Planet Portland Wobbles
By Randy Gragg, 2006
Few American cities captured the imaginations of city planning and transportation geeks—particularly, those in the Loeb Fellowship—more than Portland circa 1972-2008. As the city revitalized pioneering light rail, streetcars, transit-oriented development, brownfield redevelopment, and even an aerial tram, Portland became a planet of advanced urban thinking that everybody wanted to visit to mine ideas for back home. Ten Loeb Fellows hail from the Rose City. Over 70 visited on a fall field trip in 2004
But as heads nodded and notebooks filled with tales of the public/private partnerships that drove most of the successes, nobody seemed to notice how genuinely weird the public half was. Planet Portland is the last major American city with a commission form of government in which five elected officials—one of them, the mayor—each manage a portfolio of city bureaus. Additionally, the mayor is “weak” with a vote that counts only as much as four commissioners. His/her/their only real power is doling out the bureau assignments. Ever-shifting with each election or mayoral whim, the result is what Portlanders often call the five “mini-mayors” running everything from emergency services to transportation.
But with Nov. 8’s election, Loebs and everyone else might want to tune in to the next episode of Planet Portland’s Exotic City Governance. Voters overwhelmingly approved “Measure 26-228,” a never-before-tried combo of governance and electoral reform. Supporters believe it will pave a path to greater fairness, equity, and diversity to reverse decades of systematic ambivalence and occasionally hostile policies toward underrepresented communities. Opponents argued that it’s a “Frankenstein’s monster” of theory and idealism that risks colossal failure. Even the Portland Loeb Fellows are split.
Few deny that Portland is in deep trouble. Plenty of American cities are experiencing a gut-wrenching combo of houselessness, violent crime, mental health and addiction crises, vacant downtown office and retail, and plummeting tax revenues. But Portland’s version of the shit-sandwich is especially bitter, particularly in its lilliputian downtown where every encampment, dope-sick wanderer, petty drug dealer, and violent act can feel like it’s in your living room. Long histories of both racism, anti-racism and anarchism tangled hard in the 2020 civil unrest. The Trump Administration’s Homeland Security campaign “Operation Diligent Valor” sent in 755 federal agents. Combined with the police department’s own bad seeds, they helped stir clashes—and Fox News-friendly images--nearly every night of the 100+ days of protests inspired by George Floyd’s murder. The embers still smolder with the vacant storefronts and nightly vandalism in downtown.
Governance hasn’t helped. Portland suffers from the same poor coordination of state, county, and city services well known in other cities. But the high turnover in city commissioners and their staffs trying to run departments has thickened the bureaucratic silos. A good example: a downtown public square atop a structurally failing underground parking lot has been closed for four years, its fences routinely breached by drug dealers, campers, and rats. As the parks and transportation bureaus and their ruling commissioners tangled over their preferred fixes and who’s paying, $1 billion in new development has risen nearby, the adjacent blight figuring heavily into the stalled leasing and condo sales.
Smaller but similar scenes of Keystone Cops-style governance can be found throughout the city. But the residents, particularly communities of color, renters, and the gentrified who’ve been pushed to the city’s edge see the problems through a different lens: a five-member city council elected at large in America’s whitest major city will never serve their interests.
Every ten years, Portland must review its charter. Citizens previously sniffed reform of the 110-year-old system: six times since 1950. But the convergence of 2020’s decennial review with the racial reckoning moved City Council to appoint a 20-member task force to come up with a new structure. Majority BIPOC, hailing from a wide spectrum of social service, justice, business and political groups, the commission had only one person who had served in any significant city governmental role and no elected officials, former or current. Eighteen months and dozens of public meetings later, the commission passed, 17-3, an untried combination of new governmental structure and electoral reform.
The voters said “aye.” Thus in 2024, 12 city council members will be elected, three each from four still-to-be-determined geographic districts. The mayor will be elected at large, but that person will have only two significant powers: casting a tie-breaking vote when commissioners are deadlocked and hiring and supervising a new city manager who would direct all bureaus.
As well, each district’s trio of commissioners will be elected, not individually, but as a cohort through a little-used voting system called “proportional ranked choice.” Difficult to briefly describe without visual aids, each commissioner can be elected by 25 percent of any district’s voters, plus 1 vote. Any votes beyond what the top winner gets then will be divided proportionally to other candidates ranked by each voter. (See Willamette Week’s humorously informative analysis of how it will work.) Link: https://www.wweek.com/news/2022/10/05/we-tried-to-imagine-how-voting-would-work-under-portlands-proposed-charter-reforms/
The voting system was adopted by two dozen American cities during the early mid-century governance reform movement. But only Cambridge, Massachusetts and Arden, Delaware stuck with it (now 80 and 100 years running, respectively). But both use it for only at-large council positions.
Advocates see the governance/electoral combo as a recipe for much-needed geographic representation and an onramp for more diverse city council members. “It’s important to analyze history and the way that our city has excluded many residents across the city,” said Sol Mora, the pro-Measure 22-228 campaign’s manager and communications director for the Coalition of Communities of Color, an endorser. “East Portlanders have been underrepresented for decades. And many other Portlanders of color, renters, and working-class people have been excluded.” Detractors worry that an archaic, dysfunctional system will be replaced by an experimental one. They point out campaign finance reform has already led to the current majority-BIPOC City Council. They fear the election of more inexperienced and fringe candidates that accountability within each district would be confusing, and that the only elected official watching out for the city as a whole will be an even weaker mayor—the transition and uncertain outcomes further tangling Portland’s wickedly cascading problems.
The Portland Loebs with the deepest city governance experience mostly agree that reform is needed but were split on the current proposal. Ed McNamara (LF ‘95), a retired developer who served as the last mayor’s development policy chief cited the shortcomings of recent leaders, both political and bureaucratic, as the bigger problem than “the system.” But he conceded the political necessity of some structural reforms. Gil Kelley (LF ‘10) who spent over 30 years as planning chief under different kinds of governments in Portland, San Francisco, and Vancouver, BC, believed the proposed structure will result in “a ward system that devolves quickly into parochial behavior” in the face of the larger challenges of the housing crisis and climate resilience. The proposed mayor/city manager system, he argues, will be too weak. A strong mayor system promotes action and accountability at the ballot box every four years.
But Eli Spevak (LF ‘14), a housing developer and planning commissioner, tidily summed up many Portlanders’ opinions: “I’m ready for something new and different. It’s not perfect. But I believe it’ll be much more effective and equitable than what we have now.”