The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-07-30
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (29,896 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
A Portland City Council work session convened on Wednesday, July 30, 2025, focused on how Council uses full Council meetings versus committees, and on a proposed ordinance to restructure the Council meeting schedule. Discussion covered the purpose of committees—policy ideation, "soft" versus "hard" oversight, public testimony formats, and vetting legislation—alongside debate over whether committees should defer to a legislature-like model or whether full Council should retain primary authority. Participants discussed weekly versus biweekly meeting cadences, evening meeting scheduling and end times, use of overflow Wednesday/Thursday slots, executive session and work session scheduling authority, committee-of-the-whole concepts, consent agenda expansion, and district time balance. A visiting delegation from Japan's local government training program was welcomed. A proposed ordinance establishing a regular weekly Council meeting schedule, with provisions on start times, soft stop times, and protections against other scheduling overriding Council time, was presented and discussed at length, including proposed amendments to remove or revise several sections. Disagreement arose regarding characterizations of the executive branch's role in scheduling and agenda-setting, and calls were made for administrative leadership to participate in future sessions. No votes occurred during this work session; further discussion of committee structure was scheduled for a subsequent meeting.
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 That's the first thing you said.
1 Is.
2 Good morning. It is Wednesday, July 30th at 9:32 p.m. I am calling to order a work session of the Portland city council. Colleagues, today we are entering into the first of a couple of conversations about how we do our business, how we do our work. I'll give us a bit of an introduction. I think actually, we don't need to take roll, do we? It's a work session. Fantastic. We have quorum, though. Well over quorum. We have had a number of conversations individually in governance, in a number of other forums about what's going well and what is not going as well with how we operate our business. And today we have the opportunity to talk about what we actually want to use council versus committees for, how we want to use committees that we have set up. I will preview for folks watching that. The next conversation will be about whether we have the right committees, the right number of committees, the right approach to committees. Today, I'm going to ask that we not go too far down that road, because I don't want us to get high centered on what committees we think we should have and what topics they should cover, when what we really need to do is make sure that we have an understanding of where all of our colleagues are around, what we want committees broadly to accomplish, whether we have three committees or ten committees, likely somewhere in between. What is the work that we want those committees to accomplish, and what is it that we want council, where we all sit to be able to weigh in on? And given that, what type of cadence do we need for our council meetings, and how do we want to prioritize our council time as we move from that broader discussion about what we want to use council and committees for before we move into how do we want to structure our council meetings, I'll ask our colleague, councilor Canal, to present a an ordinance that he has filed, which gives us a proposal for how council meetings are structured. And we'll use that to kick start the part of our meeting that is about how we want to structure our time together as councilors. But I'd like us to talk about what we do at council versus committees first, to inform our thoughts about the needs for time. Your governance committee has had some conversations about these things, so some folks have the benefit of having been a part of those conversations. We also had a group of four councilors who were invited to meet with some of our staff who support our work council operations, the clerk. Facilities more broadly, and the folks who oversee our security teams to provide some feedback about what's working well and what is not from their perspectives. And so we have some folks with us today, councilors canal and Green and Novick were in that conversation who have the benefit of some feedback there as well, that hopefully we can bring into the conversation as relevant. I also believe that our head clerk, keelan, is online in case there are any questions specifically for her. We have james apple, who oversees our bts team, folks from our council operations and legal teams all here so that if there are questions about how the way we do work affects the folks who support our work, we can get those answered directly. Though I hope that most of our conversation is internal with each other about what we'd like to accomplish. Before we dive into discussion, we have some guests who are with us today, so I'm going to pause for a minute so we can greet you all while you have a chance to be here with us. We have a visiting delegation of local government practitioners and leaders from japan who are here as part of the japanese local government managers training program. Thank you so much for being here. And councilor Koyama Lane, I know you have done taken some meetings with them. Would you like to say anything?
3 Thank you, madam president. Mostly want to say hello and welcome to our council chambers. These are my amazing colleagues that I was telling you about. Colleagues as part of their learning experience yesterday. Southeast uplift and suse hatfield school of government partnered for a session that I got to be part of to talk about civic engagement. This group, since 2002, has selected Portland specifically as their destination for their annual summer training. So they come here because they're drawn to our city's leadership and community based governance and innovative civic engagement practices. So we have 14 participants here in Portland. They're here until August 1st under the theme strengthening the roots for future possibilities. And we're really glad to have you here.
4 Thank you so much for being here, and we hope that you are enjoying your time in Portland, learning a lot, but also getting to experience our wonderful city. We appreciate having you join us this morning. Colleagues, as we enter our conversation today, I want to note a couple of things. A few of you have mentioned to me that you have frustrations around how we have information from each other about what ordinance and resolutions will come forward, and how that affects your ability, as committee chairs to plan your committee meetings. And I just want to note, I shared some information with you all about potential changes to e council that I've been discussing with the clerk's office that will address some of those pieces. So there may be concerns that are raised today that we should address through changing our council and committee structure. There may be concerns that are raised today that we can address through pre-planning in different ways, or through setting up our electronic systems to support us in different ways, regardless of our committee and council structure. And I note that because I don't want us to get too focused on changing our structure to accomplish a goal that we could accomplish in another way, if there are better ways to set up our structure based on other factors, other criteria that we need to pay more attention to. I'll also note that I sent out just some questions to help people think broadly about the discussion today, including some questions around what we do in council versus committees, and what the purpose of committees are not to restrict the conversation, but to make sure that we're all thinking as expansively as possible about it. With that overview, I'd love to have us launch into a discussion about what we see as the role of committees versus the role of council, and what it is that you hope we can accomplish in committees, and what it is that you think we absolutely must do in council meetings where we have everybody present. And I'd ask us to start with that question, because I think that will help us get to a more informed conversation about how much time and what structure we need for both of both of these types of meetings. So if anybody wants to kick off the discussion with their thoughts on what we ought to be doing in committees versus what we absolutely must do in council, that would be great. Councilor Dunphy, go right ahead.
5 Thank you. You know, my thinking on committees has really evolved since we first got into this building. Truly, when I was first elected, I envisioned a system more similar to the state legislature, where the majority of work and testimony was done in committee, and that the full deliberation of the body was the more akin to a full deliberation. And the state legislature, where there's some amendments, maybe, but mostly that is internal work. And then I we had our first evening hearing and I realized, oh, what's the point of an evening hearing if we don't intentionally build places for people to testify and give feedback in a meaningful way? You know, at this point, the combination of our new form of government, which was really explicitly about community involvement, transparency, understanding the process, and, candidly, some of the government ethics laws that now dictate us around a sequential meetings laws. I think that committees need to be a place where we are starting the work on ideating about policy ideas. I think it's also a great place to track the progress of bureaus and get deep dive presentations so that we're not, as a full body. Sitting here watching a powerpoint for multiple hours about construction of a bridge and being able to include the community to surface ideas. I think that the what I witnessed this last budget session was that the community is not accustomed to transparency, though they have demanded it when we were doing our budget amendments, we brought ideas to discuss amongst the body. But the general public misunderstood that because historically, when something is brought to the main body, it is 99% done. It is an up or down vote and the community must fight like hell if they hate it, which is not supposed to be the point now. So I think that being able to have open, honest conversations around ideas in which we unearth reasons why something may or may not be a good idea, get an additional input from our colleagues that we may have not, maybe hadn't think about, hadn't thought about, and have more time to dig into community perspectives that we just simply aren't allowed as a full body. I think that there's a lot of benefit for the committee structure. I don't think that we have yet achieved that. So those are my opening thoughts.
6 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Clark.
7 Thank you, madam president. And I just want to thank you also for doing all the pre-work here to get us ready for this conversation. And my colleagues who participated in that. I have to agree a lot with councilor Dunphy about my initial sense was it would be more like the legislature and everything would be cooked in the committee, and then it would be just pro forma at the full council. But what I, I do hope we can do is streamline some. I don't want to have to repeat everything that happened in the committee. That's just really boring for a lot of us. And it also requires that we develop greater trust among each other about what does happen in the committee, and that we take more responsibility, each of us to, through our staff or some other means, to watch what happened in the other committees so that we have some sense of what happened. If it's a 5 to 0 vote, you know, it should be kind of a no brainer. But I don't want to see us repeat everything. So how do we finesse that is important. So streamlining is important to me. I also want to share with you or just read into the record. And I know people who are watching online a couple of comments that were made from the league of women voters. We all got a nice letter from them. They're watching what we're doing, along with terry harris and other members. And I just wanted to share a couple of the points that they made. And one thing that we left off this, this memo about the function of council and that is civic education, they this is from their letter council committee meetings are a powerful form of civic education. The public can watch the presentations designed to bring the committee up to speed, read the staff reports, hear the witnesses, listen to and participate in the deliberations. I think that's really important. We have that function of civic education. They also another point they made is a strong committee system is essential for the effective and effective 12 member council. This requires a willingness by councilors to delegate information gathering and policy development to colleagues. I think that's where the trust comes in amongst us, revisiting committee work at full council is necessary at times, but too much revisiting can burden the councils, the council, the staff and the public without attendant gains. And I think that point is really well taken. That's how I feel exactly, is let's not repeat everything. I kind of go back and forth on whether or not we should have public testimony at the beginning of committee meetings. I like it that we do it. Council, you know, sort of random, but sometimes people just have a random issue or they're here to talk about something on our agenda. And I would consider that for the committees. I could go either way. And we have what seems like fairly limited time to really deal with issues, so that that's kind of out there. And one other thing, riffing off what councilor Dunphy said in committees, I think we're just evolving now. We've we've gotten a lot of on send, you know, from the bureaus. We've we've absorbed a lot of information. We're exploring issues. And I think we're at a shifting point now where there will be more civic involvement, hopefully in our committees. People are going to bring issues to us. I know that in my community meetings, and actually terry harris was at one recently where the point was made is that, you know, you you want this in the district, you want something to happen. You want a change, you want a project, bring it to the appropriate committee, you know, come on down. Let's talk about that and bring in the bureau to respond or whatever. So I think we're just evolving to that point of having more people come to us in committee. Thank you.
