The Charter Commission's Sayonara

They're a gift that keeps on giving. And taking away.

Betcha you didn’t know that the Charter Commission—a group of non-elected mopes from the city’s various racial, sexual-choice, public employee union pressure groups—had yet another few cards up their sleeves, having bamboozled the city’s myopic electorate into buying the truly bizarre new charter.

Who knew, in effect, that the panel of progressives was, in reality, a sort of shadow City Council, choc-full of new ordinances to startle and amuse the citizens?

Well, we’ve got ‘em…and, boy! Have they been busy.

The Commish’s “phase II” deliberations barfed up nine proposals for voters in 2024 and six proposals for the lame duck City Council to chew on before they wind up in history’s dust-bin.

The list begs one to consider the Iron Rule of Unintended Consequences, our local specialty. Progressives, as we should know, love-love-love Big Ideas, since they are smarter than the rest of us and occupy the moral high ground. Not their fault that the ideas sorta stumble on their way to reality, but we’ll ignore that for a moment as we take a cruise through a few, which our compatriots in legacy media have avoided analyzing.

Turn over a rock, no telling what’ll crawl out.

Many of the 25 Big Ideas seem to be, well…harmless. Some are merely of interest to grammarians. Others are well-placed time-bombs designed, as is the Charter, to cement a certain quasi-religious political philosophy in place for…who knows how long. The last Charter lasted a century.

No one, of course, bothered to mention that the old charter had created a damn nice town, survived the city’s ultra-corruption of the ‘20s-’50s, and that any current failings were a matter of dumb politics and politicians as opposed to something called “siloing.” But let’s not be sore losers, another Portland specialty.

So let’s take a ramble through the progressive dream world…

Proposal #1: Delete the prohibition on mandating the weatherization of structures built before September 1, 1979.

This one tops the list? The ban was put in place by a vote of citizens, who approved it by a hefty margin but—hey! Times change. And now we have a battalion of bureaucrats within the city’s Bureau of Planning & Sustainability (one of the most odious, slow-witted, arrogant silos), which got the Commission’s Climate & Environmental Justice Subcommittee to get serious about climate change and put some fangs on the city’s feel-good goal of being carbon-neutral by 2050.

As if that will in any way alter the course of Chinese, Indian, and Third-World carbon-belching power plants and farting cows.

And so the Commish notes, in passing, that…

…approximately 71% of properties in the urban service boundary (or 140,893) were constructed prior to 1979…

…without noting where these structures are (let’s guess: in the poorest neighborhoods, which brings up an inevitable racial angle, which we’ll encounter elsewhere) and what a future City Council (with a majority of councilors elected, somehow, with 25% of the vote*) will do to force these expensive retrofits.

The Charter Commission’s PR release, modestly titled a “Progress Report” (older ones have gone down the Orwellian memory hole), says innocently…

…no mandates about specific weatherization are being proposed…

…but adds, ominously, that it…

…would allow for weatherization and energy efficiency policy to be created as an additional tool to reach the City’s climate action goals…

Give ‘em “tools” and don’t yell when the bureaucrats use ‘em.

Golly! We’re at No. 1 and already starting to suffer from utopia-exhaustion. Let’s skip forward to…

Proposal #9: Update, and make consistent, references to “protected classes.”

Looks pretty innocuous, doesn’t it? The Commish redlined 32 words in the old charter which included, “race, religion, gender, marital and family status, national origin, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, source of income.” Seems to include just about everyone (excluding the city’s who-know-whos). This was replaced with innocent-sounding…

…“protected class under local ordinance, or state or federal law.”

Note the words, “local ordinance.” And think about all of those City Council 25-percenters waiting in the wings. Gee! What do you think Jo Ann Hardesty (or Candace Avalos) will devise on the new Council filled with people “who look like the community they represent?”

There are other strange items, such as…

Proposal #7:Remove the 5% cap on transient lodgings tax.

