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The lovely stretch of Southeast Woodward between 75th and 76th

(Steve Duin)

What exactly are we fighting over on Portland's streets?

Combative allusions abound. Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner Steve Novick are, Novick insists, "prepared to be like General Ulysses Grant and keep fighting, not worrying about our losses until we get done."

The city sidewalks, busy sidewalks, are hardly dressed in holiday style along Southeast Powell at 134th Street.

But what's at the heart of this epic battle over the proposed $46 million Portland street fund?

The city's essential infrastructure?

Direct democracy?

The council's legacy of cavalier spending?

Equity for Portland's east side?

The paving percentage, people?

The wartime resolution matters. Because the way the battle is framed in the council's Dec. 17 votes on the $23 million business fee and the $23 million personal income tax will go a long way to determining whether the street-project campaign survives the anticipated referral to voters.

Providing that context for the street fund has not come easily for its proponents. Hales and Novick have generated a level of anti-government backlash that would do the late Don McIntire proud, even as they champion transportation improvements that most voters agree have too long been ignored.

Novick admits he screwed up, and wasted valuable time, by first proposing a relatively flat residential street fee -- capped at $144 -- rather than a progressive income tax that sails over the heads of 45 percent of the city's tax filers.

Where the sidewalk ends ... on Southeast 117th, at the edge of Mill Park Elementary School.

Bending the residential tax toward the city's high-income crowd -- those with an adjusted gross income of $333,000 will pay $900 annually -- has gained traction with liberals who cheerfully throw money at parks, libraries and the Portland School District.

And that has finally allowed Hales and Novick to turn the discussion over street improvements toward safety and east-side equity issues, a more advantageous battleground than the worst of the city's budget choices in recent years.

"The economy depends on (the street fund). People's lives depend on it out here," said Kem Marks, who is legally blind and lives off Southeast 136th and Powell. "We don't have safe ways to cross a street or walk along it. The bus stops out here are pathetic; it's night and day between inner Portland and this part of town. We've never had the infrastructure that a lot of the city has. We started at the bottom, and it's gone downhill from there."

"Hales and Novick are having to do the dirty work that (former Mayor Sam) Adams basically avoided," said David Hampsten, a member of the Bureau of Transportation's Budget Advisory Committee since 2009. "They're the fall guys for something that has to be done."

Novick argues that he and the mayor are determined to finally confront street and sidewalk maintenance problems that Congress ignores -- refusing to raise the gas tax since 1993 -- and that the Portland City Council has been kicking down the road since 1988.

The Portland Business Alliance has refused to come on board. Petroleum lobbyist Paul Romain dismissed negotiations with the business community as "a waste of time," and promised to devote his considerable charm and bankroll to refer both halves of the street-funding plan to the voters.

I'm guessing a majority of the council -- Hales, Novick and Amanda Fritz -- will adopt the business fee on Dec. 17 and dare Romain to gather signatures.

It would be a provocative display of diplomacy if the same trio then elected to refer the personal income tax to the voters in 2016, placing the issue on the same ballot in which all three likely run for re-election.

But however the battle is framed, Hales and Novick appear resolved to fight through to the end. "I give them credit: This is something they've staked their careers on," Kem Marks says.

"They've chosen this hill to die on."



-- Steve Duin