What’s Going on with Charter Transition?
We voted on a new City of Portland government charter in November 2022. But that charter left a lot of open questions to answer before it can be fully implemented in January 2025. Some things are being dealt with by a city transition team, led by Transition Manager Michael Jordan and supported by Project Manager Julia Meiers, who has been involved since the original charter commission. Other efforts are being led by citizen-led commissions, including the Independent District Commission, the Salary Commission, and the Government Transition Advisory Commission. City of Portland Transition Website.
The Independent District Commission (IDC) has released its 3 draft maps creating the 4 districts that will each have 3 representatives, which you can view HERE along with explanations as to what differs between them and opportunity to leave public comment. All are fairly similar in keeping I-205 as a boundary line for one outer east Portland district. The Alder map is the only map that preserves the historical neighborhood lines, keeping neighborhood associations intact and within the same boundaries. The IDC will be doing several public outreach events during the month of July and making their final decisions / votes in August 2023.
The Salary Commission has released a draft proposal for salaries for the mayor, auditor, and city council members. Their proposals are all HIGHER pay rates than they are all currently making, despite job duties being reduced, and in the case of the city council, spread out among a larger number of representatives. We’re being told the mayor will be essentially a figurehead, as the new city manager will take the larger responsibility of managing the bureaus away from the mayor and council. We are increasing the council from 4 to 12 members, and creating 4 districts that will have 3 council members each representing them.
They still have not provided any job descriptions or staffing numbers, and there are very few multi-member districts to compare salaries and job duties with, locally or nationally. The local jurisdictions being compared to do not have multi-member districts or councils with so many members, and are actually all facing budget deficits right now. This does not seem like a fiscally responsible budget decision - it’s leaning really heavily on the idea of this as helping to build someone’s generational wealth, versus being a real job they have to be responsible for performing day in and day out. The Salary Commission will having several public outreach events in July before making their final votes / decisions in August 2023.
The Government Transition Advisory Commission (GTAC) is just getting started, and somewhat refreshingly, has a handful of outspoken critics on the team. They just released a great integrated timeline of charter milestones that includes all commission and city transition events. Their first big task is creating the rules around the first 2025 charter council meeting. These will be temporary rules until the new 2025 council votes on how they’d like to conduct business, and they will vote on new rules every new council - which will be every two years. This sounds like a colossal waste of time on the taxpayer’s dime and hopefully they have to accomplish this within a very short timeframe, or else a whole lot of actual legislative and constituent relations work will not happen. GTAC will be meeting through early 2025. This topic will be discussed starting Tuesday, June 20th and likely ongoing to future meetings if you would like to weigh in with your opinion.
All comments for all commissions or the city transition team are filtered through this SurveyMonkey link. If you’ve already submitted a comment you might need to email specific project managers for each group directly via their website links up above, as the link isn’t currently allowing you to ‘take the survey more than once’.
The Salary Commission has a survey you can take regarding their draft proposal HERE.
All transition events can be found HERE. There’s a lot of outreach and public hearings coming up for the Independent District Commission and the Salary Commission in the month of July before they make their final votes.