The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-10-20
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (18,191 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Portland City Council Governance Committee met on Monday, October 20, 2025, with roll call, a statement of conduct, and announcements covering the Advisory Bodies Enhancement Project timeline, upcoming December 8th and December 15th committee dates, and the council governance handbook process. Minutes from the August 11th and September 22nd meetings were approved. The committee then discussed a proposed resolution establishing decision-making criteria for designating items to the council's consent agenda, including categories such as routine administrative items, uncontested appointments, and unanimous committee votes without public testimony, while retaining council president discretion. Public testimony was given by one individual raising concerns about prematurity and public input safeguards. Extensive committee discussion followed regarding proposed amendments, including language on committee chair consultation versus approval, and references to charter and code provisions on removing items from the consent agenda; the item was held for further review rather than acted on that day. The committee also heard a staff presentation comparing council policy-development processes in other cities, followed by discussion of tiered approval systems, constituent services, and oversight roles. A final discussion addressed a proposal for an annual strategic priority-setting process for the council. The meeting was adjourned with the next session scheduled for November 10th. Any votes that occurred are recorded in the vote ledger.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
0 Blair clarke, can you hear us? Online in the zoom.
1 Yes. Thank you.
2 All right. Good afternoon. Thank you for your patience. I call the meeting of the governance committee to order. It is Monday, October 20th at 2:43 p.m. Diego, will you please call the roll?
3 Good afternoon.
4 Clark here.
5 Dunphy. Pirtle-guiney. Ryan here.
6 Koyama Lane here in today's meeting. Oh, craig, will you please read the statement of conduct?
7 Absolutely. Welcome to this meeting of the governance committee. To testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at ww. Gov agenda governance committee or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In-person testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over, the chair preserves order. Disruptive conduct such as shouting. Refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, state your name for the record. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
8 Thank you. In today's meeting, the governance committee will approve minutes from our August and September meetings. Consider a resolution outlining how items are designated to the council consent agenda. Have an opportunity to discuss further the council policy process, and also discuss how council can set strategic priorities together. For some announcements, I will begin and then I will pass things over to my vice chair. I'd like to talk about the advisory bodies timeline. At our last meeting, we heard an update on the advisory bodies enhancement project. The city held two virtual community input sessions on October 9th and the 14th for portlanders to provide feedback on the proposed improvements. And at our upcoming December 8th committee governance committee meeting, we will consider code amendments on advisory bodies. We will also hear about proposed administrative rules for how the city will manage these bodies, as well as recommendations on how council can engage with advisory bodies. Thank you to everyone that's been providing input. It's exciting to see this project move along around the governance handbook timeline. We've heard regular updates in this committee on the progress of the governance council governance handbook, and will continue to discuss potential options for policy development. Today, we plan to bring a resolution on the handbook to this committee at a special meeting on December 15th. And now I'd like to invite vice chair Ryan to share any thoughts.
9 No, I'm good for now. I do have one question on the two meetings that we had out in the community. What was the attendance like those meetings?
10 Oh, that's a great question. I is there anyone here that can speak to that specifically? I can have someone ask. I heard back from our chief engagement officer, amanda garcia snell, that they were good meetings and they felt productive. I'm not sure what the attendance was like, but let's find that out.
11 Yeah. Just want to hear what the engagement was like. Thanks. Okay.
12 All right. Clerk, can you please read the first item?
13 Item 1st August 11th, 2025 through September 22nd, 2025 governance committee minutes.
14 So this first item is to approve the minutes for the governance committee meetings that occurred on August 11th and September 22nd, 2025. These minutes are available online as part of the meeting agenda minutes are approved by unanimous consent. Without objection, the minutes are approved. Okay, diego, can you please read the next item?
15 Item two outline decision making criteria for the designation of council meeting items to the consent agenda.
16 Okay. Great. Colleagues today will consider a resolution that establishes decision making criteria for items to be designated to council's consent agenda. As you know, the responsibility for determining what goes on the consent agenda is assigned to the council president. This legislation could could provide greater clarity and transparency for councilors and the public. And I thank the council president for joining me and bringing it forward. And now I will pass things over to the council president for some remarks.
17 Thank you, chair, and thank you for suggesting that this be a part of. A part of the work that is going into, hopefully, the handbook and a resolution to move us in that direction so that we have something more specific. I know this has been a topic of a lot of conversation, and I appreciate your identification of this as something where we might want to just have this committee really dive in. So thank you for that. What you have before you colleagues looks at some of what we have done, some of what a few of our colleagues have suggested we do moving forward. An item that I have suggested on the record moving forward and just places it in the context of how we might think about our consent agenda moving forward. It does retain discretion for the council president to make the final call on items, because ultimately there are things that don't quite fit within a specific definition or where there's an exception, something that we may absolutely want to have debate on that would normally go on consent or vice versa. Something quite not controversial. And I can give an example of that. But what you have before you lays out that appointments which are heavily vetted in committee, but where we are saying yes or no to the mayor's recommendations and not bringing forward our own people to debate, could go on the consent agenda. Obviously, appointments where council is making the recommendation and appointment, we've had that a few times wouldn't go on consent. That's a different type of appointment. It would place items on consent that are routine or administrative in nature, things that are bureaus bring to us, for example, updating the year somewhere in our code to reflect changes that have been made at the state level is one that we have had come before us. Before that, those types of things that don't make substantive changes, not even small substantive changes, could go on consent. It also suggests that items where a committee votes unanimously with everybody present and where there is not public testimony could go on consent. So those items where the public is not concerned, our colleagues were not concerned, there were not major issues brought forward, regardless of the type of item could go on consent. I'll note that there are also some. Well, I guess those would fall under administrative items. I'll note as an exception, I said there may be exceptions, and that's why I appreciated the council vice president working on this. With the language that the council president retains discretion. Today, the finance committee considered an item that had very little discussion, no public testimony, and a pretty immediate unanimous vote. One of our colleagues happened to be absent today. That's one where, upon consultation with that colleague, to make sure that they didn't have any concerns, I might want to place it on consent under that third category that I described, even though it doesn't technically meet the full extent of that category, since one member was absent from committee today. That's what you have before you happy to discuss this further.
18 Thank you so much, council president, and thank you for leading the way in using the consent agenda. I know in this first year it's been a lot of figuring it out. And I think the way that you have used it and has helped shape this. So thank you. Diego, do we have any public testimony?
19 We have one individual signed up, terry harris.
20 Welcome, mr. Harris.
21 Of course, you have public testimony. Terry harris, for the record, I have some written comments in the written comment file and I'll go through them here. I guess the the top line, though, is I don't think you need to have this in resolution right now. And if you put it in resolution, there should be some edits to this. But I appreciate the sentiment, some additional clarity and the scope of procedures would be helpful. But mostly the consent agenda needs to be considered in context with the committee system, and it needs to be in context with opportunity for public comment for legislative items. Right. Until those practices are set in rules or resolution or something. This is maybe premature. Some basic principles. The consent agenda must not be used to avoid public input and scrutiny. That should be written in a resolution if you're going to have one. The vast majority of similarly situated cities with standing committees. The general rule is that every legislative item gets at least one public hearing, and no legislative item needs more than needs more than one public hearing. With some exceptions. But I think if you're going to put this in resolution, the consent agenda in resolution, something like that needs to be also in rules or something. The consent calendar can accelerate things that are routine, administrative, required for operations of regular city business. But it's really important to get another set of eyeballs on things. And that's why having everything go to committee, where a public person like me who might read something and it bothers him, can come and help. So that should be written again somewhere, either here or in another rule. When you do that, I think you can go into city code and change out the code that says that any person can pull something from a consent calendar and leave that to be any councilor That way it doesn't. You don't end up with redundant hearings. When I get irritated and say, you got to take this off the consent calendar because I haven't had anything to say about it. And then the finally, the vast majority of of cities that have standing committees just leave it to the council president or presiding officer to do this. You have the ability of a majority of the council to rearrange the agenda. If the majority feels like it needs to do that. And the consent agenda itself has the single person who can pull it off. But I think any person in the code is probably not a great idea, and you could fix that once and for all. But I think this is premature. Two seconds. I have amendments, suggestions, and edits that I'm happy to share, but if you don't go to a resolution, I don't care.
22 Thank you, mr. Harris. I would love to see your amendments. If you want to send them, I'll send them along. All right, colleagues, now we can. We have some time for some committee q&a and deliberation. I see councilor Clerk in the queue. Go right ahead.
23 Thank you, madam vice president. I want to thank the council president for bringing this forward to trying to streamline our process. I think it's very valuable. It was really hard for me to hear, terry. I'd be interested in seeing his amendments. I haven't had a chance to see his testimony, but I have a feeling that the transportation and infrastructure committee is going to get a lot of reports. We have one, I think, that we heard recently, maybe. Councilor Koyama Lane can help me out with this, but I think it was on the water treatment plant. And I think some of these reports, I think terry has a point that we want maybe more eyes to be on them, but this is really a judgment call. I can see that some of the reports coming from tni, which will most likely are passing unanimously to council for council approval. I'm not sure I'm saying it seems like maybe the council president can make that decision. I think they may technically meet the criteria, but we may want an everybody to be informed about them. So in any event, I'd be interested in seeing terry's amendments, and I don't feel like we have to hurry on this.
