If a lock breaks at a Portland park, Scott Morris is the one to call. Morris, a member of Laborers Local 483, took over running the Portland Parks & Recreation lock shop in March.
As the parks bureau’s sole locksmith, Morris spends around half of his working hours fixing locks at the park system’s 398 permanent public restrooms.
Portland Parks & Recreation operates 156 parks as well as community and art centers, pools, and golf courses. Practically all of them have doors and locks. Keeping them in working order is Morris’ mission.
“I love doing this because I’m out in the world every day,” Morris said. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Morris drove out to Luuwit View Park in the Argay Terrace neighborhood. As he replaced a broken lock, kids nearby blew bubbles and picked up free bag lunches.
At the start of each day, Morris checks work orders and decides which will take priority.
“Our main concern is making sure people don’t get locked in. That’s the top tier,” Morris said. If he gets a report that someone had problems with a lock or door handle when trying to leave a bathroom, Morris heads out to either fix it or close the bathroom until he gets the required parts. Second priority is making sure people can access bathrooms and lock them as needed.
Some locks are damaged by people seeking shelter in public restrooms. Parks are in some ways “ground zero in the housing crisis,” Morris says.
Aside from park bathrooms, Morris is also responsible for the locks at all parks and rec facilities, like cutting keys with the appropriate access level for workers, fixing locks at maintenance buildings, and building and installing locks at facilities like the remodeled Mt. Scott Community Center, expected to reopen this fall.
Between repairs and upgrades in the field, Morris is in the lock shop at the Mt. Tabor Maintenance Yard. In an 8-by-15-foot room in the corner of the Portland Parks & Recreation carpentry shop, Morris cuts new keys, builds lock cores, and repairs broken hardware.
Morris went to work for Portland Parks and Recreation in 2019, after two decades as a self-employed general contractor. Feeling burnt out working with homeowners, he was drawn to the idea of working for an organization whose mission is to benefit the community.
He points to Mt. Scott Community Center as an example.
“It’s cool to me that a lot of people that are going to come into this place are people who couldn’t afford to be members of a health club or country club,” Morris said. “I mean, this is like the best money we spend.”
He first joined the parks bureau as a carpenter addressing disability access barriers — like doors too narrow for wheelchairs to fit through and signs printed in hard-to-read fonts without braille.
Then in 2024, as the bureau’s locksmith Karen Trappen prepared to retire, she mentored Morris to be her successor. The two worked together daily in her final months on the job.
“She would do it once, demonstrate to me what needed to be done, and then watch me screw it up the first few times,” Morris recalls. “I had pretty big shoes to fill, taking over for her.”
Morris says Trappen — and his current coworkers on the bureau’s nine-person carpentry team — are among the best in the field.
Being a locksmith is a strange, niche job, Morris said. The work is highly technical, worlds away from getting a house key copied at a hardware store. Blank lock cores are purchased from the manufacturer, but Morris builds out the core and cuts corresponding keys for different security levels.
Zipping around to parks in an electric van stocked with tools and replacement parts, his days are spent solving puzzles — broken locks.
Some lock components can cost more than $1,000 to replace, so Morris rebuilds what he can. At Luuwit View Park, he replaced a broken mortise lock cartridge with a functional one and packed up the broken cartridge. Back at his shop, he’ll take apart the cartridge, find the problem, and try to repair it.
After the years spent working for himself, Morris appreciates being part of something larger now — not just the parks bureau but the union, Laborers Local 483.
On the wall of the lock shop hangs a sign from when he went on strike in February 2023. Morris was one of more than 600 Local 483 members who struck for three days and won a wage increase sufficient to catch them up for inflation.
He said going on strike “is like jumping out of an airplane.”
“You’ve got a parachute, you think you’re probably going to be okay, but there is a degree of uncertainty to it,” Morris said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty and fear, combined with that feeling you get when you’re taking control and empowering yourself in a way that you don’t normally do — and you’ve probably never done unless you’ve been in a union.”
Morris stepped up to be a union steward last year, ready to defend coworkers.
“I can go into any park or community center,” Morris said, “and those are people who are my brothers and sisters.”
