Portland's street name debacle casts long shadow

Amid hurt feelings, council caps Chávez flap, keeps city law

Everybody – city leaders, César Chávez supporters, neighborhood leaders in North Portland and Chinatown – finally walked away from a slow-motion train wreck this week.

Not as if it hadn’t happened. More like that there was absolutely nothing they could do to make an ugly situation better.

So Portland’s North Interstate Avenue will not be renamed for Chávez, the Mexican-American farm labor leader who died in 1993. Nor will Fourth Avenue downtown and through Chinatown be renamed for him.

In fact, it’s not clear that anything in the city will be renamed for Chávez anytime soon.

What seemed to be clear after a finalizing City Council vote Wednesday morning was that – either through proponents of the idea to rename Interstate for Chávez, neighborhood opponents of the idea, or city leaders, or some combination of all three – the idea of renaming a street for Chávez came to be about race, or racism, or charges of racism. And it never recovered from there.

What the City Council formally did – in a unanimous vote rare for any decision surrounding the Chávez issue – was to undo the last-minute fix that four members of the council had engineered on their own last week.

After the weeks- or months-long debate about renaming Interstate Avenue had become contentious – racially and otherwise – four members of the council coalesced around an alternative idea to name Fourth Avenue, which runs past City Hall, for Chávez.

Only Mayor Tom Potter, a staunch supporter of the Interstate name change, opposed the move.

But what the four other council members saw last week as a compromise and a way to end the contentiousness only created more confusion and anger in the days afterward – including from the group of Hispanic leaders who had been proposing the Interstate name change, and from Chinese leaders in Portland’s Chinatown, just north of West Burnside Street.

Last week’s council vote would have meant a main street through Chinatown – Northwest Fourth Avenue – would have been named for Chávez.

Within a handful of minutes Wednesday, the City Council unanimously voted to reconsider its action last week, then unanimously rejected the idea of renaming Fourth Avenue.

The council also voted for a second time – with Potter and Sten dissenting – to reject renaming Interstate for Chávez.

Then council members talked about the train wreck.

“This will end a process that frankly (has) had no parallel in my public life,” said Commissioner Randy Leonard, referring to the anger and racial issues that the debate opened up.

Then, he added, as Potter sat listening a few feet away: “I have been stunned at the way this debate has been framed – not so much by the committee (proposing the Interstate name change). But the way the mayor has framed the discussion around race has been not just disappointing, but I think has diminished each of us.”

Potter offered his support fairly early to the group of Hispanic leaders who wanted to rename Interstate for Chávez.

He repeatedly said that the City Council should follow through on its commitment to the group – that it would support the name change as long as the group talked to the Interstate community about the idea. He also repeatedly said that, while not all opposition to the idea was based on prejudice against Hispanics, some of it likely was.

“I think when you look around the country and when you see what is going on around street renamings,” he said after Leonard’s comments, referring to attempts in Texas and elsewhere to rename streets for Chávez, “you will see that race is a factor.”

Potter also cited community opposition to his idea to build a hiring center for day laborers – many of them illegal immigrants and Hispanics.

“I don’t use the word racism,” Potter said Wednesday. “But when we talk about what we need to do as a community … part of the healing has to be to bring up things that are uncomfortable, such as race.”

Potter and other City Council members, and even some Hispanic leaders, were saying this week that those discussions would be happening away from public debates about street renamings – and away from the council chambers – for a while.

Maria Rojo de Steffey, a Multnomah County commissioner who has worked with and supported the proponents of renaming Interstate, said of that group: “They’re hurt. They need a rest.”

Meanwhile, the City Council also tabled a Saltzman proposal to expand the City Council’s powers to rename streets. Left on the books, for now, is a city ordinance that hasn’t been followed with recent street renamings but that requires significant evidence of public and neighborhood approval for a street name change.

Other than through that process, Leonard said, “it’s going to be a long time before I’m open to voting to renaming anything.”