Your City Charter Refresher Course

Before you vote, find out "How We Got Where We Got."

I can’t recall what prompted me to take my first look at the deliberations of the Portland Charter Commission back in 2021. It couldn’t have been any significant coverage in our local media; there wasn’t any.

It was a journalist’s dream: a helluva story that no one else seemed interested in covering. Nothing much—just the future government of the 25th biggest city in the USA.

Recently, pawing through the Substack archive I realized that I had somehow cranked out 27 pieces as the charter gestated, was voted into life, and grew into a very strange kid indeed.

So I asked a very bright designer, Kat, at penchantcokat@gmail.com to assemble the real-time history as it unfolded before one startled observer’s eyes. Here’s what resulted…

…and it is yours—free!—and can be downloaded (PDF, virus-free but cranky) at…

Here’s one example, from How’s That Ranked Choice Thingy Doing?, from September 2, 2022…

• Voters should expect more marginal candidates, even though you’ll probably only get to vote for four (can’t jam up the computers …) as the various racial/sexual-choice/progressive-crazy non-profits gather in back rooms to put together slates and ways to game the ballot.

• Inevitably, the power of unions and PACs will increase, since name-recognition will be the name of the game. Media’s “frames” and their decisions on who gets ink and air-time will become crucial… Expect a raft of “spoiler” candidates to mulch up the slip-slide of votes in the various rounds. Human ingenuity will know no bounds.

You have to wonder: If some old guy sitting around his fish tank and typing on a MacBook…

…could see this self-evident stuff (most of it published by the charter commission itself), where was everyone else?

In many ways the current election is more surreal than I had imagined.

The charter’s first clotted election offers two—count ‘em—modes of determining the so-called winners (rank choice voting for mayor and single transferrable vote for the council horde, hereafter known as RCV/STV). With the horse outta the barn, every local publication has taken a swing at explainiing RCV/STV for the mopes. And has struck out.

The Oregonian trotted out the insulting “best donuts” trope; WillyWeek fielded its cute Ballot Buddy…

…with the wholly naive statement…

As they say in the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play, and the more numbers you pick the better your chances.

To which we refer Ballot Buddy’s Lin Lin Hutchinson to the words of Multnomah elections director and vote-counter Tim Scott…

If you don’t want someone to win don’t rank them.

Jack Bogdanski’s Bojack blog spent seven articles trying to figure out how that RCV/STV stuff would, well…work. Bogdanski is a professor of fearsomely technical tax law, but, in the end, he threw in the towel…

Ah, me. This being Portlandia, we’ll probably have “rank choice” with us for a while. But like Measure 110, it will doubtlessly lead to some disaster or other, and then the talk of repeal will begin in earnest.

Elsewhere, another of our predictions of rampant endorsements and slates for puzzled voters turned out to be an underestimation as every publication, even pirate media, got into slatemaking. Premiere pirate media PDX.Real gets our award for best-looking endorsements…

…although how Dan Ryan, Terrence Hayes, and Loretta Smith made it through their fine-tooth comb remains puzzling and unanswered. The other endorsers left us to wonder why anyone sane would take the guidance of people such as Therese Bottomly and Mark Zusman seriously—they’ve been hanging around town since well after their sell-by date and no one takes anything they say at face value.

Meanwhile, in the shadows, various public employee and teachers’ unions made their endorsements and loaned out their logos to various candidates. (Why? They’ll never share the questionnaires that candidates dutifully filled out, telling the unions exactly what they wanted to hear. Which, as always, was More for us, less for everyone else!). It caused us to reach for Philip K. Howard’s book, “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions…”

Unions in the public sector can get what they want by helping friendly politicians get elected. As labor leader Victor Gotbaum put it, “We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.”

I missed some stuff.

Who could have predicted the flood of candidates and the police lineup-style gang-bangs with one-minute statements about how to save the city? Or the traffic jam of former (and kicked out of office) pols such as Steve (“LTIC”) Novick and ex-cons such as the above-mentioned Terrence Hayes? Or, a Bud Clark wanna-be stripper…

…with a sexy slashed Ø last name (Østhus for the record). The rank choice voting scheme is so whifty she might make it. (We’re hoping for her first City Club “State of the City” speech in the nude.)

My biggest miss was not paying more attention to the commission’s ringmaster…

…Executive Director Julia Meier, who was on hand for just about every meeting, at least electronically. She’s a master of hiding in plain sight; if you merely read the minutes of the 70 or so meetings, she’s like a ghost in the works.

Call it just a coincidence: Two of Meier’s former employers¹ were deeply involved in the commission from the get-go. She was the executive director, however improbably, of the Coalition of Communities of Color, which was hired to do the commission’s “listening” (guess who got their ear?). Meier’s PR mouthpiece swears that the CCC got the contract by standard procedures, but no one wants to disclose if there were competitors. Or send along a copy of the contract.

Then Meier bounced to the City Club, home of the People Who Think They Run Portland (which almost went under during GuvKate’s coup; they came back post-Covid as raw-meat progressives). Read the meeting notes and the Club seems to be hovering, somehow just…there. With “advice,” which had an eerie way of turning into those radical voting schemes (although we suspect that high-powered East Coast money and an outfit called FairVote, salted with Soros bucks, came into play. You’ll find not a trace of them in the official record.)

Having read all of the archived minutes (a practice that will test your sanity), and with the proviso that I might have missed some smidgen, I simply cannot determine the provenance of the two voting systems that perplexed Bogdanski and everyone else without a mathematics PhD. That’s a part of the history that will probably, in time, become an urban legend. As for Meier or her PR cut-out, they ain’t talking.

While reading the meeting minutes is a pain and poses more questions than answers, the verbatim records of online texts between commissioners during their ZOOMathons are a hoot. Here’s the interplay at the ZOOM meeting as the charter was being approved for submission to the voters…

I also wish I had paid more attention to the commission’s few actual dissenters: Vadim Mozyrsky, David Chen, and David Knowles, who voted against submitting the charter for a vote. I wish I had paid more attention to Mozyrsky’s proposal to break up the complex charter into seperate items on the ballot, which might have spared us the RCV/STV nonsense.

Anyway, hope you enjoy reliving those wonderful years when the charter snuck up on just about everyone—although we sense that commission members Candance Avalos and Debbie Kitchen were already contemplating their runs for city council.

PS: Commission member Amira Streeter is now the executive director of (wait for it!)…the City Club.

1. She’s still on the city payroll managing the transition to the charter she helped devise.