The Portland City Council, pictured in 2018. Beth Nakamura/Staff.

BY GORDON R. FRIEDMAN | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Portland's odd form of government fails residents in nearly every way imaginable and should be rebuilt from top to bottom, Portland City Club researchers concluded in a report published Sunday.

The report, written after months of research and interviews with current and former city officials, promises to reignite the debate over whether Portland should abandon its commission-form of government in favor of something better.

Portland’s city charter invests nearly all powers in the four commissioners and the mayor, who assigns commissioners to oversee city bureaus. The quintet has legislative, executive, administrative and quasi-judicial powers all at once, a remarkable melding of say-so that exists in no other major American city, the report says.

City Club researchers set out to answer two questions with their report: Is Portland’s form of government effective and does it allow for fair representation of Portlanders?

Their unequivocal answer: no.

Portland’s commission-form of government permits city departments to be controlled by commissioners “with little, if any, regard to their managerial or subject-matter expertise,” the report states, and “appears to result in poor bureaucratic performance.”

The rules for electing commissioners are also “inherently inequitable,” researchers found, saying the government fails to fairly represent Portlanders “by nearly every metric.”

The report notes that Portland’s City Council has rarely reflected the city’s diverse population. In the council’s more than 100-year existence, nearly every member has been a well-off white male land owner.

The current council, however, has three women, including the city’s first African American female commissioner. In addition, three of the incumbents are renters.

The government Portlanders need, researchers concluded, is one where the mayor and city council have fewer powers, and where bureaus are overseen by a professional city manager who answers back to the mayor and council.

A city manager system would ensure “the people who are elected are there to set policy and listen to constituents,” Ken Fairfax, a retired U.S. ambassador who headed the City Club research effort, said in an interview.

Portland’s system of electing five commissioners city-wide should be scrapped, the club recommends, for one where at least eight city councilors are elected from geographical districts.

In a statement, Mayor Ted Wheeler stopped short of embracing full-scale change, but said Portland needs "a modern form of government" where officials can "respond to the challenges of the era but be able to lead more effectively and be held more accountable to the public we serve."

"It almost feels like we’re overcoming the form of government" rather than being advanced by it, Wheeler said. Whether to redo the city's form of government is ultimately a decision for voters, he said.

Mary Hull Caballero, the elected city auditor, said Portland is past due for reform.

“The commission-form of government cannot keep pace with a fast-growing, increasingly diverse Portland,” said Hull Caballero, whom City Club researchers interviewed for the report.

"It’s hard to defend a system in which the city is run by committee and elected officials represent city bureaus instead of community members," she said. “Portlanders deserve a more responsive and accountable form of government.”

Not so fast, said Commissioner Nick Fish. Portland’s government is imperfect, Fish said in an interview, but it encourages innovative approaches to problem solving.

Fish balked at the idea of installing a city manager – “an unelected bureaucrat,” he said – and pointed to the recent election of Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who is African American, as proof the practice of city-wide voting is fair.

“For the average person, this is not a big issue,” Fish said.

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Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, pictured shortly after taking the oath of office in 2019. The Oregonian/file.

Inside Portland City Hall, however, the commission-style government has long been made a scapegoat for the ills of the city’s vast bureaucracy by mayors and commissioners, some of whom have harbored a deep contempt for the system that they barely strive to hide.

Among the common problems: Bureaus are shuffled between the commissioners frequently enough that long-term planning is difficult to achieve. And bureau directors, many of whom have professional expertise in their department’s purview, sometimes struggle to work well with their political bosses.

“Members of the city council do not walk into these jobs as experienced administrators of public works or parks or police,” said Fairfax, the City Club researcher. “They come in as politicians.”

Wheeler has been diplomatic about the city’s form of government while leaving room for tepid disapproval. “I don’t think it’s the best model,” Wheeler told The Oregonian/OregonLive last year.

Despite its evident problems, Portlanders have rejected ballot measures to do away with the commission-style government eight times since it was established in 1913.

But a new poll, conducted in December by Portland opinion research firm DHM, found attitudes have changed. More than 70 percent of Portland voters surveyed said they strongly support electing commissioners by district rather than citywide. That represented a significant jump from 2016, when 54 percent of voters surveyed expressed that view.

In this year’s poll, voters were first asked whether they believe the current City Council represents everyone equally or whether some neighborhoods are represented better than others. Two-thirds said the latter. Those perceptions could have caused so many survey respondents to express support for elections by district.

The persistence of Portland’s citywide elections system leaves it among the last cities to have councilors elected that way rather than by ward or district, according to the City Club

And almost every other major city has a council with more than five members, allowing for better representation, according to the club. Portland, for example, has one councilor for every 128,000 residents, compared to one councilor for 67,000 Seattleites.

The City Club panel recommend Portland have eight to 12 councilors.

“This number of city councilors would put Portland more in line with other American cities of similar size,” the report states, “and would significantly increase the ability of the city council to represent Portland’s increasingly diverse population without suffering excessive costs and difficult operation associated with very large city councils.”

City Club researchers also recommend electing councilors by district rather than with the current scheme, in which officials are elected city-wide.

Even better, the report states, is a system where districts have multiple councilors. For example, five districts could field 10 councilors of two per district.

Researchers also said councilors should be chosen in a so-called instant-runoff election that eliminates the need for a primary election. In two-member districts, for example, the top pair of vote-getters would win during a single round of balloting.

“Changing the voting model to a single-round system would lead to wider participation in the electoral process,” the report states, and would cut back on the power of the incumbency.

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Portland City Hall, pictured in 2016. The Oregonian/file.

Another reason Portland should scrap its at-large voting system, according to the City Club report: It’s likely illegal.

Many cities used to have a commission-style government, the report states, but they were dismantled by courts under the Voting Rights Act, which cracked down on discriminatory voting practices in mostly southern states. Judges found that racial bias played a role in those cities deciding against ward-based voting, the intent being to keep African Americans from electing favored candidates.

Court rulings finding that at-large voting hampers minority groups are so common, the City Club found, “that it can be hard to understand why at-large voting is still in use in Portland or anywhere else.”

In his statement, Wheeler said the at-large voting system "means that not every area of Portland is represented."

"In our form of government, there’s a legitimate question about diverse representation," Wheeler said.

Only three people of color have been elected to the Portland City Council. Commissioner Hardesty, elected in November, was the first in a generation. People of color make up 26 percent of Portland’s voting-age population.

“The more we looked at at-large voting the more we realized it is a really horrible system,” Fairfax said.

The only reason Portland still has the system is because the Supreme Court never banned the practice outright, he said.

“If somebody did bring a suit, Portland would probably lose,” Fairfax said. “It’s that bad.”

-- Gordon R. Friedman

GFriedman@Oregonian.com