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On Tuesday morning, the Portland City Council discussed a slate of proposals presented by City Commissioners Rene Gonzalez and Dan Ryan that would fundamentally alter charter reforms approved by 58% of Portland voters last November.
Those three changes, first floated by Gonzalez and Ryan last week, would alter the charter measure that is set to overhaul how the city functions come 2025. The changes the commissioners proposed would: shrink the size of the future City Council from 12 to eight members, give the mayor veto powers, and adopt a different form of ranked-choice voting than was approved in the 2022 charter reform measure.
With the council chambers filled with supporters of charter reform, the five commissioners spent nearly three hours discussing possible alterations to the adopted reforms. The conversation was at times spirited, tense and downright awkward as council members spoke with each other, selected speakers, and a number of city bureau staff who opined on the potential pitfalls of referring the proposed changes to the ballot.
With a majority vote, the council could place one, two or three of the proposals on the November 2023 ballot. Though it’s unclear where each city commissioner will land on the proposals, the tone of the discussion would suggest at least two of the ideas are unlikely to garner the council support needed to place them on the ballot.
Attending remotely from a car, Mayor Ted Wheeler defended the will of the voters.
“The public overwhelmingly agreed. We’ve known the outcome of that vote for many, many months now,” Wheeler said. “We haven’t even yet implemented what voters asked for, and yet we’re proposing to go back to the voters with changes.”
Wheeler insisted the will of voters was made clear in November: “I would caution my colleagues before we start changing the process after the 11th hour...to uphold the will of the people as best we can before we start making changes.”
The three referrals, already drafted by the City Attorney’s Office, have been submitted to appear at next Wednesday’s City Council meeting for a vote.
Here’s how the discussion went around each of three major proposals at Tuesday’s work session—and what happens next.
Mayoral veto:
Two members of the 20-member Charter Commission that wrote the charter reform measure—Candace Avalos, who was part of the supermajority that approved the final proposal, and David Knowles, one of three dissenting votes on the final proposal who then went on to campaign against the measure—argued their positions to the City Council.
Avalos said the commission nixed the mayoral veto because of overwhelming concern from Portlanders that the mayor would have too much power over the 12-member council.
“We believed it would be important that the council have a significant amount of power over the executive branch,” Avalos said. “I wouldn’t consider this a minor tweak; I would consider it a massive change in the balance of powers.”
Commissioner Mingus Mapps, who fought the initial charter reform measure, questioned Avalos on a hypothetical disaster scenario in which a future council would pass a failing policy and the mayor would have no method of killing it. “Having a veto is not the only way to resolve a situation,” Avalos said in response (a sentiment Wheeler later echoed from the car).
Knowles argued that the mayor, as the only citywide elected official under the new charter, has the unique responsibility of answering to the entire city. “Our concern is that the council would adopt a policy or make budget decisions that the mayor is not capable of implementing,” Knowles said. “There’s a fear that a policy wouldn’t be possible to implement. Only the person with the unique responsibility for managing the budget can weigh all those different concerns.”
Shrinking the City Council from 12 to eight members:
Despite this referral perhaps being the most contentious, little discussion was had about the proposed reduction.
Gonzalez articulated two concerns: the inability to attract 12 qualified candidates, and the costs associated with increasing the size of the council.
Mapps, though he said he was concerned about unforeseen costs, told Gonzalez he was “reluctant to try and manage those costs through reducing the number of people on council.” Wheeler echoed that hesitation.
Gonzalez cited unforeseen costs as a primary concern he has with the current charter reforms. That includes the increased requested budget for the Small Donor Elections Program (a roughly $4 million hike), the likely renovation of City Hall to accommodate the larger council, and the increased salary for each of the future city councilors. (A salary commission recently recommended $142,000 annually.)
City Budget Office director Tim Grewe said his office will produce a new estimate of transition costs in October once other details are ironed out, including the size of council staff.
Scrapping single-transferable ranked-choice voting and adopting a different form:
Gonzalez and Ryan propose substituting a different form of ranked-choice voting (instant runoff) for the form adopted by voters in the November ballot measure. They also propose that councilors from each of the four geographic voting districts be elected in alternating cycles so that both district positions aren’t on the same ballot.
Mike Alfoni, co-founder of Oregon Ranked Choice Voting, had biting words for the proposal. Any process to alter the adopted form of voting, Alfoni said, “should take months, or years, not weeks. I would say that the timeline is too short to recommend changes....It’s going to be an absolute mess.”
Because a candidate only needs 25% of the vote to get elected under the new charter, Gonzalez said he wondered if it would take away “voters’ recourse” to replace incumbents. Gonzalez also expressed concern about different interest groups—labor, progressives and a business coalition—forming slates intended to dominate districts.
City elections officer Louise Hansen rebuked Gonzalez’s proposal to alter the form of voting, arguing that it could cause a cascade of severe problems for her office and the functionality of the city’s elections. The estimated cost of placing the referrals on the November special ballot, Hansen said, would be $630,000. (That’s if no other jurisdictions put a measure on the ballot. The Portland Public Schools board is mulling one currently; if the board moves forward with its measure, that would decrease the cost to the city for placing its own measures on the ballot. “All jurisdictions that use special elections have to pay an apportioned share of the election,” explains Multnomah County Elections director Tim Scott, who says it’s difficult to immediately estimate what the decreased cost would be.)
What happens now?
Each of the three proposals has been submitted to the City Council next week for a vote. If any of the three proposals garner a majority of City Council votes, they will appear on the November ballot.
It’s not clear where each of the commissioners stand on the proposals, but if the tone of today’s forum is any indication, there’s strong hesitation from at least three commissioners on one or more of the proposals.
Already, strong opposition has formed in response to the two men’s proposals. Seven Oregon state senators and representatives and local elected officials panned the proposals in a letter Monday that urged the council not to pursue a “rushed countermeasure” that would “ultimately undermine the will of the voters.”