wrote a law to protect his own firefighter pension.

Now, amid mounting evidence of the fund's problems and renewed calls for reform, the 52-year-old Leonard faces perhaps the biggest dilemma of his career: Deciding how far he is willing to go to protect a system that he has spent much of the past 20 years shaping.

"Sometimes I feel pretty awkward here defending the system," Leonard said of the fund, which costs the average Portland homeowner $373 a year in property taxes. "But I know how the system works."

Read the whole story here. This report is an outgrowth of the O's earlier report detailing problems with the system (also see here, here, here, and here.)

Discuss.

[Editor's Note: Randy Leonard is a regular contributor here at BlueOregon - and has not been consulted on this post. Randy, feel free to write your own item on the Oregonian story.]