8 Thank you, councilor and colleagues, I want to note that in our council meetings, we've moved to folks only speaking twice on a given motion. This is a work session. Please raise your hand and talk as much as you want to need to. I am going to keep track of how many times folks have spoken to prioritize people who have spoken the least. I just wanted to be up front with everybody about my plan for calling on people so there wasn't any confusion. Later, councilor Novick.
9 I would hope that we do wind up being more like the legislature, where the all of us are willing to, in many cases, defer to what comes up through the committee with the understanding that the folks in the committee have had more time to review the issues, learn, and come up with something, you know, that's somewhat vetted. There's going to be some issues where no matter whether we want to defer to the committees or not, the public is going to be so engaged. They're going to want to be. And lengthy discussion at a council meeting. However, I think that's going to be the minority of cases. I think that we haven't really had a chance to see how the committee structure might work. We haven't had many policy proposals come through to see if people are willing to defer to the committees on policy proposals. And in terms of the budget, we had no time to have budget amendments submitted through committees. I think that, I mean, if next year the mayor has to produce his budget on February 1st or something like that, which I hope does happen, then that will give us a chance to vet amendments to the committee system so that, for example, if somebody proposes closing the Multnomah arts center, the parks committee hears testimony on that, and not everybody has to hear three hours of testimony about how badly Steve Novick screwed up. So another thing I.
10 Wanted councilor, the chair of the parks committee, had made time for that amendment.
11 In the two weeks that we had. Yes. So I one thing I just want to add is that I think that we should use some time in council meetings just to get updates on what has been happening in the committees, not just about proposed legislation, but about the oversight stuff, because I realize every once in a while, man, I have no idea what's going on in the arts and the economy committee. I don't know what's going on in the infrastructure committee, and I should really have one of my staff people watch each of those committee sessions. And it just occurred to me yesterday, thinking about this meeting. Well, wait a minute. Actually, it would be useful if when interesting things are happening in those committees, we hear sort of a briefing in full. Council hears stuff that's going on. I think that would be helpful.
12 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Green.
13 Thank you, madam president. I was at the Multnomah arts center yesterday, and I can assure you that I think people have finally realized that you're not trying to close it. So, no, I think that for me, I think the committees really need to be a place for policy development, and that does involve a certain amount of trust. I hear my colleagues who are frustrated that we seem to reproduce the same discussions that were had at committee and then at full council, and actually sometimes at work sessions as well. That doesn't seem like a good use of our time. I believe very strongly that this is also supposed to be a venue. These are supposed to be venues for the public to engage a little bit more directly with council members, and not in a sort of unilineal delivery of information or communication, but a back and forth. I think we've yet to figure out how to do that. In most cases. There's, I think, a hope and promise that legislation can emerge from the committee through those discussions. And I would like, however we go forward to, to foster that to the greatest extent possible. I think when there are appointments or kind of administrative actions that come through the committees, that we can take the recommendations of that committee and move them through the consent agenda. I, I trust that my colleagues have made the right decision on those appointments. I think oversight is important through these committees. But what I've been wrestling with is, I think, a soft versus hard oversight. And I think if it's a soft oversight, to me that's kind of like somebody in the community has. I mean, I think it was suggested that you have community meetings and then folks are interested in, you know, maybe, maybe there's something going on with PBOT or there's something going on with with public works in general. And there are real questions, but it's not like we need to subpoena, you know, members of the city of the city bureaucracy, but rather call forward and have a more formal conversation. To me, that's soft oversight. And that should happen in a in a committee, a policy committee. But when we get to like hard oversight, where there's potentially subpoena powers being exercised through council, I think it's inappropriate to delegate that to a particular policy committee, because you really need 12 city councilors present and the ability to kind of experience that exercise, that ask those questions and then, you know, have the council president or the vice president chair that that is something I've been noodling on, and I wonder how my colleagues feel about that. We haven't done that yet, and we haven't instituted any kind of practice or norm or procedure around what that kind of oversight looks like. So I just I've been thinking about the distinction of that two types of oversight in terms of public comment, I, I strongly advocate that that we should have public comment as often as possible in these committees and perhaps as a standing item. I know that there are just as a function of our time limitations. There are a number of community members who are frustrated that they don't have a way to communicate to us because they can't get in the queue or they can't get through. And so having an opportunity for folks to just have an open public comment at the beginning of some public, some committee meetings, that's irrespective maybe of the specific agenda item might be useful for us to consider. I think the Oregon public meeting law creates some serious challenges for us to work through, and I hope the state legislature can help us be be a functional legislative body in that regard. But but those are the constraints we have right now. And so these committees need to be the place where we can exercise that discussion, I think, to councilor Dunphy's suggestion that this is really the place for policy ideation. It's going to look a little frustrating. And, and to see your elected leaders really hashing out first principles and engaging in kind of messy ideas. But I don't know how we're supposed to do that without doing that in public, under under this law. And so. But we need we absolutely must get to a point where we can pass legislation and move it through these committees to council without reproducing the same discussions at length, because I don't think that we're we're we're good stewards of the of the public trust and time if we if we keep doing that. So I think those are my first thoughts on that.
14 Thank you councilor. Councilor Avalos.
15 Okay. So I've got a couple of thoughts that I'm going to try to put in a cohesive manner. So to begin, as it relates to the purpose of committees, I think that the goal of committees are for initial vetting, oversight and early stakeholder engagement. I think they should meet every other week. I know we're going to have some discussions about possibly reducing the amount of committees I think we need to assess, just in general, our capacity as councilors. I think having them meet every other week for three hour blocks. Instead, we'll give us a little bit more capacity in those meetings, especially to take on some more public testimony. I like the idea of having public communications at the beginning of committee meetings. I think that's a good way to invite new ideas to be brought to those committees, especially since they're topic specific. But I do not want committees to be the final stop for legislation. I think that robust discussion on these policy ideas belongs at the full council. So in general, I don't agree with the larger concept of deferring things to committees for decisions. I and I also agree with councilor Novick on having regular committee updates at council meetings presented by the chairs of committees. I think that could be good to just again, have a touch point where we can just check in and make sure, you know, at a minimum, if I could be like, oh, I knew that they talked about it, and if I want to learn more then I can dig. But me not even knowing what you discussed and not having the capacity to go take that first step limits my ability to engage. So I think that's a good way to mitigate some of those issues. I don't necessarily agree that we're reproducing the same discussions when we're having a discussion in committee on council, because that's two vastly different groups of people. Right? You're talking about five people of the council, which is not a majority and is not a quorum. And the committees do not have authority to move things forward. Right. Everything that comes out is advisory. The main work of the council is to see policies come to fruition. And I think where I have felt frustrated and I think some of the things around transparency on what's in the queue in the council agenda can help this. But I know I often feel I'm coming to a council meeting and I have, you know, just heard maybe three days before what the agenda is going to be. And given everything else that we're working through, that's not enough time for me to then go and be like, wait, what is this asset management thing that's coming out of transportation? Right? Sounds cool. I get the concept, but I think that part of my frustration is around feeling like I don't have the tools to be successful in making good decisions with the full context. So that's that's what I think we need to fix for. And I think some of these tweaks at a very minimum. Yeah, being able to see what's coming down the pipe would help. I do think that I know again, we'll talk more. I know some folks have ideas that they're bringing forward, but I'll just drop this one in to start the conversation around what a committee of the whole could do. I think it could fix a lot of these issues around governance, finance. I think, for example, we could do advisory body appointments in committee of the whole that could then end up on consent agenda during council meetings. So I think there's a way to use committee of the whole to do some of the more administrative stuff. You know, the things that are like it's we're approving an easement or foreclosure, which normally would be going through finance. Right. And if we're putting finance under committee of the whole and governance, then we could have that discussion there with the full council, and then that would make me feel more comfortable putting those kinds of things on a consent agenda. So that, to me is a way to address how do we get some administrative things quickly through for approval, if we could vet them through a committee of the whole I think in general, the full council needs to be the main venue for public testimony, for policy debate and final discussions. I think that councilors deserve a transparent space to propose their amendments for these different policies and weigh in meaningfully and also engage their constituencies. Right, because I think the other thing that is a barrier to me when I am not really in the know of what's coming down the pipe on council, is I don't have time to then talk to my communities and say, hey, what do you guys think of this? You know, bill, that's coming out of a committee that I don't sit on. I'm having to catch up on the information, and I want to make sure that I have time to engage my communities, my constituents, so that they're, you know, that is influencing what I'm bringing to the discussion, how I'm addressing amendments, etc. I think council needs to handle both big picture and technical issues. Our charter doesn't distinguish between the two. I get that you know, this comparison to the legislature and absolutely, it was what we discussed when we were doing charter reform, trying to I think the goal for the committees is less about trying to mimic the legislature and more about the fact that we are adjusting to being a policy council. We're a legislative council. And so policy committees are a place for us to start developing these, these ideas. But I don't think it's I it is not my view that it should be the end all, be all. And I do not agree with deferring a lot of decisions that way. I also think that by having less of the committee meetings with more time, we're going to be able to take some more testimony. But I do think we need to have the bulk of it here. At the end of the day, this is the people's house, and what I want to hear is from the people. I don't want to hear you all as much as I want to hear the people. And so if we're not creating enough space for that, then that's not going to satisfy me. I think, too, as it relates to the like, presentations and committee hearings being repeated, I have mixed feelings about it. I definitely understand why people feel like that might be repetitive, but again, I want to figure out how to solve for this issue that I know I personally am feeling of not being prepared, not feeling like I have all of the information ahead of me, and also not having a lot of time to digest it before I have to come here and make a vote. And then I think ultimately, you know, we just really need to I know there's part of a councilor Canal and I guess I'm a co-sponsor of around increasing the amount of council meetings. I think we'll by adding more council meetings and having more. I know not everybody agrees with having night meetings. Sorry, but I don't agree with you. I think we need to have at least another night meeting every month, and I think that will again create more space. I know there was a point in the document that you shared around, does the night meetings bring more people or different people? And I think the answer is both. I think also we haven't really seen, I think a maybe it was councilor Clarke who mentioned this. Like, we haven't really seen the true nature of how these committees work, because we haven't really been doing the kind of policy work that we're gearing up to do. We've just been in like formation and phase and a lot of like briefings and all of that. But I think once we start to shift into that area, it'll become more clear where people want to engage with us. I'll leave it at that for now. Thank you.
