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At the tail end of a Tuesday meeting of the Portland City Council’s Homelessness and Housing Committee, two councilors sparred over whether the body was following city rules on how a policy idea moves out of a committee to the full 12-member council.
The brief but heated exchange between Councilors Eric Zimmerman and Candace Avalos, the latter of whom chairs the committee, laid bare just how much the new council is still trying to work out the details of the city’s new legislative branch.
Zimmerman, right before he voted no on the ordinance at hand, said: “I’m pretty sure that we’re violating process by not having public comment on an amendment before a vote.”
Avalos, when it came her time to vote, defended how she’d run the meeting. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re operating within the code. And so that’s how I’m moving this agenda.”
The committee voted Tuesday to send the ordinance to the full council by a 3-1 vote.
The ordinance in question during the heated meeting was a policy championed by Councilor Angelita Morillo that would ban landlords from using a technique called “algorithmic pricing” to set rents. It’s a test case for how a policy should move through committee before going to the full council for a vote.
The new 12-member council is the first in the city’s recent history to set city policy using a committee structure, similar to the Oregon Legislature’s.
The substance of the ordinance itself, though, was also a point of contention. The committee voted to send the ordinance to the full council with a 3-1 vote, with Zimmerman the sole vote against it. (Councilor Dan Ryan, who’s on vacation, had his staffer read a statement in opposition to the ordinance, but because he wasn’t present didn’t get a vote.)
Real estate, housing and building groups that have historically held sway in City Hall have come out in recent weeks in opposition to Morillo’s ordinance, saying it would hurt the housing supply in Portland at a time when the city is trying to build the stock.
A series of letters obtained by WW sent to various city councilors in recent weeks from the housing groups and their lobbyists shows that Morillo’s ordinance is the first policy under the new form of government to generate real pushback from well-heeled groups.
In one of them, the Portland Metro Chamber, Oregon Smart Growth, Multifamily NW, the Home Building Association, and the Portland Metropolitan Association of Realtors wrote Feb. 24 to city councilors: “We certainly cannot afford to adopt new landlord-tenant regulations that may make it even harder to attract needed investment in housing production when we don’t know the impact of existing local landlord-tenant regulations on our housing supply or affordability.”
Those same groups and their lobbyists have also complained—similarly to Zimmerman—about the process by which the committee was hearing public testimony. The industry groups contend that Morillo’s ordinance changed significantly after public testimony was heard Feb. 25, and that there was no opportunity for public testimony on the revised version.
When Zimmerman brought that up at Tuesday’s meeting, characterizing the newer version of the ordinance as “deeply changed” and arguing that not allowing another round of public testimony went against the city’s charter, Morillo and Avalos disagreed. They argued the newer version included only technical tweaks and clarifications on behalf of the industry groups, not meaningful changes to the substance.
“The amendments we created were in order to address the concerns of some of the groups,“ Morillo said to Zimmerman at the March 25 committee meeting. ”They are paid corporate lobbyists, they should know when they can testify and do that research themselves....And the amendments were so nonsubstantive in change that it did not have to go through the clerk and legal review again. It was not a gotcha to pull one over on anyone."
Zimmerman then took aim at Avalos’ conduct as chair of the committee.
“I find the leadership [with] which you’re presiding over this deeply inappropriate,” Zimmerman said. “You have not allowed public comment on a deeply changed topic, and as a person who has on the record multiple times advocated for the use of committees in this City Council to now say that actually we need to just pass this on, so that it can get to the council where the real work can happen, I think is the opposite of where we’ve entered into this process.” Zimmerman said he felt the committee had been “ramrodded” into voting on the ordinance. “I’m pretty displeased by it.”
Avalos acknowledged that there were still process kinks to be worked out. But she also defended her leadership of the committee.
“I agree, I have been very public about public testimony and how we ensure the public is part of our process,” Avalos said. “There is some disagreement about to what extent is the bulk of the process in moving a bill happening in committee? Is it happening in council? I don’t know the full answer to that right now. This is a test case, in my opinion.”
Avalos said she suspected there would be “a lot of discussion on process when this comes to council, and hopefully from that, we can adopt a new process.”