24 Thank you. Councilor, clerk. Councilor Ryan.
25 Thank you, madam chair. I first want to start off by saying I really appreciate the testimony that we heard. I think, you know, it's been like ten months. We're just trying to figure out what workable norms and practices are. So I really am grateful that you brought this to our attention. I do think that the consent agenda has been merits this conversation period. And so thank you again for bringing that forward. You know, we're all just learning as we go along in this new form of government. It's worth getting this right. I'm usually not a big fan of pulling items from the consent agenda as a matter of course, but there are circumstances where it's just time efficient, and I have noticed that now that we go through things deeply and committee, when those items come to the council, there's some that it has been exhausting to then go through that again. But it's more like what is that criteria is I think where we're at right now, and I like that you mentioned and I didn't hear this. I don't know if it was in the resolution, but I didn't see it when you said that there was if there's no testimony and it passed unanimously, it's one of those operational issues that that the enterprise is really handling. I think we actually have some bigger, bigger picture issues on what items even need to come to council and what can stay in admin. So I do think there's a we have to thread that needle as well as we keep moving forward. But when you mentioned that, I think that was helpful for me because I, I think once we know what our council priorities are, had to get that in. I think that when there's a unanimous vote on something, say, in public safety or an economic development, that it would make sense even as unanimous that we continue to move forward with the whole council getting its eyes on it. Councilor Clark gave a really good example. I'll tell you right now, if there's a report on bull run, I want to hear about it, even though I'm not in the infrastructure committee, because it's a mighty price tag, period. And so it's like, what is that criteria, I think is what we're going to have to spend some more time on, is my point on that. I think storefront legislation was a great example of the 30 people that testified in two weeks, 25 of them have never been to city hall before. 25 of them have never testified before. And so it was authentic. And it was so good to hear their voices. And if we wouldn't have done that at the council meeting, then many of the councilors would not have had an opportunity to gain that perspective, which is really important in our jobs. So I think, again, I'm belaboring this point a bit, but I do think that it's not one size fits all. And so I think we have to do some more criteria on what that looks like. My goal is that when we develop those that these expectations norms on how we operate as a body, the councilors to the public and the city employees, especially with the city employees, rely upon us to do this work. I think they'll be really appreciative. So I think there's an efficiency equation mostly within the city employees. And then I think that's different than items that are priorities for the public, that they're grateful that we're listening to that. And even if it went to a committee, it better also go to the entire council. And as much as the puzzle making took place to try to have this committee system balanced with each district, it's not there's some districts that aren't represented, aren't represented in some of our committees. So that alone on council priorities and big picture issues would have to come to the council. So that's just my $0.02 as we work this out.
26 Thank you, vice chair. Councilor Dunphy.
27 Thank you.
28 Yeah. First I just want to say. President pirtle-guiney, I appreciate the, the the effort to get something that we all weigh in on and can actually have agreement, even if we don't all end up voting for it like that. The council has affirmatively said this is the position, this is the direction, this is what policy looks like. And I think that's really important. I, I hear terry harris's concerns that this may be cart before the horse, or that there are some other sort of underlying questions we need to answer. I do think we still need to get to the core question of our committee structure, and whether or not we have a committee of the whole. As we started to discuss, I think that impacts the effectiveness of this. I think if we have a committee of the whole, this will make this more powerful. And as councilor Ryan was saying, we'll have an opportunity for especially things like appointments for people to weigh in and do it in a more timely way. I also just I think the way we have been doing, sort of haphazardly pulling well, some of our colleagues have been haphazardly pulling things from the agenda is really especially for the appointments it's trying on staff and on the volunteers who are signing up for committees and things. And I think we need to be able to give them more assurance and not play around as much. So I think we're in the right direction. I'm supportive of the outline as it is written right now, and I think that I don't think there's anything necessarily fundamentally wrong with having this in place now, as we also continue working these things. It's piecemeal. It's how these things are going to be. It's never going to be comprehensive. So I think we're getting towards something that is far more defensible. Yeah, that's everything I have to say.
29 Council president.
30 Thank you chair I really appreciate the feedback from mr. Harris and my colleagues. Thoughts. Councilor Ryan, the item that the be it resolved that says items referred to city council by a council committee with unanimous approval of all committee members in consultation with the committee chair, is where what I have said for my tenure in this position, I'm looking at things that didn't have public testimony. Or maybe you have one person there as a an expert to say, yes, this is good. The homework was done, but there's not debate through public testimony. We didn't include that in the drafting here, because trying to figure out the exact criteria in a resolution seemed like a futile errand. And I think this gets to some of the other comments that you made. Councilor, this is a guide. This is a guide to say generally, these are the types of things that would go on consent. And here is the way that they would move forward. And the council president will ultimately have the final discretion to decide where things land on an agenda. And I hope that whoever the next council president is, is somebody who we can all trust to make that call. I hope that folks can trust me to make that call, at least most of the time. I think that in consultation with the committee chair is important, because that's where you have the opportunity to say, is this something where there was a lot of a lot of discussion? Is this something that's a priority to the committee? Is this something that's going to relate to five other things your committee brings forward? So we need to have this baseline discussion first. And I think both that and also the discretion to determine where items ultimately go within these guidelines are important for making sure that we still have. To your point, the ability to take something like bull run or like the storefront initiative and have that on the full council agenda to hear more public testimony, to have debate, to have that more individual vote. And there are things where we know that our colleagues want to have that more individual vote. I also think we have that release valve of any person. Maybe in the future we change that to any councilor, but certainly any councilor. And for now, any person has the ability to pull something off so that if there was a council president who somebody didn't trust to make the right decision there or somebody else in the future, any councilor Could say, no, this is actually really important. We want to pull it off. So I think what we're trying to capture here is what is the guide, without getting too specific, because there's just not a way to capture all of the criteria. I also want to note that in the conversations that I've had with our vice president about the handbook, I think that handbook is a collection of resolutions capturing of past practice, capturing of best practices. There's a lot of different ways things feed into it. And I think moving this as a resolution, given that this is something where we know there are some different opinions on council, and having that moment to say is the majority actually where we think it is is helpful. But if we don't want to do that and we just want to use this as an opportunity in governance to talk through what this might look like to go in the handbook as a past practice or a current practice, I think that's okay too. And I would defer chair to you and your vice chair on this committee about whether you want this to move forward as a resolution or just as a discussion point that goes into the handbook. I do think that it's helpful to have this guidance in the handbook. And and to mr. Harris's point, there's other pieces that might go with this or might change what we do here in the future. And that handbook is something that we'll have the opportunity to update as we move forward, and can always change to reflect changes to other parts of the the code or other resolutions. That's all.
31 All right. Putting myself in the queue. Thank you colleagues. It was great to hear all of your different thoughts there. I don't have a strong initial response to whether or not this needs to be a resolution. One of my questions about it being a resolution is, is there a real downside to making it a resolution, other than it would be ideal if we had other things in place first? What are there other things we should consider that could be downsides? I agree with council president that the idea what I do would appreciate about it being a resolution is that it would possibly carry more weight by just going from here to the full council and having a chance for councilors to discuss it, rather than it just ending up in the handbook. I can see that being important for all of us to get a chance to weigh in together and to actually see through a vote if this is a direction that other councilors can support going. Yeah. Now I'm also wondering where in the handbook would it fit, but I'm sure we could figure that out another time. And you know, at times we talk about or I've said, oh, I wish we had time to to have a retreat. And I do think this is a, an example of we are creating some practices, norms, procedures as we go. And I really like the idea of having it saved and formalized in some sort of way for future years. And so we can we can really have it written down. There's a lot that council president does that most people don't see. And there's a lot that I do get to see. And I know there's a lot that she does that I also don't see it. And beyond that. And so she has kind of set up some procedures and norms already for the consent agenda, and would like for it to be something that is, is something that people can go back and look, look at. Yeah. For the mr. Harris I believe was talking about changing it so it couldn't be any member of the public polling. I guess my question there is what's the is there a problem we're trying to solve? I at this point haven't seen a problem from members of the public pulling it.
32 Chair. Can I note something on that piece? I actually got a note that I saw as soon as I finished speaking, so I apologize from our city attorney that any person being able to pull something from consent is not only in code, but also in charter. Oh great. So perhaps perhaps we don't follow through on conversations on that piece of mr. Harris's testimony. Great.