…which will further burden the city’s disappearing tourist business for no apparent reason other than…

The Portland limit was set at a time when typical transient lodging tax rates were lower in Oregon…

…which is so stupid that you’d have to read it a few times to understand that our taxes ought to be indexed to some weird—and undisclosed—metric which always increases. Why? Don’t ask.

Proposal #6: Delete outdated, burdensome, and redundant requirements for franchise agreements.

…which changes to the way the city awards franchises—basically to make the process less transparent and more open to corruption.

Proposal #4: Delete vague and archaic language: “roaming the streets at unseasonable hours.”

…which might be better amended as “unreasonable hours,” which would solve the homeless crisis with one pen stroke.

All this is eyewash before the main course…buckle up!

Proposal #11: Create an Independent Portland Elections Commission.

….where the nut gets cut. Here’s the Commission’s sales pitch…

Creating the Commission and authorizing the Commission to implement public financing and other elections programs, in the Charter helps insulate the public financing program from real and perceived conflicts of interest by elected officials who may use the program to run for reelection.

Well, we hate-hate-hate politicians, don’t we? Let’s sock it to ‘em!

But, as with all things progressive, there’s a little catch. Here it is…

The Independent Portland Elections Commission consists of nine City residents who collectively represent the City’s diversity.

It’s a clone of the mopes on the Charter Commission! Which was a symphony of diversity, if not self-dealing and racial/sexual lobbying.

The measure was the brainchild of one Susan Mottet, Director of the city’s Open & Accountable Elections bureaucracy back in September 2020, whose memo noted, with distaste, that…

The City Charter does not permit the City Council to create via Code commissions that are independent of political influence (i.e. not supervised by an Elected-In-Charge).

Which is a nifty way to say, “Let’s keep this away from the power of voters to, like, y’know, do something if these brilliant ideas go sideways.” And forget that civic’s book nonsense about “representative democracy.”

The amended charter language isn’t clear about how these nine will be first selected, although here’s a hint…

To fill vacancies, the Commission recommends candidates for Mayoral appointment and City Council confirmation.

So—by golly!—those horrid politicians will get to stack the deck! Just as they di, to disastrous result, on the Charter Commission. Not very reassuring, eh?

There is nothing in the proposed language about the commission members’ terms (a typical stumble of the Commission’s ham-handed writing), except that…

Commission members may be removed prior to the completion of the member’s term according to this Charter or by a process outlined in the Commission’s bylaws.

You might look in vain through the Charter Commission’s PR junk for “the bylaws,” or other charter language. Typically, the messy details are missing in action.

And how about that nasty phrase, “who collectively represent the City’s diversity.” Does anyone seriously believe this “representation” will be “proportional?” My basic math calculation of 5.6-percent (a number I picked out of thin air) of nine positions yields .56. What the hell: deed one seat to the Coalition of Communities of Color and be done with it.

Except that’s not the way race-progressives calculate.

Proposal #12: Create an article dedicated to environmental issues that includes environmental justice as a core value of the City, requires the City to assess the climate impact of its decisions and establishes a right to a clean and healthy environment.

Would someone—anyone!—puh-leeze define “climate environmental justice?” Upon such feel-good language are legal nightmares created…and you can be sure that this phrase will slop over into every interaction with the city, and will give a generation of climate bureaucrats a job for life.

Are there any available metrics to do this computation? And how soon will an outfit such as Columbia Riverkeepers haul the city into court or before their captives in the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality on the basis of “a right” unmentioned in the Constitution—as the organization did in putting the cabosh on that gleaming new biofuels refinery on the Columbia River, the one that was supposed to provide a jillion gallons of sueaky-clean bio-fuel so Portland could hit its 2050 target for no more noxious diesel fuel?

Nope. That’s dead in the water. Killed by environmentalists.

And while we’re shopping for definitions, consider the proposal’s sign-off…

All Portland residents including those of future generations have a right to a clean and healthy environment. The City must equitably protect this right for all its residents.

Think we’ll finally find out what “equity” is?

Meanwhile, if you want to drive an environment-fanatic nuts, just ask a couple questions:

• Where will asphalt to pave the city’s crappy streets come from?

