Portland’s Charter Commission is preparing to vote on key proposals, including whether changes should be made to the positions of mayor and city manager.
The commission will meet Wednesday to discuss leadership models, universal resident voting and a proposal to increase the pay of city councilors. Public hearings and votes on all three proposals are scheduled, though commission Chair Michael Kebede said that doesn’t necessarily mean the members will decide on final recommendations.
“The scheduled vote tomorrow is a very, very optimistic device to get us to think in final terms about the elements of a final governance proposal,” Kebede said of the vote on leadership. “Various models have been proposed over the last several weeks, and a few of these models have lots of elements in common. Tomorrow night, I don’t expect us to have a final model voted on, but it will give us a chance to begin to build majority agreement.”
The commission is entering the final weeks before it completes a preliminary report on its recommendations for changes to the city charter. Those recommendations will be sent to the City Council and must also be approved by voters to be enacted.
“Part of the reason the executive committee of the commission scheduled a vote for tomorrow night is to ensure every commissioner feels the time pressure we’re under,” Kebede said. “March is really the most important month for our most important proposal, the governance model.”
The commission is unlikely to vote on a single complete leadership model, but will take up a handful of proposals and ideas to serve as starting points for discussion. At their last meeting Feb. 23, commissioners talked about whether they wanted to have one, two or three branches of government; the authority of the mayor to carry out policy goals, and whether the mayor or city manager would have the power to hire and fire staff.
The materials for Wednesday’s meeting include proposals from commissioners Nasreen Sheikh-Yousef and Robert O’Brien as well as a “compromise framework” from commissioners Marpheen Chann, Ryan Lizanecz and Shay Stewart-Bouley.
The compromise framework combines elements of proposals originally presented by Sheikh-Yousef and the commission’s governance committee, Chann said Tuesday. The mayor would be separate from the council and would serve as a policy leader with oversight over the city budget, but without unilateral hiring and firing powers. The proposal also calls for a new position of ombudsman, reporting to the City Council, to facilitate requests for information and respond to constituents.
“The big thing that is coming out of this process is nobody wants power concentrated in one person,” Chann said. “No one wants power completely concentrated in the office of the city manager and neither do people want power concentrated in the hands of a super strong executive mayor.
“What this framework does … is it recalibrates the checks and balances we have now while also providing improvements and more clarity to the position of the mayor, moving that into the executive and administrative side of governance and then also strengthening the council and its oversight powers.”
O’Brien, who chairs the governance committee, has also submitted a new proposal that he sees as a variation of the compromise framework. O’Brien’s proposal would keep the mayor as part of the council. It also would establish an oversight commission that could provide legal opinions and request funding for independent investigations, and an office of information that would respond to public information requests, provide meeting notices and handle other communications.
Sheikh-Yousef’s proposal, which calls for a strong council and mayor and would eliminate the city manager position, is also included in materials for Wednesday’s meeting. Sheikh-Yousef did not respond to phone messages or an email Tuesday asking about her proposal and a separate item the commission is scheduled to take up regarding social media use.
While many residents have voiced support for Sheikh-Yousef’s proposal in written public comment submitted to the commission, some have also raised concerns about its origins. Sheikh-Yousef brought her proposal forward alone, without others on the governance committee, after she was absent at the meeting where the committee’s proposal was finalized.
The proposal originally endorsed by the rest of the committee would give more budget oversight to the mayor than is currently in the charter and spell out new avenues for policy development for the mayor, council and public, but it didn’t go as far as Sheikh-Yousef’s proposal in proposing an executive mayor who would no longer be a member of the council.
Kebede said he hasn’t asked Sheikh-Yousef whether she had outside help with her proposal, and said the proposal should be judged on its merits.
“This is how legislators and lawmakers in every level of government operate,” Kebede said. “They get elected and they have groups of people help them write bills and write laws.”
Kebede said he couldn’t say what would be the starting point for the commission’s deliberations Wednesday. “I can’t tell you that yet before getting the group’s temperature,” he said.
Chann also said he doesn’t expect a final vote on the compromise framework or any of the other proposed governance models.
“The vote language is there to set things in motion so we can have a conversation and a deliberation about the proposals,” he said.
The commission, which Portland residents voted to create in 2020, is tasked with examining and suggesting changes to the charter, which outlines the basic structure of city government. It must submit a preliminary report on its recommendations by May 9 and is expected to send proposals to voters in November.
The commission has already approved a new preamble to the charter with a Native American land acknowledgement, as well as the concepts for, but not the official charter language of, a police citizen review board and proportional ranked-choice voting in municipal races. Proportional ranked-choice voting, instead of requiring one candidate to reach a winner-take-all threshold of 50 percent plus one vote, allows for multiple candidates to cross a lower threshold based on the number of candidates in the race.
On Wednesday, commissioners will also consider proposals to allow for universal resident voting and to increase councilors’ pay. Universal resident voting would give all residents of voting age the right to vote in municipal elections, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.
In addition to the charter proposals, the commission will also discuss social media policy Wednesday. Kebede said the agenda item was prompted by a complaint from a member of the public who reported being blocked by Sheikh-Yousef on social media. In a memo to the commission, the commission’s attorney, Jim Katsiaficas, said there is no code of conduct or other city rule for how elected officials should conduct themselves on social media.
But elected officials’ social media accounts have generally been considered a “public forum” when it comes to the First Amendment, meaning those who use their accounts for official business cannot discriminate against commenters or participants based on viewpoint, he said. The social media page does not need to be called or designated as an “official page” in order to give constituents First Amendment protections, Katsiaficas said.
“Whether a social media account such as a Facebook page is being used for official business is a fact intensive inquiry conducted by a court on a case-by-case basis, but it would be prudent to be careful about social media use and behavior to avoid litigation against the official and the City,” he wrote.
Adair Emmons originally made the complaint against Sheikh-Yousef last summer. He said he voted for Sheikh-Yousef in June and was excited to see her elected to the commission, but was disappointed when she tweeted right after being elected that the former city manager was a white supremacist.
“I wasn’t expecting that and I was hoping there would be more maturity to how she was conducting herself as an elected official,” Emmons said. He said Sheikh-Yousef blocked him on Twitter after he raised concerns about a subsequent tweet in which she said she would block people who were “trolling” her.
Emmons said Tuesday he is still blocked from Sheikh-Yousef’s Twitter account, on which she identifies herself as an at-large charter commissioner and tweets about Charter Commission business.
“I voted for her and I supported her,” Emmons said. “I just think it’s important to have access to public officials and to be able to give them feedback and see what they’re talking about. I think that’s a really important part of our democracy.”
Kebede said Wednesday’s agenda item is a means for the commission to have a general conversation about social media use, but he does not plan to get involved in policing individual commissioners’ pages.
“The commissioners can respond appropriately,” Kebede said. “I trust all commissioners want to follow the law.”
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