Challenging Portland Campaigns
By Emilie Boyles of Portland, Oregon. Emilie Boyles is a voter-owned candidate for Portland City Council.
Our campaign has issued a challenge to all candidates stumping in Multnomah County. Thought this might be of interest to the readers of Blue Oregon.
Portland is home to approximately 6,900 individuals with developmental disabilities.
Many of those individuals participate in meaningful activity through job programs contracted by the Multnomah Office of Developmental Disabilities. Meaningful activities means participants complete paid tasks as a precursor to working in integrated environments. However, if no paid work is available, these employees show up every day and practice work skills in order to maintain them.
Political candidates have many tasks often sent out to traditional businesses for folding, assembling, and other repetitious work. Work activity centers provide local businesses with competitively priced services with quality results.
The Boyles for Portland campaign has contracted with Port City Development Center, for example, to produce campaign buttons.
Emilie Boyles challenges all other candidates in the city of Portland to likewise contact local employment programs for persons with developmental disabilities (there are 25 acknowledge by the Multnomah County office of Developmental Disabilities) and contract a minimum of one service to one program.
For the Good of Portland,
Emilie Boyles
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March 25, 2006
Posted in guest column. |
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connect with blueoregon
Mar 25, '06
Emily, I appreciate your comments just as I appreciated your performance yesterday at the City Club debate. However, I think you are lacking in experience to be a counselor. I hope you would consider being a civillian administrator or leader of a bureau. We need talented people like you in this city!
1:44 p.m.
Mar 25, '06
Emilie, you've got a great idea there.
Mar 26, '06
I saw the debate. Emily has one answer for every question: "Let's get federal government money to help."
Which might be a fine response for certain issues. The problem is, she has almost no perspective on what the city's real problems are, due to her limited scope of professional experience.
This is evidenced by her challenge in this post. Of all the pressing issues facing the city, she decides to post on BlueOregon about people with developmental disabilities?
Not to diminish the issue, but its more of a county issue, and it is far from the most pressing thing facing the city.
This election is about big vision stuff. Do voters, like Erik Sten, think Portland is headed in the right direction? (He actually said he likes the direction Portland is headed.) Or do voters want to get rid of the social utopia vision Sten has tried to install in Portland.
For Emily to use her limited access to BlueOregon to post on the topic she did shows she has very little clue as to what this campaign is really about.
I agree she would be a valuable employee in a city or county government. She isn't councillor material. At least not yet.
Mar 27, '06
Having met Emily, I think she would make a great city council member in much the same vein as Erik Sten, except from a more conservative mid-county perspective. I also think she will ask harder question and listen thoughtfully to the answers she gets. People who have all the answers don't usually do that - I know from personal experience.
I don't think it takes a lot of experience to be effective as a city council member. As for her choice of issues here - helping people with disabilities is a darn site more important than the OHSU Tram, how leaders in Salem are selected or whether Ginny Burdick is over-rehearsed and wooden.
4:40 p.m.
Mar 28, '06
Somebody sent me the following question, without a busted reply-email, so I'll reply below:
The answer is no. BlueOregon is a regular publication that qualifies for the media exemption. This is no more an in-kind contribution than publishing an editorial in the Oregonian would be an in-kind from their corporate parent.
(Besides, how would you value it? If anything, since BlueOregon loses money - it would be some undefinable percentage of a negative value...)
7:53 p.m.
Mar 30, '06
Dear Ms. Boyles:
I've got a challenge for your campaign. Prove that the 9 people who claimed in today's paper to never have signed nor contributed to your campaign actually followed the rules and safeguards of the Voter-Owned Elections system.
If you discover that even one person was listed fraudulently -- even without your knowledge -- you should immediately return all Voter-Owned funds. If you find there was no fraud, but rather cultural reasons for their statements to the Oregonian, you should work to clear up the good name of your campaign and prevent this incident from harming the integrity of Portland's new election system.
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