When former Gov. Barbara Roberts was appointed to the Metro Council in February, it had been 16 years since she'd left Mahonia Hall – and elected office. Roberts, 74, was semi-retired from politics and teaching; she was working on her autobiography, and was serving on several task forces and advisory boards, including the Columbia River Gorge Commission.
But how would she adjust to the rigors and responsibilities of being back in public office? The Metro Newsfeed sat down with Roberts to discuss her first few months on the Metro Council. Some responses from the 30-minute interview have been edited for brevity.
How would you describe the last couple of months?
At the top of the list, I think, would be the term "steep learning curve." Even though the general areas of land use, and transportation, and clean air and all of those issues that Metro deals with have been part of my background for a lot of years, the framework in which we work with them here is very different. So I had a steep learning curve in the beginning to understand that.
The second part of the steep learning curve was to understand the breadth of things Metro did – Glendoveer Golf Course, 14 pioneer cemeteries, things beyond the sort of common knowledge about the work of Metro. So I had a lot of new issues that were part of Metro's agenda that I needed to make part of my agenda.
The liaison process is different for me than other governments I had worked in, where I got assignments to specific boards or commissions or projects, so I like that very much. That's exciting. I've chaired the committee that redrew the lines of the Metro districts – I've done that kind of work before in both the Legislature and the Secretary of State's office, so to make six districts work was not quite as challenging as to redistrict the Legislature or Congress. But it was a good opportunity for me to take on a project, get it done, finish it and move on to the next project.
The second thing that I would say about this last two to three months is that I have come to understand the very high quality of the professional staff at Metro. I've worked with a lot of professional staffs in public agencies at all levels of government. This is a remarkably brilliant staff, with true expertise in the areas in which they work and with equal dedication to doing their job and doing it right – not just doing it well, doing it right. So that has been a very pleasant learning portion of my job is to continue to meet these talented people in the legal department, or the planning department, the procurement department, the parks… just dealing with people who have that kind of talent, expertise and dedication.
In spite of the steep learning curve and the new knowledge about Metro I've gained, I have to say I'm enjoying the job very much.
Obviously, you've served on other committees and task forces and what not since your time as governor, but this is your first (technically) elected office since your term. What's that like for you? Do you hear from constituents a lot?
Not a lot. Obviously when you begin to deal with things that are controversial, the Columbia River Crossing, land use issues, the Lake Oswego to Portland streetcar project, those kinds of things, you begin to get more communications from constituents and also the broader constituents of the whole Metro region.
Those more controversial issues, you get lots of input and I got a lot, particularly a lot of emails. It's amazing how much of the communication, particularly in the Metro process, is done by email – much more than in the years I was doing government. So that's a part of the communication that's hard to keep up with because it comes in so fast.
Oftentimes people will say, "Oh, you're my Metro councilor," when they come in for something else, including staff members of Metro who live in my district. That always makes me smile when that happens. I've had a couple of people stop me on the street in Sellwood and say "Oh, you're my new Metro councilor."
When you're governor, with a whole state to look after, you are everybody's councilor, so to speak. A lot of things are handled directly by staff that never personally reach you in that kind of way. (Metro) is much more personal. It takes me back to the years I served on the school board and community college board – I mean, school board's about as personal as it gets in a community and it takes me back to those days when I was meeting with people about issues they care about – their property, their school, their school menu or whatever it was they were upset about, you heard from them. So this has a little bit of that tone.
When you first got here, it seemed like there was almost a reverence for you. Did you notice that, and have people gotten used to the former governor sitting in this office now?
I don't know if I'm the person who can answer that, you'd have to ask them. But the first issue that, right in the beginning was confusing to everyone is "What are we going to call you? Do we call you councilor? Do we call you governor?" So, I just said from the very beginning, "When I'm sitting at this council table, when I'm filling my role as a Metro councilor, then you call me councilor. What you call me the rest of the time is up to you."
I notice a lot of staff still in briefings will say "governor" to me. And I think after years of calling a governor "governor," it's very hard to take that title away. So, when people ask me that question outside of the Metro building, I say "I'm still governor." The way that title issue works is, presidents of the United States, United States senators and governors never lose their title. And they have that title for the rest of their life, and the councilor title will go away at the end of December 2012.
What about in meetings, for example, when you would be the focus of the briefing – people were there to brief the governor. Now, there's two other people, equals to you, sitting in a briefing. Is that a new experience for you?
When I served on the Land Board, it was the governor, the secretary of state and the state treasurer. And the briefings feel a lot like that. The people are all equals in the sense that they're all public officials, they all have equal status in terms of votes. Here, when I sit down for a briefing and there's two other councilors in the room, we're all equals in that room as councilors and we're all receiving information toward that same decision-making process.
In terms of things you might have heard from constituents, have there been any issues that surprised you, that made you say "I didn’t know this was an issue for people in District 6, I'm surprised to learn about this"?
I would go and listen to briefings on the Sellwood Bridge and was paying attention to what would happen on light rail, and obviously the Columbia River Crossing was a very large issue in the newspaper week after week, month after month, year after year. So I felt pretty well versed on those issues and was used to talking to citizens in my district about them before I joined the Metro Council.
You didn't really get a break when you first got started. You dove right into redistricting, then the reserves issue in Washington County, the COO search, the CRC… were you expecting this pace?
There certainly were a lot of major decisions and still are with the land use decisions still in front of us and more returning issues relating to CRC. It was reminiscent to me a little bit when I was appointed, way back in 1978, to serve on the Multnomah County Commission. That's when the first light rail decision came before the City of Portland, Multnomah County, the TriMet board and the City of Gresham, and those four bodies had to make that decision. That controversy and that decision-making occurred during my nine-month tour of duty as a Multnomah County Commissioner. That was also the time that we set the UGB for Multnomah County.
It was a period of time that there were several big decisions in a very short period of time, and not much time to play catch-up. This feels a little like that. Maybe I just arrive when there's crisis, I don't know.
And there's always a budget crisis when I arrive. Every time I have a jurisdiction I'm serving in – Measure 5 when I was governor – and each time each level of government I've served at I've sort of arrived just when the money ran out and it feels a little that way now, because as citizens and community leaders and political officials, we're all trying to figure out how to deal with money issues right now. It feels like I'm kind of back there.
I really did need to hit the ground running, and maybe that was part of the reason I was encouraged to run for the position, because there wasn't much learning time allowed – you had to make a bunch of decisions right at the beginning. So it's been very busy, and it's very hard to remember it's a part-time job.
It is?
It's supposed to be!
What are your personal initiatives for the next few months? Do you have anything that you specifically say "I want to get this done in the next year and a half?"
We're looking at some issues relating to affordable housing and equity, which is going to require a re-application for a HUD grant. That one's really important to me. I really care about affordable housing. I've been involved with it a number of times in my career, and it's something I really care about and so, whatever I can do to help, we've put that HUD grant together and whatever place there may be that I can use whatever influence I have to encourage that to happen, and to move forward then with looking how we build equity into affordable housing issues. That's a very big one with me.
Roberts went on to talk at length about creating a memorial garden at Lone Fir Cemetery, dedicated to Chinese laborers and mental health patients who were buried in unmarked graves at the site in the 19th century. Check the Metro Newsfeed later for a more detailed story about the memorial garden.
The Columbia River Crossing vote last week generated some controversy, particularly with your "leap of faith" comment. I'm curious for you, where's the dividing line between faith that this project, that you've been working on for 15 years, needs to go forward, and the question of whether it has been vetted properly?
This was not a thing where I said "Great, go build a bridge, I'm happy about this." This, for me, was that I had followed the press coverage on this issue for a long time. I talked to people about it before I ever got on the council. I recognize the controversy, and it felt much like the controversy I experienced when I was getting ready to vote on the light rail project for the Gresham to Portland light rail, that initial piece of light rail.
The anger and the frustration and the discussions about cost and "nobody has all the answers" felt very familiar – it felt exactly like that project did at the time.
I remember over the years watching as the freeway got torn up and the light rail was being (constructed), and people were still angry. The project got done, and it worked, and people rode the light rail. And the controversy went away for that section of light rail and light rail began to expand all over the region. This has that feel to me.
The people who are upset about tolling, they apparently never driven on the East Coast, where half the roads are tolls, and all of the bridges. As a child, I remember going over the current bridge into Vancouver, my family went there to visit my dad's brother, and we'd go over that bridge and we'd throw our coins in that little container on the bridge. And the toll went away when the bridge was paid for, and that was what the people had been promised and that's exactly what happened.
So it's not like we've never had a toll on a bridge – and we've got one at Cascade Locks, too, I've paid that one lots of times when I'm sitting on the Columbia River Gorge Commission, going back and forth across the river a lot.
The toll I didn't find controversial. I definitely do not find the light rail controversial. I don't think there's any way you could put an efficient, totally accurate dollar sign on this yet. I liked some of the changes that were made. I liked narrowing the number of lanes. I liked the changes that were made on the Marine Drive interchanges and that area, which I thought were very, very messy and poorly thought out initially. All of those changes feel much better to me, I'm much happier with all that.
I'm not happy with the design of the bridge in terms of the choice, but it is a bridge, it's not the Taj Mahal, and I want the bridge to work. I want it to have light rail. I want it to have people biking and walking on it. All of those things are there and I don't want to wait until we have a bridge that has the kind of traumatic problems that the Sellwood Bridge has. At some point, if you're going to build a bridge, it's going to be controversial, and it's going to be costly. I believe they're doing everything they can to mitigate the problem areas and they're going to move forward.
I have no question that as time goes on, this council will see components of that issue back on the council's voting agenda. It's not the last time, even I, as a short-termer, expect to vote on something related to this, including the land use issues that will come in a few months.
I didn't do it with total enthusiasm, I did it with the practicality that time would prove this to be the right choice.