16 Thank you. Councilor, councilor Morillo.
17 Thank you. President. I think I agree with some of the comments that my colleagues have made. I think part of what we're seeing as well is that the public is learning where they can access us, because it's very different than the old form of government, where all councilors oversaw different bureaus. Although back when I worked under that structure, people didn't know which councilor Oversaw which bureau anyway, so they would just call whoever they thought would answer, or they wanted to be mad at that day. So it was really the role of constituent services people to direct people to the right area. So I think that right now, the public doesn't fully understand all of the leverage points or access points that they have. They don't know which district they live in necessarily. They don't know which councilors, other councilors, they don't know that there are committees or when they happen, when they can sign up to testify at full council or at committee. And I think that's part of more outreach that we need to do to educate the public on the new structure and where they can access us, because I actually think there are a lot of access points, but people don't know how to pull the levers of power yet fully. And that's something that's our responsibility to share that with them. I also think that I wouldn't mind if we operated more like the legislature, as someone who's worked under that structure and lobbied there and passed policy through there. But the reason we can't do that is because of our quorum rules, because at the legislature, as a lobbyist, I could go and educate our legislators fully. I could give them a full briefing on all the research I'd done on a policy. I could give them all of the language ahead of time so they could give me their concerns on draft language and everything, and we could make those adjustments before bringing it to a committee, having it vetted there and then going before the full legislature. And we can't do that here because of quorum rules. So what we end up seeing is people could fully vet something through committee, even if it gets five votes out of committee, it will go to full council. And then someone might not even be politically opposed to your policy or values opposed to your policy, but they might just be concerned about draft language. They might just be concerned that it's not written stylistically in the way that they want. Or they might think that there's something that's been snuck in to do something, some for some ulterior motive, which I usually think is not the case. But I've seen that happen a lot. And so if we can't properly brief people on things beforehand, that's not going to we're not going to operate like the legislature. I also think there is maybe I have a different approach to politics and policy overall than I think I hear many people have, because there's a discussion often about trust with the full council getting a policy, and then us trusting each other's expertise enough to pass that policy. And I actually think I fully trust my colleagues to represent their constituencies. And sometimes those constituencies are very different than mine. And so I trust that they are experts. I trust that they're brilliant. I trust that they are values aligned in their values. And that doesn't mean that we're representing the same constituencies, or that power is shared across the board. And so some of that tension that we see at full council is because we actually have a council that is representative of very different types of people across the city, and that's not a matter of trust. That's a matter of representation. So I'm not sure I have an answer to that, but I just want to say that those are some of the barriers that I see to us operating like the legislature. I do think that the committees should be a place for research and vetting, and I hope that we can get to a point where we have more frequent council meetings, where we can have those full discussions, because I think that we frankly need them. So I'll all I'll say for now.
18 Thank you, councilor. I believe I'm the only person in the queue who hasn't spoken yet. So. Oh, councilor Ryan, do you want to.
19 Oh, no, I just put it in there.
20 Okay. So, colleagues, I've had a couple of thoughts as over the last few months, people have brought up different concerns with how things are working and how we might restructure to do things in a better way. I think committees are a huge opportunity, and I've said this since we first formed them to do accountability and oversight work in a more meaningful way than the city has seen in the past. And I still believe that. And I think the reason that we haven't done as much of that is because we are a new council, and we have all been coming up to speed on those programs, not because the system isn't right or that's not possible. I do think that the structure we have set up certainly needs some changes, but can do that accountability work. I think that having councilor Greene, you called it the soft versus the hard, having that soft oversight, the place where we say, hey, we heard concerns about this program, not just in my district, but in multiple districts. What's going on? Or hey, during the last budget cycle, we passed a budget note saying, you need to do this thing differently. How is that going to do that work of making sure that bureaus are actually doing the job that portlanders need, I think is a really important function of committee. And as we start to talk about committee work next week, I hope we talk about making sure we have time for that. Councilor Green, you mentioned hard oversight should happen at full council, and you and I have had a lot of conversations about that. And I think I agree with you when we use that. That power that we have in the charter to essentially put people under oath, that is a function of full council. I also think that's something that is a worst case scenario that we probably should never do, other than every few years, and we should have a whole lot of scaling of work that happens before then, including a number of those soft oversight and accountability hearings in committees where we're trying to tease out what's actually happening somewhere. I think that's a really important piece of what committees do. I agree with many of you that committees are where we should ideate. I also think, though, that when somebody brings a fully ideated, fully hashed out policy forward to obviously debate, but something that's an idea they've come up with on their own, not something we ideate in committee that that also has a really important place in committee. And committee should be the place where we do the first vetting and hearing from the public about ideas. I like the idea that I heard a few of you refer to about having more of a two way conversation in committees. I don't think we can do that in full council, but to use committees as a place to have a more casual conversation, I think that should be up to each committee chair. I don't think that we should mandate that in our rules, but I think it's a great thing that committees can do and a flexibility that committees can have. That's harder to do in full council. I'm also very supportive of the idea of having public communication in committees, and to have three time slots, folks get three minutes each to take ten minutes out of a committee hearing to allow members of the public to bring up things that are related to that committee, right. They need to be topic relevant. Is a good use of ten minutes at the beginning of each committee meeting. I think that that's a really. A really important tool that we have to ensure that the public has a place to bring up ideas that we might not think to put on our agendas, that we should extend to committees. And one piece of feedback that I have heard is that by only having council meetings every other week, obviously that may change, but for now, we actually inadvertently created a situation where we have half as many public communication slots as council used to, and folks are frustrated with that. And one way that we could actually have more public communication slots, whether or not we have more slots at full council, is by starting out committee meetings either. Every time, once a month. However, we decide to structure that with public communication. I hope that we can get to a place where most of what comes to council from committee is most of the way, vetted and councilor. I hear you that it's not just trusting each other to be the policy experts who have heard most of the information, it's recognizing the differences in what our districts look like and who we hear from and who we're trying to represent up here. I think a lot of what we do has broad reach and a lot of what we do. If it's good for some of our constituents, is probably going to be good for most of our constituents, but not everything. And so I wouldn't want us to have a rule that says that debate can't happen or amendments can't happen at council the way that some bodies, like the state legislature, doesn't allow amendments on the floor of the house and the senate. I wouldn't want us to go that far, but I do think that we should all be making a best effort to weigh in in committees, and some of the technology changes that will make, I think, will allow us to see what's happening in committees more. I love the idea of having chair reports at council meetings to make sure that we all see what's happening in committees, but I also think that we each have a responsibility in doing our jobs to see what is happening in committees in advance so that we can bring amendments. I've had a few things that folks have worked on that I just didn't catch in time to bring ideas to a committee, and they weren't exactly how I would have liked them to look. But you know what? They were okay, so I supported them because I didn't do my homework and that that's on me. I think we have a responsibility to be paying attention to what's happening. Even in committees that were not on. And so I hope that we can get to a point where we can maybe not trust each other and the work happening in committees, but respect each other and the work happening in committees and each other's time in the public's time enough that we can try to bring that the bulk of that amendment work to committee, but also recognize that on really controversial things, we're going to have to have those debates here at full council. I don't think that's a rules or a structure change. I think it's a cultural, maybe not change, but cultural place to land. Maybe you all will disagree and I'll get overruled. But I'm hoping that we can land there. Thank you all for coming. I also just want to note that. We've had some conversation, and I think we'll have more conversation later today about evening meetings. And I think evening meetings are really important. And I hope that as we have the conversation about council and more time for council meetings, whether that's through formally adopting weekly meetings or just holding every Wednesday morning that we don't have a night meeting like we've started to do, to use for either another meeting or a work session or executive session, whether it's formal or informal, as we add more meeting time, my hope is that and my commitment as council president. But my hope, even when I'm not in this role, is that we can use the evening meetings we have strategically to put things on those agendas that we think are most important for members of the public to weigh in on who might not be here during the day. I don't know that we need more night meetings for council. I think we need to use the monthly night meeting that we have more effectively, and as we have more council meetings, I think we can do that. I do want, as we talk about committees next week, to have the conversation about potentially having one committee meeting a month in the evening so that as things bubble up in your committee where you want that time for evening testimony, you could request a month's evening committee meeting slot. So it wouldn't be the same committee each month. It would be a committee saying, we have this really hot topic right now, and we need the evening slot in a month or in two months to discuss this topic coming up. And I think that having that flexibility could be a good way for us to use the 12 additional evening meetings that we build into the budget this year. My initial thoughts, councilor Ryan.
