Gloves come off in Hardesty race

One of the guys running to unseat Jo Ann Hardesty from the Portland City Council is named Vadim Mozyrsky. He's from Kyiv. He looks kinda wiry. And we all know those folks are fighters.

So perhaps it's no surprise that here in Portland, Mozyrsky has started slugging it out pretty hard with Hardesty's backers and surrogates. He's filed a complaint with the city attorney, alleging that two of his fellow members of the Police Citizen Review Committee have been using the committee to smear him.

Sophie Peel, a reporter at Willamette Weed & Mushroom who's not a big fan of too many white males, tells the story in painful detail:

Specifically, he is taking aim at fellow committee member Shaina Pomerantz, a Black woman, who accused Mozyrsky, who is Jewish, of using “a tone of anti-Blackness” in emails to her and the committee’s chair, Candace Avalos.

Pomerantz did so in a March 2 phone call to Mozyrsky in which she says she told him “the aggression you exhibited towards Candace is both unprofessional and has a tone of anti-Blackness.” In that call, she asked him to resign. (Mozyrsky also recalls her saying that to him and told her he would not resign.)

That evening, Pomerantz, the executive director of Race Talks, an organization that facilitates interracial discussions about social justice, recounted the conversation with Mozyrsky to the larger Citizen Review Committee in a video call, and also said she thought Mozyrsky should resign because he was running a campaign focused on community safety and serving on a committee that helps craft police policy....

Avalos has endorsed Hardesty, whom Mozyrsky is challenging in the May primary. (Pomerantz says she is a friend of Hardesty’s but has not endorsed her reelection bid or contributed to her campaign so as to avoid “the appearance of impropriety.”) 

There's more, but you get the picture. The whole thing is here.

I'm not sure what to make of Mozyrsky. I'm not voting for Hardesty, but he's got some baggage, too. He seems like an insider, or insider wannabe. His website proclaims:

Vadim is active in the Portland community, serving on boards and committees ranging from the Portland Film Festival to the Goose Hollow Neighborhood Association. He has served on several city commissions and committees, institutional advisory boards, and in community-based organizations. 

Currently he is a member of the Portland Committee on Community Engaged Policing and the Citizen Review Committee under the Auditor’s Independent Police Review division. He also serves on the board of directors for the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO) and the Public Safety Action Coalition (PSAC). He is also one of twenty Portlanders who were selected by the City Council to serve on the once-a-decade Charter Commission. Vadim is a national union representative for IFPTE, AFL-CIO & CLC.  

Yuck. In other words, he's sat elbow-to-elbow with so much of the Portland bureaucracy and the nonprofit shadow government that a fair amount of their arrogance and incompetence may have rubbed off on him already.

Oh, well. It's between him and that Rene Gonzalez guy. I see Gonzalez has got a "(D)" next to his name on his web page, which I thought you weren't supposed to do. Anyhow, we still have a couple of months to figure it out.

Meanwhile, the news of the scratch fight between Mozyrsky and Pomerantz was the second time in a week that I heard of her, and of something called "Race Talks." Both were new to me. The first mention was when some "civil rights leaders" squawked loudly about, among other things, the police calling the Normandale Park protest killer a "homeowner," instead of a renter. Pomerantz was a speaker at that press conference. 

So okay, what is "Race Talks"? It's a group that holds "courageous conversations" about race. It has a website, here. Seems noble enough. Most of the people in the photos are white, which is interesting.

But the organization is not a model of regulatory compliance. It's filed articles of incorporation with the state, but apparently it's never filed an annual report with the Oregon Department of Justice, and there's no record I can find of it even having a federal taxpayer identification number, much less being approved by the IRS as a tax-exempt charity. It's been in existence since May of 2017. 

Its website solicits donations, but there is not a single speck of information about its finances anywhere on the internet, at least not that my sleuthing skills can turn up. When business people behave that way, the folks at the Weed call it "dark money."

The "Race Talks" website claims that the organization is represented by the Perkins Coie law firm, but I can't believe that that firm wouldn't advise the group to keep up its paperwork. (Then again, Perkins represented New York Nick.) Anyway, I'll stop there lest I be accused of having "a tone of anti-Blackness." Pass the popcorn while we watch Mozyrsky and the Hardesty camp duke it out.