How best to distribute political power in Portland? Fault lines erupt over charter ballot proposal
Seismic shifts could soon be under way at Portland City Hall.
A November ballot measure seeks to transform how Portland’s vast bureaucracy is run, more than double the number of representatives on the City Council and change the way they’re selected to an unusual system not used in any other U.S. city and similar to those chosen by only a handful of American municipalities.
And, while many Portlanders are frustrated at how little the current mayor and his recent predecessors have accomplished, the proposal could result in the chief executive wielding even less power.
The mechanics of local government are a fundamentally dull topic. But amid deepening dissatisfaction with how Portland runs, or too often fails to, the proposed measure is among the most consequential to appear on the city’s ballots in recent memory.
It’s also proving to be divisive among Portland government-watchers who concur the current system doesn’t work.
The proposed changes, crafted and approved by a citizen-led charter commission, have caused political fault lines to surface as rival factions prepare to persuade a majority of voters to their side.
Proponents, who include an array of progressive advocacy groups, academics and good government types, say the opportunity to radically rejigger City Hall is crucial to address many of the crises Portland has faced in recent years while boosting diversity in and civic engagement with city government.
They have in mind not just racial and ethnic minorities but also renters, those living in east of Interstate 205 and even Republicans.
“Governance isn’t something that is sexy or interesting to most people, but it is something that helps those with means stay in power and those without means stay out of power,” said Andrew Speer, a charter commission member and resident of east Portland’s Argay Terrace neighborhood.
Like all current and former commission members interviewed for this story, Speer spoke in his capacity as a private citizen.
Skeptics, among them longtime civic leaders as well as former and current City Hall occupants, worry that the prospect of a novel, largely untested system of government could potentially sow even more dysfunction than the status quo.
They are urging Portlanders to reject the current proposal and offer promises of a simpler, less experimental overhaul next spring, though they’ve not brought forth anything specific.
Most voters know the city’s government could work better but so far remain unaware of nitty gritty details of the ballot measure, which includes dozens of amendments to the city’s charter.
CURRENT SYSTEM FLAWED
Portland is the only big city in the country where city council members each control a subset of the city’s bureaus and departments, rather than having a strong mayor or city manager run the show.
The mayor and four commissioners each seek office citywide and can live anywhere in the city, which has historically favored well-heeled or politically connected candidates from predominately affluent neighborhoods.
While the current council is the city’s most diverse to date — and includes three people of color, two of them women and one who lives east of 82nd Avenue — all four commissioners and the mayor were white men as recently as 2008.
In recent years, a growing chorus of politicians, business leaders and civic activists have called for reshaping Portland’s commission form of government that voters enacted in 1913, as they believe it hampers the city’s ability to respond to challenges.
Yet that near-universal consensus for change quickly crumbled the after the charter commission finalized its reform package earlier this summer and approved it 17-3.
Appointed by members of the City Council in late 2020, the 20-person body spent more than a year seeking broad input from Portland residents, especially people of color, renters and those from low-income households.
The commission’s final proposal was far from the narrowly tailored fix many had envisioned.
“In recent years Portland has become a petri dish for philosophical experiments,” said Vadim Mozyrsky, one of the three members of the commission who voted against the proposed measure and now among its most outspoken opponents. “This is just the latest example.”
HIGHLY UNUSUAL CONCEPT
The reform proposal would end Portland’s unique approach of having individual City Council members act as administrators over bureaus. That is utterly uncontroversial.
The commission’s plan would turn most of that responsibility over to a professional city manager overseen by a mayor who, some argue, would have less direct control of city functions than the current one.
It would also eliminate primaries and institute a complex version of ranked-choice voting that has voters elect three council members from one of four geographic districts, leading to a 12-member council. The mayor, elected citywide using a different ranking system, would only be allowed to vote on City Council decisions in the case of a tie.
Fewer than 50 U.S. cities use ranked-choice voting and only about a half-dozen currently employ a version of multi-member districts, including Spokane and Anchorage. No U.S. city uses the hybrid system detailed in the Portland proposal, which would have candidates who place second and third in a ranked-choice tally take office as well as the winner.
Some cities with more than one representative per district elect only first-choice winners but do so over multiple years. Others have a mix of single- and multi-member districts.
Members of the commission said their decision to forego a more traditional method of electing one council representative per district was, in part, because historically underserved Portlanders don’t comprise a majority in any geographic area of the city.
Many said they also had concerns that smaller geographic districts could enable small-picture not-in-my-neighborhood thinking.
“With no fiefdoms, council members will need to engage in collaborating within their district and really think about what their legislative priorities are,” said Speer, a government affairs manager for Portland General Electric and a board of education member at Mt. Hood Community College.
