Murmurs: Dispute Over Stewart Hotel Intensifies

Dispute Over Stewart Hotel Intensifies: In February, tenants in Portland's downtown Stewart Hotel sued their building's owners alleging squalid conditions, which they say became worse when the property management company Westwind LLC went bankrupt in 2017. The tenants also stopped paying rent, since no one came by to collect it anymore. The owners have responded—with a legal action that says because the tenants no longer have a rental agreement, they are squatters, and can be kicked out. Despite Gov. Kate Brown's executive order prohibiting residential evictions during the pandemic, attorneys for Pamela and Leon Drennan say they're within their legal rights to eject the residents. "Her moratorium is on evictions on residential tenancies," says attorney Kimberly Hanks McGair. "This is not a residential tenancy. It's similar to if you have an abandoned house and some squatters move in and just start living there." The residents, some of whom have lived in the building for decades, disagree they're squatters. "I've done nothing wrong. It's cold-blooded," says Wesley Appling, a tenant who's lived in the Stewart since the early 2000s. "They're going to have to literally take me to jail before I leave."

Mingus Mapps Regrets Taking Police Union Donation: Over the weekend, Mingus Mapps, who is challenging City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly in November, called his acceptance of a $15,000 in-kind donation from the Portland police union's political action committee a "mistake" in social media posts. Advocates for police reform point out the union has been an obstacle to police reform. "Accepting this donation was a mistake," Mapps wrote on Twitter. "That's why I returned it. I have learned some things. And will make different choices in the future." But his campaign then acknowledged Mapps got his facts wrong while making his apology—he had not returned the donation or rejected the union's endorsement. He had instead returned some matching funds to the city's public financing program. His campaign says he regrets misspeaking. "The past few weeks have been intense for Black Portlanders," says Mapps' campaign manager, Bob Dobrich. "Like all Black men, Mingus is outraged. He is raising two Black sons and knows he could have been the guy lying facedown. In fact, he has been. Mingus regrets the error."

Movement on Terry Bean Trial: COVID-19 has delayed most court proceedings, but Portland real estate magnate and LGBTQ+ pioneer Terry Bean will appear (remotely) in Lane County Circuit Court this week for pre-trial motions on charges he sexually abused a 15-year-old boy in 2014 and committed a related computer crime. (His co-defendant in the sex abuse case, Kiah Lawson, was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison in 2019.) Bean has wide-ranging business interests, and Lane County Judge Charles Zennache last year allowed him to remove an ankle bracelet that Bean said impeded his passage through airports. But Zennache refused to give Bean his passport back. Since then, public records show, Bean took a step to make travel easier: In February, one of his companies bought a 1998 Cessna Citation V, an eight-seat private jet, for an undisclosed sum.

Oregon City Mayor in Double Trouble: The mayor of Oregon City, Dan Holladay, has now managed to distinguish himself from his peers for the second time in three months. As WW reported in April, Holladay first fell afoul of the Oregon Department of Justice when he threatened to allow businesses to reopen in violation of Gov. Kate Brown's stay-home order. Then, last week, Holladay inserted himself into the national conversation over George Floyd's death with social media posts citing bogus statistics about black deaths at the hands of police and by complaining civil protests related to Floyd's death were allowed but Oregon City's July 4 fireworks show was not. At an emergency meeting of the Oregon City Commission on June 7, colleagues decried his behavior and constituents called him an "embarrassment." Holladay declined to comment.