A thorn in their side: Why Rose City voters decided to reform City Hall.
A perfect storm put the Charter Commission in the right place at the right time.
On November 8, Portland passed one of the most comprehensive government overhauls in modern history.
A remarkable feat for a city that has previously rejected eight less ambitious reform attempts.
What made Rose City voters ready to take the leap this time?
For over a hundred years, Portland’s commission form of government was untouchable.
Until it wasn’t.
The Rose City’s unique governance system, where elected officials serve as both legislators and as executives of city bureaus, lasted longer in Portland than in any other major city.
Portlanders voted against changing the commission government eight times, until finally deciding to give it the boot in 2022.
Rose City Reform spent the last few weeks talking to pollsters, historians, reformers and political experts to understand what finally tipped the scale in favor of reform.
A vote of no confidence.
Let’s first state the obvious: In 2022, Portlanders were mad as hell.
Exploding homelessness, rising gun violence and property crime topped a long list of grievances.
And voters blamed City Hall.
“We can't deny that the political times are different and that played a huge role,” says Candace Avalos, who served on the Portland Charter Commission that designed the reform proposal.
“People witnessed the system not working. The dysfunction of City Hall showed up in how it responded to critical issues, whether that was addressing homelessness, recovery from the pandemic, or the subsequent rising crime that comes from economic downturn.”
That made voters more open to alternatives than in the past, she says.
“It gave us an environment where people said: Okay, it's time for something new. What are the solutions?”
Local pollster John Horvick, president of DHM Research, confirms that in 2022, voter confidence was at a record low.
“The last time charter reform was on the ballot in 2007, 50% of Portland voters thought we were heading in the right direction as a city. Right now, only 10% does,” he explains.
An end to Portland’s ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it’ attitude.
Author and historian Carl Abbott says Portland’s appetite for charter reform has historically correlated with voters’ confidence in City Hall’s ability to get the job done.
In 1913, voters weren’t feeling too optimistic.
They were worried that a corrupt and inefficient City Hall wasn’t up to the task of managing Portland’s rapid growth. Voters passed a sweeping set of progressive reforms to shrink City Council from 15 to 5, eliminate district representation, and enact the commission form of government – then considered a cutting-edge idea.
That city charter would stand until 2022.
“In 1913, it was about crime and prostitution and general political corruption,” Abbott says.
“In 2022 it’s about public disorder spreading around the city, and the dissatisfaction with lack of representation, articulated more vigorously and comprehensively than ever before.”
For most of the period between the two charter overhauls, Abbott says Portlanders thought City Hall performed well enough, despite some major political scandals along the way.
“It was the classic ‘if it's not broken, don't fix it’, even though it's kind of weird,” he says.
Angry voters become risk-taking voters.
Abbott says a key contributor to Portlanders’ attitude shift in 2022 was effective political leadership on behalf of disenfranchised voters, particularly voters of color and voters in underserved areas of east Portland.
“The frustration with the lack of representation alone may not have been enough to carry the charter amendments to their quite substantial victory,” Abbott says.
“But the strands of dissatisfaction come together as white middle class voters become frustrated with the visible public disorder of homelessness, trash, and gunshots in the middle of the night. There’s an increasing sense that there's something wrong with a city that can't maintain public order.”
On election night, it was clear that Portlanders were hungry for change. Voters passed charter reform with 58% of the vote, and newcomer Rene Gonzalez ousted incumbent city commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty with 52.5%.
The net result was a total rejection of the status quo.
Yet precinct maps show a nuanced picture of the kind of change voters wanted. Voters who supported Gonzalez were less likely to vote for charter reform. And voters who wanted to keep Hardesty in office were more inclined to approve of the proposed charter changes.
In other words, some voters didn’t think City Hall needed a makeover, just new leadership. While others felt that Hardesty deserved to stay in office, but the old system had to go.
A new generation of reformers.
When the Charter Commission was appointed in 2020, Portland’s civic establishment assumed its focus would be a new form of government.
But commissioners – appointed by City Council to represent Portland’s diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, age, and geography – had a more ambitious goal: Fair representation.
The commission hired the Coalition of Communities of Color to conduct one of the most comprehensive public engagement processes in Portland’s history. It particularly sought input from historically underrepresented communities.
“We blew previous efforts out of the water in terms of how much money and time we put into talking to Portlanders to make the proposal feel like it was co-created by them,” says charter commissioner Candace Avalos.
That community engagement became the basis for the Charter Commission’s trail-blazing plan to convert Portland’s winner-take-all elections into a system of proportional representation.
“Voters didn’t want a piecemeal change, or the amount of change that the current powerbrokers would allow,” says Robin Ye, a charter commissioner who later worked on the campaign to pass the measure.
“They said: Let's not just keep our democracy alive, let's save it. Let's give it a new birth of life. So that was a feature, not a flaw.
Portland was part of a national movement.
Before 2022, many Portlanders had never heard of ranked choice voting or multi-member districts.
To some, the plan seemed to have been randomly dreamed up by the commission.
But it wasn’t random at all. In fact, the plan closely aligned with the platform of a national democracy reform movement.
Its proponents championed ranked choice voting and multi-member districts as a remedy for America’s polarization and increasingly extreme politics. Game-changing wins included the adoption of ranked choice voting in New York City and the State of Alaska.
By 2022, the movement had developed a strong base in the Pacific Northwest.
Five jurisdictions in Oregon and Washington placed measures to adopt ranked choice voting on the 2022 ballot. That was more than in any other region nationwide. Seattle, Portland, and Multnomah County all adopted the voting method in November.
