Category: Portland, Oregon Local News

A staffer in Multnomah County Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards’ office who ran a controversial political action committee that often skewered county leadership has been fired.

Vikki Payne, a communications and project manager who worked for Brim-Edwards since she began her term as commissioner in 2023, is no longer employed with the county, a spokesperson confirmed Tuesday. Payne was terminated on August 4.

It’s unclear precisely what issues prompted the firing, but during her tenure at the county, Payne was often more recognizable as a driving force behind a political group than she was for her communications work.

She came under the microscope recently for her leadership role at Future Portland, (formerly called The Portland Party), a political action committee that touts “sensible solutions to improve livability throughout Portland and surrounding communities.” The group is often publicly critical of Portland’s and Multnomah County’s government–the same entity that employed Payne.

Under Payne’s leadership, Future Portland advocated for increased funding for police and prosecutors. The PAC endorsed Nathan Vasquez for district attorney last year, and earlier this year, featured the DA as a key speaker at a fundraising event. The group has also been heavily critical of some of the county’s policies–namely, those of County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson. While Payne was working for Brim-Edwards, Future Portland propped up Brim-Edwards’ proposed legislative policies and statements, while publicly scrutinizing Vega Pederson’s decisions, including a proposal to scale back the budget for the DA’s Office amid budget cuts.

The PAC drew criticism in late May, amid tense budget sessions at Portland City Hall that saw a majority of city councilors move to redirect a planned $2 million increase to the city’s police budget over to the cash-strapped parks bureau. Payne and Future Portland mobilized residents in East Portland, organizing a press conference centered on public safety, primarily to oppose the proposed budget amendment. 

The event drew counter-protesters, and critics noted that Payne appeared to be organizing or assisting with the press conference during working hours ahead of the event, which took place at 10 am during a County Board of Commissioners meeting.

Similar to the federal Hatch Act, Oregon has rules that govern political activity of county employees, which don’t allow them to “promote or oppose any political committee or promote or oppose the nomination or election of a candidate, the gathering of signatures on an initiative, referendum or recall petition, the adoption of a measure or the recall of a public office holder while on the job during working hours.”

Bryan Hockaday, Brim-Edwards’ chief of staff, declined to provide details about the circumstances of Payne’s firing, but alluded to her political activity, among other issues.

“There were both performance concerns and concerns about potential conflicts of interest that were raised multiple times with her and ultimately led to [her leaving],” Hockaday told the Mercury, noting the commissioner’s office plans to hire a replacement for the communications position. 

Payne’s annual salary was just under $77,000. She declined to be interviewed for this story.

Prior to being hired for a county job, Payne worked on Brim-Edwards’ 2023 campaign for county commissioner. She also worked on the 2024 Portland City Council campaign for Terrence Hayes, who didn’t win his election but was recently appointed to serve on Portland’s new Police Accountability Board. 

Future Portland, the PAC Payne formerly led, bills itself as a non-partisan organization advocating for government accountability and “pragmatic solutions” to Portland’s and Multnomah County’s problems. In 2023, the group was among those advocating for overturning Measure 110, Oregon’s drug decriminalization law.

While lobbying to overhaul Measure 110 on behalf of a different political group, Payne apparently took to Nextdoor in an attempt to recruit a BIPOC woman to be the face of the effort. 

Willamette Week reported the post solicited a “female person of color to round out their public facing backers/ballot petitioners listed on a ballot measure effort to overturn aspects of Measure 110.” 

Payne has been involved with the Future Portland PAC since its inception in 2022 and disclosed her employment at the county on state filings for the group in 2023. She was listed as Future Portland’s director from 2023 up until this past June. Alan Comnes, who runs an energy consulting company, is now serving in that role.

Whether or not Payne’s involvement with the PAC was a driving force behind her departure, it’s clear the group, and Payne, embraced viewpoints that don’t align with the county’s equity and empowerment efforts. 

During a podcast interview last spring, Payne described Future Portland partly as an effort to reclaim the centrist, or “moderate,” political identity in Portland’s left-leaning political climate. But testimony she submitted to Oregon legislators in 2023 opposing a bill to eliminate the state’s budget surplus tax kicker for individuals sounded more like conservative talking points. Payne accused Oregon of using tax dollars for “fringe programs …that are attracting low to no income people to relocate to Oregon.”

“You wouldn’t need the kicker money if you would turn off the progressive welcome sign to Oregon and instead lobby the federal government to do these social programs….,” Payne stated.

