Mama, don't let your boys grow up to be congressional pages.

[October 4th, 2006] While some city commissioners circulated their wish lists for an unexpected $19 million surplus (see "Son of a BIT," WW, Sept. 27, 2006), one commish, Randy Leonard, is steaming that he had to learn of the surplus from WW's story. "There was an intentional delay of this information being released from the mayor's office," Leonard told Murmurs. "You combine it with the mayor's talking publicly about his unhappiness with our current form of government and it looks to me like an increasing disrespect from the mayor and the mayor's office for the rest of the council." Potter's office responded by producing a July memo that forecast a surplus, but Leonard said those numbers were preliminary.

Part of the hard feelings between Leonard and Potter stem from Leonard's insistence on an independent audit of a Portland Development Commission sale of property located at 209 SW Oak St. (see "A Suite Deal," WW, June 14, 2006). To justify that transaction, PDC used an appraisal oddly showing a value of negative $2.7 million for the property for which it had earlier paid $1.2 million. Now Leonard says the outside independent audit, which has not yet been made public, has determined that the actual value of the property is a positive $1.6 million . That finding is unlikely to lower the temperature of City Council debate over PDC's future.

The Derrick Foxworth scandal just keeps on giving. This summer, AFSCME boss James Hester found an internal city email that ticked him off while paging through the city's 1,200-page investigative file about former police chief Foxworth's relationship with civilian desk clerk Angela Oswalt, whom Hester's union represents. And Hester says that email has contributed directly to friction between his union and Potter's office that threatens to undermine City Hall's proposed reforms of the fire and police pension fund. So what was it? Hester says that in fall 2005, he began requesting information about plans to return injured police officers to desk positions but got no answers. Then he found a February 2006 email in the Foxworth file from mayoral aide Austin Raglione acknowledging Hester might be "out of the loop," but said that was "more [AFSCME's] responsibility than ours." Raglione now says any communication problems have been solved.

The son of Portland federal Judge Owen Panner Sr. is facing federal charges of possessing child pornography and sexual exploitation of a child . On Sept. 8, FBI agents in southern Oregon arrested Owen "Sandy" Panner Jr., a 59-year-old doctor who surrendered his medical license to California authorities last May after pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges of secretly videotaping female patients during pelvic exams (see Murmurs, WW, Aug. 31, 2005). The U.S. Attorney's Office in Sacramento tells Murmurs that Panner pleaded not guilty when he was arraigned Sept. 22 on the new felony charges. Panner's sentence for the earlier misdemeanors was 60 days in jail.

From the things-you-never-thought-you'd-read-in-a-government-report department: A recent state Department of Justice report on organized crime in Oregon reveals there's a white supremacist prison gang named the "International Peckerwood Syndicate." We can't tell you more, since prison officials don't like to talk about individual gangs, and the Peckerwoods have absolutely no Web presence. Get a Wikipedia entry, guys!

WEB ONLY MURMURS:

Portland taxi regulators have slashed the penalties they levied against Green Cab for numerous safety violations from $62,860 to $33,000. The city nearly halved those fines Sept. 18. Among the fines reduced or withdrawn: The city shaved $3,000 off a penalty for drivers not keeping track of hours worked or trips driven as required by city law. That reduction comes on the heels of a city effort to curb overwork behind the wheel after a driver who'd logged more than 18 straight hours caused a fatal wreck in 2005 (see "Taxi No Evil," WW, Aug. 30, 2006). After the reductions, Green withdrew its appeal of the fines.

Some might say Multnomah County Counsel Agnes Sowle works for people who are out of their gourds, but few know she actually works with gourds. Sowle's Native American masks are being featured in a show opening this week at Bonnie Kahn's Wild West Gallery on Northwest 23rd Avenue. "The masks are where my crazy side comes out," says Sowle, who adds with a chuckle, "but I don't have much of a crazy side." Other examples of her intricate vessels can be found at sowleart.com.

The World Can't Wait...again. The national organization under that same name, which formed out of the Revolutionary Communist Party in 2005, is again calling for "mass resistance" in the form of a general strike from work and school Thursday, Oct. 5. Portlanders may remember last year's "mass demonstration" by the same group of relentlessly earnest activists as a poorly organized, sparsely attended event in Pioneer Courthouse Square. This year's gathering has moved to the South Park Blocks, where people are invited to gather for a few hours beginning at "high noon" to show they're mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Their demands: "that our leaders either make great strides to repair the great damage they have done to other nations and to our own, or otherwise step down and get out." It's going to be historic...maybe.