21 Thank you, madam president. You know, first I do miss in the old form of government, we had work sessions. We were around a table and it was easier just to be in a more of a work session stance. This feels like we're up here still performing in a way that you can. I don't know, I just miss that structural change. Thought I'd put that out there. There's that vast space in there. I have no idea what to do with it, but I don't even think we can access it. Anyway, that wasn't what I planned to say. I will say I have listened, and I like something about each person who said something I like. And so I want to acknowledge that. I think that for me, getting real big picture, I think we're lacking. And I don't know if this is a retreat or another work session. I think we're lacking a common, common strategic goals amongst ourselves. And I think the city doesn't know what our common strategic goals are. I know we have different constituencies. I know that I continue to learn how to work with you councilor Kanal even though you have different voters than me, I have different voters than you. Everyone can turn to their left or right, no pun intended to say that same thing that's called life. And so I think I can accept that. But what I can't accept is being on a leadership body for a city in crisis where we're not focused on what I think would be strategic, top priorities. And I haven't we haven't had a chance to really do that dialog. And then I think there would then be common agreed upon metrics for each of those goals that we can measure success. And so I just wanted to lift that. And I hope that sometime over this season of a bit more reflection, that we can have a dialog about that topic. I also think that comparing ourselves to Salem is not great. Most of the policies passed in Salem are not implemented. You can't get by with that in local government. It's too close. So we're at a different elevation. So our committee meetings are not just about policies. They're about our constituents frustrations with practices on what I think are those top priorities. And again, we'll have different lenses on how we look at that. But can we please at least focus on what those practices are out there in the community that for some reason for, for reasons that are a long list, our public servants are challenged and frustrated, and they're not providing the services to the liking of many portlanders. Or we wouldn't see the exits that we're seeing in the city. And so I just think we have to be reading the big room called the city of Portland, and taking a deep breath on how we can actually be more relevant as local government, not copying habits from Washington dc and Salem, but actually remembering. Even though we have different points of view, we are nonpartisan. People care about some basics. They might have some disagreements about how we do our infrastructure, how we do our public safety, how we're doing economic development just to start there. But those are the basics that the city is supposed to focus on. I find that we do too much mission creep, and I think we also get enamored with national platforms, which often aren't relevant to what we're dealing with on the ground. And so I think that in that type of thinking, we could get more efficient and have fewer committee meetings if we were in fact, focused on strategic priorities that your average portlander is currently facing. And I don't think we're there right now. Thank you. Council. My final thing that I want to say in this initial is that I also get that we're in a different form of government, but it doesn't mean that we escape from the reality that we have thousands of city employees that have leadership. They're called the dcas. And then we have city administrator and their dot connection between their reality and ours must be in the flow. So I think that we have committee structures and advisory boards and commissions that still exist. And bubbling up those conversations into our committees would give you the synergy, if you will, that's necessary to drive work. So I do think we're have to be more cognizant and thoughtful about how we engage the city administrators in our work at an earlier stage, so we could actually have some shared commitment to those goals and those targets that we want to reach. We're in this together. They're the people on the ground actually implementing the work. And if we're up here doing policy that's not connected to the reality of what they're experiencing, that's like throwing concrete, throwing seeds on concrete and think something's going to grow. So we have to know what's going on in the soil out there. I did some gardening this last yesterday, and so I think that it's really important that we continue to face the reality, and I think that we should be bold and consider some pretty major restructuring after we've had our initial get go of trying to figure this out. So I'm up for some bold changes to how we're figuring out how to get work done. Thanks.
22 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor canal.
23 Thank you for scheduling this work session. Madam president. And I agree with councilor Ryan that there's at least one thing from everyone who's spoken before I agree with. I'll talk those through. I'm excited to get into this. I think after six months, we are at a time where we can evaluate the sort of premises to my thoughts that have led to what I think we should do. We have some challenging public meetings, law provisions which are imposed on us by a legislature that exempted themselves from those laws. We are a nonpartisan body. As a result, I don't think we can accurately be compared to the state legislature. And while we have districts, single transferable vote means that we have differences of opinion within district representation. As a result, having people of common values on some issues represent us on a committee or having district representation on a committee instead of us doesn't necessarily check that box fully. I think the new form of government was designed to and should maximize representation and public input. And just to drive the point home on the legislature, it was used as a comparison point. It is one of the more dysfunctional public bodies that we could use as a comparison, the state legislature in this state. I may change my mind. Look at camera here. If we see changes to public meetings, law and a transportation package. But yeah, I just wanted to mention that a few challenges I've seen. I think having alternating schedules where the committees are at different times makes it harder for people to plan public input, especially for a community that's been used to Wednesday council meetings every week for like 100 years. The expectation of deference, given that we aren't a partizan body. And I should note, not every district is on every committee is unrealistic. And I brought this up with gtac. It's one of the rare places I disagreed with them. The open deliberation of all 12 of us is the only way to guarantee that all the voices are heard, and I think the other part of it is the sheer volume of committees makes it harder to follow along with the ones you're not on. And I understand that sometimes that gets reacted to with, why don't you just show up or send a staffer? And this is the job. It is part of the job. Part of the job is being in district. I think that's particularly important to my three colleagues in district one. But it's I think it's important for all of us. And we can't be in two places at once, literally. So I think serving my district and my constituents requires me to be physically in my district as often as possible. We've increased the number of filers of documents from 6 to 14, and the number of people that discussed these items from 5 to 12. We've created eight committees and created 32 hours of committee meetings that help feed into this council meeting. And simultaneously, we reduced council hours from 36 to 45 a month, down to 15. At the same time, committees have done some really good things. There have been some really smart conversations in committee, and I think there's been some depth to the conversation that couldn't occur anywhere else, especially when someone has a problem statement but not a fully baked proposal. And we're trying to figure out how to solve it. Madam president, your list was a great starting point of ideas for what a committee can do. You suggested, I think, five ideas. I agree that committees should discuss future issues for council to consider. I agree that committees should include what councilor Green called soft oversight as well, and I suggest hard oversight could be at the full council or a committee of the whole. I think with some adjustments to membership, we could get towards a conversation that limits but does not remove the need for discussion at council as well. Specific suggestions I'd love to see allowing committee leadership co-chairs to schedule communication communications on committee related topics. So 3 or 5 community members per meeting can float new arts or economy related ideas or concerns in that committee, allowing public comment at committee and council, but helping the public understand that testimony at committee is more about shaping the shift from ideas or problems to proposals and testimony at council is more about amendments and advocacy, requiring committees to have representation from each district in membership. I don't think I would necessarily be a substitute for councilor Ryan or council president, or vice versa, on every committee, but I do think it helps. I agree with councilor Novick idea of regular committee updates at council. I think doing those on a monthly cadence we do for the city administrator's report seems like a good idea. Having a link with the timestamp built in to the video of the committee presentation as an attachment to each item when it's at the council level, so that it's easy for everyone to watch that those slides that were presented in committee when preparing for the council, I think, would help protecting the right of councilors, especially those who are not on the committee, to speak on each item at the full council. And finally, I'd like to see allowing a single testimony registration at the full council level for each item and allowing so that people who are signing up to testify can testify at one of the two meetings. A council ordinance is heard without allowing people to testify twice, so that one of those two opportunities is always in the evening. So if a council ordinance is heard at two meetings, one is during the day, one is in the evening, and you sign up to testify. You're guaranteed to two bites at the apple for your schedule. I'd love to see that happen as well. And I'll just close by saying I like councilor Avalos. Points about committee of the whole. I think that might solve some of our differences of opinion on the consent agenda. And I really appreciate councilor Dunphy's framing comments. To start this whole conversation off, I'll have my proposed ordinance. We'll discuss that later as well. Thank you.
24 Thank you, councilor, councilor Koyama Lane.
25 Thank you, madam president. Thank you for scheduling this, for making it a priority. I want to first share that I am coming to this open, interested in everyone's perspectives. I'm taking a lot of notes. I love councilor Canal and councilor Ryan sharing that there are pieces from everyone sharing where there's some agreement and overlap. It's reminding me of our governance committee meetings, which is a place where we get to have some shared wins. We get to focus on good governance, put our own goals, priorities, endorsers aside, and really just think about when we're long gone from this dais and it's many years from now. How are things working and how are we thinking about what could make sense 100, 150 years from now? So I hope that we're all open to finding places where we can agree and believe that this is a place where we can have some shared wins here. As we're rethinking this in terms of committees, some of the challenges that we're seeing come up with our current structure. I do think that there can be addressed and will be addressed through some smaller changes and tweaks that are likely going to come out of this work sessions, or also just as council president and I hear some ideas, we are writing them down. And these are things that can be incorporated. So rather than going really deep on all of the different challenges, I'm going to stay a bit higher level on a lot of these because for example, yes, it's really hard for us to track all of the committees that likely will be helped and resolved by having less committees. Overall, I am going to guess that we will likely come out of these work sessions with less committees. Can't promise that. And also that will result in an ability for all of us and our staff to track items coming through committees. So some of these challenges, I think, will be dealt with. Another example, we have a lot of items needing to come through. I have been in conversations, and it sounds like there is an openness to talk about what else can be added to the consent agenda. So that will be addressed. Councilor Kanal kind of beat me to the question, or this my response in to the question of should we be like the state legislature? My initial reaction is worry because it is partizan and I see honestly the media really trying to paint it to be that we are very partizan and we always vote a certain way. I have read some articles and I've just thought some of that is just really not true. I don't always vote a certain way. I come to the dais really open and wanting to hear arguments. And so there are times when I agree with many different people on this dais. I worry that if we focus too much on the state legislature and trying to copy that, that it will encourage or push us into being in certain camps, that's my first reaction. Some of the we've talked a little bit about the schedule. I know that many of us agree that we need to be meeting as a full council more. This connects to the purpose of committees. I do worry that if the purpose of committees is to do work there and to vet things, if we are meeting as a full council a lot more than we are meeting as committees, I'm worried that it will just make sense for the bulk of the work to happen in full council. If we're meeting full council every week and just twice a month as committees, it might just happen that things just get pushed to full council. And then I, I start to wonder, what is the point of committees? Or so I would be open to discussing what that would look like. And if we are going to move to weekly council meetings to make sure that committee meetings are happening, happening frequently enough, that discussion is happening there as well. So someone mentioned every other week three hours for committee meetings. I would, I would I'm that's not the only option, but I would push back and say I'd rather have committee meetings, meeting weekly at 1.5 hours than. I love the idea. Support the suggestion to provide an opportunity to get updated in full council regarding committees. I support continuing the practice of not repeating the presentations in full. Council, and this is hard for me to say. As a morning person who really does turn into a pumpkin around 8 p.m, I do see the importance around the evening meetings. I do think at a certain point though, we start to get a little loopy and they need to be cut off, but I do see them as important for accessibility around public testimony. I have gone back and forth and had many conversations around this. I love the opportunity of having a sort of open public testimony at the beginning of committees. Where I've landed on public testimony is we need to do whatever we need to do what we can to make it as accessible as possible. So I don't support limiting it at full council, I hear and understand that wednesdays is where the at full council meetings. That's where the public has been used to attending and having access to. I believe this is councilor Avalos. Did you say the people's house? I believe that, and so I want to put the public at the center. When we are thinking about accessibility, I will say I have less concern about our ability to keep up and be prepared. I do think we need to have less committees. We need to make sure that the public can access local government, and we are the government. We have the most access out of everyone. So while we can make some structural adjustments to make changes like reduce the number of committees it is on, I believe us and our staff to figure out a way to be tracking information. I'm interested in exploring the option of the committee of the whole. I'm not sure if I understand exactly what that would look like. I could see it making sense on matters of the council that really touch on the structure, and would be challenging to fully give over to another group if it's something that is going to touch everyone in the group. And I also support the idea of if we redo the number of committees and the committee makeups, making sure that there is a counselor for each from each of the four districts. And I also want to say that is not any criticism of this first round of how we did things. I think that council president worked really hard to make sure that everyone would have a place and be able to have some chance at leadership, and I think we can look at this as a way that we can take what we've had already and, and tweak it and learn from it, but I think we've had a good place to start. Thank you.
