Eugene Weekly : 06.15.06

Public Eye

A hike with City Councilor Bonny Bettman

STORY BY KERA ABRAHAM • PHOTOS BY TODD COOPER

It's not yet 10 am on a Wednesday, and the air at Mount Pisgah has that classic late-spring crispness: slightly overcast but not threatening rain. Perfect for a hike.

Bonny Bettman's ready to go in khaki pants and muddy boots, her long brown hair loosely framing her narrow face. Sunglasses obscure her eyes, but her smile, when it comes, is bright and wide. She wears no makeup, no jewelry; her fingernails are manicured.

She comes to Pisgah when her job gets stressful — which is often. After six action-packed years on the Eugene City Council, Bettman, 53, may be the councilor who evokes the most superlatives. She does the most research, asks the most questions, demands the most time from city staff, pushes the most solutions. Judging by letters to The Register-Guard and Eugene Weekly, people either love her or loathe her.

Her constituents in south central Eugene have elected her by a landslide two terms in a row. Local progressives hold her up as a champion for sustainable growth, governmental accountability and environmental sense. Her friends tout her as a level-headed woman of integrity, a devoted mother and a tireless advocate for progressive causes. But to hear her opponents talk, she is none of these things — just an aggressive, nosy politician with an agenda. City managers butt heads with her. Local developers attack her. Council conservatives often roll their eyes when she speaks.

Why has she aroused so much admiration and ire?

Bettman's voice is only lightly salted with a New York accent, a remnant from her childhood on Long Island. When she was 17 she left her parents and their Italian restaurant behind to explore the U.S. She landed in Lane County around 1971.

"It was the rivers and the mountains and the proximity to the ocean that attracted me to this area," Bettman says, now halfway up the summit trail, looking west over the snaking gray Willamette River and the squares of farmland that adjoin it. "You can balance a career and a healthy lifestyle here. It's an extraordinary place to raise children."

She knows; she's brought up two kids in Eugene. In some way or another, her concern for them has motivated everything she's done since her first child was born in 1976.

Bettman's career path has meandered like the trails that crisscross Pisgah. She owned a food concession for more than 13 years, selling pizza at the Saturday Market and the Oregon Country Fair. She worked construction with a women builder's co-op, demolished houses, recycled lumber, planted trees and repaired cars. She's raised horses, goats, chickens and bunnies.

In the early '80s Bettman earned a nursing degree from LCC and, despite an over-supply of nurses at the time, landed a job working the evening shift at McKenzie-Willamette. She was a single mom in debt; life was hectic. She would pick up her 7-year-old son at school, drop him off at her friend's house, then pick him up at the end of her shift at 1:15 am and carry the sleeping boy to bed.

"That was one of the reasons why, when my daughter was born, I stopped working as a nurse," Bettman said. "I had missed a lot of my son's childhood."

She began doing volunteer work, mentoring clients of a prenatal clinic. But volunteers there were in ample supply, and Bettman decided to redirect her efforts to the causes that needed her most — a decision that would jump-start her political career.

She started working with her neighborhood organization in the early '90s, and also enrolled in the UO's planning, public policy and management program. Family responsibilities waylaid her studies, but she kept on with the neighborhood organization, helping recruit City Council candidates in several elections.

Two weeks before the 2000 election filing deadline, Bettman's preferred candidate dropped out, leaving a conservative Republican in the lead. So, reluctant but propelled by a sense of urgency, she announced her candidacy. She won the primary with 56 percent of the Ward 3 vote, joining a City Council dominated by conservative thinking and led by Mayor Jim Torrey.

Soon after Bettman took office, the council redistricted Eugene — perhaps in hopes of preventing a progressive council majority. The move relegated Bettman to Ward 1 for the 2004 elections. Her leading opponent, investor Tom Slocum, ran an aggressive negative campaign with support from local conservatives with deep pockets. But Bettman swept up the 2004 primaries with two-thirds of the Ward 1 vote.

That unwavering support from her constituents reinforces Bettman in her moments of doubt. "A lot of people believe in my work; otherwise I wouldn't be here," she says.

Eugene city councilors don't have it easy. They do their work with no office, no staff, and next to no pay. But they serve a critical function as the only check to a city manager who, under Eugene law, wields more power than the mayor. It's an undemocratic system that undermines the role of elected officials, in Bettman's view.

"Unless you're just there to rubber-stamp, it takes a lot of independent initiative to accomplish anything at all," she says. "I've been willing to go there."