33 All right. Thank you. Those are are some of my initial thoughts, vice chair Ryan.
34 Yeah. To get I think the the part of this that needs more conversation. And right now I couldn't support it until it has some changes are two of the last three be it resolved. The first one is be it further resolved. Items referred to city council by a council committee with unanimous approval for of all committee members in consultation with the committee chair shall be designated. I think it would have to not be in consultation for me to support this. It would have to be with the approval of the committee chair. I'm really into shared leadership and I think it allows it to be more shared and then be it further resolved. I'm fine not having that one in there, and I don't like the part that that council president retains discretion to designate items to the consent agenda. I don't want to base it on your skills. I don't want to base it on whoever might be in the future. But I feel like that the combination of those two at this moment, council president gives too much power to the council president to control the agenda on such items, and I would have trouble with that. So at this moment, I would be no. Until we can resolve that, if I'm in the minority, I'm pretty comfortable with that at this point and I'll stay there. But I just had to make sure that I said that. And I would agree that I think that the bigger picture of knowing what our council priorities are, and then building committees that are more directly aligned with that, is still, I think, a more urgent issue. I know we're talking about that later, but I had to mention that since it came up earlier.
35 Is it okay if I ask you, vice chair, if you have a feeling if this should be in resolution form, or are you thinking it should stay more informal, maybe part of the handbook as a suggested procedure?
36 I don't have a strong opinion on that right now. And again, I'm really clear that this needs to be discussed. I think our mystery right now on how we're operating in regards to these issues, especially the two that I mentioned, need to be daylighted. There needs to be more transparency and dialog on it. So I'm just glad we're having the conversation at this moment. But if it was going to go to a vote, I just had to be clear that those two are problematic for me at this time.
37 Okay.
38 Councilor Dunphy.
39 Yeah, I councilor Ryan's comments triggered something in the back of my brain as well, specific to the. And I can't find it. Talking about how. Is it even on here? Am I reading this wrong? We had mentioned the items that came without public testimony broadly and just sort of demonstrating that, you know, sometimes that is because an issue is non-controversial, and sometimes it's because we did a bad job as a city of getting information in front of people. So I just want to want to make sure that that is not, I guess, inherently codified in any sort of way, that that lack of comment isn't seen as consent. Something if it was something along the lines of divided testimony or something without. Yeah. Something along those lines would be certainly more demonstrated that it's more non-controversial, but I wouldn't want silence to be the standard.
40 Chair. May I mention something there? Councilor? I was probably sloppy in combining talking about the specifics on the page with how I've been looking at things. Nothing in here talks about no public testimony. I was using that as an example of how I have been thinking about that piece around unanimous approval with all committee members present, that if you have that, no one's testifying to it. Sure. Fair. Sometimes that's we haven't done outreach, but I think we can often tell in a situation not always, but often if it's that it's truly non-controversial. We have one person there saying, hey, there was a lot of input on this. Everyone's thumbs up that maybe those would be the appropriate things, but that that public testimony piece was my editorialization of how that might be applied and why the consultation with the committee chair is important for situations where the the presiding officer may not know exactly what the discussion and debate was in committee.
41 That's. Yeah. Thank you. I, I knew it triggered something that hadn't been there before. So I was scrambling to read and I didn't find it. So I that's why.
42 That's why.
43 Yeah. Thank you.
44 Councilor Dunphy, do you have any preference about this if this is a resolution or not?
45 No, I don't I mean, I think it is important for us as a body of 12 to to weigh in one way or the other. And I am a firm believer that even if I'm on the losing side of something, if the council speaks, that's the that's the rules. That is the, the, the law. And it's my job to defend that. And we have these robust debates on purpose. So I think it does I think we do need something for this council to weigh in on in a formal way. I do think that well, so I guess that means I actually talked myself in, I do think it should be coming as a resolution. In fact. Yeah, I guess I do. Okay, okay.
46 Vice chair Ryan.
47 Yeah, this could turn into a friendly amendment or not, but I have a question for the council president who brought this resolution forward in the two that I, that I want edits from. When it says in consultation with that means you have a conversation with the committee chair. So then the next one, you make it clear that irregardless of how that conversation went, you retain discretion to designate items. So it gives the council president control over the actual implementation, no matter how that conversation went down. And that's how I'm reading it, and that's what I'm not comfortable with. So can you tell me if I'm reading that right.
48 So I want to frame this up by making the point. And I say this knowing that it's always a little awkward when I'm involved in these conversations as the city and council president. But I do try to think about these things in the context of what would I want in the future from a different council president. Right now, the council president retains discretion to designate items to the consent agenda or not, without any guidance from the council as a whole about how they might make that decision. So everything we do here is providing guidelines that currently don't exist, where the council president currently makes that decision with.
49 Is that in the charter.
50 The creation? I don't know if it's I believe it's a combination of charter and code, but the creation of our agendas is set by the council president, including what goes on, consent and what doesn't. So the goal here was to actually create some guidance from council for the council president on what that should look like. I will tell you that the reason that. The reason that council vice president and I and I don't want to speak for you, so weigh in if this is not how you remember it, but what I remember us talking about when we added in consultation with the committee chair, was that there could be those scenarios where there are things that the president doesn't know because they weren't in that committee. And it's important to have that conversation. And then including council president retains discretion. This can't be the only guidance. We can't capture every criteria. There might be things that very clearly are appropriate for consent, but that defining them would cut too close to other things. That wouldn't be so. We don't want to include it here, or there might be things that, as a broad category, are very appropriate for consent, but an individual item is controversial and shouldn't go on consent or didn't get a full hearing in committee because we didn't do the outreach first. And we know we need another opportunity for public testimony. So while it would normally go on consent, we think it shouldn't in this case. So I think given those types of scenarios, I would want to make sure that we include language here that allows the council president to make decisions even outside of this guidance on what to place on consent or not, because we can't capture every situation perfectly. As you said, I might be in the minority on that. And and if we go to a vote and I lose, so be it. But it seems to me that there are too many individual scenarios to try to capture here, and that we need to leave room for the council president to make good decisions.
51 Okay, I, I heard what you said, but I don't it didn't get to my question all the way. So in the way this is played out it it means that the council president can have a conversation with the chair of that committee after a unanimous vote. But then at the end of the the final authority is with the council president to decide if they want that to be on consent or on the agenda.
52 Yes and no. So you're right, the way that these two.
53 Things first, then the no.
54 Yeah. The way these two things read together, you are correct. The council president could. Could have that conversation with the committee chair, could consult with the committee chair, decide that the committee chairs gut was not the same as the council president's gut. And do something different and put it on consent or not put it on consent depending on which direction. Right we're talking about here. If it was put on consent and the committee chair disagreed with that, ultimately any person can remove something from consent. So the committee chair could go around the council president and say, we had this conversation. I think you're wrong. I'm pulling this off consent. And then when it's pulled off consent and when and we're in a council meeting, that committee chair could, in discussion of that item say council president, we had a discussion. You did me dirty. You put it on consent when I asked you not to. I'm really mad at you er that publicly and make a complete fool of the council president. So I do think that while you are correct, these two things together would allow the council president to override a recommendation from a chair. There is a response to that, that the law allows for that chair or any other member of council that would hopefully create a check that would make it unlikely that the council president would do that without a strong reason. I don't know if that answers your question.
55 It did. It was colorful. Even so, I.
56 Very rarely colorful.
57 You know, that was kind of like taking note of it. And I'm not worried about that part. But it was entertaining. So basically the big the bigger box here is always that anyone from the council can pull something from the consent agenda.
58 And we're not changing that at all.
59 What's that?
60 And we're not changing.
61 We don't ever need to vote on that because that part is in the charter. Okay, okay. I still don't love the language, but it helped that we had this conversation and I am not having this dialog that's specific about the current council president. I'm also only thinking about who the council president would be or whoever it is. And I tend to really be comfortable with shared power. So that's probably why I'm speaking. I am, yeah.
62 I can just jump in now. I wanted to clarify that my office worked on this. I didn't want to correct anyone because I yeah, I'm happy to share the work, but I also don't want this to be taken as council president brought this forward and specifically was trying to put in here that the council president retains discretion. I actually think even if we were to strike that part, it is just true that the council president holds power over agenda setting. So and that's in code, right? So to me, it just feels like it's reiterating what's already the case. Is there a issue with taking that out or. Yeah, I would love to hear thoughts about that. And then councilor Ryan, a word that you said you would feel more comfortable instead of consultation was was it an agreement.
63 Yeah. Agreement or approval.
64 Yeah. Wondering if anyone has comments to either of those.
65 That would make sense to change that. If the next one says what it currently says. So that's why we had that exchange. And I think bigger picture since we've been doing this in January, we've had some debates and conversations about what we think is in the charter, what's not in the charter. Let's think of that veto or veto. It was clear as mud, I think to your average voter right now on what that was and how we're implementing it. And I, I do believe on council president authority. There's been less dialog with the public on what that is and what it is not. So I would say these are all very fresh conversations about how we're building this new form of government. So so I don't really I'm not that comfortable saying that, that that's in code for the council president, because it's not that clear to anyone on what's in code for the council president's authority in the charter or in the code. We haven't had those that dialog. But if anyone can pull I think is that in here? Again, I wasn't looking at it. So maybe it was and I just accepted it. Is the resolution remind us of who can pull any item at any time.
