The effort to oust Portland's gay mayor
Sam Adams over a sex scandal has failed – for now, Portland
alternative Willamette Week reported.
The all-volunteer group led by Jasun
Wurster has failed to meet Monday's deadline to hand in the 32,000
valid signatures needed to force a recall of Adams.
But critics of the mayor say they're
ready to mount a second effort.
Adams quickly returned home from
Washington D.C., where he was participating in President Obama's
inauguration festivities, to admit that his long-standing denial of
having a sexual relationship with a teenage boy, Beau Breedlove, was
not true. He confessed to the affair under pressure from a
Willamette Week reporter who confronted the mayor with new
evidence the paper was preparing to publish.
The rumor that he and Breedlove had an
intimate relationship first surfaced during the 2007 mayoral
campaign. Adams' response was to dismiss those reports as a “nasty
smear.”
Adams, 46, has admitted to sleeping
with Breedlove as soon as three weeks after he turned 18 in 2005 and
the two dated for “maybe two months.” The legal age of consent
in Oregon is 18 and opponents of the mayor have suggested the pair
shared an intimate relationship before the former legislative intern
turned legal.
But an official investigation into the
scandal failed to bring charges against Adams. State Attorney
General John Kroger said he could not find credible evidence that the
men slept together when Breedlove was underage.
Still, opponents are rolling out a
second effort. Wurster says his new political action committee
called Portland Future PAC has already gathered over $100,000 in
promises from local business leaders to pay for a new recall
campaign.
“It should be only a week or two to
secure those commitments and get them filed with the state, and get
those checks entered into our bank account,” he told the Gazette
Times. “Then we will launch the new recall.”
The new group is expected to hire
professional signature gatherers this second time around.