Portents of a Fate Foretold

Just one (of many) recent City Council sessions leaves us wondering about the dozen waiting in the wings.

Some people like to watch reruns of I Love Lucy or The Sopranos; I collect those studies of human foibles known as Portland City Council meetings on YouTube. Here’s one that might get you thinking about the future city council…

Bear in mind, as you watch five extremely fallible human beings grapple with something known as the “Fall Bump” that the next council with be 2.4-times bigger. And, as a cursory scan of the ballot hints, dumber.

Let’s summarize the business in the video above, starting with Mayor Wheeler telling his colleagues that their session will have something or other to do with “true up-ending balances from the prior fiscal year,” and that given inflation, and “sunsetting” and other fiscal stuff, “…the demand for resources continues to surpass availability within the city.”

This is what’s called the fall “bump;” a nip ‘n’ tuck of the city’s budget for the rest of the year and the chunk following (since government seems incapable of following the Julian calendar)..

I’m probably imagining that lame duck Wheeler looks like the last guy off the Titanic as he explains the unhappy facts of the condition he’s leaving behind as he prepares to go on to whatever rich guys do when they’re, technically, unemployed. Bad news—but I’m in the lifeboat.

After Wheeler’s depressing warm-up, bureaucrats (city budget director, Ruth Levine; Jonas Biery, deputy city administrator for finance¹) take center stage. Aspirants to a place on the new council would be advised to study this terminology carefully…

“We did this a little bit differently this year and items on this list are for known capital expenditures and liabilities that the city faces and they don’t quite meet the technical definition of capital set-asides and so we are waiving them in the ordinance itself….they aren’t being budgeted right now but, hey, we know we have these liabilities outstanding, we have to pay for them so we’re using this vehicle to do that…”

Biery cautions the commissioners that they should keep their paws off any smidgen of dough left unclaimed in order “to address unanticipated needs that might arise in the near-term…”

Call it the Trump Riots reserve.

The councilors/candidates stare at their laptops. (You wonder: Are any of them sneaking in time to play Roblox?)

Slides start flashing past and we arrive at this…

That first item refers to PBOT, our old friend, and the strapped Parks Department, which have reached some sort of settlement with some sort of someone with a grievance and a 501-c-3, to build 18-thousand (over 12 years) of Americans With Disabilities “ramps” (aka “curb-cuts”) for the hordes of our wheelchair-bound citizens. The $6-million and change is what it would cost to put in a minimum of 1,500 of those a year, give or take. Each one goes for $26-thousand a pop at current prices, which are guaranteed to go up. (That number probably includes people paid for standing around watching other people doing the work.)

But there’s a little problem with that number: Unfortunately, according to the budget bureaucrats, this requires money the city does not have. Which means the number…

….is a contingency amount and it’s not in the bureau’s budget…and it would have to be allocated based on, you know, an actual proposal about how much money is needed, and so, so it’s truly an estimate…”

Tough luck, it’s a federal requirement (which the feds wouldn’t dream of funding). And the city made an agreement rather than face trial in federal court—a no-no, considering how another federal judge has done his best to ruin the Portland Police Bureau.

And it’s hard to imagine any sane pol going against wheelchairs.

The ADA-ramps bring commissioner/candidate Mingus Mapps out of his torpor; he inquires about PBOT’s total liability. Answer: it’s in the “$30-million to $40-million range…”

Which is an extraordinary moment, since Mapps’s “silo” is…PBOT. Didn’t any of the bureaucrats tell him about the boulder from Washington barreling toward the city’s budget? He seemed surprised to hear about the “settlement,” which poses a question of its own: Doesn’t anyone from the legal department or the city administrator’s office pick up the blower and let PBOT’s boss know that $30-million has just gone down the drain? Was Mapps consulted about making that agreement in the first place?

Which we guess will be a problem when the Daffy Dozen 25-percenters take office in January. For now, it’s just a matter of voting for a resultion to—essentially—kick the can down the road. Off to the lifeboats!

Which leads us to the afternoon’s comedy slot, filled by Commish Dan Ryan. (Wheeler had kept moving him from bureau to bureau, for reasons he never explained—and didn’t have to). Ryan, let’s remind you, is running in the jam-packed (22 candidates) District 2 mob.

Ryan introduces an amendment to the “Bump”…

Motion to reappropriate Commissioner Offices’ and the Mayor’s Office prior year General Fund underspending to the future City Council and future Mayor…

…which, short version, is a measure to spend more money on staffing those incoming frosh city councilors. Who, in one of Wheeler’s bye-bye acts of sabotage, were left with money to hire just one aide apiece. By contrast, Ryan’s staff now numbers four; Mapps gets by with five, Gonzalez with six, Rubio somehow keeps eight busy.