66 I have it right here. Who can pull it. Yeah. Section 2-127 talks about consent agenda.
67 Is it in the resolution language?
68 The city charter? I don't believe it's referenced.
69 So we keep referencing something that's not in the current resolution.
70 You would prefer to have that actually stated as, as stated in 2-127 in the.
71 Yes, since it's been referenced as the backstop a couple of times, then I think it's would be more transparent and legislation if it was mentioned again. If it's not mentioned in this, I, I didn't focus on it. I was focused obviously on the two that I mentioned.
72 So adding back in who can pull.
73 If in fact. Adding in that would be a friendly amendment. I would ask for the council president who brought this forward because she's you've referenced it a couple of times.
74 So I want to go back to council. Vice president's office worked on this. I want to make sure that credit is is going to her staff team also. But I think that we could add a whereas council vice president, if that's something you'd be interested in maybe the second to last we talk about city code provides for different agenda types, different actions. And then before whereas the criteria for designating items to consent agenda has been assigned or actually maybe right after that, whereas the criteria for designating items to the consent agenda has been assigned to the office of the council president. And whereas city code allows city code, was it 2217? Yeah. 22127 allows for any person to remove an item from the consent agenda. Now, therefore. I think if that provides more clarity for what we're doing.
75 Yeah, since it was mentioned a couple of times and is legal already looked at this.
76 Looking at aubrey from my office. No, because it's a resolution, correct. Oh. Resolution.
77 Repeat what the the amendment was again or the proposal.
78 Do you want me to do that or do you want to. Yeah. Okay. So adding a whereas as the new last whereas so that it would say and whereas Portland city code and we'll get the right section and actually it's in the charter. So we might even go back to the charter. So portland's charter section Portland and Portland city code section allow for any person to remove an item from the consent agenda.
79 And we say person, we mean councilor.
80 Charter allows for any person to remove an item from the consent agenda. It does not specify just councilors. I don't know if there's ever been a challenge to what person means and how that reads in context. I certainly wouldn't propose one.
81 Council president. Would you be open to that being right before the last? Whereas because this technically is referencing city code 3.02.03, which is in here, but then that would more be a little bit more explicit.
82 Absolutely. I think that was the original location. And then I changed my mind. So happy to go back to that.
83 Does that work for aubrey and craig or one or both of you? Okay. And we do have the last, whereas is referencing the part of the code that does state. That the office of the council president, as far as how we've been interpreting the code, is in charge of the agenda setting. Are there any more suggestions about.
84 Would those codes passed at the end of the last council, when we had like a boatload of codes that they rammed down us?
85 I believe it was, but then we're adopted them in January, is that correct?
86 I think that this was part of that conversation in January.
87 So we've never this is the first time this has been daylighted.
88 Well, it was part of the discussion that we had in January as this council and daylighted it there as well. Okay. I'm not sure if the original.
89 I'm sorry.
90 No, that's okay. I'm not sure if the original changes that you all adopted as the last commission. How many of those? Obviously, those were all created by the transition team, and I'm not sure how many of those came out of direct recommendations from the community body and how many of those came from staff and where this one lied.
91 Yeah, same. I don't know either.
92 And I have heard this idea that at the end of every year or beginning of next year that we look at the resolutions and, and norms and the handbook and it's something that we adopt. So this is a conversation that I think many folks would be interested in opening up. And for today, I'm trying to kind of gauge for my colleagues where we're at, if we'd like a little time to think about this resolution, if we. Are ready to move it forward, possibly, and have it be part of a broader conversation with all of our colleagues.
93 I don't really have any strong feelings one way or the other.
94 My only pause right now is that we bring up these two city codes, and that wasn't where my focus went. But now I'm a little I'm confused. So do those two codes here that I didn't click on right now, because I'm trying to be focused in this meeting. Do they spell out both the rules around pulling consent items and the rules and codes better? Word on council president authority. Is that why those two codes are in here? But I did not hear that mentioned until we got into this.
95 3.02020 discusses the council agenda and how items are submitted to the council agenda, and what sorts of items are on the council agenda, including the regular agenda, the consent agenda, time, certain items, 9/12 items, etc. 3.0 2030i believe is the other section that is referenced there, and that is council actions. So that speaks to not how does this get on the agenda, but what can we do with things once they are on the agenda. And again it goes through what can we do with emergency ordinances, franchise ordinances, resolutions, reports, consent agenda, etc. So it's the procedure for how we take those items up once they're on the agenda.
96 So then this is necessary to add what we're talking about. It didn't get covered in those two.
97 It is not covered in those two. And I think that if it is.
98 I just want to make sure I hate clutter. So yeah. All right. That was my question. I wanted to make sure we weren't adding something that wasn't necessary, but it is necessary.
99 Council vice president I do think that we should include the charter reference, not just the code reference.
100 Great, great. And aubry from my office who drafted this is willing to come up if we have any questions for her.
101 Can we pass?
102 Motion? That we're kind of in a break? Yeah.
103 Council vice president. I'll just say I like where this conversation is going. I like these amendments and additions and new references, but I would like to see that before I vote on it. So I think rather than moving this forward today, I think it would be better if we schedule this maybe for our next one, and just have a quick check in about that and see where it landed.
104 Did you hear our whispers?
105 That was great.
106 I think that's where we're.
107 We're in the.
108 Same that's the right direction to go. And I think my team has the information that we need about where you all are at and are happy to have more conversations and hear more feedback, if that is helpful. All right. Thank you, colleagues. Clerk, can you please read the next item?
109 Item three discussion follow up for the council policy process.
110 Great. All right, colleagues, thank you for the thoughtful discussion at our last meeting on how we can provide pathways for counselors to get input and maybe some support on policy development from city staff. Today, we'll hear a brief presentation from both aubry and craig expanding on what they shared at the last meeting. And then we'll take the rest the most of the rest of our time in discussion with our ourselves. And the goal here is to create a process that meets counselors needs while also honoring and respecting staff time and resources, and ultimately leads to more effective policy through increased collaboration between our city's legislative and executive branches. I know that we have many electeds, and we're all kind of doing things a little bit differently. And even if we don't end up with a clear process that everyone's going to use, I do think that there's some value in talking through these different options. Right. I am happy to pass it over to aubry and craig now. Thanks for being here.
111 Great. Thank you. Thank you so much, counselor. For the record, my name is aubry chen. She her pronouns. I'm a counselor with vice president Koyama Lane office.
112 And I'm craig cook. He him pronouns. I am a council policy analyst with council operations.
113 So very briefly, this is a follow up to the conversation we had on Monday in the governance committee on October 6th. This is a follow up to the council governance handbook update council policy process item. Briefly, in terms of this conversation, we'll briefly recap some of what we went over in the presentation during the last committee session. We'll provide some of the information requested regarding different options, alternatives, and analysis of other cities and their operations, both here in Oregon and I believe was requested to look at other cities around the country like minneapolis. And then we'll take some more time to discuss our rationale, proposal and reasoning. Cool. So first off, this chart should look familiar to everyone. This is from the previous presentation outlining the current policy process here at the city. Very basically, we look through issue identification. We typically move into that policy research and drafting stage, where individual offices take different approaches to engaging subject matter expertise and sort of career staff at the city side to engage in that process. After that research and drafting stage, we typically move to technical review. Then it goes through policy referral process into a committee meeting and then into a council meeting. Looking at this current process, we identified several key challenges that we're facing from the city council side. I know there's an expression of frustration around access to experts and the want to develop a process for accessing the city's professional and technical expertise. We were also joined by councilor Kanal, who spoke a little bit about the political influence component and concerns about the perception of political influence on that access to professional expertise process. We also heard from city administration, city staff frustrations around sort of unclear policy directions set by council from policy proposals that are not informed by subject matter expertise. There were also concerns about capacity prioritization, prioritization and the turnaround time on report requests. As part of those challenges, what we proposed is an implementation of an additional step, a resource request staff authorization component to our policy process with the proposal that councilor and council offices, which are policy idea was council operations to coordinate with the city administration in order to determine and prioritize that staff allocation and authorization to collaborate with council offices. Additionally, through that conversation, we mentioned that this process was an optional one. We wanted to give flexibility for council offices to continue doing their work, but also provide a little bit of guidance in terms of addressing those key challenges. We also wanted to make sure we clarified expectations and provided clear expectations for city administration and career staff, and address the bottleneck and resource allocation conflict between city council and city administration. That issue of who should be, you know, what item should be prioritized and how who should be treated most equally, I believe, was the term. Recapping that conversation, there was a request to look into different processes for other cities. What we wanted to reference is several other cities here in the state of Oregon, in the city of Salem, for example, if staff assistance is requested, typically an issue or policy issue is raised at a regular meeting. If that request necessitates more than one hour of staff time, that project must be approved by by council. If less request. The request is directed to the directed to the city manager for approval. The city of eugene follows a two hour rule if a request will take more than two hours of staff time, that request must be approved by a vote by the full council. If less, that request can be directed to the city manager for approval. I also looked at other cities, both large and small, looking into the city of aurora request for information, go to department heads and notably request will not. Department heads will not initiate any action or prepare any report that is significant in nature, or initiate any project or study without the approval of the majority of the city council. If we look into in terms of guidance from the league of Oregon cities, for example, their standard template drafting manual for council rules and procedures includes a stated sort of limit to the amount of individual inquiries and requests for information from staff, and to make sure we limit those to things that could be readily answered as part of a staff member's day to day responsibilities. That standard template guidance includes the following as well. Questions of a more complex nature shall be directed to the city administrator. Questions from individual members of the council requiring significant time or resources to hours or more is what is suggested shall normally require approval of the council also. Notably, it also shares this best practice, which is that members of council shall share any information obtained from staff with the entire council to make sure that all council has that benefit of that information.