• Where will all of the hundreds of products with petroleum as the feedstock—such as aspirin, epoxy, bicycle tires, ink—come from?

Meanwhile, the European press is loaded with stories about the failure of wind- and solar-power as winter bites. Latest headline: When we need it, renewable energy is nowhere to be found

Proposal #14: Require the City to create a participatory budgeting program open to all residents.

Well, the city’s voters just proved that they’ll fall for proposals that no one really understands and that no one knows how they’ll work—so why not this?

Here’s what’s in store…

The City would need to create a participatory budgeting program where Portland residents would be responsible for allocating at least 1% of the City’s General Fund discretionary ongoing resources. The decisions would be binding.

We’re not talking chump change here…

Using the latest forecast information, a 1% General Fund discretionary set aside beginning in Fiscal Year 2025-26 would be $7.3 million.

Being a Portland resident will—somehow—get you in the door, but how decisions will be made is left up to your imagination. One can be absolutely sure that the usual suspects from the various non-profits will line up at the trough, each promoting their own money-laundering projects, immune from any real scrutiny and rife with kick-backs and cut-outs and weird slip-slide transfers of tax-free funds from one hand to another.

We can’t wait.

Which brings us to the beauty-part…

Proposal #15: Expand right to vote in City elections to the fullest extent allowed by law.

It’s the “We’ve got to do something with all of the illegal immigrants we’re dumping around the country” measure. Well, why not? The proposal doesn’t mince words…

The City must extend the right to vote, including but not limited to extending the right to vote to noncitizens…

…and, while we’re being paranoid, note the words, “not limited to,” although it remains to be seen how the vote could be extended any further. Maybe dogs ‘n’ cats ‘n’ goldfish?

Had enough? Chasing progressive dreams is a bit fatiguing.

Meanwhile, now that media has succumbed to its short attention-span, here’s yet another item, buried in the latest communique. It’s a job opening…

Applications are open for a Strategic Projects Manager to develop the City’s implementation plan for delivering ranked choice voting for the 2024 election and to support the Independent District Commission’s work to establish districts for the election of City Council.

Odd, don’tcha think, that the work of “delivering ranked choice voting” is a job best suited to a fellow such as Tim Scott, who is the director of Multnomah county elections. He was just selected to serve as president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks (OACC). The organization says…

Its membership… is the foremost association providing leadership, education, legislative expertise and civic engagement pertaining to the administration of elections and related duties throughout the state.

So, let’s assume that Mr. Scott knows what he’s doing, at least in the eyes of his fellow clerks. Not good enough for the Charter Commission?

Interesting that the job notice (no mention of salary, of course) doesn’t mention the really heavy lift—devising the software (which doesn’t exist) to count those “single transferrable votes,” that will put those nine 25-percenters on the new Council.

Mr. Scott will be facing three vastly different voting mechanisms: good old first-past-the-post; ranked-choice; and single-transferrable vote. It’s a safe bet that not even the members of the Charter Commission actually understand how these things will work; but Mr. Scott’s a guy who looks like he can get a tough job done (and who is one of the few local civil servants who will answer inquiring emails); he says he will start working with the city’s long-time voting-software supplier after New Year’s (when Clackamas county, which covers slivers of Portland, will get a new, and presumably competent, county clerk). Washington county also figures in this new voting scheme as well. Troikas, anyone?

Lucky Tim! He’ll now have someone looking over his shoulder while the software is written, tested, wrung-out, re-written, and then tested, a cycle that—as any programmer knows—almost always busts deadlines and that has a nasty way of not running well out of the gate.

In less than two years. With some equity-hireling jamming up the works.

But—not to worry. It’s merely the bedrock of our republican democracy. Which the folks who purport to run Portland could care less about.

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*Single transferrable vote works thusly: In each of the city’s four districts, three Councilors will be elected. The first candidate to win 50-percent of the vote will be elected; counting their votes will be ended and votes redeployed to the voters’ second choices; when one has received 25-percent of the vote, left-over votes will go to the next candidate who gets 25-percent of the vote and…they’re on Council! Got that?