PORTLAND — The Lyft went bad from the beginning once Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty ordered a pickup at the ilani last week.
Hardesty got upset over a mixup about where she was waiting for the car, then she didn’t want the windows open for ventilation because she was cold, then she wouldn’t get out when the driver cut the ride short and tried to drop her off at a gas station miles from home.
The trip ended with dueling calls to 911.
Richmond Frost, a Lyft driver for four years who has handled more than 18,000 rides, said he didn’t realize his fare was Hardesty until it was all over.
Hardesty didn’t immediately respond to messages for comment.
But the two emergency calls are documented in Clark County dispatch records obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive through a public records request.
Frost, a 63-year-old Beaverton man who has lived in the Portland metro area for 51 years, said he shared what occurred with his kids and some friends. But word got out and reporters started calling Monday night.
He said he was concerned about the publicity and worried the Nov. 1 encounter could affect his Lyft license.
“She was not a pleasant person,” Frost said. “That has nothing to do with her political position as a Portland council person. I’m out here doing my job. She was very disrespectful to me, made me uncomfortable. I don’t feel like I have to sit in a car for anyone to have to argue unrelentingly and be rude and abusive, telling me what I have to do in my own vehicle.”
Frost’s account starts when he said he was clearing a fare in Vancouver and accepted a pickup request from a customer named “Jo Ann.”
He drove about 25 minutes north to the casino in Ridgefield and pulled up to the front entrance. He said he waited five minutes with no sign of his fare. So he called her.
“It kind of went south from there,” Frost said. “She wasn’t happy. She didn’t understand where I was.”
He soon figured out Hardesty was waiting at a side entrance and drove to meet her there.
Once in his car, Hardesty was perturbed that he had trouble finding her, he said. He grabbed his phone from the bindle on his dashboard and showed her where the pin drop indicated her location, but that didn’t seem to assuage her displeasure, he said.
“I just wanted to calm her down, make her understand that I’m not a rookie. I know what I’m doing,” Frost said. “She didn’t want to hear any of that. She just wasn’t happy with that.”
As he started to drive out of the casino’s lot, Hardesty told him that he needed to roll up the windows, that she couldn’t ride with them down.
The car windows on the front driver’s side and front passenger’s side were cracked open to allow for air circulation as a safeguard due to the coronavirus pandemic, he said. According to Lyft’s website, the company’s new rules for the road during the pandemic recommend keeping the car windows open.
He rolled the windows up slightly but kept them open a sliver, telling Hardesty that the windows were open for safety purposes since they couldn’t be six feet apart in the confined space of his car.
“I did say, ‘It’s for my safety and your safety.’ But that was like pouring gas on her fire,” Frost said. “She demanded that I close that window right now. She was kind of ballistic at that point.”
He pulled onto Interstate 5 south but decided to take the next exit when he said Hardesty wouldn’t let up in demanding that he close the windows.
“So I made a decision, it would be in the best interest for both of us to cancel the ride,” Frost said. He took the first exit south of Ridgefield. He spotted a Chevron to the west of the freeway and pulled in there.
“It’s lit up like a football field. It’s safe. It’s warm. She could order another Lyft or Uber, whatever she wants to do, and I can be done, and I can get on with my work,” he said he thought.
But Hardesty’s anger boiled over. He said she told him: “‘Well, no, either you’re going to take me back to the casino or you’re going to take me to my destination,'” he recalled. Hardesty, he said, told him that she’d already paid for the ride, but Frost said he had canceled the trip and no money had been exchanged.
He said he pulled close to the front door of the gas station’s convenience store, but Hardesty wouldn’t get out of his four-door black 2019 Hyundai Ioniq.
Frost asked her if he’d have to call police to have her removed and she told him to go ahead, he said.
Then Hardesty herself dialed 911 at 9:52 p.m. from the back seat.
She told dispatch that her Lyft driver wanted her to leave the car but she wouldn’t. She said she wasn’t violent, wasn’t in danger. No weapons were involved.
She said she wouldn’t get out “because it was cold and she was a woman and alone,” according to a dispatch record.
The driver heard the conversation with the emergency dispatcher, including when the dispatcher asked his passenger for her full name.
“Jo Ann Hardesty,” she said. She asked for an officer to respond.
As they waited in silence in the car, Frost decided to call police himself to register his own complaint.
“I’m a Lyft driver. I want this passenger to get out of my vehicle,” he said he told them. The dispatcher quickly figured out that his call was related to the one just received, which is confirmed by the dispatch records.
A marked Ridgefield police car with two officers pulled up behind them at 9:57 p.m. as another Lyft driver also arrived.
Frost got out of his car and told the police what had occurred from his perspective.
“It was just a ride that didn’t work out. It wasn’t going well. I thought it was best to cancel the ride, start over and reset,” Frost said he told police. “I didn’t see a point in sitting in the vehicle with that kind of tension and upset customer for 35 minutes.”
When an officer approached the rear passenger door, Hardesty got out. She ultimately got into the other Lyft, which she had already ordered for a ride home, according to dispatch records.
“Peace restored and involved parties sent their separate ways,” read a 10:16 p.m. entry on the dispatch report.
Frost said he got back into his car and drove off. Once back on I-5 south, he stopped on the shoulder and called a Lyft help line to report the canceled trip.
Only when he was recounting what had occurred and reported the passenger’s full name did he recognize that Hardesty was the Portland city commissioner, he said.
“She was just another passenger,” he said. “I treat everybody the same. I try to be professional.”
Neither Hardesty nor her staff responded to phone, email or text messages Monday night.