Poor Dan: He’s complained (along with Gonzalez) about this before and been swatted down. He gives it yet another shot…

“My team and I have heard overwhelming demand…about the need for more staffing in 2025…and give the new council tools to meet their evolving needs. My amendment is simply good governance and good manners…”

Where will the money come from?

From that bucket of ADA ramp dough! Which may or may not exist (“unallocated” being the word of art.)

This doesn’t deter Ryan: he’s asking for just a teensy bit of it—only $437,733. A pittance!

Mapps rouses himself again; he reveals that taking that dough away from his bureau’s ADA ramps “profoundly confuses me.”

The budget bureaucrats start spooling out more arcana of the budgeting process… “one big bucket”…and then, “I can’t tell you which bucket it’s in…” and…and…

Mapps fires back…

“I’ll tell ya that from what I’ve heard today, if I have the choice of building more curb-cuts for people in wheelchairs versus hiring more staff and bureaucrats for people in city hall, I’m more inclined to build the curb-cuts…”

Remember what we said about wheelchairs?

Cue mayoral hopeful Gonzalez…

“All cities struggle with this…we have not done any better than any other city…and that predates all of us…just in my short time on city council we waive this all the time…so it begs the question, why even pretend this is guiding our budget…”

Whereupon Ryan can’t suppress a mordant grin, like a kid who’s gotten his parents arguing about the proper punishment for his misdeeds.

Mapps, in full Portland Polite mode, guilt-trips the commissioners to recall a proclamation they voted on earlier for “White Cane Day,” yet another 501-c-3 cause; and now we’re, somehow, ripping off the blind.

A twofer! Gotcha!

The “conversation” (this is Portland, remember?) trickles to a sort of truce, and Gonzo issues a body-language statement…

…with an expression we predict he will repeat, often, if he gets elected as the capon-mayor.²

Next up comes the “public comment,” which is always a source of amusement, and proves that self-interest rules the human race.

And then Wheeler sums up: he’s…

“…hearing outstanding arguments on both sides…that sounds like a cop-out, but I’ll get to an actual position in a moment…”

…and admits that the new council offices are “likely³” understaffed…but that it’s “incumbent” for the new council to decide how they want to govern themselves…and figure out how to handle constituent services…and how to pay for it.

Which is rich coming from the mayor who decided to get the jump on putting together the bureaucracy based on the new charter’s goofy design, staffed it, and moved Michael Jordan, current small-a administrator into the Big-A position. A sort of “off the shelf” package, which will present the new mayor with a fait accompli. Not to worry: it’s a matter of “good manners,” to quote Ryan.

The whole package—administrator, a flock of sub-administrators, the grouping of bureaus into clusters—is up and running…

…while Jordan modestly says on the city’s website…

At the halfway point, the skies look sunny, we’re making good time and our destination is clear. While there is still more work to do, we are on track to deliver – because of you. 

…which somehow reads to us like the cover letter on a resume.

Back to the arena: Gonzalez takes a shot at Wheeler—isn’t the mayor’s office using one-time funds to cover ongoing expenses for the Chinese Garden?

Which gives Wheeler a chance to stuff it back down Gonzo’s throat by extolling the many virtues of the Garden (recently fenced to protect it from marauding bums, which no one mentions). It’s not exactly wheelchairs and white canes, but you get the idea.

Whereupon the “conversation” devolves into gotchas. But Wheeler (who didn’t go to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard for nothing) has Ryan pinned to the mat with the “next council can do whatever it wants” argument.

Wheeler: “Well that was cheerful. Call the roll.”

Mapps reverts to candidate mode, reminds one and all that “disability issues are civil rights issues,” and brings up the white canes again, and issues a warning…

“If Ryan’s amendment passes the headlines tomorrow in the newspapers will be like, ‘city council pulls more than $400-thousand out of funds to help people in wheelchairs safely cross streets in order to hire…more stuff for city hall offices…’”

Really? Hard to see even Sophie Peel falling for such a cheap shot.

He votes no. If he slips into the mayor’s office on the third round of ranked choice voting, let’s see how jealously he guards those curb-cuts when something more, say, civil-rightsy comes up.

And then Carmen Rubio comes alive. She has spent one hour and twenty minutes without uttering a word.

