Paranoia in the Peanut Gallery

A bunch of people you've never heard of--and didn't vote for--are busy crafting handcuffs for the new City Council.

For some reason I keep coming back to an animal metaphor—busy beavers (the state animal, after all)—to describe the work of the city’s Government Transition Advisory Committee and its multitude of minions, advisors, contractors, and bureaucrats. Like beavers, they’re creating a pond for lame ducks to paddle around in, more or less permanently; chief among them soon-to-be ex-mayor Wheeler and his right-hand man, chief bureaucrat and city administrative officer(also non-elected), Michael Jordan.

One senses that, after the end of the year, when the new charter kicks in, the pond will be bigger, deeper, darker, and the dam’s twigs will have been replaced by concrete. Or at least soggy piles of guidebooks and memos and slide decks.

Wheeler, to the relief of many, will be out; Jordan will be doing his best to seem like a fait accompli and keep his $260,680 a year(as of 2023) job.

There will be a new mayor (mostly powerless); a flock of people elected with no more than 25-percent of the vote (its weird mechanics discussed here) to a new four-district council.

The sales pitch for the new city charter was that fresh faces would be elected—tough to explain why many of the candidates, such as Steve “Tiny Terror” Novick and Loretta Smith and Constance Avalos and Dan Ryan seem awfully familiar—but some are actual innocents and political virgins and maybe even a couple who truly want to “do good.”¹

What no one really seems to have paid much attention to is the murky figure lurking in the background—the “administrator”who will work maybe for…maybe in tandem with…possibly in opposition to…possibly making end-runs around…the mayor… The official city website says…

The mayor will have executive authority over city business, collaborating with and delegating responsibilities to a city administrator. 

…which, in our book, leaves a lot of wiggle room. We will presume the mayor—whoever gets elected by the fluky voting scheme—will have a big ego; one could say the same for anyone hired to somehow manage the city’s notoriously opaque bureaucracy lodged behind its union contracts.

If the new mayor proves as unable to work with the administrator as has GuvTina in managing her minions (six political corpses and counting)—then things could get out of whack. Particularly since the fine print of the charter says that the city council won’t be able to mess around with some rather important stuff…

(IGA being inter-government agreements…which will be really good news for the folks over at the Joint Office of Homeless Services, or whatever the hell they’re called now.)

All of that will now be in the hands of the unelected administrator. Who, we assume, will be totally and completely immune from the temptations that have been a way of doing business with the city of Portland since somewhere around 1851.

And since what goes on in the bureaus now will be filtered up through two new layers of bureaucracy, the council will be hopelessly dependent on the same self-interested bureaucrats to ‘fess up and send over various piles of paper filled with exotic terminology. Which, as anyone who has ever covered a town with a city manager knows, is a standard defensive tactic: drown the mopes in paper and do whatever you want.

Oregon Public Broadcasting—well over a year too late—dropped an encyclopedic list of things the charter will, and won’t, do recently…

…and dropped these little nuggets…

Due to budget limitations, Portland is only offering the new councilors one staffer (currently, commissioners have between six and seven staff each). What that employee focuses on — community engagement, policymaking, office operations—will be up to the councilor to decide.

…and…

In the outgoing form of government, where city commissioners oversee bureaus, commissioners have constituent services staff who have been expected to field these kinds of questions. With just one staff member, that’s not anticipated to be a councilors’ responsibility.

Instead, if a Portlander has a problem with a basic city service—maybe there’s a pothole that needs fixing, or your garbage wasn’t picked up, or a park light is broken—they will be advised to call 311.

Anyone who has called…and called…and called 311 is invited to comment. And disregard the headline in one of the ghost-written Charter “Progress Reports” back in ‘22…

Ensuring City Councilors focus on legislating and constituent services…

…so how come each councilor now has just one satrap? Oddly, the current council (which had seven staffers budgeted) just couldn’t seem to scare up the bucks to allow their successors to hire people who might be able to get a picture of what drives constituents crazy. Three of those votes came from candidates for the capon-mayor, which a cynic might say is insurance against unruly minority-elected city councilors throwing spitballs at the future mayor and the administrator.