If the commission’s package of reforms passes, Portland voters will pick their three favorite candidates in their quadrant of the city to represent them on the City Council come 2024. Voters would rank as few or many candidates as they wish.
Each candidate would have to get a highly ranked vote from 25% of a district’s voters votes to win. Candidates who surpass that threshold would have their supporters’ second- or third-choice votes transferred to lower-ranked candidates. Similarly, candidates who finish at the bottom of the pack would be eliminated and their supporters’ second- and third-ranked choices would gain votes.
Supporters say this system, known as proportional representation or single transferable vote, would more fairly distribute power and offer communities that have traditionally lacked a seat at City Hall a greater voice.
“It’s moving from a politics of dominance to a politics of inclusion, one where no single agenda decides what an election is about,” said Robin Ye, who served on the charter commission but stepped down to focus on promoting the ballot measure.
CAMBRIDGE CASE STUDY
A handful of studies support the claim that multi-member districts combined with proportional ranked-choice voting bolster political minorities. Few such systems exist in the U.S., however. Supporters of Portland’s proposed measure point to the one used in Cambridge, Massachusetts as the closest comparison.
Home to academic powerhouses Harvard and MIT, the affluent city just outside of Boston has one-fifth the population of Portland and a median household income that’s nearly 50% greater, census figures show.
Under its proportional representation system, adopted in 1940, candidates run citywide and voters can rank up to 15 of them. Nine members of the council are ultimately selected, with each one needing just a hair over 10% of ranked choice votes to win. The elected body then chooses one member to serve as mayor.
Robert Winters, a longtime Cambridge City Hall watcher and publisher of the Cambridge Civic Journal website, said the system largely succeeds in allowing those with minority political views a seat at council and also puts in power people with an array of personal and professional backgrounds.
Cambridge’s current council includes community activists, an architect and a former business consultant, as well as an openly gay Black woman and a pair of representatives who immigrated to the U.S. as children, one of whom grew up in Cambridge public housing.
“Some vote for a candidate because of neighborhood proximity, others because of race or simply because they liked a person’s handshake. That all can get captured by this kind of ballot,” said Winters, who added that the final results can come as a surprise to many. “The arrogant political types think they can impose their sense of proportionality on an election, but voters often have another idea.”
Constituent services, however, can at times be difficult to navigate. Some council members focus their energy and attention around certain neighborhoods or portions of the city. Others are more issue or policy oriented.
“In Cambridge, you have a menu with nine meals on it,” Winters said. “It’s a bit of a free-for-all.”
BALTIMORE BOONDOGGLE
That’s precisely a concern raised by some skeptics of Portland’s proposed multi-member system, who believe having three separate council representatives would eliminate a direct line of accountability and hinder efficiency and responsiveness to voters.
They have used Baltimore as a cautionary tale. In 2002, two-thirds of its residents voted to end the city’s longstanding use of three-person council districts and replace them with single-member ones.
Those who pushed for the change, including a broad coalition of community, labor and good government organizations, cited the abysmal representation many experienced.
“There was no direct accountability to any one council member for any constituent problem,” said Terry Harris, a lawyer who served on a Baltimore charter commission that took up the issue and now lives in Southwest Portland.
Odette Ramos, a community activist who helped lead the campaign in Baltimore, agrees.
“It was problematic. Extremely problematic,” said Ramos. “Residents didn’t know where to go when they had a problem. There often were concerns about whether all three worked equally or whether one or two were simply skating by.”
In 2020, Ramos became the first Latina elected to the City Council in Baltimore, where fewer than 5% of residents identify as Hispanic.
Portland charter commission members and their supporters have bristled at the comparison to Baltimore. Part of the problem, they say, is that Baltimore did not use proportional ranked-choice voting and instead asked voters to mark their ballots for only their top three choices. Those who received the most votes would win.
“In a majority, winner-take-all system, you can end up with a single constituency capturing all three seats,” said Jay Lee of the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based public policy research group that supports Portland’s charter proposal. “That can leave many without a candidate of their choice representing them and their issues.”
MAYORAL POWERS
Strong disagreements have not been limited to the relatively untested election component of the Portland charter proposal.
While a broad consensus exists for eliminating the city’s commission form of government and adding a professional city administrator, some critics have taken issue with what they say are the limited powers the proposal grants the mayor.
Still elected citywide, the mayor would no longer be a voting member of the City Council. Nor would they have the ability to veto City Council decisions, a power granted to about 75% of mayors leading the nation’s 40 largest cities, including west coast neighbors Seattle and San Francisco.
And while the mayor would choose the city administrator, the choice would be subject to City Council approval and the council, with a three-fourths vote, could fire that person.
