Freshman politician.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

UNION - Kyle Corbin is the new calm in the middle of a town torn asunder by political chaos in recent years.

Kyle Corbin is the nation's youngest mayor.

Kyle Corbin pumps gas to make ends meet.

Kyle Corbin is a college freshman who lives at home with his parents, whose girlfriend is the captain of the cheerleading team. The Union High School cheerleading team.

And she wears braces.

But his mother says he is "an old soul," always has been. That would explain much. That would not only explain why Corbin never liked playing with toys as a child, but also why the young man who wears more hats than any 18-year-old probably should, is the mayor here.

"Kyle is refreshing," says Gary Graham, 55, a former city councilor who lives in one of the century-old Victorian houses that line Main Street. "I'm already impressed with the way he's conducting meetings. They're orderly. He wants to find answers to things. He wants people to work together on things."

Corbin was elected to a two-year term Nov. 7 with 46 percent of the vote in a three-man race. He ran an old-fashioned, door-to-door campaign as a write-in candidate last fall out of necessity; as a 17-year-old when he announced his intent to run in August, he was too young to be a registered voter and qualify for a spot on the ballot. His 399 votes topped the 271 received by outgoing City Councilor Scott Morrison, 59. A former city councilor, Dick Middleton, 64, finished with 200 votes.

"I know the procedures and rules," Corbin, Union High's student body president last year, told The Oregonian after being elected. "I've run a meeting with a bunch of high school kids."

Now, he's running a meeting with six City Council members whose average age is about 68.

The sport of recall

Union is a small town - population 1,960 - tucked between the Wallowa and Blue mountain ranges in northeast Oregon's Grande Ronde Valley, about a dozen miles southeast of La Grande. And chaos has indeed reigned when it comes to city government.

"The situation is very tough out there," says Jeff Dense, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande. The professor has Corbin in his international relations class.

"Recall is a sport out there," Dense says. "It's an annual rite. His success is going to be his ability to bargain and compromise with the forces out there."

Those forces recalled two longtime city councilors in 2004; indicted one police chief after another on criminal charges; elected Deborah Clark, the woman who led the recall effort, as mayor in 2004 and her husband, Roger Clark, as city councilor; recalled them both last year; and fired city administrator Joe Wrabek last fall. After all of that, the most recent police chief, Lee Bertsch, resigned last month, leaving the town without a law enforcement officer.

But nothing here surprises the young mayor anymore. He grew up in the midst of it all. He even remembers the story of a 77-year-old woman being knocked down at a City Council meeting after a scuffle broke out between two men.

"I heard about it every day," Corbin says of City Hall troubles. He really didn't have a choice. His mother, Sharon Corbin, used to work at City Hall; an aunt was on the Budget Committee; and his grandmother is still on the Planning Commission.

Maybe, though, he gets his city-governing blood from a great-grandfather, the late Thomas Cadmus of Reading, Pa. A longtime city councilor there, Cadmus exposed the corruption of the town's mayor back in the 1930s or '40s and reportedly turned down a chance to run for governor, Sharon Corbin says. Kyle Corbin never met the man, but says of his legacy, "I always thought that was pretty neat."

"Now what do we do?"

A political science major at EOU who hopes for a career in city or county administration, Corbin thought about running for mayor while he was still in high school, after Deborah Clark's recall last year. A family friend who became interim mayor after Clark's recall, Willard Bertrand, encouraged him to run, Corbin says. So did his mother.

"What better learning opportunity?" says Sharon Corbin. "I've always encouraged my kids. If you're given an opportunity, go for it."

Kyle lives with his parents in the family's modest, one-story home. Sharon Corbin is a bank teller in town, father Clint Corbin is an auto body technician in La Grande and Kyle's younger sister, Kayla, is a sophomore at Union High.

Sitting in Ackerman Hall on the EOU campus, Kyle Corbin says, "It was a big decision. It was a serious decision. I felt that a dramatic change was needed. And I felt that I could do it and had enough support. One of the things I almost found amusing, and I hate to use the word amusing, is that I just thought having something completely new would change their attitudes. It would be like, 'Now what do we do?' '

Although he currently is believed to be the nation's youngest mayor, Kyle Corbin is not the youngest ever elected. In fact, at least four 18-year-olds have been elected mayor of their cities in the United States in the past 17 months. Sam Juhl was elected mayor of Roland, Iowa, on Nov. 8, 2005, just five days after his 18th birthday, according to The Tribune of Ames, Iowa. That would make Juhl 39 days younger on election day than Corbin.

The Oregon secretary of state's office doesn't keep any records that could verify whether Corbin is the youngest mayor in state history.

Asked about the hubbub his election has raised - besides the stories in The Oregonian and The Observer, the nearest daily paper in La Grande, Wisconsin Public Television came out to do a piece and even the Los Angeles Times has called - Corbin says he's not necessarily surprised, "but it is kind of overwhelming. I'm not really used to it."

Congruent hamburgers

Soft-spoken, thoughtful, mild-mannered, good-natured and of average size and build, Corbin has a firm handshake and a habit of nonchalantly shrugging his shoulders when you ask him a question.