In Portland, the Coalition of Communities of Color (CCC) promoted proportional ranked choice voting, which lowers the threshold to get elected, as a way to boost voting power for minority groups.
“Proportional ranked choice voting breaks down barriers for candidates of color so that voters of color can elect candidates of their choice and build coalitions with likeminded people that represent them and share their values,” CCC’s civic engagement manager Sol Mora told Rose City Reform in the spring of 2022.
Allies laid the groundwork for the campaign.
The Charter Commission had no shortage of allies in its endeavor to redesign Portland’s local democracy.
Election reformers, community and grassroots organizations, political scientists, and civic groups like the City Club of Portland, engaged early and often.
Advocates knew the odds were against them, at least if the past was a reliable indicator of success. They needed to treat the effort like a campaign from the start.
“The advocates did a fantastic job,” says pollster John Horvick.
“They raised a lot of money, they organized a lot of communities, they knocked on doors and they had effective persistent messaging that connected with voters’ values. They did the political work to get this done.”
Over a hundred organizations and community leaders endorsed the charter measure. The campaign, led by the Coalition of Communities of Color, raised around a million dollars, including substantial contributions from out-of-state democracy reform organizations.
Charter commissioner Candace Avalos says the collaborative effort made the Charter Commission stand out from its predecessors.
“We built a large table and a coalition of good government and democracy advocates in the community, across the country, and even around the globe, that tested various models that we were able to play around with.”
Elected leaders weighed in at the 11th hour.
Missing from that table were city elected leaders.
With the exception of city commissioner Mingus Mapps, who raised concerns in early 2022, officeholders didn’t publicly weigh in until May, a month before the Charter Commission referred the measure on a 17-3 vote.
The official explanation was that city leaders wanted to respect the commission’s process. But that made little sense to voters when a majority of the council later opposed the ballot measure.
Politicians might have been genuinely torn on the proposal, or been loathed to pick a fight with a group of citizen volunteers with deep ties to the community.
They may also have been hoping that the city attorney wouldn’t sign off on bundling the charter amendments into one measure. That would have opened the door to supporting portions of the proposal, while opposing others.
“Whether they were too intimidated to get involved or just made a calculation that it wasn’t in their interest, they were derelict in their duties as elected council members from exercising their power to get more engaged in the charter process,” says Tim Nesbitt, union leader and chief of staff for former Governor Kulongski.
“The council being as deferential and as hands-off as it was for so long left a vacuum where there should have been a healthy criticism,” says Nesbitt, who opposed multi-member districts and changes to Portland’s voting method.
Opposition had a messaging problem.
The opposition campaign didn’t begin in earnest until early fall.
“The narrative about this measure had been set well before the opposition got organized, and by then they were just trying to claw back what they had lost,” says pollster John Horvick.
Opponents may have expected the proposal to fail without much pushback, as reform attempts had done in the past. Perhaps they were waiting for the outcome of the Portland Business Alliance’s ballot title challenge, a Hail Mary attempt to stop the measure that ultimately proved unsuccessful.
Once the campaign finally got underway, it had a messaging problem.
Because the opposition wasn’t actually against charter reform. Their beef was only with specific aspects of the proposal, like the lack of a mayoral veto and the plan for multi-member districts.
The no-campaign’s ambivalence was captured in its slogan ‘Vote no for a better yes’, an allusion to city commissioner Mingus Mapps’ alternative charter reform proposal, which he vowed to introduce if the Charter Commission’s measure failed.
Tim Nesbitt, an organizer of multiple successful ballot measures, says promoting an alternative measure can be effective – if voters can vote for it. Mapps’ alternative plan wasn’t on the ballot, and there was no guarantee that it would be in 2023.
“Compared to other no-campaigns, this one was super polite and kind of wonky,” Nesbitt says.
“If you're running a no-campaign, you expose the weakness and the failings of a measure and just hammer away at it. That never happened here.”
Opinions may not be fixed.
There was no magic bullet.
Charter reform didn’t pass because of one specific reason.
A confluence of factors created a perfect storm, and the Charter Commission was in the right place, at the right time – with a solution that enough voters thought was the right one.
“I doubt opinions about this are fixed,” says pollster John Horvick.
“Voters will continue to learn about what this measure means going forward. Opinions may change in the months or years ahead.”
Charter commissioner Robin Ye hopes reform will lead to a healthier body politic in the Rose City.
“If you ask anybody, they know what the problems are. This system opens possibilities to solve those problems. Now it’s up to Portlanders to decide what to do with those possibilities.”
What a year it’s been.
Thank you for being a Rose City Reform reader in 2022.
The newsletter will be back next year with in-depth analysis, interviews and some surprise content along the way.
Happy holidays and see you in 2023!
While diversity may be a positive factor when it comes to food, art or music, it is not a given that diversity is a positive trait of government. What I see happening to Portland is something that I have seen taken place in many organizations that I have been a part of, inaction due to the dilution of responsibility. With so many voices demanding input into policy-making, what will happen is no one shoulders responsibility. Shared blame and finger-pointing will be the backdrop for lack of progress.
The founding fathers were prescient in making our nation's govt to be a republic instead of a democracy. The idea is to elect a few capable people to make the tough decisions, instead of lack of consensus and exigent decisions based on the loudest voice.
Also, rank-choice voting is just a polished turd. Flaky loser candidates lose for a reason, and it's not fair to just have their supporters' votes be redistributed to other candidates, while everyone else is deprived a similar opportunity to cast a reconsidered vote. A long string of "flakes" can defeat the top sensible candidate after repeated rounds of vote redistribution.