Let's get engaged! Civically, that is.
This Valentine's Day, commit to Portland with an act of civic love.
One year ago, I sent Portland a Valentine in the form of my first Rose City Reform newsletter.
Because what is civic engagement, if not an expression of love?
Today, civic participation is more important than ever. In fact, the success of charter reform might depend on it.
Pop the bubbly, readers! It’s Valentine’s Day, and it’s Rose City Reform’s birthday.
One year ago, when I published my first post, charter reform was Portland’s best kept secret. Now look where we are, on the precipice of a complete government overhaul.
This town has always had a penchant for new ideas, and its vein of civic engagement runs deep. That’s lucky, because Portland’s transformation is going to take a village.
No, more than a village. It’s going to take a city.
People make the logic.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about Jane Jacobs.
Jane Jacobs was a mid-century activist who championed community-led city planning during an era when city leaders had a habit of designing huge infrastructure projects without consulting the communities involved.
“There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city,” Jane Jacobs famously wrote.
“People make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”
It occurred to me that when it comes to politics, it’s voters who make the logic. The ultimate arbiters of success – from charter reform to City Hall’s past, present and future policies – are Portlanders themselves.
If cities, like Jane Jacobs believed, are complex networks of independent ecosystems, then the closer city leaders keep their ears to the ground, the better the odds that their decisions will make sense to the people who have to live with them.
Hello, proportional representation.
Portlanders may soon get the chance to bring more community expertise into city government. At least that’s a potential outcome of our new electoral system: proportional representation.
In 2024, Rose City voters will elect a brand new City Council. Instead of five members elected citywide, the reformed council will have twelve members: three representatives from each of Portland’s four new districts.
Some districts may elect three representatives with similar profiles. Others may choose leaders who offer starkly different perspectives.
Imagine a district where public safety is a voter priority, but not all voters agree on how to address it. The district may send their representatives to City Hall with competing platforms: one that relies heavily on law enforcement, and another favoring unarmed first responders. Which platform will prevail? That depends on the representatives’ respective ability to form council alliances.
To charter reform advocates, that’s precisely the allure of proportional representation. By increasing the size of our assembly, and lowering the threshold to get elected, we’re expanding the menu of political choice for Portlanders.
That, in turn, opens the door to a greater variety of outcomes.
Wanted: Reps with serious negotiation chops.
How dramatic will this change be? Will we notice it right away?
Hard to say. Progressives will inevitably snag most of the seats, but we may start to see factions develop under the progressive label. In some districts, independents, moderate Democrats, or Republicans, could get traction.
Some candidates will likely be elected on issue-specific platforms. For instance, many people I’ve talked to believe we’ll see the emergence of an informal Green Party, working across districts to promote a sustainability agenda.
Others may win seats by championing neighborhood interests, such as bringing parks and sidewalks to historically underserved areas, or increasing private security and sanitation in a local business district.
How will this eclectic bunch govern together?
By finding common ground on as many issues as they can - and forming competing coalitions for the rest.
In proportion to… what exactly?
The concept of proportional representation comes from multi-party systems.
Unlike the American two-party system, where government control is binary, multi-party democracies allocate seats to multiple parties in proportion to their share of the overall vote. If no party secures a majority on its own, parties align with each other to form a governing coalition.
In Portland’s nonpartisan elections, proportionality won’t be tied to a specific party or ideological platform. So why use it? Those who favor it would say: Because it breaks the majority’s monopoly on representation.
Currently, in Portland’s winner-takes-all system, the majority elects every seat, every time. In the future, if an alternative platform can clear the 25%+1 threshold, it will have representation on council.
Of course, winning a seat is just the first step.
No legislation can pass without seven out of twelve council votes – or six votes with the mayor as the tiebreaker. That means coalitions may shift on different issues, and sometimes getting things done may require alliances between strange bedfellows.
Imagine, for example, a scenario where a coalition of moderate and left-of-center officeholders block a centrist budget, brokering an alternative that instead delivers specific priorities for their voters.
That’s coalition-building – and that’s what proportional representation is all about.
Without parties, who shoulders the burden of organizing?
In multi-party systems, political parties do the heavy lifting of vision-building, candidate recruitment, and political organizing to help voters understand what they stand for.
In Portland’s nonpartisan elections, candidates and voters don’t have the luxury of relying on a powerful party machine. They have to do the brunt of the work themselves.
Our new system is likely to inspire a large pool of candidates, at least initially, when it dawns on Portlanders that public office just got more accessible. Without party labels next to candidates’ names, it could prove difficult for voters to differentiate between all of them.
Another risk is that media, knowingly or unknowingly, effectively coronates winners by picking a few front runners to write about. That’s why it’s critical to use what civic infrastructure we do have – from neighborhood associations to grassroots groups and places of worship – to facilitate meetings where matchmaking between voters and candidates can happen.
After the election, officeholders should reach out and immediately pick up the thread of those conversations.
In a city where all elected officials have served citywide since 1913, it’s going to take a minute for representatives to develop the muscle memory of directly involving district constituents in the problem-solving process.
From problem-loving to possibility planning.
Consider the possibility that the most innovative ideas about how to move Portland forward won’t come from the top, but from our communities and neighborhoods, where Portlanders respond in real-time to the whack-a-mole of parallel problems.
In his book The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves, Dr. Shawn Ginwright warns against “problem-loving”, the tendency of leaders to confuse awareness of a problem with actually solving the problem itself.
To move past problems and start brainstorming alternatives, Ginwright recommends a pivot to what he calls “possibility planning”. He encourages communities to play a game that bans sentences with the words we can’t, we don’t, and we shouldn’t. Only we can, we do, and we should are permitted.
What might we come up with if we could only offer solutions? How might we talk to each other if trolls couldn’t pounce on our ideas with negativity? Who might speak up who has previously been silent?
We could try to find out.
So what do you say? Shall we get engaged?
Here’s to a long and happy life together.
Independent District Commission kicks off its work.
Portland’s Independent District Commission, comprised of thirteen citizen volunteers, will convene for the first time tomorrow, February 15. The commission’s charge is to draw Portland’s new city council district map.
The first meeting, from 6pm to 8pm, will take place on Zoom. You can watch it here. Spoken testimony will not be accepted at this particular meeting, but you can always submit written comments here.
Absolutely, thanks for adding that nuance! That's what I meant by shifting coalitions and strange bedfellows, but I like how clearly you laid it out. Likewise, I didn't even have space to mention that the majority may just make a habit of negotiating directly with minority interest groups before consequential decisions to make sure they have the votes. That may look like consensus to voters when it's really coalition-building behind the scenes, or logrolling, if you will ;-). And of course STV governments can run on consensus too on a lot of issues that don't divide their voters.
Governance entails a third approach besides "finding common ground on as many issues as they can"..."and forming competing coalitions for the rest." These two approaches assume that governance means parties must either share interests, meaning they have the same priorities, or governance is a zero-sum game where only one coalition's priorities prevail. The third option builds on having diverse interests with different priorities, which the new electoral structure intends to create. A colloquial term for this form of governance is "log rolling." That means, I'll support your highest priority if you support my highest priority, the highest priorities of the parties being different. If one district in the City is keen to have sidewalks, better street lighting, and fewer accidents on its streets, while another district is keen to have more economic development, cultural amenities, and taller buildings, they have the basis for a deal that benefits them both and possibly the City at large. Indeed, if the City has diversity in its neighborhoods reflected in diversity on the City Council, this might become the approach to governance that we observe the most.