26 Thank you, councilor, councilor Novick.
27 Thank you, madam president. First of all, I want to second your thought that we should use the evening meeting selectively to address topics that we know are going to there's going to be a strong public interest in. And I think that simply having an evening meeting scheduled every two weeks or once a month and, and addressing whatever issues happen to normally come up in the in our flow of business in those meetings means we'll probably be spending a lot of time on things that there wasn't a lot of interest in people coming at night to talk about, and we should be deciding, okay, what are the issues that people will want to talk about and schedule the night meetings for those? I also wanted to note that to me, a lot of the function of our committees is to avoid either rubber stamping or reflexively rejecting proposals that come from the administration, either from the mayor's office or from commissions. I think that when I served in this body previously, I mean, you can't follow everything that's going on. And to a great extent, we did act as a rubber stamp for a lot of administration proposals. I think that part of the function of committee is to have a chance to go back and forth with the administration. One example being we recently voted on the FEMA floodplain amendments, and before that we had a discussion in committee. And councilor Morillo had a number of amendments, which we approved. And then there were a few follow up amendments that came up in full council, but it was much more limited. I think that we should see that playing out in committees often, particularly on technical issues like land use. There's going to be a number of technical issues coming, issues coming up, big issues from the planning commission over the next couple of years. And I think that it's going to be useful to have the committee engaging in those issues and being prepared for the controversial issues that are coming before us, and also being prepared to engage the rest of council when those issues come before council and say, here's, you know, here's some of the things that have to be this way because of the laws governing land use. And here's the topics that we've really gone back and forth with the planning commission and the administration on. So I think that, I mean, when we think about not deferring to committees, I think that there's going to be a lot of issues where we won't. But I think that the committees will play the role of ensuring that we are not blindly deferring to the administration, but also are not suddenly, you know, ambushing the administration at full council with ideas that we haven't had a chance to talk to talk about through committees. So when I talk about our deferring to committees in the way the legislature does, to a great extent, I'm talking about deferring to committees on issues where that are coming to us from the administration, and that not all of us will have a chance to look at. And by the way, one more thing is I think that in terms of oversight, in terms of getting things done for the administration, we should be careful about limiting the number of committees, because I think that having committees that are focused on limited number of things enables us to do that vetting process with the administration more than if we just decided we're going to have three committees, period.
28 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Green.
29 Thank you. Thank you, madam president. Just a few follow up thoughts based upon this discussion. I do think night meetings are important. I, I also think that we got to cap how late they go for a number of reasons, but the one that comes to me and that I've heard a lot, is that it's the accessibility question cuts both ways. Like if you if you run well past your your reasonable time, then people are going to bed. They're putting kids to bed, you know, like they're not available either at that point. So when we have our when we consider the frequency, the action that will result, maybe potentially an increase in frequency, really just supporting that, that cap or soft cap, I, I really support this idea of trying to be deliberate about what goes on the night meeting agenda. That makes sense. We don't need to spend our time considering like 15 different vacate actions for road stuff at the night meeting. I think generally that's less interesting than a major policy decision. I think, you know, I agree that the trust versus politics question is very real. We're never going to be able to like, I'm never going to fully just submit to, you know, hey, this thing came out of committee five zero. Therefore I'm going to vote yes if we have if we use our committees. Right. And then we've got this increase in frequency of council meetings, I think that will help us address those follow on debate points in a way that's productive. Like you could have a couple meetings, consider a series of amendments that follow on with your, you know, two, two speaking times per, per round constraint, I think would be would be effective in that in that regard, I also think we have an opportunity to opt opt into some conversation as non-committee members with the committees, for instance, like there's no reason why we can't show up at a committee area of policy interest and then sign up for testimony or ask to be on that committee to say, hey, I've got some thoughts on the thing that you guys are discussing. Would you consider this and engage in some of that? Because then when I do introduce my amendment at full council, it's not a surprise what my concerns are. And then we might be able to adapt to that a little bit more. And I've already, you know, councilor Smith has already done this once. I think in a teeny committee perhaps, I can't remember exactly. And I valued that commentary. I've done it with the social housing thing before the housing committee. And so I think that's that's a way to model that a little bit. You know, I think councilor Ryan, you you raised a really good point. I thought, which is we whatever we do, whether it's in committees, whether it's at full council, whether it's a work sessions should be driven in some respect by a set of strategic goals, because I think portlanders are watching, and I want to use our time and resources correctly. And for me, I connected that to the recommendation for priority based budgeting. So if we can figure out a world in which we can connect the strategic goals of this city to an approach to budgeting that resources those goals, then that's an opportunity for the chairs of these committees, for the council president, for all of us to think about how we're going to plan our work and sequence our work. So it's working towards those priority based budget items. So when we show up at the next budget hearing, we're saying, we're advocating this mayor. We're advocating this colleagues in line with these strategic goals, and this is how we're going to resource it. So that's just a thought that I had in response to your comment. I probably don't need to say anything more at this time, so I'm done.
30 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Morillo.
31 Thank you, madam president. As the person who gets most delirious past 10 p.m. At our evening meetings, once we've been sitting for 12 hours and then you get pirate quotes out of me. I think that what I've actually seen is that the public seems to have a lot of stamina for the nighttime meetings, like they will be here till 11 p.m, when we're all tired and delirious because we've been sitting here for 12 hours and maybe they just joined for the three. But people seem to have a real appetite for the evening meetings, and I think that what we need to do is, I agree, put the more public facing topics that there's a lot of public interest in on those. I think there will inevitably be times where we come up with a land use thing that has to get passed that night because of some deadline, and we'll have to do some of that more boring behind the scenes work in those meetings. But overall, I agree with the approach of having matters of public interest being the being prioritized on those agendas. On the topic of what committees are for and talking about quote unquote, real Portland issues or the infrastructure and things that are happening on the ground, I'm going to push back a little bit on the framing that the national politics stuff doesn't impact us locally. Right now, we are in discussions where as a city council, we are going to have to make decisions about what we do moving forward because the federal government is saying that they're going to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grant dollars that impact all of us and how we operate locally if we don't make certain decisions. So what's happening at the federal level impacts all of us. It impacts our constituents. It impacts our infrastructure. And I would dare to say, too, that there's not a single councilor on this elected body that isn't, in some ways, impacted by what is happening when we're all standing in front of the jaws of fascism. So all of us hold marginalized identities that are going to be targeted in one way or another. I think it's obvious that as an immigrant, I'm representing a national issues in a different way than my colleagues are. But some of those federal grant dollars include are we going to lose money for low income people who have aids? Right. So to say that the federal issues are not a matter of Portland interest and not something that should be focused on in committee or council, I think doesn't really make much sense because our people are very much impacted by those issues. And that's not that's not just like a political stepping stone. That's not a thing to talk about in a way that isn't material. It is very much materially impacting us, and our committees are going to have to have those tough discussions as well, even in our existing committees right now. Are we going to lose federal grant dollars for shelter spaces for affordable housing? How is that going to increase the homelessness on our streets? So I guess I just wanted to point that out when we're having these discussions about what committees are for, because all of our governments are tied together ultimately, and we are going to be representing different types of people with different types of struggles in this form of government to.
32 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Clark.
33 Thank you, madam chair. Just a couple of really minor comments. I think I'm becoming part of this pumpkin caucus. I think we have a growing pumpkin caucus. Some of us just disintegrate. Some of us get nasty. And I think that I think that it would be helpful. And I, you know, the cdc has actually come out with some pronouncements about the unhealthiness of sitting too long. It may be as bad as smoking, actually. So if we could build in at least breaks, you know, because sometimes you see some of us pumpkins standing up and stretching our legs and it's just not healthy. So if we can have more breaks, that would be great. You know, no more than, you know, two hours sitting is a long time. I wanted to quickly comment too, on councilor Novick points made about the bureaus. I hardly agree with you and I think I've discussed this with the council president. Is that in the tni committee we find a lot of things coming to us at the last minute that we need approvals on. It's like, you know, that take up a lot of time. And I think this is a part of the transition between different forms of government, you know, where do these things land, what are the bureaus need? And we really need as much early notice on these things that are coming to us, because we're planning out our committee meetings. And then there are surprise issues that have to be dealt with for a bureau or whatever. So the more early notice we can get on those things, the better. And some of those, I think can just skip right out of tni and go right to the full council. And some people have actually mentioned that. I agree with that. And I'm I'm not taking a lot of notes here. So I hope I hope that the council president or staff is because there's been a lot of great. Okay. Super. There's been a lot of great ideas and thoughts expressed here. I've actually learned, you know, my thinking has changed as I've listened to others. So I appreciate that. Thanks.
34 Thank you councilor. And I'll mention that I do plan to have us take a break at 1130 today or somewhere around abouts there. Councilor Kanal.
