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A Flock of Applicants for Friedman's Job

The Eye will never be able to understand why anybody would want the job, but 15 people have applied for the late Bill Friedman's seat

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The Eye will never be able to understand why anybody would want the job, but 15 people have applied for the late Bill Friedman's seat on the Bend City Council.

The presumed front-runners are Jodie Barram, a teacher and vice-chair of the Bend Planning Commission, who lost her bid for Council Position 2 to Jeff Eager in this month's election by about 1,100 votes, and Don Leonard, who also has served on the planning commission and was buried by more than 8,000 votes in his race against incumbent Councilor Jim Clinton.

Leonard got a pile of campaign money from the Central Oregon Association of Realtors and the Central Oregon Builders Association and has the endorsement of The Bulletin, whose main beef against Barram is that she signed the Infrastructure First initiative, "which (quoting The Bulletin) is the product of a thinly disguised - and often nasty - campaign to complicate development in Bend."

Horrors - we mustn't have anything complicating development, must we?

If appointed, Leonard would join newly elected Councilors Eager, Kathie Eckman and Tom Greene plus incumbent Mark Capell to give the pro-growth lobby a solid five-vote majority on the seven-member council.

The 13 other hats thrown into the ring belong to:

Rod Cathcart, a transportation analyst with ODOT;

Bruce Ewert, a self-employed software developer and Internet gadfly who comments frequently on the BendBubble 2 blog;

R. Mack Horton, a retired engineer;

Steve Jorgensen, a planner with the Bend Metro Park & Recreation Distric;

Jeff Keller, director of sales at AT&T Mobility;

Robert Lebre, a retired civil engineer;

James J. Lewis, a self-employed land use consultant and former employee of the Bend City Planning Departmen;

Michael L. Middleton, a house designer;

Glen "Tom" Pickell, an independent executive management consultant;

Andrew Tyvand, a former Bulletin sportswriter now teaching at Aventa Learning;

Christian Veach, a general contractor;