Pop quiz! Who’s your district rep on Portland’s City Council?
Just kidding, it’s a trick question. Bridgetown hasn’t had geographic representation on the council for over a hundred years.
But a new system is underway, and Portland will soon be divided into four voting districts.
Have you been wondering what’s going on with Portland’s districting process? Well, prepare to have your curiosity satisfied. Portland’s Independent District Commission is about to drop some preliminary district boundaries.
Rose City voters approved the shift to district-based representation last year when they passed a sweeping ballot measure to reform city government. Among other things, the reform package expanded the city council from five to twelve members and required its members to be elected from separate districts.
The measure also birthed the Independent District Commission, a volunteer body tasked with drawing the district lines. In early June, the group will release its draft maps for public scrutiny. Butterflies, anyone?
Slicing Portland four ways may sound like a piece of cake, but districting is no ordinary map-making. It’s first and foremost about people.
People who have strong opinions about the place they call home.
So let’s dig in!
Why no districts? Because we have baggage.
Elected officials living among the communities they serve is a widely popular concept. So why has Portland, a city known for its unique neighborhoods, been electing all officeholders citywide since 1913?
Because we have a complicated history with districts.
In the early 1900s, Portland had a city council consisting of fifteen members. Ten of them were elected from wards, another term for districts.
Ward reps had a reputation for using their part-time legislating gigs to advance their own interests while ignoring the needs of a booming city. In 1913, a group of good government advocates capitalized on voters’ frustrations to pass a ballot measure that repealed the ward system and instituted citywide elections for all officeholders. It also cut Portland’s council size by two-thirds.
Reformers wanted to turn city government into a small, clean, and well-oiled machine. To that end, they bundled the mayor and four full-time commissioners into a council that could both pass legislation and directly oversee city bureaus.
Does this structure ring a bell? It’s still the blueprint for Portland’s City Hall.
Sorry, early reformers. Voters actually like districts.
Today, many Portlanders seem to think the turn-of-the-century reformers threw the baby out with the bathwater when they wiped out Portland’s districts.
Last year, district-based representation emerged as a major selling point for Portland’s reform measure, which passed with 58% of the vote.
In his endorsement of the ballot measure, State Senator Michael Dembrow argued that at the state level, constituents in his district benefit from local lawmakers representing them as a team in the state house and senate.
“It makes sense for Portland City Council to work the same way,” Dembrow said.
Dembrow's district encompasses neighborhoods in East Portland, an area from which only two city commissioners have historically hailed. Under Portland’s new system, East Portland - typically identified as the part of the city located east of 82nd Avenue - will have its own distinct district. This guarantees that a minimum of one out of every four council members will live in East Portland at any point in time.
Today’s trailblazers seek to capture voters’ diversity.
Districts are making a Rose City comeback, but will they take their cues from Portland’s history? Not so much.
Bridgetown will soon become the only major city in the United States with multi-member districts. In the 2024 election, voters in each district will rank candidates on the ballot to send the top three vote-getters to City Hall.
Modern reformers argue that multi-member districts, especially combined with ranked choice voting, are harder to gerrymander and give voice to multiple groups of voters, not just the majority. That’s fairer for voters and candidates alike, supporters say.
Not everyone is convinced the new system will make voters happier, however. City Commissioner Mingus Mapps, who opposed the reforms, said districts with multiple representatives could confuse constituents about who’s in charge, foster rivalries between district reps, and lead to finger-pointing when something goes wrong.
“I think if we're trying to promote accountability, the cleanest way to get to that, in terms of electoral systems, is to have single-member districts, which is what we have for both Multnomah County and Congress,” he told constituents during last year’s campaign season.
Care to submit your own map? Spoiler: It’s hard!
Where do you think Portland’s district lines should be drawn?
No, it’s not a rhetorical question. The District Commission wants Portlanders to submit their own maps using this online tool.
If you try it, you might be surprised by how tricky it is. Districting requires balancing a list of federal, state, and local criteria. One such criterion is that each zone must have roughly equal populations. Based on the latest U.S. census, Portland’s districts should strive for 163,126 souls each.
This rule puts Portland’s west side in a bit of a pickle. Since the population west of the river is too small to form a standalone district, it needs a suitable companion on the other side of the Willamette. Commissioners are currently eyeing Sellwood and Eastmoreland for this purpose.
East Portland presents the opposite challenge. Its population is too large to fit within a single district. This leaves the District Commission with the unenviable task of deciding which neighborhood to leave out of the East Portland district. At the moment, Montavilla seems a likely candidate to be cut.
People who vote together want to stay together.
Remember this term: “communities of common interest.”
It refers to groups of residents who benefit from remaining in the same district. Examples include transit users with similar travel patterns or families whose children attend the same high school. Sometimes communities of interest can be defined by what they lack rather than what they have, and it’s their need to advocate collectively that unites them.
Preserving communities of common interest is a fundamental principle of districting. It’s also a goal that frequently ignites conflicts and tensions.
“Expect that you're going to have a lot of dissatisfaction around the draft maps and remind people that this is all part of the process,” said Kathay Feng, Vice President of Programs at Common Cause, in a recent talk organized by Portland’s North Star Civic Foundation.
“If you keep the process transparent and inclusive between the draft maps and the final maps, people aren’t going to get everything they want, but they’ll feel heard by the process, and they're going to embrace the final product,” she advised.
Reform begets reform: Portland comes full circle.
The District Commission is planning a series of public hearings over the summer to receive and incorporate community input on its draft maps.
“It's easy to get kind of obsessive about making the population differences between the four districts as narrow as possible,” district commissioner Kari Chisholm said in a recent meeting.
“But the real job here is to identify and to draw maps that make sense to the public.”
The District Commission must approve the final map by September 1. When it does, Portland will have completed a remarkable journey. Rewind to 1913, when reformers believed Portland’s wards were hurdles to the city’s progress. Now, fast forward to today, when a new generation of change-makers hope districts will remedy underrepresentation and government dysfunction.
What will future reformers say a hundred years from now? Only time will tell.
Until then, let’s make the best of it.
This is the third installment of Rose City Reform’s Charter School series, designed to make you the most intelligent person in the room when charter reform comes up in conversation.
It case it's not obvious, it will be impossible to satisfy all criteria simultaneously. Drawing the districts requires deciding upon a balance. "Contiguous" means, roughly, that every part of a district is connected to another part, and "compact" means, roughly, that you can walk from any point in the district to any other without leaving the district. These criteria are designed to mitigate against gerrymandering, which implies drawing district lines to give an advantage to one political party. If the intent of Portland's reform is to assure that "communities of interest" have the same representation, and each community doesn't exist in a geographic cluster that amounts to 25% of Portland's population that invariably means violating the criteria of compactness, if not contiguity.