35 Thank you, madam president. I agree with councilor Novick's points. I do think we need to work on prioritizing councilor Items on council agendas, in part by telling the administration to bring things to us in advance. We've seen the gun to head method that is designed to create a rubber stamp council, used too frequently by the administration. I think part of this will be assisted by having more frequent council meetings. And I think the example the councilor Novick gave, I agree with the way you brought it up on the flood insurance item and how you talked about it being benefited by committee discussion. That was a years long process that got brought to us with, if you don't act within a couple of weeks, everybody in the city loses their flood insurance, that there's no reason that that shouldn't have come earlier, that no good reason. To your point, madam vice president, I agree with you that that the questions we've talked about do sort of implicate the question of why have committees at all? And I to respond to that. I would start with a philosophical point that the purpose of the work is to serve the people. But after that, I think we've been prioritizing what's good for the committee structure over what's good for the council and how we develop ideas. Committee structure is just a means to an end, as far as I'm concerned. The point is, the council, as an institution that serves the strategic goals and the public broadly. More specifically, though, I want to strongly push back on the idea of 1.5 hour committees weekly, because in the community and public safety committee, we have single items that require more than that for testimony alone. I don't want to have to put the public through waiting for 90 minutes to know if they have a chance to testify, and if their 31st in the order, then they have to wait for, you know, a week to do it. I think three hours, which the old council successfully had three hour long sessions helps with that. I'll also point out that having biweekly committee meetings means that councilors don't necessarily have to come into city hall for one meeting on a Monday or Tuesday, when we could have every other Tuesday be in district if we had biweekly, three hour meetings. I definitely think that the. I am not a person who enjoys spending a ton of time in the rest of this building. I just want to get that out here. I think there's a lot of really important work that's done in this room and other rooms too, of course, but I think it's really important to be able to be in district two. And finally to the evening meeting conversation. I agree that scheduling the items with a high likelihood of public testimony for the evening meetings makes sense. I will note that when we'll get to this more when we talk about the proposed ordinance, the proposed ordinance that I proposed addresses this by putting a soft stop at 9:00 pm, and that means items currently in progress at 9:00 pm can run later until they're finished. So if it starts at 8:40 p.m. And goes until 9:10 p.m, it's okay. But it also means that new items could not start after 9 p.m, so I don't want anyone to think this means we adjourn, you know, hard stop at nine every time. But it would, you know, make it so that no one's waiting for an item that's going to start after that. And I think there's ways to massage that if necessary, to achieve the goal of having that sort of peak window. The pre pumpkin window of 6 to 9:00 pm be maximized for public testimony. And then I much as I do, I have observed in a couple of cases what councilor Morillo brought up. I do think there's diminishing returns after that. And maximizing those windows is, I think, the goal of that particular provision. Thanks.
36 Thank you, councilor, councilor Koyama Lane.
37 I'm wondering if councilor Kanal what your response is to the idea of chairs or co-chairs being able to decide if they meet twice a month for three hours or weekly at 1.5 hours, and they that is the cadence for that committee.
38 Councilor.
39 Thank you, thank you, thank you for the question. Yes, I should have started from the beginning. One of the challenges, I think we've been trying to treat all the committees equally, and that might be resolved in part by adjusting what committees we have. But I do think, and councilor Novick can correct me if I'm wrong, but we've had meetings where we've gone a little short at the committee and public safety committee, but we're often going right up to the line or even a little over for public testimony. We there's another committee that exists that has canceled more of its meetings for lack of agenda items, and it's actually held. And so I think allowing for flexibility in treating meetings, treating committees differently is great. And I do think having co-chairs be able to make that decision, you know, with, of course, the collaboration with council leadership and for the purpose of scheduling with the staff would be a really good idea. Thank you.
40 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Koyama Lane, did you have more? No. Okay. Councilor Dunphy, thanks.
41 You know this discussion. I raises a thought for me that what I mean? I guess this is more a question for my colleagues. Would it make sense for us to have a hard sequester between administrative items that we, as a body, are required to weigh in on, versus council driven or community driven policy conversations? And then we would have maybe an entire city council hearing that is just dedicated to the vacation of a dead end and whatever, and then we can have full given policy, new policy, idea hearings entirely. Just as an idea, just throwing that out there.
42 I'm going to go to councilor Novick. And then if anybody wants to answer councilor Dunphy's question, I'd encourage you to jump in the queue to do that.
43 On behalf of what councilor Avalos has just dubbed the moonlight caucus, which has substantial overlap with the goat caucus of councilor Avalos councilor Dunphy and myself, I, largely persuaded by councilor Rios, comments that our night meetings should actually be between 8 and 11 rather than 6 to 9 because, as councilor Morillo pointed out, there's a lot of moonlight people out there who, like, are at their best at that time, would come to testify and also would maximize the chance for us to hear more of councilor Rios more entertaining quotes.
44 Councilor Morillo. Would you like to rebut that comment at all? Or should we move on?
45 I did not say that we should have more meetings at that time. I think multiple media stories about our banter are enough, but I do think we are more fun at that time. So there's a debate to be had there.
46 I think there's an argument for casual time after a certain hour. Councilor Dunphy, I will just say, having tried hard to think about how we sequence, what goes on, what council meetings and attempted to put things on evening meetings that are more useful there, but found the limitations of deadlines difficult with all of that, that I would be nervous about a hard difference between meetings where we do administrative work and meetings where we do policy work. But I certainly think that we could have, again, a culture of saying, for example, the first meeting of the month when we hear from the city administrator, and maybe that's when we get committee chair reports and things like that is more process things. And policy debates are more likely to happen at evening meetings, and administrative actions are more likely to happen at morning meetings, I would be. I would caution us that having hard and fast rules, as opposed to cultural norms, could create limitations that we might regret later. But I think a discussion of those cultural norms as we move forward is definitely a good thing. Councilor Koyama Lane.
47 Sorry, that's a legacy hand.
48 Okay, colleagues, I want to transition us a little bit. And what I'd like to do is start a conversation about some of the variables around when and how we hold council meetings. I listed some questions on the, I think, third page of the sheet that I sent you all and just have a more limited discussion on some of those variables. Then we'll take a quick break and then come back and hear from councilor Kanal about his proposal. The third page, what I called attachment b was a list of questions about how we make considerations about our council meeting schedule. So things like, do we need more hours for council meetings than we currently have, or do we just need to change how we use our time by dividing it amongst more weeks so that each meeting is shorter? What is what are we trying to accomplish as we change the schedule? Is it more or is it different? Does having a hard stop time help us control our work, or is that limiting? And we need to have soft stop times, but more flexibility? Do we want to? Regularly use our overflow times Wednesday and Thursday afternoons? Or should those be emergencies and not part of our regular schedule? Right now we're holding our non council Wednesday mornings so that we can use those for executive sessions as needed, work sessions as needed, or extra council meetings as needed. If we move to weekly council meetings, do folks have strong opinions on how we do work sessions or executive sessions? And should we be holding a different day of the week for those? Or is that too much time held? And we want to think about how to use wednesdays for those types of conversations as well. And then, of course, continuing the conversation about how we use evening meetings. So I'd love to hear folks thoughts as a starting place. Then we'll break. Then we'll hear from councilor Canal and pick up on the conversation about how we use council time after the break. Within that frame of the proposal that councilor Kanal has brought us, if anybody wants to kick off a conversation about how we use our council time best and how we think about the different meetings that we have, feel free to jump in. We can also just keep moving if nobody wants to take it. Councilor Novick.
49 I think the arguments for having weekly council meetings is that then we don't have marathon sessions when we're not at our best, and it also means that it's more likely there will actually be prepared to deal with a more limited number of issues. And also, importantly in the discussion that some of us had with staff, keelan said that she'd feel that it would be a lot better for her and her staff if we had weekly council meetings, and I think that's important. I, I think that as far as when to schedule work sessions, if we don't have that alternate week, I mean, I know that everybody likes to be in district on fridays. It's my observation that I tend to have more free time on mondays. So maybe we could use mondays, more mondays for work sessions.
50 Thank you, councilor Canal.
51 Thank you, madam president, and I appreciate the opportunity to do this in this order. I think it's a good way of framing it. I think what councilor Novick mentioned is a really good point, that it's not, and I think it leads into your first couple conversation questions. It's not necessarily that we would, by going to weekly council meetings, reduce the amount of time relative to the schedule. So we would reduce the amount of time relative to what's actually happening, which are those the length of overflow that we've had. So I think the answer to the first question, do we need more hours for council meeting times or not? Yes, I agree with the. Point is, do we need more time generally or specifically need weekly time? Yes to both. I think I agree with keeping the overflow times, but but continuing to have the flexibility that you have as council president to when we don't have a need for it, let that time go. And to that fourth question, I think this is really interesting as it relates to the conversation you referenced at the beginning, where we had briefings with our staff. I like the idea of having some flexibility. I think the way it's ended up manifesting has created at least my interpretation of what the staff said is, is not enough time to process and schedule, and has created a bit of a burden. I don't think there's necessarily anyone's fault to that. I just think it's a thing we can fix. And when I say staff, I'm not talking about a counselor staff in our offices. I'm talking about the five teams that support us in council operations, in the clerk's office that those teams, bts as well, bureau of technology services. So I do believe that there are very important needs that would meet it. But I would hope and I would note that even as a member of the moonlight caucus, I do I do think that even a marathon meeting that's during the day we start to have diminishing returns as well, even, you know, so there's opportunities there to be addressed through this process. As it relates to evening meetings. I agree with I think it was councilor Dunphy earlier, do different people or more people come to evening meetings? And the answer was both. I think you said that and I would my interpretation of the conversation on the burden on our staff, again, those five teams is more about the unpredictability than it is about the actual hours. And I've already addressed the what length of meeting is reasonable for an evening meeting, I think. I think 6 to 9 is the optimal time frame for maximizing public input, from what I've heard and from just visually in the room, I can't see how many people are online. We can get that data, but it's not visible in the moment. But if you watch this room in an evening meeting, it does start to clear out at a certain time. And I'd like to scale our meetings to that.
52 Thank you. Councilor, councilor Koyama Lane.
53 Thank you.
54 I see the need for weekly council meetings. They seem to make sense to be on Wednesday. That's what the public knows and is used to. If they're not needed, they can always be canceled or changed to a work session as needed. I would love to see committees happen all on one day, maybe tuesdays if we only have four of them, 4 or 5 around there. And that Thursday overflow seems important and I appreciate how council president has used them, used it as really that an overflow that can be canceled as needed. And if we do need to hold a time for executive session special meetings, which I do think is helpful, I wonder if Thursday mornings could be a time that's held so we can have mondays and fridays more flexible to be in district. Thank you.
55 Thank you, councilor, councilor Green I'm sorry. Council Green. Councilor zimmermann just jumped in the queue and he hasn't spoken yet. Councilor zimmermann, go right ahead.
