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As Bananarama sang, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.
The most recent meeting of the Portland City Council dragged on for five hours, and some of the holdup hinged on questions of process. The at times contentious discussion over a routine budget amendment ran for over an hour of an April 16 meeting that ran till almost 11 pm before the councilors finally called it quits.
The disputes point to how the council is still grappling with rules and protocols in its fourth month, and how closely split it sometimes falls along political allegiances. Here’s what happened.
What was the ordinance at hand?
Mayor Keith Wilson proposed an emergency ordinance to make “technical adjustments” to the city’s current fiscal year budget. (Such adjustments are common when a bureau underspends its budget.) This technical adjustment proposed sending an unspent $5 million back to the general fund for the next fiscal year and carrying over another $6 million to next year’s budget but keeping it in its original bureaus.
The ordinance had been discussed in the Finance Committee on April 1 and passed unanimously to be heard in front of the full council.
What was the amendment at hand?
Councilor Sameer Kanal proposed an amendment that would move two line items from the next year’s beginning balance in the general fund and preserve the money in the bureaus for their initial intended use.
The two items were: $737,000 for Portland Fire & Rescue’s firefighter training program and $100,000 for a contact survey by the Portland Police Bureau that would gather citizens’ feedback on their interactions with officers.
Kanal mounted a more spirited defense for the contact survey, which was requested in late 2023 by a citizen-led police advisory body called the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing. The city allocated $100,000 for the project but was delayed by a slow procurement process, meaning the project can’t be completed by the close of the fiscal year that ends June 30. (Kanal formerly worked for the city overseeing a project to create a new police accountability body.)
More moderate councilors, such as Eric Zimmerman, who chairs the Finance Committee, took issue with Kanal’s proposal. But the argument was less about the substance of Kanal’s amendment or the ordinance, and more about the process.
What process questions came up?
The fledgling council has for months been working out the kinks in how an idea becomes a policy, and it’s not all been smooth.
Throughout the hourlong discussion on Wilson’s ordinance and Kanal’s amendment, which ultimately failed, a number of process questions were debated.
One was whether the mayor may break a tie vote on amendments or just final policies. Councilor Loretta Smith asked the question after Kanal’s amendment resulted in a 6-6 tie. City Attorney Robert Taylor said his interpretation was that the new charter allowed the mayor to break ties only in final votes.
Smith said she was “troubled” by that explanation and kept asking questions, until Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney insisted the council needed to move along. More debate about Robert’s Rules of Order followed.
Another question was, how does the council handle one-off bureau funding requests outside the budget process?
Councilor Zimmerman said it felt as if Kanal’s amendment “looks like putting money into a department that hasn’t asked for it, for a mayor who hasn’t asked for it.” He added that the amendment “seems like a way to plump up a bureau’s budget without going through the regular budget process, and that seems strange to me.” Councilor Olivia Clark echoed that concern.
Other councilors who are more politically aligned with Kanal took his side on the issue.
Councilor Candace Avalos said she didn’t like that the Finance Committee was presented a list of funds to carry over into next fiscal year for what seemed like a “rubber stamp.” She asked rhetorically whether the council could direct a bureau to “reprioritize” a program through a budget directive, as Kanal’s amendment would do. “I believe the answer is yes.”
Yet another recurring question has been along the same lines: Does the majority of work on a policy happen at the committee level or in front of the full council?
Kanal made the argument that the mayor’s emergency ordinance was presented in a rushed manner to the council, giving committees—including the Community and Public Safety Committee, which Kanal co-chairs—insufficient time to review. “We had no ability to react,” Kanal said.
On that point, Smith agreed, saying the technical adjustment had been “hidden in the Finance Committee” and that the council president should have scheduled a work session on it.
“Don’t slide it through finance like nobody’s paying attention,” Smith said. (Pirtle-Guiney said councilors made it very clear early on they wanted fewer work sessions, not more.)
Kanal later agreed: “This is where the final decision is going to be made, not at the committee level. The question is whether we’re going to be deferential on it. We didn’t have the time, and we didn’t have a work session on it.”
The debate didn’t stop there—although Council President Pirtle-Guiney tried to end it.
But when she called a vote on whether to end discussion and vote on the mayor’s ordinance, that set off a debate on another question: What powers does the council president have to guide the process?
More debate ensued. And Kanal ultimately voted against Wilson’s ordinance. “We need to get out of the habit of using the idea of calling the question to cut off our colleagues. It’s not a good way of doing things,” Kanal said. “And that’s my reason for voting no.”
The only other “no” vote came from Councilor Angelita Morillo. The mayor’s ordinance passed by a 10–2 vote.
What’s actually going on?
It’s always been a tendency for the losing side of a political battle to claim an insufficient, botched or rigged process. Now, with the council split evenly 6–6 on many policy questions, both sides have pointed to process as the reason for their frustration. On this particular topic, most councilors seemed irked by either how the mayor’s ordinance made its way through committee or how Kanal’s amendment came about.
Some councilors characterized the mayor’s ordinance as having been rushed through the committee process without proper council input. Others who opposed Kanal’s amendment characterized it as a sneaky move.
As council president, Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guiney gets to cast her vote last. Before she voted in favor of the mayor’s ordinance, Pirtle-Guiney, who’s kept her cards close to her vest as president, chastised her colleagues for characterizing the ordinance as one that had been intentionally rushed through.
“We have committees for a reason. We all agreed early on in this process that we wanted to have committees,” Pirtle-Guiney noted sternly. “To suggest that something was rushed because it went through a committee you were not on feels highly disingenuous to me.”
She added: “Using that as an excuse to not do your homework and to look at what’s coming, and to suggest that we didn’t have process because we used the process we created, feels highly disingenuous, and I think that needs to be called out.”
As for the $100,000 for the police contact survey, city spokesman Dan Douthit says the mayor intends to preserve that funding in next year’s budget for that use.