114 Thank you. Aubry. Another request that we had was to look beyond Oregon and specifically at the city of minneapolis. You on this committee have heard a number of times about the minneapolis model. It's a very similar structure of government to Portland. And so in minneapolis, they really divide this into three different categories. The first is informal requests. Those are made from council offices directly to department heads. They are less than five hours of staff time that do not interrupt normal operations. The administration can request a legislative directive if they determine that the informal request is beyond scope. So if it would take more than five hours of staff time or would interrupt their normal business operations, the next step is a legislative directive, which you've heard a presentation on this process previously in this committee. But to recap, it's a formal request including scope, timing and deliverable of what council is asking for. When committees in minneapolis are working on this, they do seek input from the administration and from the mayor's office on the scope before finalizing and voting on it. It is approved by a majority of the full council and then tracked by central council staff, and then finally our council staff. Research options I will note that the city of minneapolis has a much larger central staff. Their version of council operations has much more capacity than our current model and Portland. They are able to do. Because of this, a number of policy briefings and longer research reports, those are also formally requested either by committees or the full council and voted on. They are tracked and made available on a public dashboard. It's a pretty cool model. I would love for us to be able to do this. Not sure that we currently have the capacity to do so. What? Based on these models, both in Oregon and in minneapolis and other cities around the country, we are thinking of potentially suggesting a tiered level of approval for information, requests and legislation assistance. So these would be approved at three different levels. The simplest would be approved just directly by council office. It would be what you normally are doing now, just going directly to the administration with whatever questions you may have. We're suggesting potentially copying council operations and or the deputy city administrator's office. So there's awareness and tracking of these informal requests. The next step would be similar to the minneapolis model, a legislative directive council could help council offices prepare the scope, timing and deliverable rather than following the minneapolis model. We are suggesting that this would be approved on the committee level, rather than going to full council for procedure reasons. It would make it go faster. It would still require drafters to show that they did have support from at least one council committee, but they wouldn't necessarily have to bring it to full council. And then the final step is what already exists in our structure today, which is the possibility of passing a resolution that goes through committee and council approval and directs the administration to do something. So there have been several examples of how this council has done that with councilor Ryan's storefront legislation. That's one example of a resolution doing so. So in this system, the info and briefing requests would be quick informational items or a feasibility review. If you've already drafted your legislation, it's just getting sort of that stamp of feasibility approval from the administrative side. The administration would retain the authority if it did go beyond that scope to ask for a legislative directive, legislative directive, again, would be a request for the administration to help draft legislation or conduct about two hours or more of internal research. And council ops would help committees draft those scopes, deliverables and timelines for the committee review and approval. And then the resolution processes. As it stands now, we're envisioning that as creation of significant new programs or initiatives like the storefront support program or the unified housing strategy, things that this council has passed through resolution, they would require full council approval and the administration before this would be passed by full council. We would recommend that the administration review the scope of these resolutions for feasibility. So some of the advantages of this system, first of all, transparency. We have talked several times now about ensuring that there's no political interference in this process. We would be able to track these requests and they would be able to be made public in a report to council, which would lead to greater transparency between council and the administration. It would lead to greater efficiency. We know that there is limited city staff time and resources, especially in our current fiscal environment. Those resources are ever more limited, and so being able to scope these items through the legislative directive process would signal to the administration that the items are likely to receive majority support when they go through committee and council approval processes. It would allow council to focus on their strategic priorities. I know we're talking a little bit later in this committee today about determining some of those strategic priorities together through council, but being able to scope legislation and discuss it as committee before it's potentially fully developed, means that council is able to focus on the things that are truly important strategically to the members of this body. And it could lead to more effective policy. I think we can all agree, hopefully, that policy that would be informed by the subject matter experts and city staff and their expertise would be more effective, feasible and achievable with our current city resources. So we talked a little bit last time about how council operations might factor into this process. So some ideas for your consideration here would be the council operations would be able to track assistant councilors and staff, ensuring that there is responsiveness on every level of this request. System council operations can assist with drafting of all types of policy, and in this system would be responsible for drafting the scope, timing and deliverables for the legislative directives. Council operations can already and would continue to be able to assist with external or comparative research, and this is an important distinction that I want to make. The city administration is able to assist with internal research. What happens within the city. They are able to look into current practices, you know, potentially through a legislative director, work on potential new practices of how the city operates. But it's more appropriate for a research request for council operations. If you're asking what other cities are doing or for a landscape study, council operations is here to assist with that. Council operations is able to proof legislation review for form, style and content before it's formally submitted. And as always here to assist with processes, general questions or needs related to the policy process. So we wanted to present this as an item for discussion today. As we've said previously, these will be recommendations that will appear in the council government governance handbook. We are thus far I will say I have not heard a desire from this committee necessarily to work on legislation that would set this process formally in, in the processes, but we would be providing recommendations in the handbook. So welcome your feedback, your questions. And I will also say we have some colleagues here from the city administrative side. We have been working closely to understand some of the needs from folks in the service areas. That's been part of this conversation and will continue to be so. Appreciate your feedback today, and we'll continue this conversation with administrative side. Thank you.
115 Thank you, craig and aubrey. Thank you for reiterating that we this is about coming up with some recommendations. I expect that there will be many different thoughts and opinions, and just want to remind us that the goal here is to be thinking about what type of functional process do, do we want to have that's transparent and feels fair across offices, and might even open up the door to be collaborative? As we're shifting into this new while we're in this new form of government, where a bureau, you know, is used to focusing on the needs of and thoughts of one elected to now possibly 12 council president can add on to this if if you'd like that I believe we've gotten as council leadership asks from the mayor, from the executive branch to have some sort of process guidance so things can run smoothly. And it might also be I can recognize that we are in the middle of hiring a new city administrator, so we can have some of these conversations. Some of that might need to wait until that person gets here and and is part of the conversation or kind of make some decisions. But I think this is a chance for us, people who I all respect to really think things through. And if we if it is ideal, what would what would some of this look like? So happy to hear from you all. And I think it can also be pretty casual if folks just want to pop in and share their thoughts. Council president.
116 I want to start by thanking you, chair, for bringing this issue up the first time and bringing it back today. I know that you all started this conversation at a previous meeting, and I had had to leave that meeting early, and I really appreciate the opportunity to get to weigh in on this. It looks like with some more iteration since that last meeting, which is fantastic. So thank you very much for making sure that this came back. There are a lot of different variables here. And as you all were going through aubrey and craig, the presentation, I was zigzagging a little bit, right. On the one hand, we don't want to limit the ability to iterate by saying that councilors can't go to can't go to staff for research on an idea until they've had it passed through a majority of councilors, because we want somebody to be able to get the background information, think about how something would work to then bring it to committee and have that conversation amongst our colleagues. We don't want ideological differences affecting service, and frankly, I trust every single person I have worked with on the executive branch side to not take that approach, to act as true professionals and serve the needs of our city as a whole, including getting information to councilors that they need. But I don't want to. Undervalue the fact that perhaps some of my colleagues raised that as a potential concern for the future. I also know that our staff have full time jobs, even without us here as 12 councilors, and we need to make sure that we respect their time. It's up to us to build relationships so that we can have access. But that's easier for a councilor Who's been around for a while than somebody who's new on council. And we don't want that to affect your ability to do good work. So I just want to name that. I'm holding all of those and many other things. As I think about the pros and cons of the proposal you've brought to us and some of the other examples that you put before us, I like the idea of having different tiers. I like the idea of giving our administrative staff the opportunity to say, okay, I understand that this is a higher level priority. I also understand that I need to do all of this. As the council vice president said, the mayor has asked us to think about how we can limit the incoming to our administrative staff. Right? They have full time jobs even without us. That's important for us to all remember. And the mayor has suggested things like something from his office saying, yes, this had the input of the experts in the city and this one didn't. That might influence us in our voting and influence us to tell our colleagues, sometimes to go back and make sure that something works, or to ask deeper questions of the administration. I think we need a way to create a filter that doesn't limit our ability to do our work, but that also respects professionals and the administrative side. As I look at the three tiered approach that you brought forward and like I said, I really like this idea. These are priorities. This came from council as a resolution. These came from a council office. You still need to respond to this. It's informational. It's important. It's what will lead to the next piece of legislation or the next resolution, but it can't override the resolution. Council has passed. I'm a little bit concerned, though, that the bar for a legislative directive is too low. If I, as a councilor, have an idea and I want to talk to the administration about how I might form it into the best policy possible, that might take a couple of meetings that might be more than two hours of work. And I have two ideas here. The first is that we could raise the bar for what counts as an informational or briefing request, versus a legislative directive, so that something coming from an individual councilor Could take a little more time. The second proposal, though, is the idea of a set number of priorities where perhaps legislative directives are anything that comes from a committee or each councilor has a set number of legislative directives. Style asks that they could have each year to suggest as their priorities, so that this two hours of research rule, I can't bring forward 20 things that require that unless I get a legislative directive through a committee. But I could individually, without going through a committee, bring forward, say, five a year or whatever the right number is that I think is somewhere between 2 and 20. So that's another way that we might approach it, is there's an info or briefing request council. You get as many of those as you want. There are legislative directives and priority councilor Requests, as many legislative directives as a committee wants, limited number of priority legislative requests from individuals, and then resolutions. My thought as I look at this also, I credit to my staff for thinking through some ideas on how we approach this as well, and how we might combine some things that work in other places. Some of the work you have done thinking about what works here.