He was a precocious child, his mother says, never asking for the latest toy for Christmas - (except that one year when he wanted a Buzz Lightyear doll because the "Toy Story" movies were all the rage) - but maybe an electric pencil sharpener or a globe. When he was 5, he asked for a red pen because his teacher had one, Sharon Corbin says. Then he asked the entire family to write the alphabet on a piece of paper and used the pen to make corrections.

He was obsessed with the "Wheel of Fortune" TV show as a toddler and spelled words on a magnetic letter board, asking his parents if they wanted to "buy a vowel."

When he was 6, he cut his hamburger in half and said, "Mom, this hamburger is congruent."

"Do you know what that means, Kyle?" she asked.

"It means it's equal on both sides."

Kyle Corbin has been singing in choirs since he was 4 and is now a tenor in the EOU chamber choir that left Thursday for a two-week tour of China. His mother thinks he sings so well that she encouraged him to try out for the "American Idol" auditions in Seattle last year. "Everybody was trying to get Kyle to go," she says.

"I wouldn't have won," he says. "I don't do things unless I know I can."

He drives a red 1978 Chevy Silverado pickup and has worked at the Shell station on Main Street - where the bulletin board contains headlines such as "Teen to take on 'chaos' in Union," "Union elects 18-year-old mayor" and "Kid mayor takes office" - since he was 16. He could be any teenager in Anytown, U.S.A., with a pile of dirty laundry in his bedroom.

But here, in a place where the main street is Main Street and is lined with brick buildings dating to the mid-19th century and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, where pickups come revving around the corner, he is the mayor.

He is in charge.

That is quite apparent during the monthly City Council meeting on March 12, Corbin's third council meeting since being sworn in Jan. 8.

"So the (school) board isn't opposed to restoring the building, is that what I'm hearing, if a way to restore it can be found?" Corbin asks Union School District Superintendent Mike Wood. A public hearing on the fate of the town's "bus barn" dominates an hour of the two-hour meeting. Built in 1863, a year before the town was established, it is Union's oldest building. The school district thinks the dilapidated brick structure should be demolished, but several citizens, including Graham and Dick Alexander, one of the two city councilors recalled in 2004, address the council and urge the city to save and restore it. Corbin suggests the city establish a committee to make a written proposal on how it might be saved and restoration paid for with possible grants suggested by Graham. A motion has already been made and seconded to delay a decision on demolition for one year, but suddenly Councilor Dick Walker wants to amend the original motion and asks for quarterly reviews in addition to the one-year delay.

"Can we do that?" someone asks, referring to amending an already-made motion. "I don't think so," Corbin says. But the motion is ultimately allowed and Corbin ends the hearing with a lighthearted comment: "And just for fun, doesn't anybody want to look that up and see if I'm right?"

Don't read and drive

Talk around town about whether the young mayor will succeed ranges from skepticism to sunny optimism.

"I think he's doing great," says City Councilor Sue Briggs, a former Union mayor herself. "Of course, he's naive on some things, but that's his age."

Briggs says she urged Corbin not to run because she believes he has too much on his plate, but she's been impressed with his energy and poise.

"He either doesn't require much sleep, or something's going to suffer there," she says of his balancing school, work and running a town.

"If there's an 18-year-old who can do it, he can," says city administrator Jeff Wise, hired at the first of the year to replace Wrabek. "I think if Union's going to make a change, this is the time."

New mayor. New city administrator. Three newly elected council members. And, hopefully, a new police chief on the way. However, a five-year local option levy intended to pay for a new chief's salary failed badly March 13, 485 votes to 205. The city is contracting with Union County to provide law enforcement until a new chief or officer can be hired.

In a blue-collar town, where the property tax rate is a meager $1.57 per $1,000 of assessed value, lack of funds has always been a problem. Asked what the town's financial situation is, Corbin says, "That's an interesting question. I don't think anybody really knows." Wise says the town's general fund is about $300,000 annually, and property taxes bring in about $90,000 of that.

A dismal financial outlook, of course, does nothing to help patch up the town's squabbles. And many here trace the trouble back to the local golf course, of all things.

Buffalo Peak Golf Course is an 18-hole public course with panoramic views of the mountain ranges. Built in 2000, the course quickly put the town in debt, and it was eventually taken over by the county.

Add all of these mayoral challenges up, throw in a full course load of college work and a part-time job, and it's probably not a mix most 18-year-olds would want to take on.

"It's my personal belief that he doesn't have enough adult learning to handle the situation," says Jerry Moore, 79, another former mayor.

"But everybody I've talked to has said, 'Oh, he'll make it,' ' Moore says. "He may have some great ideas, but a mayor needs to be involved in there three hours a day. And I just don't think he has the time going to college."

The mayor is playing hooky. It's 10 a.m. Monday on the EOU campus, but Corbin is not in his chair for Dense's international relations class. He was "partially" dealing with matters at City Hall, he says later.

"Time management," he says. "It's difficult. I try to make time for both separately. If I could read and drive at the same time, I'd be set."