With yesterday’s 3-1 vote to begin endorsing the Sit-Lie Ordinance, city council has put the last, disappointing touch on their big, dragged-out letdown.

It put an end to a process that began more than a year ago with the creation of the Street Access For Everyone (SAFE) committee, which came after numerous failed attempts to renew the city’s embattled Sit-Lie law. At the time, it seemed like a stall tactic from Mayor Potter’s office—he didn’t have the votes to extend the law, and sticking homeless activists, the police, and the Portland Business Alliance together was a surefire way to kill some time.

What emerged from the committee, however, should go down as one of the most politically brilliant things the mayor’s office and the PBA have ever done.

And it stinks. Find out why after the jump.

The first task of the committee was tying the Sit-Lie law, which the PBA desperately wanted in place, with the delivery of homeless services, like benches, restrooms, a day access center, etc., and then required that all of the committee's recommendations be unanimous. There'd be no sit-lie law without the PBA giving money to fund the services, and there'd be no money to fund the services if homeless advocates didn't get on board with the sit-lie law.

Effectively, that meant that if homeless advocates wanted to deliver services that the city and county had otherwise refused to fund, they'd have to not only agree to, but champion, a law that they should never have been in a position of advancing--banning people from sitting or lying on the sidewalk.

By doing this, the mayor and the PBA immediately swept the legs out from under the sit-lie ordinance's then-biggest, loudest, and most credible critics, and they did it by luring those critics in with the promise of better amenities for the homeless population. But, of course, homeless advocates couldn't praise the law, since they were diametrically opposed to its principle, so instead, they praised "the process." "The process" of drafting the recommendations was so great, they've testified repeatedly, that they were able to support a law that strips away the rights of the people they've pledged to support. And it's all been done with a smile and a ton of back patting.

Perhaps the biggest coup, though, was hooking Commissioner Erik Sten, council's chief homeless advocate. The mayor dangled funding for a permanent day access center in front of him, in exchange for a yes vote on the ordinance, and Sten bit. This isn't political conjecture--Sten has admitted that he voted yes on the ordinance in order to secure the day access center funding. "Right now, there are already plenty of tools that police officers can use to move homeless along if they want," he told me this past spring. "The Sit-Lie rule doesn't really change anything." Except placate the Portland Business Alliance.

If you really want to get cynical, you could argue that the SAFE committee also attempted to buy off Street Roots, one of the few organizations (along with the Mercury) that's been critical of the process. The street newspaper was given a nice chunk of money to produce a quarterly resource guide for the homeless, directing them to services. Luckily, Israel Bayer and the rest of that team is ballsy enough to still speak out in whatever way they please.

Tying the ordinance to the services also served to frame the debate completely away from the merits of the ordinance itself. The question is no longer "is this the right thing for the City of Portland to do?" It's "how much do we have to pay to get it?" So let's do what council refused to, and stop for a minute to consider the law: It makes it illegal--as in, against the law--to sit or lie on the sidewalk in all of downtown and the Lloyd Center. Without even going into its impact on transitory people, it is on its face a draconian law, which treads all the way to the edge of constitutionality. You don't even need to care about the homeless--that council has so flippantly imposed this law, telling you where you can and can't sit on public space, should enrage you.

Not only that, it but its effect is miles away from the problem it is attempting to solve. If the point of the ordinance is to keep sidewalk traffic moving, and to limit "disorderly" behavior, why wouldn't council enact a law that simply bans blocking sidewalk traffic, whether it's with a body or a sign or a pile of boxes?

The cynical answer is because it's not actually about keeping traffic moving on sidewalks--one little trip downtown can confirm that that isn't currently a problem. Instead, the point was to move "undesirables" out of the retail centers. As if that wasn't obvious, yesterday's testimony by Tim Greve of Carl Greve Jewelers should clinch it. He praised council's support of the law by saying how much it's going to help his business, and the soon-to-open Brooks Brothers store. Blatantly, he wants downtown to be clear of the homeless, so suburban shoppers will be less scared to come to his shop and spend more money. His speech should have made everybody on the SAFE committee--as well as council and everyone in the mayor's office--cringe. They just allowed themselves to be implicated in the fervent belief that downtown should only be for the wealthy.

(As a side note, Greve also thanked Potter and Sam Adams for helping him relocate his business recently--Potter even attended the ceremonial grand reopening of the store on June 22. Potter may have campaigned on a pledge to be a man of the community, but what Portland apparently got was a mayor for the jewelers.)

That's a long way of saying that Potter and the PBA locked in the city council vote a year ago. Yesterday's council hearing, which should have been about the wisdom of enacting the Sit-Lie law, instead became a surreal argument about where to put a restroom. Even Randy Leonard was stuck arguing about the number of people who use the city hall bathrooms over night, and whether a ten-minute wait for a security guard was too long. Nobody could vote no on the ordinance on the principle of civil rights; they'd also be voting no to funding services for the homeless.

In the end, the long, tedious process was enough the justify the product. Slapping back Leonard's last ditch effort to get another restroom opened closer to the downtown homeless population, Dan Saltzman said, "I think that we've reached the milestones for this committee but it's time to accept this report as is, and move on. This committee has labored long and hard but it's time to move on." He used the same rationale to advance the charter reform package earlier this year.

Yes, process in this city can drag on endlessly, but when it comes to shockingly bad policy, "process" should never be enough to get to a yes vote. No matter how much work the committee put in, it's still the duty of city council members to protect the city from bad law.

As I said, the strategy was brilliant. But also? Cynical. Also? Reprehensible.

The Sit-Lie law should be a lasting stain on this city council. When it comes to yuppie policies like recycling and green streets and saving the trees, they trip over themselves trying to out-liberal the rest of council. But when it comes to the civil rights of our city's most vulnerable population, they can't be distinguished from Bill O'Reilly.