“That means they’re essentially going to have 13 bosses,” said Stephen Kafoury, a lobbyist and former state lawmaker. “Meanwhile, the mayor will just sit around for a tie to occur? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Not so says former commission member Melanie Billings-Yun, an international negotiations consultant. As head of the bureaucracy, the mayor would have the task of implementing legislation the City Council passes. The mayor would also continue to propose the city’s yearly budget, which would then be subject to council approval.
“We were looking for a system that had a clear separation of powers, and sufficient checks and balances,” she said. “This checks those boxes.”
Billings-Yun added that Portlanders who participated in charter commission hearings and surveys overwhelmingly expressed a desire for the mayor to not be given too much power.
As for council firing the city administrator, that would happen only under extreme circumstances given the supermajority required, she said.
“I wouldn’t go out of my way to piss off nine councilors,” said Billings-Yun, who also resigned from the commission to campaign for the proposal’s passage. “Ultimately, the City Council is voting on bills and the budget. They are not the city administrator’s boss.”
Despite the sweeping proposed changes, the charter commission’s measure leaves many components about the comprehensive new system to be determined.
The proposal, for example, doesn’t establish geographic boundaries for the four new council districts and instead directs that decision to be made by a future districting commission. Similarly, an appointed salary commission would determine compensation for the mayor, 12 councilmembers and city auditor.
The overall price tag for the proposed overhaul is also unknown. City budget officials estimate that it could add up to an additional $8.7 million annually to Portland’s general fund, not including start-up costs of nearly $6 million a year over the next three years. That analysis does not account, however, for potential savings achieved by streamlining government services and operations that are currently spread across multiple bureaus or agencies.
“The one thing we do know is that the cost to Portland by doing nothing will be so much more,” said commission member Becca Uherbelau, a communications strategist who has worked for unions representing teachers and public employees and the Metro regional government.
ANOTHER OPTION?
Adding to the uncertainty is the prospect of an alternate proposal.
An effort to generate one is being spearhead by Portland Commissioner Mingus Mapps, who last year launched a political committee to support charter changes but plans to fight the current measure.
His group, the Ulysses PAC, is exploring proposals that would create six or seven council districts with a single member elected from each and place oversight of bureaus under a professional city administrator. The mayor, elected citywide, would remain a voting member of the council. He and his allies are also considering a form of ranked-choice voting.
“Portlanders should not be forced into a false choice of sticking with the status quo or going with something that’s never been attempted on planet earth,” Mapps told The Oregonian/OregonLive earlier this month. “Charter reform doesn’t need to be rocket science.”
Mapps said his group plans to publicly release a draft of its proposal by Oct. 3, a little more than two weeks before ballots begin arriving at homes.
He and others opposed to the current proposal believe that providing a potentially viable alternative prior to November could sway many voters who have reservations about the charter commission’s plan but worry it’s the only shot in the near future to reconfigure City Hall.
Should the current measure fail, Mapps says, he will attempt to usher a new charter reform proposal through the City Council early next year with the hope of getting it before voters as early as May 2023.
Such a referral would need only three commissioners’ yes votes to advance to the ballot, which appears within reach. Commissioner Dan Ryan has announced he plans to vote against the current proposal and Mayor Ted Wheeler has indicated he’s not in favor of it either.
Even U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a darling among progressive Portlanders who launched his political career on the City Council, has given the charter measure a cold shoulder. In a recent interview with the Portland Business Journal, he called the proposal “more convoluted than I would like” and predicted it was unlikely to pass.
Blumenauer would not say whether he planned to vote in favor of it.
Meantime, rival factions are gearing up. Portland United for Change, a group formed to push for the passage of the measure, has raised over $200,000. Nearly three-quarters of those contributions have come from five nonprofit organizations and a board member of one of them that favor ranked-choice voting, according to campaign finance filings.
Two political committees opposing the measure, Mapps’ and Partnership for Common Sense Government, have raised $22,000 since the measure was finalized in June, records show. Prominent people including former U.S. Rep. Les AuCoin and philanthropist and real estate titan Jordan Schnitzer have spoken out against the proposal. The Partnership for Common Sense Government’s website lists nearly 100 neighborhood and civic activists as supporters of the opposition group.
The Portland Business Alliance, which lost a legal challenge to the proposal in August, has yet to announce whether it will formally oppose the charter measure.
The proposal’s growing list of public endorsers include three dozen progressive, labor and good government groups — among them, League of Women Voters of Portland, the Coalition of Communities of Color and the Portland Association of Teachers — as well as nearly a dozen state and local elected officials representing neighborhoods in East Portland.
“We didn’t run this process to pander to Blumenauer, the Portland Business Alliance or Commissioner Mapps,” Speer, the commission member, said. “We ran this process to achieve the best outcomes for all the people of Portland.”
-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh