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A new poll shows just how large Portlanders’ appetite is to change the city’s form of government, which often results in stalemates between bureaus and slow, ineffective coordination.
The weak-mayor system consists of five city commissioners—including the mayor—who oversee the daily administrative tasks of several bureaus apiece while also acting as legislators elected by voters citywide. The commissioners guard their bureaus as fiefdoms where they can build programs to justify their reelection and bristle at encroachments by colleagues onto their turf. The mayor reassigns bureaus after every election, often scattering them in different political directions.
The weak-mayor form of government is no longer used by another other major city in the United States. Yet Portlanders have rejected a change in its form of government six times since 1913.
Every 10 years, an independent city commission recommends reforms of the city’s government to the City Council. This year presents an opportunity to succeed where others have failed, because voters are largely dissatisfied with Portland’s direction and disgusted with its leadership.
The Charter Commission, a city-funded panel of 20 appointed members, has been working for over a year to decide which changes will be offered to Portlanders on the November 2022 ballot.
On Thursday night, a polling firm showed the commission the results of a poll of likely voters.
What’s most clear: Voters are deeply unhappy with how the city is currently run and represented, and they want to scrap the weak-mayor form of government in favor of an alternative.
FM3 Research of Oakland, Calif., conducted the poll on behalf of Building Power for Communities of Color, an affiliate of Coalition for Communities of Color. The city contracted with the nonprofit to talk to Portlanders about charter reform before the city drafted a ballot initiative.
The pollsters queried 620 likely Portland voters over a two-week span in February and March.
And while voters strongly supported switching away from the current form of government, there wasn’t overwhelming support for either a mayor-council or city manager-council alternative.
A slim majority (51%) supported switching to a mayor-council form of government in which the mayor manages day-to-day city operations and leaves policy decisions to council members; 18% were undecided. (That support rose by 8 percentage points when coupled with a larger council.)
Support for a manager-council form of government was 52%, with 29% opposed. In that form of government, elected commissioners and the mayor appoint a city manager to oversee day-to-day operations outside the scope of elected politics. (Nearly 60% of American cities use this framework.)
But voter enthusiasm for change varied widely depending on how the questions were framed.
Seventy percent of those polled said they would vote yes on a ballot measure that reads: “Shall city manager be responsible for managing city functions, appointed and overseen by larger city council, with members elected by district?”
Fifty-four percent said they would vote yes on a ballot measure that reads: “Shall elected City Council appoint a city manager to manage all city bureaus, subject to the mayor and City Council’s policy and quasi-judicial oversight?”
That variance suggests a reform proposal could be vulnerable this November: If any powerful interests decide to oppose it, they just need to frame the idea with different wording to shrink its support.
Another wrinkle: The Charter Review Commission has added other ideas to its possible reform package, including increasing the numbers of commissioners, electing them by districts rather than citywide, and using ranked-choice voting. The support pollsters found for those add-ons varied, and another poll commissioned by the Coalition for Communities of Color will explore those add-ons in greater depth, says deputy director Jenny Lee.
Lee says the poll, which cost $36,000, made other findings that aren’t yet ready for distribution: “There is a fuller version of the poll, but our pollsters didn’t have a chance to go through the cross tabs to prepare them for distribution. We tested slightly different language in the survey but any changes kept us at a majority support.”
The presentation of poll results to the commission can be found here.
Voters overwhelmingly supported of ranked-choice voting in city elections, in which voters rank candidates on a numbered list. Seventy percent of respondents supported this type of voting.
Fifty-eight percent of voters supported district-based elections with multiple council members each, where candidates run based on geography.
Fifty-five percent of voters supported expanding the council from its current five commissioners to nine to 13 members. (That’s fairly weak support for an idea being presented for the first time.)
At the end of the month, the commission will submit its recommendations to the City Attorney’s Office so it can begin drafting ballot measure language.