117 Thank you. As I'm looking through the presentation and I'm thinking about the role of city council, and on the one hand, this looks like it's really doing a good job of trying to address some of the burden that we are putting on folks who have day jobs, and we ask them to do a lot of things. It doesn't feel as though it's responsive to the city council's relatively new investigatory powers. We under this charter, as differently than previous city councils, are given explicitly investigatory oversight. How do you think that a city council investigation of, I don't know, the pools at the parks or something, you know, how would that be responded? How would this system be responsive to something like that?
118 Thanks for the question, councilor. This process really wasn't designed to look into the oversight or investigatory responsibilities of council. We're looking at specifically at policy development through this process. I think that is something that is certainly within the scope of the handbook, and certainly something that will be thinking about. So would be happy to have conversations on that. If that's something that you and your office have ideas on.
119 Okay.
120 Thank you.
121 I would also offer a number of cities have different practices regarding how their city city administration reports the day to day city operations of different functions to their different councilors. I think it's definitely worth having that conversation, especially as we're looking to bring on a new city administrator to say, what are the preferences or what are the expectations regarding reporting of day to day city operations, and both in terms of cadence and also in terms of detail? I was just at the league of cities. These are the types of things that you might consider as part of, for example, a performance evaluation for city manager. Our city administrator. My apologies.
122 Vice chair.
123 Thank you. Chair Koyama Lane. This is really fantastic. First of all, that we're making headway on issues that were that are having bottlenecks for this council. And one of the biggest ones is how we interact with the city administration and bureaus. So I think you're getting to the heart of that matter. And that's important. You know, the last government, it was more clear because the legislation was developed in partnership with the bureaus and the elected body and public input. So I think I think our culture in general still is in that habit in those norms of practices. And so I think we have to just be patient with the culture, both up here, but also in the entire enterprise, if you will, to try to work with us as we figure out what this is. So I think it'll always need to be a partnership. We're churning out legislation with a lack of norms and established processes. So now we're trying to figure that out now. And I think that you're doing a lot of great work by just investigating other cities. Of course. I really appreciate that you brought up minneapolis because it's a more similar footprint and also a similar charter that they've adopted. I think we just need to set our bureaus and our city staff up for success. And I think the ambiguity is what's hard at this moment. And I really appreciate that. We're talking about bringing the city's practitioners of the work at the conceptual stage again before we have this fully developed. So so my one question who's on your who are your sounding board? Who are you connecting with in the bureau land or the enterprise land as we develop this? Is there are there key people that you're engaging with as we move forward?
124 Thank you. Councilor, we have been working through mostly through the service area staff, the folks who are working for the dcas and for the city administrator. I think. We have not. We have had some conversations, I guess, with bureau staff as well.
125 That's me also making a mistake right now in my the old form of government. So I actually was satisfied when you said dcas in the service areas. So pardon that I started using the word bureaus at this moment.
126 Yeah.
127 I think it's important to get all perspectives certainly on this. I think when we do come up with a process, that agreement will be with the city administrator and with the dcas. I think we we completely intend to continue those conversations, taking the feedback that we've gotten today. And potentially we could come back to this committee with a response from the administrative side if if they are prepared to do so, I don't want to commit them to anything quite yet.
128 I do think from my perspective, the minneapolis model is one that could work specifically to legislative consent process. I did hear the capacity concerns and I hope we can look. I hope we can look at what can be dropped. When you're trying to change and evolve. There's probably some practices we have now that aren't necessary anymore as we try to implement those that are more specific. And I say that as a big statement with both the enterprise and with the council operations, I think I noticed there's some patterns that are still perhaps from the past that we don't need to do anymore. So I just hope we keep getting comfortable with what we're letting go of as we add. So then we can address those capacity concerns. I think it was getting you were getting at this, councilor Dumphy. But one thing that I don't think we're focusing enough on is probably under the minneapolis model, the informal request. And that's the biggest difference between the two forms of government. One of the biggest is that we have constituents who come to us because they haven't been listened to, sometimes for years, on an issue that's been lingering, and it never got through the the wall of the former government. And there were reasons for that. But just hold that thought for a second. And we are often have appointments with people that now want us to really understand a concern that they've had, perhaps for a while, and they haven't felt empowered or they didn't know where that would ever go, like I would go to elected and it would die, or they'd go to the bureau and it would die. And now they see us as performing a role that advocates with them. If we think that it really is unfair and they deserve better response than they've received on a set item, whether it's a lingering traffic issue, I think PBOT has those all the time. The silence from the city when they thought something was supposed to happen, and then it just stopped moving, and they don't get a very good understanding of why. So there's all these informal requests. I'm not the only one that has meetings with constituents that bring up these types of issues. And I do think in community facing government that we are supposed to have now, I think we're spending way too much time in city hall. But when we're out there listening to our constituents, those type of issues come up overwhelmingly. And I want to know how to work with that and how to take that. I think that I'm learning how to go forward as an effective regional, if you will, north northeast facing legislator. And I think that there's a lot of clumsiness right now with how we interact with the constituents as kind of a connector, if you will, and our forum and our enterprise. And that's the word I'm using because it's given to me by the mayor and michael jordan. So I think that remains an area that could continue to I just want to continue to daylight that. Yeah. And I think we might be seeing just like when you were commissioner, trust me, when you brought that to a bureau, some of those issues, they, they it wasn't always welcomed. So this isn't new and there's always that I will outlast you thing from a bureaucrat when you're dealing with an elected who just might not be there after the next election. So maybe this will go away. And I'm daylighting that because that's reality. And so now in these this form of government, I think it's becoming more obvious that that's one of our roles. And so I think the informal request in minneapolis is getting at that. But I do think we haven't had enough conversation on that topic, if you will.
129 Councilor, thank you for raising that. Minneapolis does use the informal request process for constituent services, but I certainly hear what you're saying, and I think we can do some more research on what a constituent service system could look like, and work with our partners in the administration to better understand how we can connect to you as electeds, to add your constituents to the administrative side.
130 I appreciate that, and I think this gets more at the heart of the matter of why a lot of portlanders have voiced in polls of their dissatisfaction at times, is the customer service in general is what a lot of their complaints are. Their expense to live here has gone up and their services have gone down. If I could summarize. And so they want us to help with that and to heal, to hear that pain and to advocate for them. It's one of the things that in this form of government, where we decide to have three people represent the same geographic area, where the three people can not worry about ideology, but just look at some basic customer services that need to improve from the city, which is really what local government is supposed to do anyway. And so I think it allows us to work more in that shared partnership that they are seeking when they voted yes on this. So I think it gets to a lot of issues that we have to keep talking about. Thanks.
131 Go ahead. Council president.
132 Some of my colleagues have touched on how broad this system would be and the other work that councilors do. So I just want to state for the record that from my perspective, what I think I am thinking about potentially supporting on potentially voting on down the road is something specific to our legislative work. As councilors, we have a constituent services role, and I hope that my staff can continue to call us. Leaders within service areas and even bureaus on occasion when that's appropriate, on constituent services needs as needed without limit. I have a role in oversight, and I hope and assume that any committee I serve on or chair in the future could call the administration into talk about a program and its outcomes in my oversight role, without limitation. Regardless of this system we put into place, I have a role in translating what government does and communicating to portlanders what we're doing. And I hope that in order to have the information I need to fulfill that role, I could call up a service area or again, as appropriate, a bureau to have a quick conversation about how something's working so I can translate that at any time. And if we need to in the future. Think about processes and limitations for those things, because it's too much. We should talk about that. I would have a lot of concerns about limiting my ability to function in any of those roles. I do think with what we've seen, with what we've heard from the administration, asking us to prioritize within our legislative role could make sense. And that is, I hope, the only piece of our work as councilors that we're talking about with this system. From my perspective.
