As you've no doubt already seen, I wrote in Hall Monitor this week about the deals behind the deal that led to the Sellwood Bridge rebuild moving forward. In fact, the city council on Wednesday officially approved Portland's promise to spend $100 million (plus interest) on the $330 million project.
Well, Anna Griffin of the Oregonian also wrote a column about the political backstory. I linked to it in this post, written after the meeting, where I noticed commissioners were unusually boosterish in their comments about the deal, and about Mayor Sam Adams. It turns out Griffin's column was the reason why.
The column pretty harshly took Adams to task for his role in the contretemps over the bridge. But it also included this interesting claim, citing anonymous sources: That Amanda Fritz, Nick Fish and Dan Saltzman approached Adams and threatened to go around him with their own three-vote majority.
Last night, Amanda Fritz posted a fairly scathing response on her personal blog. She used words like "making up stories that aren't true," but noted the Oregonian is sticking by Griffin's sources.
I said a word nobody whose mother raised them right should ever say (sorry, Mum). When you work really, really hard to communicate and work with your colleagues in an adult, professional, and collaborative manner, and then someone asserts in the newspaper that you did exactly the opposite, it's more than a little annoying. Perhaps I was supposed to feel grateful that I was assigned a here-I-come-to-save-the-day role in the narrative. But that's not what happened.
It is clear The Oregonian's editors and writers don't like Mayor Adams. That is no excuse for making up stories that aren't true, or believing unfounded allegations by people with other political agendas, without checking with those most directly involved. At no time before publishing the column did Ms. Griffin contact me or my staff.
I'd heard grumblings from others, privately, about the column. My first thought is that everyone was circling the wagon in a council that likes to tout its unity, even when it's not quite always there. But Fritz isn't known for playing games, either. I've got calls in to Fritz's office and Griffin to find out more about this very public response to an opinion column.
Read Fritz's full blog post after the jump.