Bettman has become a passionate advocate for progressive land use planning, alternative transportation and budgetary restraint. As a member of the Police Commission, she's leading the charge to install an independent auditor to oversee the city cops. On the Metropolitan Policy Committee, she's opposed the West Eugene Parkway and offered alternative solutions. She led the council to reject the PATRIOT Act and supported the successful push to rename Centennial as Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. She worked to bankroll the public library with the general fund (rather than a new levy) and end taxpayer support for the self-sufficient Eugene airport. "I'm here to save the taxpayers money and provide a check to the administration," she says.

In her crusade to bring accountability to city government, Bettman has repeatedly chafed against City Manager Dennis Taylor and Assistant City Manager Jim Carlson, criticizing them as driven by a conservative agenda and disrespectful of progressive councilors. "I would rather have been heaping praise," she says, "but the things I've said about the city manager were honest and needed to be said."

Her work as a nurse in the intensive care unit gave her a toughness that has become her trademark. "Facing the pressure of a hostile city manager is nothing compared to facing a 28-year-old man with a wife and two children whose heart is failing," she says, barely breaking a sweat as she starts up the steepest part of the trail. "You have to put politics in the perspective of real life."

Tough talk and unapologetic actions have made Bettman some powerful enemies. First there was the empty threat to recall Bettman in 2001. Then there was the PR attack by the Gang of 9, a group of powerful local conservatives led by Arlie & Company's John Musumeci. A series of Gang-sponsored cartoons ran as ads in The Register-Guard in 2001, depicting Bettman as a thuggish character, lanky and slouching, bent on an evil mission to destroy developers' profits and regulate local industries to death.

Bettman's progressive colleagues on the City Council have also been targets for attack, but local conservatives haven't torn into them to the same degree that they have Bettman. "Bonny questions things instead of letting them slide through," explains fellow councilor Betty Taylor, who has served with Bettman since 2000. "That irritates the people with the money, who are threatened by anything that seems to interfere with their agenda. They want to win without any argument."

In 2003, a majority-conservative council denied Bettman her rightful turn as council vice president, instead voting Torrey's protégé Nancy Nathanson into the post. Bettman finally assumed the council presidency in 2004.

Lauri Segel of Friends of Eugene and the land-use nonprofit Goal One Coalition has observed the attacks on Bettman with increasing dismay. "I think Bonny is treated in a sexist way," she says. "When a man stands up for what he believes in and is tenacious about it, he doesn't receive the level of criticism and finger-pointing that Bonny has experienced."

Recently, Bettman took Carlson to task for emailing a two-word insult about her return to Eugene from a lobbying trip to D.C.: "She's Baaack." The assistant city manager was comparing Bettman to the ghosts in Poltergeist: II. Bettman saw the email as not just a minor barb, but as a metaphor for the lack of respect that city managers have for progressive elected officials. With her official complaint came a flurry of letters to the R-G, suggesting that she was overreacting.

"It just seems like one thing flares up after another," says Bettman, now at Pisgah's summit. "I try so hard to put those things behind me. I keep my focus on the possibilities we have to move forward."

She takes a deep breath and surveys the 360 degree view: the snow-topped Three Sisters on the eastern horizon, bucolic Creswell to the south, farms morphing into city to the west. "This is how I keep my focus on the bigger picture," she says.

Bettman explains that personal attacks have a paradoxical effect on her. Rather than silencing her through pain or humiliation, they only strengthen her resolve to get things done. "My work would be easy and I would get much better press if I was willing to 'go along to get along,'" she said. "When you question the status quo and aren't willing to back down in the face of withering criticism and intimidation, you're sure to take some heat. But disenfranchising me as a city councilor is disenfranchising those Eugene residents whom I represent."

It is, after all, her constituents, family and friends who remind Bettman why her work matters. She draws her strength from them, as she does from her children and from nature. Every Sunday she hikes Pisgah with "the Gang of 6" — her tongue-in-cheek name for a group of close women friends.

Local teacher Nancy Gabriel is part of that gang. She describes Bettman as a woman of uncompromising integrity, highly sensitive but always unflinchingly honest. "She has the personal strength to be able to take action on the things she believes in, and she's passionate about her beliefs," Gabriel says. "She understands herself because she takes the time to breathe."

Asked how Bettman deals with criticism, Gabriel thinks about her friend hiking Pisgah. "She's the kind of person who starts out slow, but she gains steam as she goes up the hill," she says. "When she reaches the top she's proud of herself, but that's just the beginning. She has an ongoing strength."