Carmen Rubio Wants Your Vote for Portland Mayor

The question is: will she be trusted to drive to the city commission meetings?

Carmen Rubio wants you to vote for her for Portland mayor in the upcoming November election. In other words, she wants you to trust her in guiding the future of Portland, a city beset by an impressive array of very serious problems. Some might even claim these problems aren’t just troubling, but perhaps nearly insurmountable.  One of the biggest problems facing Portland is crime. I shall get to the subject of crime later on.

Earlier in the month, Shane Kavanaugh, one of the few actual news reporters left on the quietly listing Oregonian, reported that Rubio had a rather egregious number of traffic and parking citations on her record - over 150 of them to be exact - going back nearly two decades. If one does some simple math, that works out to be nearly one citation every seven weeks during that considerable length of time. Perhaps more shocking is the fact that Rubio had a long record of not paying the fines for these citations, as over 100 of these were referred to collection agencies. In the course of receiving these stacks of citations, Rubio also failed to show up to court multiple times, which also led to her license being revoked 6 times. These revelations of misconduct boggles the mind of most people. Personally, I have driven and parked around Portland for three decades. I think I’ve received 3 parking tickets and 1 moving violation. I would imagine that is probably a normal experience for most drivers.

Rubio, being a child of the Portland non-profit bureaucracy prior to becoming a member of the actual bureaucracy in her position as one of Portland’s city commissioners, went to the place where Portland bureaucrats always seem to go in times like these: she played the victim.

You see, citizenry of Portland, Carmen got all of these citations (many of them while she was Executive Director of the Latino Network, a non-profit that reports $30 million per year in gross receipts, where she was making well beyond 6 figures) because she was being unselfish.

Now, this might seem to be a dubious claim, but let’s follow Victim Identity Logic, shall we? I mean, Rubio could be our next mayor, and we should give someone as honorable as her the benefit of the doubt.

Carmen told Shane: “I’ve never hid the fact that in my younger years I put my family financial and career obligations first - and that I learned some hard lessons about when life catches up with you. I now know and try very hard to never put my personal life on the back burner even when times are tough.”

Rubio never explained how racking up tens of thousands of dollars in traffic citations is putting her “family financial and career obligations first,” or how it “put (her) personal life on the back burner.” It actually sounds as if Rubio has “moved on” as she claimed, except that the last citation she received was just two months ago back in July.

Now it is interesting that the local media is suddenly very interested in the driving habits of elected leaders. Willamette Week and Nigel Jaquiss even tried to desperately throw Rene Gonzalez into the citation cauldron by publishing a rather milquetoast hit piece within hours of Kavanaugh’s article, saying Gonzalez was in the same league as Rubio since he had seven speeding tickets between 20 and 26 years ago. Alex Zielinski, the former dubious writer for the slurry of Portland media, the Portland Mercury, claimed that his infractions were during the same period as Rubio’s when they so clearly were not. Rubio racked up all of her citations since 2004. Gonzalez’s last infraction was 2004. Why I say all of this is interesting is because PDX Real had reported years ago that JoAnn Hardesty had received nearly a dozen unpaid parking tickets while she was a city commissioner. The local media ignored this fact, and probably grumbled how we awful for even bringing up such inconsequential nonsense.

After the “young, dumb, and overly unselfish” excuse played out, one would think it would end there. But you would be wrong, because, after all, this is Portland, and we are speaking about our leadership.

After Rubio claimed that she had moved forward from her crazy days of bad parking decisions, it came out that Rubio had been caught hitting a parked car, getting out of her car, and…well, simply walking away as if nothing happened, gleefully trapezing away without a care in the world. Unfortunately for Rubio, but perhaps fortunately for Portland voters and those who love to make fun of The Stupidity of Elected Officials, the car she struck was a Tesla, a vehicle that is surrounded by cameras which apparently record when the vehicle is molested in any way.

What did Rubio do? What could she do? She had to admit fault…

Nope. Not gonna happen folks. You see, once again, Rubio was actually the victim!

Apparently, poor put upon Carmen Rubio was being “exploited” by the evil Tesla owner. As an aside, I would like to state that there are numerous Reddit and X accounts solely committed to speaking to the evils of this electric car and the company’s owner, a person we shall not name due to potentially triggering 2/3’s of Portland’s populace. The Tesla owner dared confront Rubio with an actual note on her car, complaining about the damage and the fact that no information had been left regarding the accident, as is demanded by normal driving decorum.

Apparently, after the incident, the Tesla driver watched the videos and saw who the driver was. When Rubio came to her senses (or probably realized she was busted), she called the Tesla owner who demanded recompense. During the phone call, the driver of the Tesla demanded payment for the damage because she likely didn’t trust Rubio to take the responsibility to get her car fixed due to her questionable driving history, and her past flippant attitude in paying for previous moving violations.

Since Rubio’s claims that she had put all of her past lack of responsibility had been proven false, the reaction in the community was swift. First of all, The Street Trust Action Fund, the anti-car non-profit run by previous mayoral candidate and fellow member of the Goofy Glasses Brigade, Sarah Iannarone, rescinded their endorsement of Rubio. Then, of all places, KGW’s own Pat Dooris delivered a scathing indictment of Rubio’s “dreadful driving record” and the new allegations of Teslagate. Blair Best, KGW’s best reporter, then cornered Rubio prior to a city commissioners meeting to ask her about what had happened in regards to the previous day’s incident.

The interview went like this:

Rubio: So I did what most people do. As soon as I learned that I had dinged the car, I left a note and called immediately and offered to pay or go through insurance. So, I did what most people do in that situation, and that’s the best I could do.

Best: So you left a note?

Rubio: I called. There was a note on the car. I called immediately as soon as I got back to my car and saw the note.

Again, I’m not perfect. I make mistakes, but I put that away, took accountability and resolved all of those things years ago. That was during a different part of my life, that was when things were hard, and I’m moving forward.

When Best tried to redirect Rubio back to the accident, Rubio told her, “I think I’m ready to go now,” and walked away.

There is so much wrong with what Rubio says here. First of all, Rubio openly lies when she first claims that she left a note. When Best asks her to confirm that she had actually left a note, Rubio said she didn’t, that she called the person who owns the Tesla because that person was the one who left the note on her car.

Rubio says not once but twice that she did what most people do. No Carmen, most people leave a note first when they ding a car in a parking lot, rather than not leaving a note and waiting to do the right thing only after being called out on it.

Another issue is that Rubio claims that she “took accountability and resolved (her driving issues) years ago.” This claim is clearly not the case. As I stated previously, her last citation was back in July, less than two months before Kavanaugh at the Oregonian originally reported on her driving record. It appears that she definitely hasn’t taken accountability or changed her ways, since she continues to have issues, as well as the fact that rather than taking actual accountability, Rubio claimed to be a victim of exploitation from the Tesla driver who simply wanted to be made whole by Rubio’s actual lack of responsibility.

It appears that not only did Rubio just show her lack of responsibility or care for the community, but she more than likely broke the law. OR 811.700 states that it is against the law for a driver to “fail to perform the duties of a driver when property is damaged.” When Portland is facing very serious issues around crime, it might be time to elect a leader who recognizes that reducing crime is priority and leads in a way that shows that this is a priority.

Now, there are other aspects about Rubio that we should be carefully considering when we think voting for her that is beyond just her driving record. During Rubio’s “hard times,” she ran the Latino Network making big bucks in an organization whose core values are the education and uplift of members of Portland’s Latino community. In recent years; however, the organization has been more interested in gaining access to Oregon’s multi-billion dollar affordable housing slush fund in order to invest in real estate. Rubio’s mother, Maria Caballero Rubio, has run Centro Cultural for years, which also has itself neck deep in the affordable housing money that seems to only find itself in the hands of certain non-profits. Rubio is also closely aligned with Victoria Lara of Lara Media. Lara has made millions charging the city, county and state governments $300/hour for various consulting gigs, including running city meetings that could be easily run by government employees, who are making in the neighborhood of $100K/year themselves. One has to question whether it would be wise for Portland to hand over the keys to the city to someone whose main purpose seems to align with selling it out to the highest bidder for personal enrichment and power.

But, hey, this is Oregon. Why the Hell not? Everyone else is doing it

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