The city's dry run begins July 1, and officials will be tasked with figuring out why costs for cleaning up homeless camps, for example, have ballooned.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Portland's rapid move to abandon the committee system that has served it for more than a century and launch a new form of government is bearing striking parallels to the collapse of the Soviet Union's Iron Curtain. City officials not only want to prepare for a new era of government, GlasnostThey are interested in what is going on within each of the Portland bureaus.
The segregation of city departments has been increasingly blamed for Portland's dysfunction over the years: Each department is an independent fiefdom of a single commissioner, and is therefore increasingly unaccustomed to working well together or following directions from the mayor or the full City Council.
Over the years, each station has established its own communications team, asset management team, human resources team, technical team, etc.
Officially, Portland is scheduled to move to a more unified city government with an expanded City Council on January 1, 2025. But long before then, on July 1, the city will begin a dry run of the new system.
Under this structure, nearly all of the existing city departments would be grouped into six new areas, each overseen by a deputy city manager, above whom would be the city manager, who would be Portland's current chief administrative officer, Michael Jordan, in an interim role.
Related: Portland official named city manager to set course for government reform in 2025
By the numbers
The July 1 soft launch coincides with when Portland's new budget goes into effect. Story's Pat Dourice spoke with Jordan recently, but that was before the budget was fully finalized.
“Not only do we have a ton of numbers, we also have probably 20 budget memos,” Jordan explained, “and that's a directive from the board for us as management to consider a lot of things when adopting the budget. And we have a lot of things. This is a lot more budget memos than normal, and I think that's a result of where we are at right now.”
KGW reviewed the budget and found a total of 15 memos. The first memo is for the Impact Reduction Program, which is responsible for cleaning up homeless encampments. The budget memo notes that costs for the program have increased by 300% over the past three years and instructs the program's leader to work with the new deputy city manager to get costs under control and find ways to pay for the program.
Another notice directs city departments to cooperate on data sharing, including improving data collection, usage analysis and sharing within and across city service areas to implement charter reform.
Overall, the idea is to make the city more efficient and better able to serve its citizens' needs, and Jordan, the administrator tasked with transforming the city's vast bureaucracy, said the budget is a powerful tool to make those changes.
“The intersection of the transition and all the changes we're talking about and a tough budget year has brought up a lot of ideas for us to consider,” Jordan said. “And as we look at them, most of them are good ideas. Can we do it all at once? We're a little nervous about next year, but those are good questions, and we're going to do our best to address them.”
Jordan acknowledged that a mandate to prioritize such reforms through the city budget could help cut through some of the bureaucracy that can slow things down.
Station Breakdown
A big part of the process of dismantling Portland's city government is taking parts of departments that might work more effectively as standalone units and consolidating them. The city has already taken that step with its complex permitting process, which has long been split among multiple departments.
Related: Portland creates new department to streamline permitting process for residential and commercial properties
One of the new departments in Portland is asset management, which is essentially responsible for maintaining the city's assets and infrastructure, which is currently managed entirely by various departments.
“Currently, we don't have an asset management department, but we do have multiple bureaus that manage multiple asset classes,” Jordan said. “Frankly, we have some bureaus that are doing well. We have one bureau that's doing really well. The water bureau is very good at asset management. We have some bureaus that are pretty good at it. And we have some bureaus that are not doing so well. I like to say we're bureaus that are kind of wandering in the wilderness looking for food and shelter. It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs.”
“So what we need to do in that office is basically have a conversation among ourselves about, ‘What do we need in an asset management office?’ Someone to set the standards of practice, someone to advocate for maturity where the places aren’t yet?”
These assets include buildings, HVAC systems, sewer and water pipes, treatment plants, roads and sidewalks, parks and pools, community centers, and more.
“They're all assets,” Jordan continued. “We have many types of assets, and historically they've been managed by bureau.”
This new organization will influence how city policy is implemented as set by the new Portland City Council, who will have input from the new asset management department when sending capital maintenance bonds to voters.
“It's hard to prioritize for each department,” Jordan said, “and one of the ideas with the asset management group is that they're in charge of running the city right now, but given that part of their job is capital maintenance planning, maybe they'd be better suited to do a capital version of capital planning in the budget department. So there's a lot of questions and we'll look at them and try to make this place run better. That's our job.”
Portland has $80 billion in assets, according to its property budget documents, but until now there's been no centralized way to track what's going on with those assets. Jordan is working on a new system that will allow that.
Related: The Portland Parks and Recreation Department reports a backlog of $615 million in property in need of repairs. We've mapped each property.
Challenges and opportunities
One reason Portland has had a tough budget year is that the new city government is simply more expensive on paper — adding in the salaries of 12 city council members instead of four, as well as the city manager and all six deputy mayors — but Jordan argues there are potential benefits to the change that could help the city balance fiscally.
“As our viewers will say, this is quite expensive and another layer of administration and bureaucracy,” Jordan acknowledged. “So how do we use this to elevate these things, vet them, make them more efficient and effective? And what role do these offices play in that? And I think this is going to be a very big role. I think this is going to be kind of the golden key that can transform the way we've done things in the past into the way we need to do things in the future.”
But those benefits may take some time to materialize: Currently, city commissioners are nominally in charge of departments and have appointed a deputy city manager who, like Jordan, will be involved in this soft launch through the end of 2024.
“The commissioners said, 'We want you to get started right now. We want you to meet with all the directors, attend staff meetings, get to know the directors,' so some of them have already started,” Jordan said. “The mayor said, 'We want you to start July 1,' so we're officially meeting. We've been meeting. We're thinking, 'Okay, who are we and what are we going to do? What's the work plan?' And we'll be reviewing the proposed work plan with the directors on May 23. We want to get them on our side because we need their cooperation to be effective.”
Jordan said there has been a team working with commissioners for almost two years in preparation for this transition, so this is not something entirely new to them.
“They know it's coming,” he said. “They're the ones that helped put the structure in place. So we've had two years of preparation for July 1 and we're ready to start practicing in earnest.”
The Portland City Council on Wednesday gave final approval to the creation of a centralized agency to oversee permitting and development for the city, eliminating the centralized permitting and development agencies that were previously spread across various departments. This will also take effect July 1.
