Dress Rehearsal for Chaos

More last-minute surprises from the new charter illustrate inevitable conflicts in the utopian dream.

A smattering of news stories last week—with local reporters mindless about what they meant—caught our eye.

First one…

…in which one of WillyWeek’s favorite Big Girls was given ink to nudge the Oz-like city chief administrative officer, Michael Jordan, into fast-walking her ideas about city permitting.

It was a typical “inside city hall” kerfuffle, laden with nudge-nudge/wink-wink stuff that probably sailed over the heads of the weekly’s readers.

Better headline might have been…

Lame Ducks Figure Out the Approaching Nightmare of the New City Charter

…since Ms. Rubio is now, no doubt, counting the days until the new city charter kicks in and she is either…

• Out of a job, with a trip back to the money-grubbing world of nonprofits, or…

• The city’s new “executive” (ie, powerless) mayor after somehow surviving the madness of ranked-choice voting, or…

• Just one of 12 city councilors, elected under a truly weird voting system that is engineered to guarantee over-representation of POCs, various other sub-minorities (we can’t wait for the first trans candidates), and anyone who can get a mere 25-percent of the vote (according to the voting machines’ algorithms—which are, as we write, untested).

This last option must keep Ms. Rubio up at night. It’s simple arithmetic: being one of five votes has more clout than one-in-12. Besides, no one has any idea how the dozen will organize themselves beyond the charter’s stipulation that there will be a “president.” Duties? Seat assignments. Power? De minimis.

Somehow, the new council will have to do something progressives seem to find daunting: organize itself. With a city losing population (just wait until the housing market unfreezes for the real exodus), with crime and druggies and street sociopathology rampant, with a local economy heading for points south (or across the river)….well, chaos on the council will do the city no favors at a moment fraught with downside potential.

Fearless prediction: The wet-dream that all POCs are besties will evaporate as councillors shoved into office by rival ethnic/racial nonprofits and unions get down to the dirty business of assuming power—which always means “power for me and not for you.”

On the other side of the argument is Michael Jordan, currently pulling down $260,680 as the city’s chief administrative administrative officer. He’s the de facto engineer of the new city government (since the charter commission left all sorts of unresolved issues—again, it’s a progressive thingy).

In addition to slow-walking Ms. Rubio’s lump-’em-together plan to solve the city’s sclerotic permitting bureaucracy (traditional mother lode of low-grade corruption), he has been producing a flood of org charts that will become the framework of the new government. It’s something you might have expected from the dozen or so savants on the charter commission—but dreamers can’t be bothered with such tedious detail.

Which is where the devil, as is said, likes to reside.

We wrote here about Mr. Jordan’s first shot, which had a bad encounter with political reality. It seemed to local cynics that Mr. Jordan was centerpiecing himself in all of the transition’s colorful propaganda and designing, essentially, his new job.

But—tough luck—Mr. Jordan is also a lame duck. His prime promoter, Mayor Wheeler isn’t going to run for mayor—which means there will be a new butt in the Big Chair.

If it happens to be Ms. Rubio’s, then the Peel article might be read as a memo from a wannabe mayor to a wannabe professional administrator: don’t bother applying.

But it was also a dress rehearsal for the inevitable conflict between the city professional administrator and the dozen pols who will be whining that the pro is slow-walking some 25-percenter’s weird obsession or isn’t on board with the latest progressive fad or just isn’t being nice. One peeved politician won’t be enough to get rid of the professional; seven PO’d pols would be a different story. Bye-bye professional.

The mayor will “hire” the administrator but the 25-percenters on council will approve the position. Does anyone around here doubt that race, sexual preference, proper progressive credentials (preferably from a government-funded nonprofit) will be tie-breakers?

Fearless prediction: The professional administrator will be nibbled to death by the 25-percent ducks, producing more turnovers than a Blazers b-ball game.

Which brings us to yet another dress rehearsal; again with Mr. Jordan taking shots…

…this one from the Oregonian’s City Hall hitman, Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, and yet another reminder that local media ignored this stuff when it was in the overheated Charter Commission oven. Did it occur to no one last year that 12 new members might need scads of office space—including digs in their home districts?

And isn’t it a teeny bit embarrassing that the five council members’ chambers were remodeled recently?

The lame ducks on council quacked at Mayor Wheeler, and by implication his satrap, Mr. Jordan, in their tiresome, televised “working session” recently. If nothing else, it was a study in body-language…

…mixed with confusion and a sense of being trapped in an elevator with people who’ve just had garlic sandwiches. There were probably three wanna-be mayors around the table, maybe even four—don’t these folks have anything better to do?