More recently, a racially-charged video from a separate collaborator account was featured on Future Portland’s Instagram page in late May, following the East Portland press conference. In the video, Andre Miller, a Black activist who serves as a vice chair with the Multnomah County Democrats and chief of staff for City Councilor Angelita Morillo, was criticized in the Future Portland post for his public conduct and accused of “[acting] more like a thug than a public servant.”

Payne isn’t the first person to be ousted by a local elected official’s office in recent months over their public persona and political ideology.

Last month, the Mercury reported that Portland City Councilor Dan Ryan parted ways with local podcaster Andy Chandler after just three days, when Ryan’s team learned that Chandler often espoused anti-trans views and held political views that didn’t align with those of the councilor.

Chandler has also collaborated with Future Portland on several occasions via his podcast and other fundraising and community events. 

For a second, imagine you don’t live here. Deep in the southeastern part of Portland, there’s a dormant volcano. Around this volcano, there’s a massive forested public park (191 acres), with hiking trails, several reservoirs, a dog park, and a disc golf course. Every summer Portlanders huddle around the concrete walkway in the middle of the park and watch gravity-powered homemade cars hurtle down the track, from the top of the volcano to the bottom. Some cars are built for speed—sleek and low to the ground. Far more are built for artistic expression, to get the crowd hooting and hollering. 

Now, you, a person who doesn’t live here, hearing about this for the first time? You probably think it’s a little much. And you’re right. Portland is never beating those charges. It’s a place where a lot of adults are doing energetic, weird, youthful shit. 

This is what attracted David Paulsen—the director of the Portland Adult Soap Box Derby, which ran its 26th annual race this past weekend—to the city in the first place. 

“I was a ward of the state of Idaho,” Paulsen says, “living in group homes and foster care. On my 17th birthday, I ran away to Portland. I was living in a provisional housing program off Hawthorne that unfortunately just closed due to federal funding cuts. In 2000, I wandered by, saw my first derby, and fell in love with it. It was the Portland I was looking for. Spray-painted, booger-welded frames… crazy, fun people being creative and having a fantastic time… I’ve been around ever since.” 

If you’ve never had the pleasure of attending, here’s how the Adult Soapbox Derby works: At the top of Mt. Tabor, near the playground, there’s a large pit area where drivers loll about, putting finishing touches on their vehicles, and talking to passers-by about their creations. If you made your car look like Lightning McQueen—like Max Strand and the Benchmade Knife Company team—you let kids sit in the driver’s seat and get some pictures.

“It took us a couple months to build,” Strand says about their racer. “Spray foam covers an existing frame, and then spray paint over that. Last year, we used the same frame and ran as the Wonder Bread Car from Talladega Nights.”  

At around 10 am, the drivers attend a safety talk from Aaron Foster, another member of the derby board. Then, three at a time, the cars line up at the starting line. Foster, strapped with a megaphone, yells “GRAVITY, START YOUR ENGINES!” Then, three at a time, these cars race down the hill, and after crossing the finish line, get towed back to the top by a friendly truck, sit in the pit for a while, and wait for their number to be called two more times.

For a period between rounds, people can walk up and down the track—but when it’s time to get going, a clutch of megaphone-sporting volunteers rush everyone off so the next cars can start. Some of these vehicles—the smaller, sleeker ones that are lower to the ground—really start to haul ass as they get halfway down the hill. Other carts don’t go as fast, but they content themselves by looking cool, weird, funny, whatever. One car, the fan favorite this year, was a gigantic slice of cheese, populated by drivers dressed as mice. Some of these jokers amuse themselves by blasting startling quantities of water into the crowd.

“We call our entry ‘The Fastest Car’,” says John Dixon, an engineer at Daimler Truck running in his ninth race, “because we took two days to build it. It’s not the fastest on the course, but it’s the fastest built. We normally kill ourselves all summer building [our car], but this one? We were on the waitlist until the last minute, so we just threw it together.” 

Despite “throwing together” their vehicle, it was clearly built with lots of engineering knowledge.

“We used a wood chassis to give it a flexible suspension,” Dixon points out. “Our steering design is really well outfitted for this course. Normal wheels this size have much smaller spindles, but on this course they can’t take the load, so you’ll see them fall over when they start going really fast. Instead, we got heavy duty spindles and rebuilt them with custom rims.” 

As you can probably imagine, not all soapbox racers are created equal.

Richard Beard and Joe Davis have built a representation of a Mercedes G-Wagon that they call “The Wooden G.” They spent the last two months, “but mainly, the last two weeks,” building the car—their first ever entry. Their first run was marred by a slipped axle. 

“It was kind of hitting the brakes a little bit,” Beard says. “That was the first time we went down a long enough hill to know something’s wrong. We had no plans and no measurements… we just went for it, and somehow it just worked out.” 

Casey Wagoner, the driver of the “Muscle Kween”—a “pink Cadillac inspired by gay charisma and strength”—had a rough start. 

“Round one, we had a flat tire and didn’t realize it,” Wagoner notes. “So we got pulled across the finish line by a bicycle. But my Kween looked stunning in the back, so I don’t care. She looked good.” 

Michael Centeno, sporting a big fake-fur hat and a necklace with a bunch of spray foam cigarette butts around his neck, was elated.

“It’s incredible! All this artwork, all these beautiful people, all these races, it’s a lot of fun!” 

His team’s car, “The Croc Pot,” depicts a crocodile busting out of an outhouse in Aurora, Oregon. It’s based on a true story. 

“See, someone bought a crocodile as an exotic pet and their parents didn’t want to let them keep it, so they tossed it in the outhouse,” Centeno recalls. “It grew up, eating whatever it could find, and one day, it got  too big and busted out. Age-old revenge story.” 

Centeno and his team work at Aurora Mills Architectural Salvage, and constructed their car out of materials from the shop. 

“We put it together with a bunch of foam, chicken wire, reclaimed wood, [as well as] reclaimed materials like a horn, baluster, and old school chairs.”

“I’m just a girl with a dream of making a corndog go fast,” says Alex Paget, seen here sitting in the backseat of her car, a tribute to one of Oregon’s most famous inventions. “I grew up in the Portland area, and my dad has always wanted to do this. He retired last year, so we started building it.” 

“The event was phenomenal. It was the biggest derby we’ve ever had as far as attendance goes,” says Paulsen, who ballparked the attendance at more than 10,000. “Nobody was injured, a couple of minor crashes… a good time was had by all.”

Paulsen was frank when asked about the biggest challenges of putting on this event: finding money and volunteers. 

“I try to make it clear I don’t run the derby: 300 volunteers run the derby. We just do the steering, the permitting, the fundraising, the organizing. Then, every year Portland shows up. The volunteers, the local businesses… they support us and make this possible. 

“On the surface, it seems like it would be an impossible pitch. You tell a city you’re gonna run an artsy kind of X Games that’s going to be free to attend, and completely run by volunteers—I don’t think you’d find many people who’d invest in that. And yet, every year hundreds of people invest their time and energy, local businesses invest their beer and their wine, and our other partners who are helping with merch and posters, they give in-kind donations. And somehow we just keep managing to put it together. It’s pretty amazing.”

Even the most dyed-in-the-wool Portland music historian can be forgiven for letting Zipper slip through the cracks. After all, there’s so much of Fred Cole’s music to keep track of (and thank goodness for that!)—from the 1960s psychedelia of the Weeds and the Lollipop Shoppe, to the glorious, shambling rock he made with wife Toody in the bands Dead Moon and Pierced Arrows up through the end of Cole’s life in 2017. The Portland DIY legend’s musical DNA is all over this city’s garage, punk, and rock ’n’ roll bloodstreams.

Yet there is a slab of heavy-truckin’, boogie-ready, fret-shrieking hard rock that’s unlike anything else he ever made. It’s simultaneously one of the most mainstream things Cole attempted and the foundational starting point of his no-compromises DIY ethic. 

Zipper, the only record released by the eponymous band, turns 50 this year—and in a cooler alternate universe, you could easily imagine these jams blasting out of a Camaro 8-track or the four-piece band headlining the Pontiac Silverdome. 

But Zipper is a little too raw, a little too fiery and fierce, a little too real to have displaced Grand Funk Railroad or Black Oak Arkansas from any FM rock rotations.

Zipper formed in the early ’70s, sometime after Fred and Toody’s attempt at homesteading in the Yukon for a year. Upon the couple’s return to Portland, they opened a music instrument store called Captain Whizeagle’s, providing a new hangout spot for local musicians. 

Within the scene, Cole teamed up with guitarist Jim Roos, bassist Greg Shadoan, and drummer Lorry Erck, forming Zipper with Cole’s lyrics and concepts at the fore. The band functioned as an all-cylinders live unit, with Roos’s guitar capitalizing on the dominant traits of ’70s shag-carpet rock. Cole, too, attempts to replicate the banshee shriek of singers Robert Plant and Ian Gillan—a de rigueur style for all hard rock bands of the era—but doesn’t quite have the voice to pull it off. Instead, he ends up creating the blown-out falsetto that became the hallmark of Dead Moon years later.