133 Thank you for that clarification. Yes, that is correct. This process is designed to govern the legislative drafting process and is not focused on general communications or oversight of this of the of the executive and administration.
134 I'll just go a little further than that and say, you know, we are, as the council vice president stated earlier, we'll bring a resolution on the handbook plan for December. But as we continue to talk about these processes and as they continue to be refined, I anticipate this work will go beyond December and will continue to identify ways that we can improve some of these other processes and help council achieve its goals, not just with legislation, but also in terms of oversight, constituent services communications continue to refine these processes.
135 Yeah.
136 I want to add I appreciate the dialog that the council president brought up. I never want to be in the role of thinking, because I'm elected, I can parachute in and fix something. I want to repeat. I don't want to just fix a micro issue. I want to daylight something that probably is bigger than just that one issue. And I would rather see that this is a micro example of a practice that could improve. And we're daylighting that for the enterprise. So I wouldn't want to take anything to them. That isn't something that's probably more systemic in in customer service. So I think we could be perceived as being unhinged if we just every time there was a complaint, we went to the enterprise person and said, we're getting this complaint, please fix it. Like, I don't want to ever be that person because I respect the capacity that's built in this city to address that. And they might be blindsided to a pattern that we're exposing. I hope that made sense. Like we're here to be helpful, to improve the services, but that doesn't mean that we get to just pick little micro ones that might not be about something bigger. That makes sense.
137 Yeah.
138 Thank you, vice chair Ryan I when I was looking at this earlier today, was thinking about separating kind of the more traffic control of of smaller questions that you might ask staff, which I do think is, is mentioned in this. And I think it has been clarified, although we'll probably need to figure out with our new city administrator when they join us at some point, what that traffic control needs to look like. I feel like we've been told, reach out. Please try to let the the deputy city administrator and that service area know. And this really is more about how to when you're working on legislative legislation, how to work with the executive side, how to work with city employees or city staff in a way that that works for them. And if I'm if I'm honest, I'm very grateful to see what some other cities have in place. And if I'm being honest, I don't think our body of 12 will be receiving many of these other ideas from other cities very well. I think that a lot of these processes might be seen as losing access, or might be seen as being restrictive, and. And that might be where we're at. I could be wrong. I think at the lowest level, some clarity for councilors that might feel good and might be a step towards this is having it really written out clearly what to expect when you are making legislation? In terms of timeline, how long will a legal review take? How long should you expect a code review to take? How long should the financial budget analysis take and who to go to? I wonder if approaching it as like, here's a guide to help you when you're working on legislation. And at the same time, I do think at some point being able to come back to this, it does feel like an equity issue for me, for people who hopefully will be in these seats as electeds one day, who haven't been part of drafting and creating legislation. I do think we should be able to have something that we can hand to someone when they say, so how do you how do you do this? It doesn't have to be, you know, set in stone and code. But just here's an option. You can identify an issue and then here's how you can ask for help. And I'll just say, like speaking as someone that was kind of asking in January, so how do you do this exactly? What's the process. And what we see right now is different offices kind of finding their own way. Councilor Dunphy. Go ahead.
139 Yeah. Thank you. I suspect this may be a future installation within the handbook, but I do think it is important to sort of what councilor Ryan was saying to differentiate between the responsibilities of constituent services versus legislating. And I always view these things as 50,000 foot level. And then the the five foot level, I want to make sure that the 50,000 foot level isn't preventing us from being able to do some of the work that is at the five foot level I do, actually, I actually disagree with, with with councilor Ryan that I do want to be able to swoop in sometimes and be able to fix things, because if these systems worked as they would were needed, then there wouldn't be as much of a responsibility for for elected officials to be there. But sometimes it does require an elected official to come in and say, hey, the conditions on this do not work. And the decision maker who is in this is not in a position to be able to do x, y and z. I think some best practices around that. I've stepped in it a couple of times by forwarding an email thread to an internal communications and ceasing the constituent. That's bad. I shouldn't have done that. But to help future city councilors understand, you know what the limit of that is? And keeping that in mind, because I really do, I prioritize both of those responsibilities equally in my office. And so I think that they will hopefully inform each other in this future handbook as we're getting closer to being done. So that's all.
140 I just want to add, I actually do agree with you on that. My point wasn't that I don't want to I don't want that to be the only way. And I don't want it to be like that. Just got fixed. And and then I get to be okay with it. Because usually when you bring up something like that, it's bigger than just that issue. So I think our job is to help the administration look at the bigger picture and how that can be a practice that could be that could that could multiply and it could change the practices that are currently there. That's what I'm getting at. I feel like in a dysfunctional organization, you do it like that. You just keep plugging up the holes. And I don't want us to be that way, and you don't either. So it's like, how can that example multiply and ripple. Out in a more systemic way?
141 You know, there's some some examples I can think of specifically about, like fixing our frontage improvement requirements. Right. That's going to be a long responsibility. We all want to have legally compliant curb cuts and plenty of trees. But also when a small nonprofit is trying to open up an all ages music venue in north Portland and they get hit with an additional $30,000 bill from the city that they weren't expecting. I think it's totally okay for us to be able to say, hey, what can we do to try and figure this out that isn't calling a question to whether or not we should have curbs that work, but rather for this specific circumstance, how flexible can we make the rules? And I just want to make sure we aren't removing that flexibility by defining what we can do on the front side.
142 Thank you, councilors, I think we're ready to head into the next item. Diego, can you please read the last item.
143 Item for discussion on process to determine council strategic interests?
144 Thank you. Thank you so much, craig and aubry and I should have said right before that I think my office will follow up with you all on what you think the next, what makes sense for next steps and option is we can bring the mayor or city administrator to come speak to us about this. We can. Keep thinking about if we have more we would like to discuss. Think about if there's something we would like to include at all on this in the handbook, or wait. Okay, I want to thank vice chair Ryan for your commitment to bringing forward discussion on how council can determine strategic shared interests, and would like to pass things over to you now.
145 Well, thank you, chair Koyama Lane. Yeah, clearly I've been speaking about this for months, so you also might be sick of it and how we can continue to come together with a clear, shared priorities and objectives. We will be more productive and effective when we're working together on a shared vision with shared priorities and objectives. We must be united to address the critical challenges that portland's facing. And this is a first step. And this was part of the conversations over the summer of adding council meetings, which I think was a good decision to make them weekly and reducing committee meetings as we have not had enough time legislating as a full council. I was and continue to be a supporter of additional time together as a full council. However, I'm disappointed that we didn't make any meaningful headway. We had great dialog and there was people up here that brought some suggestions, and I do think that we need to keep looking for more efficiencies with our committees, and it's something we still have to consider. We just did no action there. Our actions have resulted, however, in more than half of the weekly schedule obligated to council and committee meetings, which is not reasonable. This expectation of this new government was also formed so that councilors had more access to our constituents being out of city hall and in the district, in our district, on the streets and in our parks. This balance of meetings versus community time is really not working personally for me, and I still want us to have that conversation. And I do look to the council president of to give us direction on that. As such, the main point of today's agenda is to bring forward the proposal to establish an annual strategic priority setting process. Again, we are defining this new form of government as we go, and we must take the time to be diligent and thoughtful about what we need as an elected body to do our best work for the people of Portland during an established period of time each year, committees could would be suspended and time repurposed with the intention of a full council setting. These strategic priorities and objectives to shape the efforts of the council and frame legislative priorities. This process would provide transparency and accountability for the public as well to each other. We know that we have different people on the council over time, and this could be an annual process and will assist in revising and reflecting evolving priorities as this council evolves. This, to me, is essential in what a functional nonpartizan elected body looks like. I'm planning to work with the council vice president to bring forward a resolution shortly in. This committee's input will help shape that. So that's the biggest way of framing this. I heard that it was too difficult for people to understand how we would suspend the committees. At the time we were having this discussion, I think around the beginning of the calendar year, since that's when new people are sworn in. When we look at a leadership of the council, would be the opportunity to have that type of higher elevation of dialog. And I own the fact that trying to do that during the middle of the year, right after a very challenging budget session, which will be every year, it was it, didn't it? It didn't get the momentum that I was hoping it would. I'm bringing it back with some more reflection that we could consider this again as more of a standard operating procedure of the council in in agreement with the voters of Portland, that they know that this council is not just reacting, but is actually clear with its vision on what our top priorities are.
146 Go ahead, councilor Dunphy.
147 Thanks, councilor Ryan, how are you envisioning practically this sort of working, you know, are you imagining that it would be a, you know, a list of the top ten issues? Or is the number not as important as the number of people who can vote for it if, say, you know, this council, I would say certainly has some divisions, but I would say only in Portland would we say there's actually any real ideological spectrum. Are you looking for only would you imagine unanimity being the goal? And if we only get two things that we all agree on, is that it? And does that limit us from being able to talk about other things that are important, but maybe not on the priority list? Could you just say a little more like, how do you how do you imagine we get from here to there?