56 Thanks. I, I believe firmly that every single Wednesday should be a council meeting. It's non-negotiable in my mind. I am willing to give up this idea that at least one of them can be at night. But we're the largest city government in the state of Oregon, and the idea that we reduced the numbers that councilor Kanal cited has been a problem from day one. It was a bad idea to start with. It's still a bad idea. We have a model across the river, which is the next largest government outside of being the state of Oregon. And Multnomah county is very predictable. They have work sessions on tuesdays, they have council meetings on thursdays. It's the same every single week. This jumping around on the calendar in the city of Portland is immature. It's strange. It's unpredictable. It's not very good when you're talking to the community. So I'd be in favor of establishing a work session day and a council day, and we just stick to that. Everything else I think of is auxiliary, and you make it work where you can. Those are the two most important. I also think that every time that this body meets us 12, there should be a city administrator sitting in that seat. We're the only city in America who just completed a budget work session, who didn't have their city administrator in their budget work sessions. That's unheard of. We are having a conversation about the professionalism of this, of this body, and there is a profession in running cities. They're called city administrators and city managers. And yet we're not getting that advice because we're having work sessions because of a culture from the previous session where that role didn't show up. It's really important. So I think establishing that norm, as well as the city attorney, every time this body meets is 12. The city attorney should be present. So I'm I'm easy in terms of making me happy. It's like weekly predictable and steady. And then on the nighttime meeting, I appreciate councilor Connell's recommendation about I'm not sure the term you used, but basically soft stop, I think, is how I'm taking it. I think that's a great number. Novick is wrong. It's not 11:00. I know he's joking, but nine sounds great. Thanks.
57 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Green.
58 Yeah, I just echo everything. The councilor to my left politically. No. Just kidding. Everything. He said I had to get that in. You're always to my left. I think we got to have these every week. We should have the overflow reserved. There is a large volume of requirements that this body needs to take up, given the state of our city and given the structural and transformational adjustments that we need to make to like, survive into the next decade. And that's going to require a lot of deep engagement and to, you know, like, I don't want to wait a year to implement something like inner east side for all, which is a series of code changes that needs to happen when we have a housing crisis. And so the only way to do that is to have that weekly cadence, the work session, to sort of maybe get us ready for that discussion and some overflow. So that's just one example. But I know that there are many that kind of the big asset management questions that my colleague to my right wants to, wants to take up will require the same accommodation. So I think that's all I wanted to add on that. Oh, last thing is I don't think we need an increase in the aggregate volume of time that we're we're meeting, whether it's committee or work session or, you know, just some of all these things. It is very costly. And we do have a budget constraint. So when we get into that committee discussion, we recognize we're making a trade off between council time and committee time. And so that's going to drive the number of committees that we have and how frequently they they meet. Some committees I don't think need to meet as often as, as others. To your point earlier councilor Kanal. So that's it for me.
59 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Avalos.
60 Yeah, I'll go ahead and throw out my initial thoughts on timing of meetings and such, and some of these thoughts are drawing upon an assumption that we will be reducing the amount of council committees. I think ideally two four and with the addition of the committee of the whole. So I know that I'm basing these suggestions on the idea that that is a model that I would like to see us move towards. I think that mondays and tuesdays I hear you councilor Koyama Lane I don't I worry that we would be able to get all four on tuesdays. So I had originally structured it as mondays and tuesdays, two meetings each day with three hours. Right. Like the 930 to 1230, the 130 to 430. So that was my initial thought. I agree with councilor Zimmerman that wednesdays just need to be council days from here on out. I think that if we do the alternate alternating between the mornings, so the morning time would be like the 9 to 1 ish, the evening time, the 6 to 10 ish, right? And then in this scenario where we have a committee of the whole, I think it would be nice to have a chunk of time on wednesdays from 2 to 5. That's just a hold. And I think that hold could be once a month for a committee of the whole. I think it could then be for exec sessions, it could be for work sessions, because I know one of the things we've been chatting about, right, is just the suddenness of trying to get these executive sessions and other things, like it's just really disruptive to our calendars. We need some predictability, kind of like what councilors Zimmerman is saying. And then I think the Thursday block of time should remain so that 2 to 5, then that could be spillover from council if needed, but also could be another spot for exec session or work session. So to recap Monday tuesdays are council committee meetings and those would happen also every other week. But you know these are just my ideas. I know there's some thoughts on maybe doing it less once a week. I'm open wednesdays being the council day on the second and fourth. It's on the morning. On the first and third it's in the evening on the fifth week. I think councilor Canal suggests on the fifth week we just make it morning. And then again this block of time on wednesdays. So that again, if I'm committing to wednesdays is like council day, then I'm going to have that block. So I know that it will either be I'm doing council meeting from 9 to 1 and some kind of meeting 2 to 5 or 2 to 5, 6 to 10, and then Thursday again being spillover and another spot. So then that way, as I look at my week, right, I know that every other week I've got my committees, whatever days they're going to be on. I know that every week on wednesdays I'm going to have at least probably two meetings. And then on thursdays, you know, again, those might be a little bit more droppable, if you will, especially if we could add this block on wednesdays, then I think we could consolidate all of that work that day. And if we can let go of the Thursday times then, then yeah, we could do that. So those are my initial thoughts on timing.
61 Thank you councilor. Is anybody else.
62 Interested in weighing in on how we plan out our our council meetings before we go to a quick break? Okay. I will add some thoughts of my own. I appreciate hearing clearly from a whole lot of people that we want to make sure we're meeting weekly, not just first, second, third, fourth, but just in general. Wednesdays are council meetings, period, so that we create that predictability for the public. For me, in all of these conversations and the conversations I've had about our electronic systems, in the conversations I've had, about what information is available when the north star is always, how do we make sure that members of the public can get information as early as possible, know what to expect, and know how to weigh in? And I think having those weekly meetings is really helpful for that. I know from the perspective of sitting in the council president's office, if we have a time held for either exec or work sessions that we don't always use, I don't think we need them every week, but that we have so that we're not wrestling to try to get things on all of your calendars and blowing up your schedules last minute is really helpful, and I'm hearing an interest in that, and I really appreciate that. So I think that should be a part of any final schedule that we put together. I'm hearing a split around how many evening meetings we have, and I think we'll probably talk about that more after the break. Right now, I continue to think that we can do it with the one, because I think it's interesting to prioritize an evening meeting every month for committees. And I know that evening meetings are difficult for staff, so trying to do more than just a couple seems hard. But I'm I'm interested in hearing where the discussion leads after the break as we as we talk about that. And then I also have heard from some people more than others, but a lot of calls to make sure we have district time. And one of the things that is helpful for me to think about in the council president position, because I don't get to be in district as much, I think, is when that time is best spent for everybody. And is that mondays and fridays? Is it having two days in a row? Is it important that you have consistent days, or does it not matter as long as you have more time? For example, if with the committee structure you had a couple of half days versus having a full day, does that make a difference? So I don't want to open up a new conversation topic, but I just love as we move forward with these conversations over the next few weeks to get a sense of folks priorities there as well. Councilor Ryan.
63 Thank you, council president, on this topic, I'll just say that I'm fine with weekly meetings. I think that's a good idea. I didn't really know why we went away from that, but only if we cut committee meetings at least in half. We have how many? Eight committees right now. So unless we're willing to be more efficient with the number of committees, that should go down remarkably, I'll just put it out there for then. I could be supportive of that. But I'm I ran for this position because I wanted more time out on the streets talking to constituents. I'll continue to do that and miss meetings here. The real action is out there, not on the second floor in terms of getting insight and forming my opinions on how we should serve portlanders.
64 Thank you councilor.
65 Seeing no other hands in the queue, I am going to have us take a ten minute break right now. So that folks can stretch their legs before we jump into the second part of the conversation. When we come back, councilor Kanal will start it off with you and then discuss council meetings in a more specific way after hearing your proposal. So we are going to move into a recess, and we will be back here at 1122. Welcome back. We are resuming our council work session and councilor Canal, would you like to just jump right in and talk over your proposed ordinance with us?
66 Yes. Thank you, madam president. Diego, are you able to put it up on screen? Sorry I didn't ask you this earlier.
67 Did you send over the document?
68 I can right now. City council. So I thought, but I can I can email it to you.
69 I apologize. What was the exact document?
70 Adopt council regular meeting schedule pursuant to code subsection 3.0, 2.010. C point one.
71 Thank you so much. Would you be able to email it over?
72 Yeah. I'll just I'll actually.
73 Just message.
74 You the link.
75 I appreciate it. Thank you.
76 Okay. Colleagues, I introduced a proposed ordinance back in may. So as we're going through this, please be aware that there are some now obsolete references in there that because we are at the end of July and this will probably be voted on in August. So if it looks like there's a few parts out of out of sequence, that's why it's a proposed ordinance that is modeled with a lot of the same council findings in that section one, as we did in the ordinance councilor Zimmerman put forward a while ago that changed the council agenda and created that special meeting for the budget, and so a lot of this is the same. It just recognizes that we have many of the things we were talking about earlier. We don't have council meetings on the fifth week of the month. If we have a fifth week. We have previously changed council meeting times in the past. We have reduced our aggregate full council meeting hours from the old council's 36 to 45 a month, depending on if there are 4 or 5 weeks a month to 15 hours a month. Beginning in January. We've increased the number of filers and discovers, and then we've added 32 hours a month of committees that can feed into the full council. Those are the sort of findings. I'll let you read those in detail. I think the key parts here are the council directions, which are the operative part, and it would change our council's schedule to on the first and third Wednesday of each month, as well as the fifth Wednesday of months that have a fifth Wednesday, a 9:30 a.m. Council meeting with a recess, 2 p.m. Meeting, or the following Thursday at 2 p.m. That is the exact text mirror as the current code on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month at 6 p.m, a recess meeting will be held the following Thursday at 2 p.m. That same formulation is in code now. Again, it does add a second evening council meeting. And then there's the when the meeting falls on a legal holiday, which is exactly the same as the current schedule. That's part a. Meetings that start at six will be scheduled to end at nine. Can adjourn earlier upon a completion of the agenda. In the event that council has not completed its agenda by nine, council will complete consideration of the current item, and then we'll continue to consideration of any remaining emergency ordinances, 912 items or adjournment. Council can also suspend the rules, so I'll just note it would take 912 to get a 912 item on the agenda or to suspend the rules emergency ordinances as well. All of those are by definition and in code place at the top of the agenda anyway, so they will usually be cleared by long before 9:00. And then we'll adjourn as soon as the current item finishes its part. See no work session scheduled by the mayor, administrator, or auditor, nor any executive session may be scheduled during the three hour period following the start times listed. So that means our Wednesday mornings can't be superseded by other parts of our government, or Wednesday evenings on those evening meetings. Part d holding the Thursday time and saying no executive sessions on that Thursday time. We had a pattern in earlier parts of this year of executive sessions being scheduled on Thursday for us. So that's what that's about. Part e and f refer to previous schedule changes in the case of f, or a proposed change that would have happened in July 2nd, so they're irrelevant now. I'll be putting forward an amendment to remove that part. You can ignore e and f. That's the. This is not proposed as an emergency ordinance either. So just keep that in mind. And that's why you don't see that section two part there. So in sum we would go to weekly council meetings alternating in most months between morning and evening. In the event there's a fifth week, we would have another morning meeting. Those meetings would be the standard three hour length the old council had, and allow for a little run over to complete the current item, and it would protect our time from being superseded by scheduled work sessions or executive sessions that come from outside of this chamber. Nothing would change in terms of the council president's ability to schedule work sessions or executive sessions, and I know that there is a proposed amendment from councilor Dunphy that he can speak to, but that's the big picture. And I'd welcome any questions or thoughts anyone has.
