Mayor 2012: All the latest

Kari Chisholm

With a mayoral forum or debate almost every night of the week, it's almost impossible to keep up with all that's happening. I thought I'd attempt a recap of recent news.

Willamette Week continues to nip at Eileen Brady's heels, this week going with a big cover story. The main story by WW's Corey Pein is actually fairly interesting - and despite my day job role as one of her campaign consultants - I actually learned some things about her life story.

Of course, the big reveal in this episode of "Nigel Jaquiss has a crush on Eileen Brady" is the sidebar story that there's a New Seasons Market investor that dismisses her early involvement - saying Brady was just "married to a board member who was a founder." Nevermind the implicit sexism, it ignores the fact that she invested her life savings in the startup. I don't know about you, but if I invested my life savings in a kitchen-table-stage startup, I'd consider myself a "co-founder."

The O's Beth Slovic has her own reporting on the story. Most importantly, the primary leader of New Seasons, board chair Stan Amy, weighed in and made his view crystal clear: "Eileen is one of our co-founders."

As KATU's Patrick Preston notes, "The matter may come down to semantics: What makes a co-founder a co-founder instead of an investor and adviser? Brady's view is there are more than 50 co-founders of New Seasons, including herself."

MEANWHILE...

• The Portland Association of Teachers has endorsed Jefferson Smith for Mayor.

• Charlie Hales penned an op-ed defending the much-maligned South Waterfront project, noting that it was a critical part of a campaign to keep OHSU in Portland.

• Monday night, there was an arts forum for the mayoral and city council candidates. The O's D.K. Row has a round-up, while the Merc's Alex Zielinski live-blogged it. And BlueOregon's Nova Newcomer used the opportunity to reflect on her own relationship to the arts. Good stuff.

• Last week, WW's Heidi Groover reviewed the social media efforts of the three candidates. The Hales campaign was dismissive of social media, telling WW that older voters are "less familiar with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube." (Memo to Charlie Hales: There are 180,740 people over age 50 in Portland who are on Facebook. And half of them use it every single day. No, really.) But the Hales camp had the last laugh, just last night, tweeting: "@WWeek we read your article dissing our social media efforts. We'd ask you to add us to G+, but u haven't posted since Jan. #BringIton"

• The O's Beth Slovic wonders aloud why Rep. Jefferson Smith had his district office seven miles outside his district. Smith's answer: "Having a legislative office that was nearby to my day job [at the Bus Project] made a lot of sense." Seems reasonable enough to me.

• Tre Arrow, who recently polled at 7% in the mayor's race, won't be prosecuted after all.

• And as I mentioned in my filing day roundup, the O's Beth Slovic put together biographical snippets on each of the 23 candidates for Mayor.

• Finally, I've been meaning to post for a week - in case you missed it - all three major candidates have now done the Sunday morning KATU interview with Steve Dunn on the "Your Voice, Your Vote" show. Check out Eileen Brady, Charlie Hales, and Jefferson Smith.

By Kari Chisholm March 09, 2012