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The next political contest to lead the city of Portland is already underway.
At the first meeting of the Portland City Council in January 2025, the 12-member body will elect a council president and vice president.
Under Portland’s new government structure, the position comes with power that rivals that of the mayor. The council president will decide which policy items to hear at council meetings and will assign various policy proposals to council committees, much like a Senate or House majority leader in the Oregon Legislature.
It took less than 24 hours after preliminary election results were released on Tuesday night for the top finishers in the City Council races to begin exchanging congratulatory calls to one another and slipping in, mostly indirectly, hints that certain candidates would be seeking the role of council president.
Five of the future City Council members, speaking on background, tell WW a number of the new council members are eyeing the president position.
The new council members who are definitely angling for the spot, according to fellow councilors, include Steve Novick in District 3, Olivia Clark in District 4, and Candace Avalos in District 1. Three others mulling the position, according to fellow candidates, include Elana Pirtle-Guiney in District 2, Loretta Smith in District 1, and Dan Ryan in District 2.
The new council will also have to elect a vice president, a less powerful position but still a meaningful status symbol. The president and vice president cannot be from the same district, and both will be elected only by a majority vote. City spokeswoman Christine Llobregat says city code does not lay out a specific process for how a presidential candidate is nominated (or if they may nominate themselves). In the absence of rules, Llobegrat says, Robert’s Rules of Order apply.
Most candidates declined to say definitively whether they will seek to be council president. Clark, a longtime government leader who served under Gov. John Kitzhaber and worked at TriMet for 20 years, is the only member who confirmed she would seek the job.
Current City Commissioner Dan Ryan, the only person on the new council that will have sat on the prior City Council, says he’s “allowing the dust to settle and am increasingly focused on the importance of the 12 of us coming together to set strategic priorities as we face an extremely grim 2025-26 budget reality.” Ryan added: “Our collective focus will be essential to keep the work moving forward. I believe the council president will emerge organically from this pragmatic conversation.”
Pirtle-Guiney says that should her colleagues ask her to be in leadership, “I’ll certainly consider it.” But, she wrote, “I think it’s important for every Councilor-elect to have time to lay out what they’re looking for in our leadership team before we start jockeying for positions.”
Novick, too, declined to say if he would run for president. “I think a big part of the council president’s job is about managing relationships. It needs to be someone who can navigate ideological conflicts so that the people on the losing side won’t be embittered,” Novick says. “And it needs to be someone committed to doing what they can to make each of us as successful as possible. To that end, I have asked my prospective colleagues if they can each identify something, or some things, they want to get done that are sort of unique to them and which might not be controversial.”
Avalos and Smith in District 1 did not respond to a request for comment.