As recently as three weeks ago, Robert Liberty was raising thousands of dollars to help an ideological counterpart into the council president's office, a short walk down the hall from his own.
In last Friday's pre-dawn hours, the man Liberty was fundraising to defeat, Tom Hughes, was riding shotgun in his car.
"It's dark and it's cold and normally your instinct is to go fishing," Liberty said. "Except we were going to a climate change summit instead of fishing for steelhead. I guess we were fishing for policy."
The four-hour roundtrip ride was part of the Metro Council President-elect's listening tour, Hughes' opportunity to familiarize himself with the agency he's set to lead for the next four years.
But even on the listening tour, Hughes' anecdotes are legendary. Hughes doesn't just have a story for everything. "Three stories," Liberty laughed.
To understand Tom Hughes is to know that he has stories to tell, and when he’s out of stories, he’s got at least a day’s worth of observations. Entering his fifth decade in public office, he’s seen it all, and he’s got an anecdote to go along with just about every situation.
Growing into the job
It might be counter-intuitive to think, then, that the 67-year-old Metro President-elect’s first order of business is sitting back and watching.
"It's my advice to all young elected officials – not that I'm a young elected official but I'm newly-elected. You spend the first two months being still and in the corner and listening to conversations," Hughes said, nursing a cup of black coffee at an inner Southeast Portland café. "Every organization has its own language, its own dialect. If you're not speaking that dialect to important audiences, you sound like you don't know what you're talking about. You sit around for awhile until you've picked up what the acronyms mean."
Luckily for Hughes, Metro has a list of all commonly used acronyms. It's 12 pages long.
"That in and of itself probably speaks volumes about why you need to shut the heck up for awhile," he said.
The instinct to keep quiet is a learned behavior, picked up three decades ago in what was then a sleepy county seat, Hughes' hometown of Hillsboro. A 33-year-old high school government teacher, Hughes was coaxed by a friend to run for city council to "turn things around."
"What I thought I knew about city government was pretty negative," Hughes said. "I discovered pretty quickly there's good reasons for why things were done the way they were done."
Former Hillsboro City Manager Elden Mills helped Hughes understand the nuances of city government and planning, at a time when Metro was in its formative stages and the Washington County seat was searching for its identity.
"That was when we said we don't want to be a bedroom community. We don't want to be a place where there's only one job for three people, and everyone has to leave town to find work," Hughes said. "We wanted to grow a job base and we set about to develop that."
Hughes only served on the city council for a couple of years, later joining the city’s planning commission after a short stint working for the League of Oregon Cities. It was during that time on the planning commission that the city saw its most dramatic changes.
Hughes was part of the team that helped consolidate the lots of Ronler Acres, a subdivision some refer to as a land investment scam. It's now home to Intel’s largest Oregon facility.
Of course, parcel consolidation isn’t exactly a key Metro role, and changes in state law since the Ronler Acres job have made the task difficult. So Hughes, who campaigned on a platform of “Let’s get Metro working,” – referring to the employment of the citizens of the region, not the functionality of the agency, he points out – has to find a way to follow through on his job creation promise.
Not surprisingly, he’s got a story for that.
The two guys from Munich
Early in his term as mayor of Hillsboro, the city he led from 2001 to 2009, Hughes was at a trade show in Munich and met two gentlemen who were putting together financing for a solar manufacturing facility.
“They were an interesting couple,” Hughes said. “A very tall Arab guy and a very short Indian guy.”
One Friday after that, Hughes was sitting at home watching TV when he got a all from the city’s economic development department. Two gentlemen were in town for a surprise site visit, and the usual tour guide was out sick.
“I got dressed, went down to the city… and it was these two guys from Munich,” he said. They talked for a bit before he turned the meeting over to an economic development representative, who presented charts, graphs and statistics.
“She answered all the questions and John (Southgate) and I just kind of sat there and looked smart,” Hughes said. The two investors looked at Hillsboro and Gresham and went off to Austin, Texas.
