On Tuesday night, the Overlook neighborhood overwhelmingly voted against renaming Interstate Boulevard for César E. Chávez. Tonight, the Arbor Lodge neighborhood is holding a meeting to decide whether or not to support the proposal (6:30 tonight, Chief Joseph Elementary School Library, 2409 N Saratoga).

I fielded a late night phone call from Bill Mildenberger Jr., manager of the Nite Hawk Cafe & Lounge on Interstate, who wanted to report that he’d spent the afternoon handing out a thousand flyers about tonight’s meeting. Mildenberger thinks a ‘no’ vote from Arbor Lodge—coupled with the strong ‘no’ vote from Overlook—would in turn cause New Seasons, one of Interstate’s most prominant businesses, to decline to support the proposal.

In the comments to my write-up of Tuesday night’s meeting, someone asked why neighbors are so passionately against the idea to rename Interstate. I got the sense from Tuesday’s meeting that neighbors were most angry that the idea was being “shoved down our throats,” as one resident put it. The Chávez committee didn’t follow the city’s official process—which an Overlook neighbor asked them about. “There’s a lot of people still upset about Rosa Parks Way because it broke the process,” the neighbor said.

Chávez Committee member Sonny Montes gave an answer that made the crowd groan: “What [the city wants] to do now is to treat us differently from the other groups, and we said that’s not fair.” In other words, the Chávez Committee saw the rushed Rosa Parks Way name change ushered in with Commissioner Dan Saltzman’s help—to the chagrin of the neighborhood—and they want the same speedy, direct service. While that’s understandable, it’s also politically naive—the Chávez Committee would have been smarter (and possibly more successful) had they taken the high road, and followed a process that’s in place to ensure community support.

Will, another one of our commenters, summed up why the neighborhood is upset, and how following the proper process might have alleviated that:

Let’s run it down again:

Street name changes impact peoples’ lives. City Code (Chapter 17.93) recognizes that. That process is in place to avoid the lingering bitterness we’re STILL hearing in North Portland about the change of Union Avenue in 1989, much less Rosa Parks Way last year.

What’s lost when Council doesn’t follow Code?

- A serious threshold of public interest in the name change — 2,500 signatures from the City at large, or 75 percent of property owners on the street.

- Criteria for what streets may be renamed — streets that are “significant in their own right” cannot be renamed.

- Independent review by a panel of historians, to establish “significance.”

- At least two mailings to property owners, paid for by the applicants.

- Review and at least one public hearing by the Planning Commission.

- And THEN it goes to City Council, for (at least) one more public hearing.

There’s more in the Code. It’s all there for a purpose, and it’s a lot to lose. We lost it in the N Portland Boulevard proceedings, mostly because the public didn’t know it was there. Now we know (thanks, Amy).

That’s just the Code. Note the 70-0 vote in Overlook to support some other honor for Chavez. Had the Chavez Committee come to the neighborhoods without a fixed agenda, we could have worked through this together and found something realistic. As it is there’s been lots of talk but no real dialog. Maybe it can still happen.

It’s easy to trivialize it all when you don’t live in the middle of it.