“I’m torn here,” she says with a sigh, and says nice things about the charter change, “so our new structure can get its legs the first year,” and yet, “What’s striking me are the numbers I’m hearing about what our settlement requirements are and that we’re behind…”

…so, No. Wheelchairs win again. Rubio lapses back into a zen-like silence.

The gap is filled by Ryan, who plays the sore loser card against Mapps…

“I haven’t heard much from you since I’ve been on council about this issue, so thank you, Commissioner Mapps, for finding your voice today…”

Gonzo “appreciates the discussion” (really?) then grumps…

“I hear a lot of preaching and a lot of not walking the walk on this subject, including in the preparation of this year’s budget.”

If this is a preview of how a Mayor Gonzalez will handle the veto-proof shenanigans of the Daffy Dozen…well, good luck with that.

Final vote: 3-2—tough luck messages from Gonzo’s two “main” opponents, whose lizard-brains are communicating to their cortices: enemy alert! And who may be thinking that crippling a city council that can do whatever it damn well pleases without a threat of a veto might not be such a bad thing.

Wheeler puts in the final word…

“There are lot of things I could say, but I’m not going to…”

So what are the take-aways from this dreary exercise?

First, multiply this pas de quinque by 2.4 and then wonder how the 25-percenters will get anything done. After all, it took 1.3 hours to wrestle with a single item that, let’s face it, concerns less than $500K—chump change—during which one of the five combatants was almost mute.

Wheeler, as mayor, is actually pretty good at running the current council show, since he has had (and used) the whip of bureau assignments to twist arms, which isn’t bad considering that the other four folks obviously hate and fear one another, despite all that “conversation” bowing and scraping.

Not to worry: the wonderful people on the charter commission (some running for offices they engineered) repeatedly assured us that a new, chummy, cooperative, collaborative, we’re-all-together, hugs-all-around era of politics is on the doorstep.

Which 57-percent of Portland’s notorious easy-sell electorate bought, despite virtually no serious coverage by the dinosaur media about what all this dense wordage actually means.

Unfortunately, what’s done is done, despite second-thinkers, such as Jack Bog’s blog, suddenly alarmed at what the voters hath wrought. Somehow, many citizens are shocked—maybe even a trifle iintimidated, by those ranked choice thingies and the “jungle” ballots, three pages tougher to work through than a SAT test.

But weird voting is the least of it.

While the charterites went into deep detail about what the mayor can—and cannot—do, they left the mechanics of running the all-powerful council intentionally vague.

The charter mentions that the council will have a president, but beyond setting the agenda—a rapidly evaporating power of the Multnomah county chair—there’s little said about how the council prez will rule the roost. As Wheeler repeated like a mantra, the council will have to figure that out. Somehow.

Question: who will run the sessions before the president is elected? How will the councilors figure out the details of the president’s power? While they simultaneously try to figure out who can be trusted, who’s a potential threat, who’s a moron, who will make waves, who’s got the media brass-ring, who’s a liar, and who’s going to cave when the going gets tough? How long will it take for the Daffy Dozen to figure out how to run their show?⁴

There are all sorts of other questions the newbies will have to sort out. Will the hapless mayor get to sit somewhere around the cheek-to-jowl dias? Will he participate in debates?

Then there’s the matter—so important that no one will actually talk about it—of the city administrator.

What if the administrator decides there are a bunch of things the council really shouldn’t be bothered with? There’s already a lengthy list of “don’t bothers” in the Wheeler prefab administration—just penny-ante stuff, but an administrator with delusions of power can start stretching the envelope. Which is where Wheeler’s sabotage of the 25-percenters comes in: with just one helper apiece (someone’s gotta answer the phones), the councilors are, effectively, blinded.

And the administrator will be the only person with a white cane.

At the next candidates gang bang session, consider asking the aspirants: How many of you have actually read the city’s budget, “bumps” and all? What portion of the city’s expenditures are locked-down, automatic, mandated? How are you going to work with that? What about that “estimate” about those ADA ramps?

And when the budget bureaucrats show up with their slides and lingo…will it be one bucket or two?

1. Biery holds his job as part of the “transition” to the new city bureaucracy, tailor-made by Wheeler as a going-away present which we reported here, in Dress Rehearsal for Chaos.

2. And again prompts the question: why the hell would anyone want that crummy job?

3. It wouldn’t be a Wheeler statement without triangulation. The guy’s a master.

4. Maybe Julia Meier will be available. After running the charter commission (only she really knows where single transferrable vote actually came from) and the transition project, she’ll be available for…whatever.