By Edward Hershey

I joined the City Club of Portland shortly after arriving here 13 years ago. I attended Friday Forum luncheons when I could, dove into scrupulously researched reports and eventually heeded the club's pleas to engage in these and other endeavors. My personal highlights included a year helping to guide a study on bicycle transportation and three more on the committee that produces the forums, the last in 2016 as its chair.

Yet, I will not renew my membership when it lapses this month, joining what seems to be a wave of members heading for the exit. Why? Because at the worst possible time, with mainstream journalism and other sources of impartial information in short supply and under attack, the City Club has abandoned its time-honored approach to weighing public policy issues without bias.

Club leaders will tell you (as they have told me) that much of this is an offshoot of efforts to attract a younger and less white membership. The problem is that in their zeal to advance this worthy goal, the club's board and paid staff have transformed a valued and trusted resource into an advocacy organization. They have frittered away both credibility and influence and rendered the club an ill-equipped advocate for some of the very reforms they -- and I -- hold dear, such as improving economic and social equity, reducing environmental toxicity and holding government accountable.

I can pinpoint the day this downslide began because I was there at a committee meeting in 2014. Sam Adams, hired on as executive director in a soft landing from his one term as Portland's mayor, announced that in the coming year every Friday Forum, all 44, would focus on a single topic: racial equity. The committee chair and several members had been ousted to make room for others hand-picked to advance this new mission.

Several of them worked hard but as the year progressed, more fell away -- perhaps because they had not come up through the ranks as club volunteers had for nearly a century. Attendance at planning meetings dwindled and after a time, luncheons grew sparse, too, probably because even progressives can weary of being preached at week after week.

The final forum that season presaged a more dramatic decline. The forum, entitled "Do We Have to Choose? Clean Air, Good Roads, Smart Choice," was so one-sided that OPB refused to air it. This in turn led the station to re-examine its longstanding partnership with the City Club and terminate it, depriving the Friday Forum of a weekly statewide radio audience of about 20,000 -- 100 times a good luncheon turnout.

Unconstrained by even a pretense of meeting public radio's demand for fairness now, the club turned most forums into badly slanted discussions on behalf of good causes. Even worse, after someone complained about the racial makeup of a committee that produced an authoritative research report on addiction, club leaders pulled the report, so infuriating the chair -- a prominent physician long associated with progressive causes -- that he issued it anyway. Finally, when a group of former club presidents approached the current board seeking to discuss their deviation from its time-honored principles they were rebuffed with one member declaring she would rather City Club disband than change its altered course.

In a letter to members in July one club staffer decried "neutrality," equating it with apathy and characterizing the club's activist approach as "true independence." Good luck with that convoluted view of the decline of this once-treasured Portland institution.

-- Edward Hershey lives in Southeast Portland.