The Zipper album is defiantly handmade. Recording locally at Recording Associates, 500 copies were pressed up on Cole’s invented Whizeagle Records label, with the band spending long hours assembling the cardboard jackets with masking tape, ensuring no two copies were identical. 

The sound is raw, loud, and brash, but not necessarily punk. Rather, it’s deliberately libidinous, designed for Friday nights, deafening bars, and sweaty local dances—full of aggression without anger, with one boot on heavy metal’s driveway and another in the front lawn of soulful R&B.

Roos’ riffs are king here, providing the rocket fuel for Cole’s inflammable melodies. “Let It Freeze” amps up the hook of the Beatles’ “Come Together” into a bluesy, ominous stew, while “Born Yesterday” is second cousin to the Stooges, featuring hatchet-simple power chords and a trash-rock veneer. “Bullets,” meanwhile, is full of borderline-gross innuendo (the “bullets” are sperm, y’see?) that’s almost dumb enough to circle back around to being clever again. “The Same Old Song” and “Worry Kills a Woman” are gentler, even if the lyrics don’t quite rise to the level of being enlightened—it was the ’70s, after all. But those two tracks in particular showcase Cole’s undeniable sense of song structure, with R&B bones poking out beneath the fuzzy guitars.

And then there’s “Face of Stone,” the album’s relative epic, and the Zipper track that most clearly opens a window onto the Fred Cole we’ve come to know. Starting with a horror-movie guitar arpeggio, it’s slow, creeping, and full of dread, with an impressionistic story told in iron-gray tones. At the song’s end, it leaps into double time, providing release but no real relief. If it’s far more self-consciously dramatic than the no-frills pow of Dead Moon, it also feels like the Zipper song where Cole is least influenced by ’70s hard-rock tropes.

Zipper eventually folded, with Fred and Toody becoming inspired by the punk movement to form the Rats, and, later, Dead Moon and Pierced Arrows. The album has been re-released several times, appended with extra tunes from Zipper’s aborted second album, although it appears to be out of print again. 

Perhaps the album’s 50th birthday is a golden opportunity for Zipper to hit fresh ears: It’s a kind of Rosetta Stone of Northwest music, uncovering the connective tissue from the spooky psych of the Weeds and the Lollipop Shoppe, to the garage-punk style that Fred and Toody Cole embodied.

Related: Fred Cole passed from this temporal plane in 2017. If he was still with us, he would be turning 77 on August 28. In celebration of the legendary rocker’s life, Toody Cole, Los Hackals, and the Reverberations are throwing a bash at Crystal Ballroom, more info here.

The Mercury provides news and fun every single day—but your help is essential. If you believe Portland benefits from smart, local journalism and arts coverage, please consider making a small monthly contribution, because without you, there is no us. Thanks for your support! 

Good morning, Portland! The weather is going to be nice today, with temperatures projected to top out at around 80 degrees. But don’t get too comfortable. By Friday, things will not be so pleasant, and we might hit 100 degrees on Saturday. I am, personally, not a fan. But there’s not much I can do, is there? (Except try to get more people to give a shit about the climate crisis, which I am constantly attempting to do.)

Anyway, let’s hear about some news.

IN LOCAL NEWS:

• Here’s some good news ahead of the upcoming heat wave: The Willamette River is safe to swim in again. This update follows last week’s advisory about a toxic algal bloom, issued first by local advocacy group Human Access Project and, after some lagging, the Oregon Health Authority. Apparently, last weekend’s rain did its magic (as rain is wont to do…that glorious substance from the sky), helping break up the algal bloom. So, you are free to embrace our beautiful river without worry, at least for the time being. However, please don’t bring your dogs to the river. Dogs are super sensitive to the toxic algae and exposure can be fatal. (I assume this is the case for cats, too. But if you’re considering bringing your cat to go swimming in the Willamette River, you live a life I could never dream of understanding, and I frankly don’t feel qualified to give you advice about anything.) 

• The Portland Central City Task Force’s tax advisory group, a 10-person committee convened by Governor Tina Kotek in 2023, wants Portland to overhaul its current taxes. The group, which includes representatives from the Portland Metro Chamber and semiconductor company Ampere, recently released a set of recommendations for city and county tax reforms. And, honestly? They made some pretty decent points. 

I’m joking. While a couple of the suggestions are…okay, I guess (like a proposal to “improve fiscal transparency with forecasts, dashboards, and plain-language reporting”), most are very questionable, some are so ridiculous I think they might be pulling a prank on us all. An example from the latter group is the proposal to replace the 1 percent gross receipts tax that funds the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund (PCEF) with a “broader, consumption-based revenue tool,” which the advisory group thinks is “more stable and economically neutral.” Here’s some plain-language reporting: They’re talking about replacing a tax on big businesses (you’re only required to pay the PCEF tax if you report an annual gross income of $1 billion or more) with a sales tax on consumers. Apparently, our city and state governments ought to show a little more respect for H&M and Target than they do for the people who live here. 

