Commissioner Mingus Mapps Scolds the City for Enabling the Dysfunction of His Former Employer

Two days after Portland City Hall coughed up a scathing external review of the Office of Community & Civic Life, Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who oversees the bureau, announced the office’s new interim director: Michael Montoya, who was the office’s innovation, strategy and performance manager.

Hardesty’s statement said recruitment of a permanent new director wouldn’t begin until “significant work has been accomplished as part of an overall strategic planning and change process” in the wake of the report.

The report was released reluctantly, after a public records appeal by WW and a ruling by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office. Two days after that order, the office’s director, Suk Rhee, departed.

She picked up a healthy check on her way out the door. Documents obtained by WW show that Rhee received $178,000 in severance pay, as first reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting on Wednesday.

Such large payments have regularly been used by City Hall as leverage to hasten the departure of embattled bureau directors.

Rhee was certainly that. The report, prepared by a consulting firm ASCTE, tore apart the office’s management, particularly Rhee and four other leadership figures. Employees who were surveyed for the report offered intense recollections of various instances in which they felt Rhee was emotionally abusive, spiteful, disrespectful, controlling and manipulative.

City Commissioner Mingus Mapps, who worked for the bureau several years back and was fired, says the report “lays out the depth and breadth of the dysfunction within Civic Life. I have a heavy heart for the employees who suffered at the hands of incompetent and abusive managers.”

Mapps scolded the city for not taking action sooner: “It is beyond alarming that as a city we allowed staff and the public to suffer for so long with no action taken.”

Mapps’ dissatisfaction with the leadership of Rhee and the elected official who hired her, City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, was a driving force behind his successful election campaign to unseat Eudaly last November. Eudaly hired Rhee in an effort to widen and diversity the bureau from its traditional base of neighborhood associations.

Yet the report showed the office continued to struggle with racial friction, deeply held grudges, and uncertainty about what it was supposed to be doing.

On Wednesday morning, in what seemed like ironic timing, Civic Life sent out a rosy statement wishing Rhee well and thanking her for her leadership.

“During this time, Director Rhee better aligned the bureau’s work with the city’s anti-racist and equity goals. Over the last three years, Director Rhee’s leadership has guided Civic Life to deliver meaningful outcomes for communities, with a focus on those least well served by government,” it read.

The statement made no mention of the outside report.