Citizen Smith

BACKSTORY: For this guy, civic involvement is second job

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, Feb 20, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (10 Reader comments)

JIM CLARK / PORTLAND TRIBUNE

By day, Chris Smith works as a techie with Xerox Corp. He fills the rest of his time doing Metro committee work, working on his transportation issues blog, serving on the board of Portland Streetcar Inc., chairing a streetcar advisory committee and riding the streetcar itself.

It’s getting dark outside. And it’s getting mundane inside. A dozen people are sitting around a conference table, on the second floor of Metro headquarters on Northeast Grand Avenue. Another dozen or so fill chairs around the room. It’s 5:30 on a Wednesday evening. Most of Portland is just getting off work and heading home, or maybe for an after-work drink.

But here, people are talking — or listening to people talk — about the policy framework of a draft of a regional transportation plan.

And about the proposed timeline for another large study by Metro, the regional government that manages growth in Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties. And about proposed changes to the bylaws of this particular group — the Metro Policy Advisory Committee — so the group actually could scrape up a quorum half the time.

And Portland citizen activist Chris Smith is talking about how lucky he is to be here.

“I’ve always felt it was a power trip that I’m sitting here at the table with the big boys, and Gil is in the back row,” he says to his tablemates, joking and referring to Portland Planning Director Gil Kelley sitting in the audience. A few laughs all around.

It’s not entirely clear how many big boys, or girls, are around this table. Or, at least, it’s not clear that this particular table matters that much — this is, after all, simply an advisory committee to a government agency.

But if one thing is true about Portland civic life in recent years, it is this: If there’s a table — at least a table where wonks are talking about policy frameworks and regional planning and assessing needs for the future and seeking input from stakeholders and blah, blah, blah — Chris Smith is probably at it.

He is Citizen Smith.

He was transportation chairman of the Northwest District Association, a neighborhood group. He is a former board member of the City Club of Portland. He is a current member of the Metro Policy Advisory Committee, chairs the Portland Streetcar Citizens Advisory Committee and serves on the board of Portland Streetcar Inc., the organization that operates the streetcar.

And he is founder of his own transportation issues blog — well-read by the 600 or so people who care deeply about such things — at www.portlandtransport.com.

Sometimes, local leaders say, he seems to be at more local public meetings than the people who are paid to be there.

And just last week, he signed on to another venture — to lead, with former Portland Mayor Bud Clark, the “grass roots” campaign against changing Portland’s city government to allow for a stronger mayor and placing the operations of city bureaus under a city manager who reports to the mayor.

The proposed change to the city charter is on the May 15 ballot.

Making a living, a difference

The 46-year-old Smith — who moved to Portland from Boston in the late 1980s — works slightly less than full time as a Web site technology expert for Xerox Corp. in Wilsonville.

He telecommutes nine out of 10 days, working out of his home on Northwest Pettygrove Street. And he spends much of the rest of his time participating in the processes that define civic Portland.

“I spend 30 hours a week making a living,” he says, “and 30 hours a week making a difference.”

There are a few who would interpret that last part a bit differently than Smith means it. Especially people who disagree with Smith’s often-stated and often-blogged ideas about the issue he’s probably most passionate about — the need for alternative transportation in Portland like the streetcar.

Lewis & Clark College law professor, local blogger and frequent local government skeptic Jack Bogdanski made Smith one of his top 10 most disappointing public figures for 2006.

He was No. 9, right after New York Knicks executive and coach Isiah Thomas and right before Portland Catholic Archbishop John Vlazny.

“Chris Smith, chief apologist for the Portland Streetcar, and living proof that selfless, dedicated citizen activists can really do a lot of damage to a city’s finances,” Bogdanski wrote.

For Bogdanski and others, Smith is one of the most visible embodiments of the wrongheadededness of many leaders in Portland and the region — a wrongheadedness that they say has wasted billions of government dollars on streetcars and light-rail trains that only a small fraction of the population actually uses.

“Chris Smith is an absolute windbag,” says Mel Zucker, founder of the nonprofit Oregon Transportation Institute and a critic of many transit projects. “There is no point in responding to anything Chris Smith says. Because no facts, or no amount of education, will ever divert him from his appointed rounds.”

Smith supporters just laugh at the criticism.

“That crowd has been rebuked by every election Portlanders have had for the last 30 years,” city Commissioner Erik Sten says of the people who criticize Smith and his defense of Portland’s alternative transportation investments.

Sten, who says he has known Smith “it seems like … my whole life,” says of him: “I’m just a huge fan of his. I think Chris is actually doing the work that most Portlanders want done and either don’t have the interest or time to do themselves. It’s a badge of honor he’s drawing fire from the folks who prefer Houston.”

Walker says he’s not anti-car

When he moved to the Portland region for a job at Tektronix Inc. in 1988, Smith figured he’d be here only for a couple of years before he moved back East.

“This place grew on me instead,” he says. “I sort of got it, at a gut level. We had a very different kind of city here.”

After living his first three years in Beaverton — “in the middle of suburbia” — and commuting to the Tektronix plant in Wilsonville every day, Smith moved into Northwest Portland, eventually buying, with his longtime partner, Staci Paley, the house on Pettygrove.

He got active in the Northwest District Association, the neighborhood association for inner Northwest Portland, in the mid-1990s.

As head of the association’s transportation committee, he was an integral part of that group’s opposition to a proposal for several new parking structures in the neighborhood — a proposal that eventually was approved three years ago by the City Council.

In part because of his work in Northwest, Smith’s civic work eventually began focusing on transportation issues — and on transportation alternatives other than car trips.

Smith and Paley now have only one car, since Paley’s 19-year-old son has left for college and her 17-year-old daughter departed for boarding school on the East Coast.

Smith walks, bikes, or uses buses or trains to get most places, he says. He tries to walk 15,000 steps per day, he says, and has a pedometer to count. (He left Northwest Portland at about 3:50 p.m. for that5 p.m. Wednesday meeting across the Willamette River at the Metro building. He rode the streetcar part of the way and walked across the Steel Bridge.)

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