The entire report of suggestions may be based on a false premise, which is that wealthy Portlanders are truly leaving the city due to high taxes. This idea has been taken for granted by many local politicians and unquestioning news reports, but it is far from a universally accepted truth. (Click here for more on that. Or here.) Please also keep in mind that Donald Trump and his worthless cronies in Congress recently passed a massive tax break for rich people nationwide, which is already set to gut many of the country’s most important social programs. Also, take heed that the people who wrote the report said it contained “policy options—not prescriptions” for us to consider. We don’t have to (and God willing, we won’t) adopt any of these proposals. So—my rant aside—let’s not give them more power than they actually have. 

• About the upcoming special session in the Oregon Legislature: 

Co-Vice Chair of Joint Interim Committee on Transportation Funding is Christine Drazan, the House GOP leader who thinks the Oregon Bike Bill should be repealed, doesn’t think ODOT needs any more funding, and says that cycling, walking, and transit are not “core functions” of ODOT. Cool.

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— Jonathan Maus (@jonathanmaus.bsky.social) August 18, 2025 at 4:08 PM

• There looks to be a major media merger underway between two broadcasting big-timers, which happen to own two of Portland’s TV new channels. Nexstar Media Group (which owns KOIN, among 200 other stations) is purchasing the slightly smaller Tegna, which owns Portland’s KGW. Given the lax regulatory environment the Trump administration has created for media mergers (especially if you butter him up by firing Stephen Colbert, for example), Nexstar leaders seem optimistic about the sale. While Tegna and KGW may not treat its employees much better, I would be remiss not to mention that KOIN TV employees have long alleged truly outrageous union-busting tactics from their management at Nexstar. And the more news companies consolidate, the worse off we all are, as shown by the ongoing catastrophe at the Oregon publications owned by Pamplin and EO Media Group, reported on our Abe Asher earlier this week. 

IN NATIONAL/WORLD NEWS: 

• Washington, DC’s streets are empty—and not because people are scared of supposed criminal sprees. They’re afraid of the federal cops and ICE agents currently patrolling the streets to terrorize the area’s residents. And they’re right to be scared. Almost 2,000 National Guard troops are now deployed in DC, including more than 1,000 recently sent from six Republican states, their governments apparently keen to kick off a second American Civil War. It’s no wonder businesses are shutting down, especially those owned by people from Latin America, who are at higher risk of being targeted by immigration officials, often violently and cruelly. Trump is, of course, claiming the deployment has been a major success.

Even ostensibly skeptical reporting from AP News gives Trump’s claims of reduced crime in DC far too much credit, allowing that “the number of crimes reported in DC did drop by about 8 percent this week as compared to the week before,” though they allow that “a week is a small sample size.” Yes, people are probably less likely to report crimes when 1) their local police agency has been forcibly taken over by the feds, who might deport them or their neighbors for calling the cops and 2) they’re not going outside because extreme law enforcement presence has made their city hostile to exist in. Not to mention, crime reports fluctuate regularly, AND by all (trusted) accounts, crime rates were falling in Washington, DC before this whole disaster. Please, dear media colleagues, let’s put on our thinking caps and stop giving fascists a millimeter. 

The National Hurricane Center is urging beachgoers to stay out of the water. Parts of North Carolina’s Outer Banks are under mandatory evacuation orders. n.pr/3UD9V0b

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— NPR (@npr.org) August 20, 2025 at 8:55 AM

• Ummm…people in 13 states may currently have radioactive shrimp in their freezer. Walmart recalled bags of raw, frozen shrimp after federal health officials found it may be contaminated with a radioactive chemical. Apparently, the radioactive substance (Cesium-137) is only a “potential health concern,” and it would seemingly only pose a major problem if you were exposed to it for a long period of time. But there’s something quite disturbing about radioactive shrimp. Oregon is not one of the 13 states currently on the recall list, so you’ll probably be ok if you’re still hungry for some frozen Walmart shrimp. (But…are you?)

• Trump wants to whitewash and change history (AKA purge the “wokeness”) at museums across the country, starting with the Smithsonian in DC but potentially expanding to other institutions. Guys…I really don’t like where we’re headed with all of this……….😭😭😭😭😭😭

• We need baby animal videos now more than ever. Please watch this. And have a good day.