We believe that Portland is a unique city, set to lead the country and the world in modeling innovation and livability. While Jim Francesconi offers the prospect of an efficient transfer of power, since he is already intimately involved in the running of city government, on the whole it's not clear to us that he can move Portland forward to benefit the whole city.

Which isn't to say that we reject Jim outright. On parks he's done an admirable job and earned the endorsement of Mike Houck whose opinion we respect immensely. However, in regularly strolling Laurelhurst Park we are aware of long stretches of time during which the bathrooms there have been without seats, and where benches are left broken for extended periods of time.

In our interview, Jim talked about bringing Columbia Sportswear back to the city instead of Home Depot, and he could probably do it. It's a little scary to hear Tom Potter's plan to go to other states to lure in new businesses. Portland has over 40,000 businesses and they should be a focus of the next mayor. On the other hand we've seen Tom Potter attend small business association meetings and listen to their needs. He has vowed to create a business liaison to the mayor and initiate a forum by February to hear from local business leaders. Both candidates expressed interest in supporting the Sustainable Business Network of Portland (SBNP) “Think Local First” campaign.

Jim Francesconi has attended neighborhood events like the Kerns National Night Out picnic and the HAND tomato festival for years. His natural gregariousness makes him attractive compared to what we perceive as Tom Potter's more reserved attitude. However, our sense has been that Jim is first and foremost a deal maker and that his friendliness comes with strings attached. It seems like his early comment to Commissioner Leonard about remembering who endorsed him early is an indicator of too much politics. Tom Potter spoke eloquently of the role of neighborhood associations. Hearkening back to an earlier period where neighborhood associations were seen as community builders, rather than mere conduits for information between the government and its citizens.

Tom has earned strong Kudos from neighborhood leaders like Frank Dixon who said “As a neighborhood association President and District Coalition Chair, I worked with Captain and later Chief Tom Potter as community policing was introduced in Portland. Tom has always demonstrated a deeply held conviction in community problem solving and a dislike for "top to bottom" authoritarian management.”

Tom Potter offers the prospect of a return to the days of Bud Clark's tenure as Mayor. Tom is open to new ideas, like the use of open source software (OSS) by the city. Tom's been using OSS software to run his website because the campaign is “run on a shoestring”. He also noted that citizens would like to believe that the City itself could exercise some financial restraints as well.

Given that Portland is a world wide hub of OSS activity it was reassuring that both candidates could identity Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system and current Portland resident. It was Tom Potter however who had actually had Linux installed on his laptop and tried it out.

Of course, the opinions of our readers has been important too. As of the writing of this article, our News4Neighbors poll has Tom Potter leading with 70% compared with Jim Francesconi's 17% which just barely beats out “neither” which registers 12%. Granted, only a small percentage of our readers participated, but still the spread is significant to us.

While it seems to us that both candidates are good options for Portland, we believe that Tom Potter has the better chance of working together with Portland citizens to shine as the best city in the world.