This Just In

[November 8th, 2006] While the good folks of Glendive, Mont., wait for high-school basketball season to break up a Badlands winter, a notorious ex-Portlander is giving the town of 4,700 residents something to talk about.

In news first reported last week by local blogger Jack Bogdanski (bojack.org), former Portland City Council candidate Emilie Boyles, who owes Stumptown $95,000 in public campaign funds—including interest and penalties—has turned to the "last refuge of the vaguely talented": journalism.

Boyles took a position last month as a news announcer at Glendive's KXGN radio station in the nation's smallest Nielsen market.

Last spring, when Boyles was among the candidates challenging Portland City Commissioner Erik Sten, she qualified for $150,000 in public money to run her campaign. But the city auditor ruled she violated campaign-finance laws by misusing money. She installed a phone line in her home, signed a one-year lease on her campaign headquarters (even though her campaign would be shorter than that) and paid her 16-year-old daughter $15,000 for campaign work.

And now City Auditor Gary Blackmer is in the process of working out an arrangement with Boyles so that she can pay the money back.

As for Boyles, she says her new $8-an-hour job is about as important as any gig at McDonald's.

"I do happy community news," Boyles says of her five-minute broadcasts.

But Boyles says she intends to use the money she earns to repay the City of Portland. Blackmer says he's after the same thing. "She turned around and broke the rules," he says. "The consequences are harsh."

It's what Boyles left behind in Portland rather than what brought her to Glendive—where cattle outnumber people six to one—that interests some of her new neighbors in Eastern Montana.

"I know they have a lot of progressive ideas in Oregon," Glendive Mayor Jerry Jimison says of Portland's public financing of political campaigns. "Here in Glendive, if you ran for city council and spent $100, that would be a lot of money."

"News reporter" might not have been Boyles' first-choice job. Glendive City Council member Leon Baker says Boyles also applied for a position as a Glendive police dispatcher, a job that pays $10.42 an hour to start. By applying, Boyles submitted to a police background check, and it was this procedure that Baker at first said brought Boyles' Portland troubles to light.

"That's what I heard," Baker says, noting he might have heard that third- or fourth-hand. "You know how it is in small towns."

The mayor says that's not true. The background check is designed to turn up possible felonies, nothing else. And even though Boyles had no felonies, the job went to another candidate.

But it seems Jimison will be seeing Boyles regularly anyway. The mayor says she was in the audience at Glendive's city council meeting on Oct. 17, when the council discussed, among other things, the possibility of putting in a yield sign on a road near the local hospital and the prospect of raising the city's ambulance rates.

The Glendive Ranger-Review, the city's twice-weekly newspaper, is not writing about Boyles and the trail of campaign woe that followed her to Montana, because she's not a public figure, a reporter there says.

Boyles' nose for news appears to be similarly refined.

"I'm not quite sure what the news is," Boyles says in response to questions about her job in Montana. "I've never been missing. From day one I've been in contact with the appropriate authorities."

She adds: "My response to people is to get a life."