Just sayin’…

Planning for—and handcuffing—this new city government might go down as Wheeler’s greatest accomplishment (OK; we’re starting from a low base). The Oregonian caught a whiff of the project here…

…but then the paper hasn’t ever really been on top of reporting on the new city charter—especially back when voters might have wised up.

One can assume that our current mayor has had it up to here with unruly colleagues on council; god only knows what a dozen will do to disturb the equipoise of the city’s government.

Thus, the people who purport to run the city (until something goes wrong) were a little nervous about the charter commission’s ghostwriters uttering dumb stuff such as being…

…more accountable, transparent, efficient and effective, responsive, and representative of every area of the city.

Fine for a PPS civics class; not so good for the messy business of keeping progressives in power (and making money for their allies) for approximately forever.

For example, one of the cow-pies left unnoticed (by me, among others, and I’ve been writing about this stuff since the beginning of PortlandDissent) is the office of city council president. The dozen will have to elect one of their own to the podium—given the potential mix of geographic, ethnic, and philosophical types, the task shouldn’t take much longer than a month or two. The hooker: the president will have absolute control of the council’s agenda.

Sound familiar? It’s exactly what has led to the county council chair dominating (in the case of Deborah Kafoury, intimidating) the rest of the board, with current chair Jessica Vega Pederson occasionally letting other members know what she’s doing. Which is the undercurrent of the Big Girls’ (plus the nice guy from Gresham’s) ongoing, occasionally nasty fight.

Triple that—with the added complication that Vega Pederson is elected and basically immune; whoever presides over council will be removable. Instantly. With seven votes. (If the council splits, the mayor will be awakened from slumber to break the tie.)

What fun awaits!

Meanwhile, downstairs, totally removed from the public’s eye, the administrator will go about the city’s business.

The Wheeler/ Jordan duo has a solution for all this “responsiveness” drivel: Micro-manage the playbook for the mopes in the peanut gallery, kind of like packaging directions for running a McDonald’s franchise for someone who’s never flipped a burger.

All of this prep work is going on without any real public scrutiny. Given the nature of the Portland electorate, it probably wouldn’t make any difference.

As with the charter, the transition is, somehow, the responsibility of 14 who-know-who’s from the central casting office in charge of finding progressive shills…just plain folks we wrote about here and here.

But, in reality, the process is under the thumb of inside City Hall types, such as Tate White, Strategic Projects Manager, who cut her teeth in planning stuff at the Parks department (which, last we looked, was too broke too maintain current parks).

They’ve been busy-busy dropping heavy hints and “recommendations” on the yet-to-be-elected council. You can read their latest here, if you have nothing better to do…

…all very pretty and loaded with graphics and inside- city hall vocabulary, such as “onboarding,” “feedback loops,” and “no wrong-door policy.” You get the idea.

The report is loaded with all sorts of time-bombs. Here’s just one…

Some of us feel that—although in-district offices are expensive—certain parts of our community, including East Portland, lack a voice in City decisions and access to local government….In other words, the committee is open to establishing offices in some districts, but not in others. This is a key equity consideration.

…and…

Every councilor should be either a chair or vice chair of a committee and serve on the same number of committees as the others.

…and…

There should be six standing committees plus the Committee of the Whole…

…and then, oddly, the Commission “suggests” eight committees…

…multiple choice?

How will councilors be assigned to whichever committees make the final cut? Good question, left unanswered. As for who will get stuffed onto the no-win committees, such as “Homelessness” and “Community Engagement”… who knows? Our bet is that hyper-ambitious go-getters such as Candace Avalos or Eli Arnold will head straight for the finance slot. Numerous campaign contributions await.

Just to save you reading the rest of the report and its eight pages of micro-management of the city budgeting process, it’s full of familiar progressive eyewash, homilies about following the city’s so-called Core Values (“anti-racism” in first place, far above ‘fiscal responsibility”), with side-trips through “grow our democracy” while finally coming to rest on that timeless mantra…

“Invest the education and engagement resources in communities that have been traditionally left out of City Hall and city decision-making, including Black, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Latinx/e, people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants and refugees, non-English speaking communities, people under age 25, houseless Portlanders, people who live east of 82nd Avenue, and the LGBTQIA+ community.”

Got a problem with that? Call 311.

1. They won’t be elected. Although the voting system is so weird…who kows?