148 I'd be.
149 It'd be important to start with a conversation and actually have a meeting focused on this. We haven't had that meeting. And so in the last council, granted there were five people, not 12. We had that conversation and we had that conversation a couple times, and it was a really helpful. We had it when a new group came in in 2021, and we had it again at the beginning of 2023, and it was helpful and it helped the then presiding officer the meeting make decisions on how to prioritize agendas and actually to earlier points. What could be on consent, what should be more of a dialog, what would have more community engagement? And I think we're missing the fact that we just haven't had that conversation.
150 So like.
151 You were talking about numbers, I'm not attached to that right now. I'm just trying to get us to a place where we actually have it. I do think strategic usually means focus and less is more. So that's my personal opinion on that.
152 My my thought and sort of popping into my head initially is that I think what I hear every single day should and is a top priority for this council. Is homelessness, right? But the city historically were a sticks and bricks kind of organization. We're not supposed to be the ones who are actually focusing on solving homelessness, because most of that is service focused. So if a future city council or this city council now said that homelessness is our number one response, our number one priority, but it is sort of outside of the scope of what the city traditionally does. Is that okay? I mean, similarly, it could a future city council say that baseball is our top priority, and even though we aren't necessarily, you know, in that line of business, do you think there are bookends to this or limits on what you would want to see?
153 I think there's a venn diagram on shared priorities with shared local jurisdictions in the state. So I think that you can have a priority that that you share with another jurisdiction, irregardless of what the iga looks like. Those can always be adaptable as well. And so I think you bring up when you said baseball, it's to me that's economic development is clearly an issue. I will probably go hard for that as being one of our priorities, since we have a revenue problem and because of our economic challenges, we have less revenue coming into the city's general fund. Right. And if we don't focus on that, I don't know how we'll ever pay for any of these priorities.
154 So I guess. From, you know, like I'm trying to phrase this properly, trying to get the thought into my brain.
155 I'm thinking out loud with you.
156 Yeah.
157 Don't overthink it.
158 Okay. You know.
159 I.
160 I think that for a lot of these things. Yeah, we could sort of zoom out a step and say, you know, baseball is economic development. Economic development fits well into the service areas. It fits into the work we do. I wonder, though, are there I worry that there may be situations where we just sort of find ourselves with the same five sort of priorities again, and they sort of loosely align with our five service areas. And I worry a little bit about seven, five votes on things like, I think that if, you know, we could probably get to seven votes on a lot of things, but I worry about how that limits debate on whether or not this would be able to be used as a, a tool to to limit debate about other things that maybe are one offs or come off that aren't what our priorities are. And I guess this is about agenda setting specifically, but I would not want to see our priorities list be. Exclusively what we talk about. I guess.
161 I think that I would agree with you. There's no reason to be rigid. There are emergencies that show up. I don't think we were hoping. I think any I I'll be careful because I don't want to belabor this, but when this current president was elected, we probably could have assumed we would be prioritizing what we currently are forced to. And I understand that. But I do believe that there are core priorities that someone viewing wouldn't know that we were focused on them right now. And I am concerned about that. And I'm okay with the debate. I'm okay with critical thinking. I'm okay with not all of us agreeing on what they are. I just don't like to be muzzled, to not have what I think would be a very common sense dialog for the city of Portland to listen to that. These are the people that you elected to focus on, a city that needs us to be pretty focused right now on some key priorities, that's all.
162 Thank you, both of you. I have confirmed that with support staff that we can go over a few minutes. Council president, did you want to hop in very quick?
163 I just want to make sure to say a couple of things so that as you and the vice chair think about where to go from here. I've got a few thoughts out there. I think that having a shared vision with shared priorities and objectives, as you stated, councilor Ryan, is a great thing to have. I also will take the example that councilor Dunphy brought up. While everybody on this council might say that homelessness is a top priority, I think that the solution some of our colleagues would propose are not only not the same solutions, but might be solutions that point in opposite directions. So as we think about a shared vision and shared priorities and objectives, that's harder to get to than shared priorities alone. And I just want to make sure that as we think about what we're building, that we acknowledge that sometimes we all agree on a problem, but have not just different, but competing ideas for how to solve it. And that's that's reality. I'm a little nervous about the idea of having a long period of time where we are just thinking about our priorities, because there is so much work to be done. I do think, though, that January is an interesting time, because in January we elect council leadership. We while we can restructure committees at any point, I know we've talked at various points about having new committee proposals in January when we elect new leadership. We've talked about adopting and adopting a handbook at the beginning of the year. And that's something that, you know, I think might be a really interesting every other year opportunity when we get new people seated and to then every other year in January when new people are seated after an election, have a meeting that focuses on adopting an agenda and priorities as a facilitated discussion could make a lot of sense too. So I'm, I think, interested in thinking about our calendar and our January and how either a council meeting or a separate work session in January could be used for a facilitated discussion, perhaps after the election of leadership. And before that, leadership brings forward a committee proposal. But I don't know that I want us to set a goal of coming up with a shared vision and shared objectives. When I think in some cases, that might not be possible once we identify our priorities and that's okay, and we have to work through those things in a in a way that will take more time than just some facilitated discussions. I'll end there for today.
164 Two things, because I appreciate what I heard. Please know I'm not the arbiter here. I'm just merely bringing up the fact that we've been together for about ten months and we haven't had this conversation as a council, and that's what I'm I'm promoting, that it would still be healthy. There is probably going to be disagreement, but that's not the reason not to do the strategic work. That's just called democracy. And so if we have debate over what they are, I'd say that's healthy. And it would also be healthy for the city to see how their elected officials are thinking about the key strategic priorities for the city. That's all. But I'm not arbitrator of that. I'm just merely trying to get us as a body to lean into something that it sounds like we're nervous. I'm not nervous about it. Some of you might be, but I think it's important for us to have this type of transparency for the voters and the residents of Portland.
165 And I just want to clarify, councilor, I'm not at all nervous about it. I just want to make sure that we have goals that we can actually achieve and that we're setting ourselves up if we're if we're going to take time away from the work that we're doing it in a way where we're setting goals that we can actually that we can actually achieve for ourselves.
166 I will debate you on that. I think this is the work, and I think it's the primary work. You know, we have that conversation in January. I think we should have done this before we built the committee. So I think this is work. I don't think it's taking us away from the work. I would say that our work is not as effective as it could be because we haven't had this conversation. That's where my opinion is, and we can have different opinions, but that's why I keep bringing it up.
167 Thank you. Councilors. I was excited to hear about this just this morning. Some of the specifics. While I think you know when it happens, how many goals we have, I think those things can be discussed. You won't be surprised that I love the idea of us coming together to do some shared work. I think this could also be a bit of a retreat. I think time when we can come together and find ways that we are on the same page. I will again encourage everyone to look at the city of long beach's June 9th city council retreat notes that I think a lot of that aligns with what councilor Ryan is discussing, and they identify. I mean, it's pretty high level there. Priorities are homelessness and housing, economic development, public safety. And then they added fiscal sustainability and staffing. But time to discuss what we what's going well in our districts, priorities for our own districts describing Portland, you know, from from each of your colleagues to hear them saying that, I think it makes a lot of sense. And if you look at their retreat objectives, it's to identify shared interests, establish priorities, and also to build some council norms. And I like the idea of it being in writing that you come back to this every year and think about what are some of the goals that we set. Are these norms still working for us? And I just really believe we can't just expect that, can't hope that this work will happen. We are making we're doing some norms here and there, but I think we need some dedicated time when it happens. I'm flexible, but I do think there's a natural time before we elect a new council president and council vice president. And there's maybe it's right before that, or some of it happens at the end, like in the middle of December or January. But there's something that I feel like we're already kind of refreshing and looking at committees again, I like the idea of us trying to figure out where we can be somewhat on the same page. Councilor it looked like you wanted to maybe say some. Did you want to say some?
168 No. I appreciate this dialog. I think that we will work together on something and put it forward, and I just will end with in every organization that I ran that was that was successful. This was a common practice where, say, the board and the staff would get aligned on what our priorities are, and it allowed us in always lean times to make very efficient decisions on how we're going to spend the purse and be good stewards of that purse for those who invested in us. And in this case, it's the taxpayers. So I think we owe it to people who spend a lot of money to live here and provide the resources for us to run our government, to know what our strategic priorities are.
169 Thank you.
170 Okay. Our next meeting is Monday, November 10th, November 10th. You can expect that vice chair ryan's this topic. His work around this will come back to us and we can discuss it further. We will also talk more about the consent agenda and any follow up, if we would like, on having a process for policy legislation. December 8th, we'll talk more. Kind of wrap up in a bit. This first stage of the advisory bodies enhancement project. And then on December 15th, we will be talking about the governance handbook. And with that I will adjourn the meeting of this governance committee. Thank you everyone.