Stalwart After 20 years (actually, almost 21) on the Portland City Council, Cheryl Leeman is still standing -- despite a career of leaning to the right BY ALEX IRVINE

"I never meant to get involved with politics," Cheryl Leeman says. "My background, if you can believe it, is in computers."

This is a startling statement coming from a woman who has political experience ranging from stuffing envelopes for Tom Andrews to field coordination for John McKernan and then McKernan’s wife Olympia Snowe (in Snowe’s campaign against Andrews) to a double dose of the ceremonial Portland mayoralty . . . oh, and then there’s the nearly 21 years of service on the Portland City Council. How can you not mean to do all that?

"You know," she says. "Friends get you into things."

The way Leeman tells it, she was sitting around with a group of neighborhood parents complaining about the Portland schools, and somebody said something to the effect that one of them should do something about it. "Next thing I know," she recalls, eyes widening, "they’re all looking at me!"

She first ran for the school committee in a 1980 special election, losing by 35 votes to Alan Levenson. The next year, Levenson moved into an at-large seat and Leeman won election to his vacated district seat. Then it was on to the city council in 1984, when she ran against popular incumbent Jim Banks — and got her first taste of the Portland old-boy network.

"I had people come up to me and say, quote-unquote, ‘We would like you to consider not running because it’s not your turn,’" she recalls with amazement and a bit of residual anger. (This quote puts into interesting context Jim Cloutier’s remark that Karen Geraghty was elected to succeed Leeman as mayor in 2001 "because it would be, as they say, her turn.")

Leeman won the election and became the fourth woman on the city council, joining Pam Plumb, Linda Abromson, and Esther Clenott. Four years later, in 1988, she started drumming up support among councilors for a mayoral bid. "The first time I was mayor," she recalls now, "it was a 5-4 vote, and it was the men against the women."

Counting on his fingers, your correspondent quickly concluded that one of the men must have crossed the gender line and provided the crucial fifth vote for her candidacy. Who?

"Peter O’Donnell," she says.

Twenty-one years is a long time to do anything, let alone a job like city councilor that turns you into a magnet for petty complaints and vendettas. And for a woman like Cheryl Leeman, who is so forward-directed that she has trouble remembering how old she is (we do the math, and she’ll be 58 pretty soon), it’s kind of hard to look back over all of it. Our conversation consistently returns to the themes of nonpartisan public service and the tumultuous events of her second term as mayor, from June 2000 to December 2001.

But taking a step back and trying to get a big view, what has she accomplished for the city in her years of public service? What was Portland like in 1984?

"There was no city of Portland in 1984," Leeman says flatly. "My God, the Old Port was like the Bowery."

The breaking of the old-boy network, she says — specifically the election of women to the city council — paved the way for the rebirth of Portland as the reasonably vibrant place we all live in today. "You saw a change in the attitude," she says, "a clearer vision that there had to be a change if Portland was going to survive."

All because of four women?

"I suppose it’s pretty bold to say that it was the women," Leeman laughs. But she’s at least half-serious about this proposition. Given a minute to think about it, she says that she and the other women of those council years — Plumb, Abromson, and Clenott — were elected because the people of Portland were sick of living in a dying city. Caught up in a kind of community ferment, Portlanders threw the bums out and started looking for new leadership.

And it worked, in large part because the new leadership, unlike the old, got things done. "What helped us a great deal" in efforts to revitalize the decayed waterfront and Congress Street areas, Leeman says, "were UDAG [Urban Development Action Grant] grants, federal money for urban renewal, which kind of kick-started the revival of Portland." Then, once this federal money was in place, or in Leeman’s words "once you created an environment where there was a different mission" than in previous councils, "community leaders stepped forward."

Here’s a lifelong Republican who works for a Republican senator crediting federal grant money for shocking a moribund Portland back to life. "I’ve always been a Republican," she says, even in the days when she worked on Tom Andrews’ congressional campaign.

And what about that, anyway?

"I could tell that he would stand up for the little guy," she says. "That’s how I am. I always root for the underdog."

On the city council, she now is the underdog, but it’s a role she’s played before. "Every experience you have," she says, "prepares you for the next thing."

There turned out to be several next things immediately before and during Leeman’s second term as mayor: the adoption of curbside recycling, a school funding crisis, the Commtel TIF boondoggle, the sudden death of powerful and popular City Manager Bob Ganley, and of course September 11. If Leeman was a recognized Portland public official before this sequence of challenges, she was something like a local celebrity afterward. She spearheaded the Ocean Gateway project, occasionally bulldozing her fellow councilors to do it; she organized task forces on everything from housing to transportation to elder issues; she was accused of partisanship and of being a cat’s-paw for local business interests; she led City Hall through the uncertain time after Ganley’s death; she got in a very public shootout with Munjoy Hill residents who didn’t want a new housing project in the neighborhood, the fight eventually escalating into lawsuits and a referendum on development in the city; she was temporarily evicted from her office by a pigeon (an event that brought her national publicity); she had her picture taken with Godsmack, Barenaked Ladies, and Rustic Overtones; she navigated the tricky post-9/11 issues surrounding local immigrant communities and the sense of shock among Portlanders that two of the hijackers had stayed here on the night of the 10th; and she came out of it all as the de facto strong mayor Portland hasn’t had since 1923, and may not have again any time soon.