Samuel F. Adams is an American politician and the former mayor of Portland, Oregon. He grew up in Newport, Oregon, attended the University of Oregon and worked on a number of campaigns before taking office as a Portland commissioner. Among them was Vera Katz's run for mayor of Portland. After she won, he served as her chief of staff for eleven years and then went back to school, earning a degree in Political Science.
In 2004, he was elected to the Portland City Council, serving four years on the council earning a reputation as a "policy-driven advocate for sustainability, the arts, and gay rights." He was elected to a four-year term as Mayor of Portland in the May 2008 primary, with 58% of the vote and a dozen other candidates on the ballot. He was outed as gay by the alternative newspaper Willamette Week in 1993 and was the first openly gay mayor of a top-30 U.S. city. In July 2011, Adams announced that he would not seek a second term as mayor. He had an approval rating of 56% eight months before he left office.
In 2009, Adams in his inauguration speech said his top three priorities were creating more family-wage jobs, reducing the high school dropout rate, and making Portland more sustainable. Later that year, Adams was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing related to a consensual sexual relationship with a young adult he met in 2005. Adams said the deception about the relationship was warranted because a political opponent had falsely accused him of having sex with a minor, but later apologized. That year he also established a local economic stimulus plan by fast-tracking capital improvement projects, secured a Major League Soccer franchise, began work on the Oregon Sustainability Center established a free-bus-ride program designed to help low-income students more easily get to school, helped secure $2.5 million in new grants designed to help the city reduce diesel emissions, began construction of 15 miles of bike boulevards, and consolidated the city's permitting process.
