Adams Admission Reaction: Critics Rip Adams in Council Testimony
February 4th 2009 10:19am
BY: Nigel Jaquiss
Mayor Sam Adams might want to start showing up late for City Council meetings. Today, the city's top elected official took a beating in the public comment section of the regularly scheduled council session, a couple of weeks after he admitting to having lied about a 2005 sexual relationship with then teen-aged Beau Breedlove.
This morning, KXL (750 AM) talk-show host Lars Larson teed off on Adams with three minutes of rhetorical questions about what Adams did and how the public and his colleagues should regard him now. Larson spoke in front of a council chamber packed with public safety employees, who were there to be honored later in the meeting for their performance during December's snowstorm.
"If Portland voters knew then what they know now, would you have been elected?" Larson asks. Regarding Adams' fellow city commissioners, Lars asks "why should any commissioner believe anything you say?"
Adams did not respond to Larson but one audience member called the talk-show host an "out-of-state carpetbagger." (Larson lives in Vancouver but works in Portland and as he noted in his comments, pays Oregon taxes).
After Larson spoke, Tom Klovski, who says he runs a small excavation company in Gresham, made a less polished but no less impassioned plea for Adams to resign.
After reading excerpts from the city code about integrity, truthfulness and the need for city employees to avoid even "the appearance of impropriety," Klovski presented Adams with a example from his own life.
"As a business owner, I deal with city inspectors," Klovski says. "Is it okay for me to lie to them and apologize later? Because as long as you're in office, that is the message that is sent.
I admire the citizens who are taking the time to keep the pressure on. I still hope the AG nails him, so we can get this over with more quickly than a recall election. Adams will never resign in the present context, and misguided progressives, for whom a fraudulent election doesn't seem to be an issue, encourage him to stay on.
Does any city in the country have LESS "Obama spirit" than Portland?
No comments:
Post a Comment