The issues were unimportant and penny-ante in terms of the massive waste in the city budget (mostly debt service and a cruddy pension system). The giveaway is that none of the councilors have ever seemed worried about wasting money before—so there’s something else (deeper, darker) behind the hissy-fit.

It’s actually a matter of politicians having power pried from their grasp—never a pretty sight. That, and the nagging feeling that—jeepers!—this new “professional” city manager might not be very sensitive to…

• Telling us mopes on the fragmented council what’s really going on…

• Hiding stuff in the obscure regions of city budget that we mopes don’t really understand.

This, if anyone in local media had been on the case when it counted, is a well-known failing of the city manager form of government. After all, it’s the manager who manages, which involves up as well as down. The good ones (who keep their jobs) are great at flooding the pols with acres of reports, memos, position papers…the more the merrier. Somewhere, buried, is the—take your pick…

• Brutally honest

• Embarrassing

• Scary as hell…

….stuff.

We’ll be seeing a lot of that—count on it. If the press is bamboozled today, tomorrow will see a boom in utter confusion. Your typical post-graduate reporter won’t have a clue who’s doing what and where they’re hiding. (Hint: at home in Minnesota.)

As for the problem of offices for the 25-percenters: give ‘em an allowance to work from home, just like everyone else in city government. The prospect of having the unwashed citizenry dropping by for coffee and complaints might prevent some sociopaths from running.

Despite losing his patron, Mr. Jordan soldiers on. And, as noted above, he flooded the council with even more charts of his government’s structure loaded—surprise!!—with whole legions of unelected bureaucrats.

Here’s just one…

…which you can view in full here.

It’s slightly different than the previous version offered by Mr. Jordan. There was something called “Portland Solutions” (which really didn’t have much to do with “solving” any of the city’s endemic problems since the real fiscal hammer rests in the hands of the Big Girls at the county), which was attached, like an inflamed appendix, to the hapless, powerless mayor’s office. It offered nothing but downside—so it didn’t fly.

So Mr. Jordan found a new burial-ground. Portland Solutions will now be in the care of the assistant administrative officer (you might want to muse that the Charter Commission, in its year of deliberations, never thought up this position; nor did they posit those six deputy city administrators).

And so the assistant will have this little kingdom…

…which, to our mind, seems like a job from hell, if you can even begin to define touchy-feely dreck such as “Adapt to Impact.”¹ Especially with twelve 25-percenters yelling and screaming and pleading and lobbying for special favors for the folks back in their home districts and all of those “underserved” types pleading to be “overserved,” and if the assistant is white and male (highly improbable) then the “systemic racism” stuff will fly, even though it’s long past its sell-by date.

Two things stand out in Mr. Jordan’s tailor-made charts…

• The lower-level bureaucrats-for-life will now have at least three layers of unelected professionals between them and what the charts call “Portlanders.” Whose box on the charts connects with…nothing.

• The mayor looks even more isolated, ceremonial, powerless, pathetic.

….and why does he/she/zey need a “chief of staff?”

• Watch out for the “equity officer.” In addition to there being no functional definition of what constitutes “equity,” (beyond “more special stuff for POCs”), there is nothing specific for this person to do. Especially since there is a deputy administrator who is in charge of “human resources,” a prime pressure-point for equity’s tacit pursuit of quotas and, let’s be frank, anti-white discrimination in the name of….whatever.

• Yes, the Mayor has the chief of police hanging like a chad from his/her/zer’s box—but how to explain the working relationship with yet another deputy city administrator, who reports, not to the mayor but through the administrative officer…

…which makes one wonder if the police chief will have any power whatsoever. Which might occur to anyone who might be bamboozled into considering the job.

Final prediction: local media will continue to be…

…shocked!!!!

…by the various easter eggs hidden by the charter commission and the busy Mr. Jordan. And they will fall for the distraction of the issue, as opposed to what’s lurking out there in the dark. They’re in the bubble (they love it there), but it’s about to pop.

Just what a city circling the drain needs.

1. Adapt to Impact is defined thusly: “A collective of Citywide programs that work across the City's 26 bureaus to strategically transform the City's engagement with impacted communities, especially those that have been underserved and under-engaged in policy, budget, development, planning, and programming…” If you follow the URL to the city’s web page, you will find, “You are not authorized to access this page.” Which says it all.