A forced hand

There was a funny moment in Portland journalism yesterday. It started when the O published (to those who pay) a hot scoop about city commissioner and mayoral candidate Carmen Rubio's scofflaw ways.

Carmen Rubio, a Portland city commissioner and one of the leading candidates for mayor, has racked up more than 150 parking and traffic violations over the last two decades, failing to pay most of them for months or sometimes years, records show....

On at least six occasions, a judge suspended Rubio’s driver’s license after she failed to pay the citation fine or appear in court, including a five-month suspension in 2016 when she was 41 years old and earning more than $100,000 a year as the executive director of a Portland nonprofit.

Multnomah County courts also referred Rubio’s unpaid parking tickets to a collection agency at least 100 times, records indicate. On at least two occasions, her car was impounded and held until she settled scores of citations totaling several thousand dollars.

That was at 12:58 p.m. A fine piece of muck raked up by Shane Dixon Kavanaugh.

At 5:00 p.m., Portland's Jack Ruby, Nigel Jaquiss over at the Willamette Weed, put out a similar tale of malfeasance by another city commissioner and mayoral candidate, Rene Gonzalez.

Starting in 1998, Gonzalez racked up seven speeding tickets in Oregon (one was dismissed); twice had his driving license suspended (in 1998 and 2003); and was cited four times for failure to display current registration on his vehicle.

After being cited for driving while suspended in 2004, Gonzalez wrote to Multnomah County Court judge seeking relief. “I wasn’t aware DMV had suspended my license,” he wrote. “All told, one speeding ticket has resulted in approximately $900 in fines and DMV charges.” The judge denied his motion for relief from failure to appear in court but did reduce his fine.

In 2014, records show, a TriMet fare inspector cited Gonzalez for not having a valid ticket on a MAX train.

Take that! Tit for tat!

What's funny to me was how quickly His Nigelness got his Gonzalez story up. It looks to me as if he had had it pretty well developed but had been waiting for the proper moment to spring it on Gonzalez – a moment calculated to inflict maximum damage. As it turned out, the best old Nigel could do was cancel out the Rubio story; cosí fan tutte and all that. The O forced the Weed to move more quickly than planned, and took a lot of the fun out of it.

Anyway, the disclosure of all the bad acting by Rubio and Gonzalez reminds me of the beginning of the end of the political career of one-time mayoral candidate Jefferson Smith a dozen years ago. It started with a couple of skeletons in his closet but quickly turned into revelations of some much deeper doo. Eileen Brady's campaign was assassinated that same year over much flimsier offenses than those of Smith, Rubio, or Gonzalez. (But the Weed got the Charlie Hales mayoralty it so strongly craved. Which was, predictably, a flop.)

We'll have to wait and see whether Rubio and Gonzalez are on similar disastrous paths. In the meantime, you gotta believe that the nickname Speedy Gonzalez is going to be around for a while.