On the streets with OPAL, Portland’s brainy new bus advocates
This is an unusual post for our blog: Instead of highlighting content from around the wiki, it’s a story originally planned for our September print magazine that we couldn’t fit in. Photographer Michael Schoenholtz and I spent an afternoon with OPAL, the environnmental justice group whose opposition to TriMet’s Sept. 1 fare hike and Sept. 5 service cut has been turning heads. Here’s what we found.
It’s Wednesday afternoon, and the future mayor of Woodburn is carrying a clipboard and riding the 4 for a few bucks an hour. As usual.
Orlando Lopez, 21, smiles when the other organizers tease him about his political ambitions. But the calmness in his eyes tells you he’s not joking.
His buddies from Western Oregon University are spending their summers stacking boxes in warehouses or laying tile for their uncles’ businesses. Lopez has spent his scraping by on a stipend in Portland, talking softly with strangers about the fourth bus cut in 12 months and trying to persuade them to care.
“Sometimes they mistake you for a TriMet employee,” Lopez says after his latest target shrugs him off and swings out the back door. “We just tell them, ‘No, we’re just trying to help people.’”
Lopez and a squad of 20 other paid and unpaid bus organizers have spent three months on the 4, the 9, the 20, the 71 and the 72, scribbling phone numbers and trying to build an army. When the group rallies against TriMet’s bus cuts outside City Hall this afternoon, Portland will find out if they did.
“Most folks don’t even know that this is coming,” says Jon Ostar, the 32-year-old adjunct professor at Lewis and Clark Law School who has pulled together $150,000 in grants and donations to pay for OPAL and its bus organizing project. “They’re going to show up at their bus stop early in the morning or late at night at the time they thought it was going to be and no bus is going to show up.”
It’s too late to stop the service cuts or fare hike, Ostar says. Today’s rally is really about the future.
“The next time they try to make cuts to bus-dependent communities,” Ostar says proudly, “we can stop it.”
Can they?
The afternoon is winding down, and Lopez and the other organizers are riding the Green Line back to the office. It’s been a slow day, but the team will spend the evening calling the handful of numbers it just gathered, hurrying to make a second contact with all the new recruits before it’s too late – before the recruits forget about the moment they were briefly convinced to attend a rally about their commute.
While Lopez tries to strike up one last conversation with a woman reading a catalog, Grayce Bentley, another of Ostar’s bus organizing commandos, thinks about the day’s work.
“If you want 100 people to come to your rally, you’ve got to get 200 people to say yes,” she said. “For this it’s more like 300.”
Bentley, 23, was directionless and discouraged when she finished at Portland State University last spring. When she spoke about it at a political event, one of the panelists buttonholed her afterward.
It was Ostar.
“Don’t go to law school,” he told Bentley, handing her his card. “Come work for me.”
She’d never considered community organizing. But she hasn’t looked back.
“I’m right where I need to be,” she said, swaying with the train.
(Our September print magazine, the Scapegoat Issue, tells a few stories of individuals whose choices led to TriMet’s cuts — or could make choices that would fix them. It goes out to subscribers today and is also available for $1.50 at Microcosm and Reading Frenzy.)
Posted by Michael at 8:01 am September 1st, 2010. Like what you see? Get future posts by email.
