Now the Real Fun Begins
...wherein Portland's voters find out what the new charter's really all about
I was reminded, as I greeted the morning after the election and the will of my fellow citizens, of something that happened to me a long time ago…something that altered my vision of how to predict the future.
I was being prepped for an operation—on a part of my anatomy where, as they say, the sun don’t shine. I was on a gurney being wheeled along a hospital corridor, having been “prepped” with a shot of something wonderful (they never tell you what the giggle-juice is), and I was cracking jokes and guffawing and full of bonhomie.
The fellow steering me toward my meeting with the surgeon’s scalpel looked down at his supine passenger.
“You be singin’ a diff’rent tune pretty soon,” he said.
Truer words were never spoken.
And so 57-percent of this city’s voters have cast their ballots for a new city charter.
Well, well, well.
They were sold on a vision conjured up by a “citizen commission,” and we’ll say no more about that august group. There are probably no happier campers in the city than its surviving members. They were installed (without bothering with the indignity of being elected) as representatives of various racial/sexual/business/union pressure groups and they delivered. Bravo!
As we’ve pointed out, there’s a lot of fine print in the measure, which few voters took the time to contemplate:
Four districts, borders unknown. (The “who gets Felony Flats” conundrum.)
A strange voting system without any software to allow it to slice ‘n’ dice votes.
A second voting system for the mayor and auditor—no software for that either.
A voting system that will have to be implemented by three different counties.
Salaries for the 12-member council, mayor and the “professional” city manager undetermined.
Everything whipped into shape by fall, 2024.
The Charter Commission isn’t going to close up shop, having done its damage; nope, they’ll continue to cogitate eath-shakers such as “climate and environmental justice,” and amendments to the newly-passed charter (golly! that didn’t take long!) from city bureaucrats, and something called, ominously, “expansion of voting rights.” (Non-citizens didn’t pass muster with county voters—but they’ll keep on plugging.)
No, we’re in for a full complement of yet more “citizen commissions.” In addition to a murky “transition team” under the control of Michael Jordan, the city’s chief administrative officer. You will search—in vain—through the city’s voluminous web pages on the new charter for any mention of who, exactly, is on this team. But let’s be assured that Mr. Jordan is ready to deploy the usual progressive word-fog…
“Portlanders spoke. As public servants, it’s our job to carry out their direction efficiently and effectively while advancing the city’s core values of equity and anti-racism.”
Did I miss “core values” of, say, public safety? Maybe even “respect for people who pay taxes?”
In addition, there will be a 13-member commission to draw the four new districts which, as the Oregonian observed, will have “ about the same population as Eugene or Salem.”
Think drawing those lines will be easy? Nah; there’s the usual arm’s-length list of progressive goals…
Contiguous, compact, use existing geographic or political boundaries
Connected by transportation links
Equal population
Don’t divide communities of common interest
Don’t favor any political party or candidate
Don’t dilute voting strength of any language or ethnic minority group.
That last sentence being the real reason for this exercise. Which the charter commission explained in its April “Progress Report #4” on page 25….
Increasing opportunities for communities of color to elect their candidates of choice has also been a driving goal for the Commission.
Funny thing about those reports (written by the real power-behind-the-throne, the Coalition of Communities of Color): they’ve disappeared from any of the city’s websites. And does it strike anyone as an unusually fast response for the city in flooding the zone with a dozen or so web pages extolling the new charter virtually overnight?
Those 13 district-drawers will be selected by Mayor Whatshisname and approved by the instantly lame duck city council. Good luck! And expect local media to ignore the process. But, should you want to join that commission, you can apply here. But be warned—you’ll have to fit this criteria…
You are an advocate for racial equity: you want positive and long-lasting outcomes for racial and ethnic communities who have been left out. You can bring discussion about racial and ethnic communities who need it most.
But wait! There’s more…
Throughout this process the City of Portland will receive recommendations from a Charter Transition Advisory Committee, a community oversight group being appointed to make sure that the city implements voters’ direction.
Who will be on this committee? Who knows? (But we can guess.)
Then there’s the matter of somehow making two new voting systems actually work. The city’s website makes it sound sooo easy…
During early 2023, the City of Portland will begin working with election offices in Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties to make the transition to ranked-choice voting.
Didn’t I just read a story in the Oregonian that long-time Clackamas county clerk Sherry Hall just got bounced because the county’s previous election had been a “fiasco” and the “largest election debacle in state history?” Think they’ll get that mess cleaned up in time to put together the software to run two different flavors of voting?
Will the other two? Especially when there is no other US city that is using the slip-slidey “single transferrable vote” system. Write if you know how that will work.
Well, the voters have spoken; some of them after a slug of their own happy juice. They’re on their way, strapped to a governmental gurney and—by golly!—the person pushing is someone who won’t be around for tomorrow’s pain. Who might possibly find it personally rewarding…
Won’t the next two years be entertaining?
Well, I guess the phrase comes to me from Churchill via Goldwater who put his own spin on it and so I put my spin: Portlanders are making the rubble bounce.
I knew Multnomah County had it within itself for slow and thorough self-destruction . The real mystery here is why do you have to be a citizen to vote! That outrage will be corrected I'm sure.
And then my second favorite quote with regard to Portland comes from Oscar Wilde when he read of Little Nell's passing, but I apply it to the outcome of the recent election: “A MAN would need to have a heart of stone, not to laugh.”
Of course Kotek has yet to be naugurated and I doubt I'll be seeing JoAnne checking at the dollar store. She's an influencer.
Let's all keep our fingers crossed for the Bay Area carpetbagging Sapphist, Democrat Jamie McLeod-Skinner. Come to Oregon where the future is exciting.
One by one the lights are flickering out in Oregon and the nation. Will either survive my lifetime? Ohh, the excitement is just starting!
The new city council's 1st order of business will be to establish a city Bureau of Degentrification, make cultural appropriation a crime, prohibit those evil, rich business and real estate types from being in Portland after sunset and change the city motto to "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism."
Seriously, though, the question is whether the powers that be will continue the exclusionary practices that produced a charter commission with no conservative voices that also grossly underrepresented the white community, or whether there will be true diversity in opinion, race and ethnicity.
What no pundit in town with a job they want to keep will say is twofold. First, the charter revision signals a collapse of trust in white politicians on the part of Portland's woke minorities. Secondly, it represents the triumph of the racial or ethic identity group over the individual as the basic unit in Portland's democracy. How else is it possible to explain the rejection of a system that produced a city council where 60 percent of the members are minorities, or 80 percent if sexual minorities are included? The truest words ever spoken about the charter project came from the minority-group proponent who said, in effect, that they want their representatives to look like them.
If that's where we're headed, the bureau that oversees the construction of new governmental facilities had better get busy designing Portland's own Dis-United City Council Building, modeled on the United Nations Building in New York.