“About three months later, my daughter, who was working for a law firm in Washington, D.C., called and said ‘Do you remember going on a site visit with a couple of guys who were going to put together a solar company?’” Hughes said. He asked if it was the tall Arab and short Indian. It was – the two were looking to hire the firm to do some lobby work for them.
Hughes quotes his daughter: “One of my lobbyists came out and said ‘Isn’t your dad still the mayor of Hillsboro?’ I assured her you were, and she said. ‘You should have heard these guys talk about Hillsboro. Their site visit to Hillsboro was the most impressive site visit they had. The mayor showed up and he had graphs and he had charts and answers to all the questions. And they went to Gresham and there was one guy and he didn’t know anything and the mayor didn’t even show up.’” (Hughes was not referring to current Gresham Mayor Shane Bemis, who he mentioned as one of the region's leaders in job recruitment.)
Hughes said the investors' perspective, however based in hyperbole it may have been, was an eye-opening experience.
“Clearly that added value to the appeal,” He said. “So I just started doing that routinely. One of the things I had to learn was to shut the heck up most of the time. That’s kind of the secret – you’ve got to be there but be out of the way.
Too top-heavy of an approach?
But the region is governed by some strong personalities. A visit to the Metro Policy Advisory Committee, which Hughes once chaired, demonstrates that clearly.
Would MPAC representatives welcome Hughes tagging along on trade missions?
“If you look around the MPAC table, there’s a vast majority of those jurisdictions that don’t have anybody doing that for them at all,” he said. “It’s an opportunity for the president to be there on behalf of the folks who don’t have that level of economic development expertise. I’d love to see the day when five mayors flew out on trade missions representing various parts of the region.”
There are those who doubt Hughes will be able to represent the region broadly. Never before has Washington County had so much of a presence on the Metro Council, as both prior Metro President David Bragdon and former Metro Executive Mike Burton hailed from Portland. The county is split between two council districts.
Former Beaverton Mayor Rob Drake, whose city both complemented and competed with Hillsboro economically, said Hughes’ loyalties don’t lie with just one geography.
“Tom was a great ally when it came to trying to represent broad opinions,” Drake said. “I could always count on Tom either matching funding, or at least to come into an idea with an open mind. I think that will serve the region really well.”
Hughes said he had a regional view to economic development even in his tenure as mayor, pointing to Ferrotec’s selection of Fairview for its solar equipment manufacturing facility.
“They’re here, and they shorten that supply chain for companies that are in Hillsboro,” he said. “They make it easier for folks in Hillsboro who are recruiting to recruit the next company that’s going to come in. They also make it easier for Gresham to do that, and other places.”
He had a similar reaction to WaferTech’s going across the Columbia in Camas instead of Hillsboro.
“We’re better off having them in Camas than we are in New Jersey,” he said.
Practical duties
But what about his primary job – interactions with a Metro Council that can have very strong opinions on growth issues?
Despite some of the projections during the campaign, Hughes has a fairly varied track record. In his first run for mayor a decade ago, business leaders in the Tualatin Valley were worried he was too liberal for the job.
He was endorsed by the Oregon League of Conservation Voters – the same group that ran a brutal campaign against his council president run – and ran his 2000 mayoral campaign on a platform of slower growth.
"I think the environmental community will be surprised at how much of an environmentalist I am," he said. "I'm not somebody who's going to say 'Let's just revisit this idea of having an urban growth boundary.'
"It's both an important and vital part of how we do business in the Portland metropolitan area and it's something we all… embrace as part of who we are and what we do," Hughes said.
David Lawrence got to see Hughes' consensus-building through years as Hillsboro's deputy city manager.
"Tom's just Tom," Lawrence said. "You don't have to agree with his liberal political stance, but everyone likes him. He partners and works well with a lot of folks. He's always been that way."
Which brings us back to the four hour ride to Eugene with Liberty, who is likely to be the left-leaning council's most liberal member next year. Liberty said Hughes' government experience is going to be handy, and said the two have some common interests. But above that, the car ride showed southern Portland's Metro Councilor one thing: "He's just easy to get along with."