77 Thank you. Councilor, why don't we hear from councilor Dunphy on his proposed amendment just so we have everything out in the open, and then we'll start discussion. Councilor.
78 Yeah, sorry. I'm trying to pull it up in e council. And it is. There's one taking its sweet time. Sorry. Actually, it denied me so. I am not prepared for that right now. I'm sorry. Let's just continue.
79 I apologize.
80 Yeah.
81 Your amendment was specifically about the idea that you raised earlier in the day around having city and administrative business council and legislative business meetings, was that correct?
82 Yeah. Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm just being behind. Yeah, absolutely. That was I mean, part of why I previewed it here just for the council discussion. I tell you, I don't have a particularly strong opinion about it other than I want to make sure we are prioritizing our time as legislators to be able to legislate. And I recognize that the majority of our work historically, or the majority of the city council work historically, has been reactive to proposals brought by the administration. But I do think that for the purposes of. I guess, recognizing the different state that we are in now with 12 legislators who are explicitly told, go legislate, I think we need to honor that in some, some intentional ways, so that that was what my amendment was in, pertaining to. And we had a good conversation about it, and I appreciate that. Thank you, thank you.
83 Thank you. Councilor councilor Kanal, are you back in the queue. And just.
84 Wanted to mention, separate from the sort of what it was at the time it filed there, I am going to be putting forward amendments to modernize this document. One is to take away all the references that are now obsolete to June and July. One is a little clarification in the impact statement, which I don't know if it needs to be submitted as an amendment at all under community impacts and community involvement. And the third one is I in retrospect, I believe that the part d was a little bit harsher than I intended it to be. And so and it didn't explicitly say that the recessed Thursday meeting could be canceled by the council president. And I think it's helpful to clarify that explicitly instead of leaving it implicit. So it would say no. Executive sessions may be scheduled on Thursday between 2 to 5 p.m, unless the recess Thursday meeting is canceled by the council president, or with the written consent of at least seven councilors. So that's the third amendment I'll be putting forward. I'll have those filed soon. But I did want to just, you know, indicate that I'm aware that the these are sort of ancillary or secondary pieces of the document that do need to be updated, given the time that has passed since it was originally filed, but that the central idea remains the same, which. Is first and third wednesdays along with the fifth, second, fourth in the evening and protecting our time from being subsumed by other parts of the city government.
85 Thanks.
86 Thank you. Councilor, I'd like to give folks an opportunity to comment on or react to this proposal. Offer alternates if you don't like what you see or express support. Obviously in a work session, we won't be taking amendments or voting, but I think this is a good opportunity for us to have that broader discussion that might otherwise be had in a committee about what we have before us today, councilor Ryan.
87 Yeah, thank you, madam president. I have a technical question. Two of my colleagues have brought forth two different ordinances or ones a resolution. But you're the sponsor of councilor Canals. All right. So here's what I need. I need to know why and why you're not your sponsor of councilor Canals yet you offer resolution. I just I just want to understand, like, what's the one? There must be something different. But I don't know.
88 What councilor Kanal is pursuant to or is related to weekly city council meetings, and it requires an ordinance. Mine is a resolution on the structure of our committees.
89 Okay.
90 So this one, you know what what councilor Kanal is, is specifically about getting us back to the weekly schedule. Okay. Independent of that conversation fully, I have a resolution with a proposal on what a new committee structure could look like. This is the first conversation that we need to have, though, is whether or not my committee structure doesn't work if we don't go back to weekly, weekly, weekly meetings. So we need to have this conversation.
91 Councilor Kanal yours doesn't touch on committees, it only touches on the council meeting wednesdays.
92 That is correct. There's a couple references in the impact statement acknowledging that there may be a parallel conversation, but it doesn't do anything related to that.
93 Okay, now that I have that context, I'm going to try to read this and listen.
94 And were you also asking about the amendment, the council dunphy's amendment, or did you have that clarified too?
95 I had I think I had that clarified his the whole resolution started to feel like an amendment.
96 Yeah. I didn't mean I apologize for any confusion in passing that out. I just had a stack on my desk, and I wanted to make sure everybody had a copy for when that does come up. But right now we can ignore my resolution.
97 It's okay. I was trying to listen and read yours at the same time. It failed, so thanks.
98 Councilor Ryan.
99 Anything else? No. I just had to understand what was happening. Thank you.
100 Thank you, councilor Clark.
101 Thank you, madam president. So we're going to update this, right? Because given all the conversation that we've just had, I think there are some logical changes to this. The weekly meetings, having a specific time for overflow, the thursdays, the executive sessions, scheduling those. I would like to see that. I'm not sure how I feel about your your see amendment. You know, dividing up the meetings between just, you know, administrative business versus, you know, policy. I'm I'm kind of up in the air on oh that's yours. Okay. Sorry. Okay. Councilor Dunphy, I'm not sure how I feel about that yet. I want to chew on that a little bit more, but I also, I don't want to do this consent of at least nine councilors. I think we can. I would rather that we just set these, you know, streamline or have predictability as what councilor Zimmerman said. And just, you know, let's just say that we're going to do this. We don't we're not going to have to vote every time we need an executive session or whatever. Let's just schedule them. So I would prefer that and streamline this a little bit. And given everything that we've heard today, integrate some of the comments. Thanks for doing it.
102 Thank you, councilor. Councilor Green.
103 Yeah, thank you. I councilor Thanks for bringing this forward. I'm glad we're finally getting a chance to talk about it. I generally support this. My and I guess I'm going to signal now that my preference is for the two evening meetings per month, but I'm not going to die on that hill for the sake of this, this larger. What's most important for me is moving to the weekly meetings and getting the regularity. And also what I really like about the ordinance is putting in some structure around. Whether or not other scheduling priorities can impact our ability to meet. I think that's really important. So I'm going to be fluid on the question of how often we have those evening meetings, but my preference is still, as it's written, my comment I'd like to make a comment on councilor Dunphy's amendment. I appreciate the intent here, but I guess one of the things I'm a little bit worried about is how do we know what the composition is there going to be an equal balance of actions? And are we putting ourselves in a situation where we're being overly prescriptive on on what these agendas will look like? Because I would hate for us to, to get unweighted there. And so there may be an opportunity here to put something like the council president shall provide, I don't know, priority on an alternating basis, something to that effect. But that still provides a little discretion, because I think part of what's I'm noodling on here is, you know, in the budgeting process, we pass a number of notes and at times we will pass resolutions and we will pass ordinances that give the administrative side some directives or some some requests and urges that then may result in an action that they bring forward to us. So it's an indirect council action in some respect, but it's still there. And so I think that's to me something that we want to honor in some respects because they're going to be dealing, I think by definition, they're going to do a lot of the work that we want them to do. We're not hyper micromanaging. So I, I wonder if we can be flexible on this clause, but I but I really appreciate your intent, and I think it's good to have the exception rules laid out as a supermajority as well. So that's it for me.
104 Thank you. Councilor, councilor Koyama Lane.
105 Thank you. I there's a lot of this that seems to be aligned with things that were coming out of her conversation. I would like predictability. I'm not exactly sure exactly when it needs to be, but the idea of weekly council meetings, committee meetings being predictable, the public knows when to, where and when to access them. I like the idea of there being a set overflow for full council, maybe for committees too. I liked what council president brought up about that, that evening slot for committees that could be an option. I like the idea of us being intentional about setting aside time for those executive sessions when we need to talk about labor negotiations, negotiations. I'm not sure that c needs to be an ordinance, or if that's something that is an agreement is something that we just we start scheduling. I'm open to hearing more about that. I wonder if we would need to add something in a maybe a three about for when council is recessed. I like the idea of the soft ending at 9 p.m, and I think, oh, and then the last piece is part of this for me. Depends on what we decide around committees as well, because I do want committees to be empowered. I don't want us to unintentionally undermine or disempower committees. I think it could look a few different ways. Meeting twice a month for longer chunks of time, or having the option of meeting weekly. So I would want to make sure that when committee how often and when committees are meeting is also part of this conversation. Thank you.
106 Thank you councilor.
107 I'm going to jump in after you. And I kind of love that because I agree wholeheartedly with your comments about making sure that we are empowering committees and also being very intentional, that we don't inadvertently disempower committees with how we change our structure. And also with your comments around predictability. And I think having that predictability and transparency around what we do when is so important both for all of us to be able to prepare, but also more importantly, for the public to know what to expect and when they need to weigh in on different things. Council, I want to thank you for bringing this forward as a jumping off place for us. I think having something for everybody to react to is great, and I appreciate that you took the time to do that. I wholeheartedly agree with b, the soft start. I like that it gives us flexibility but also gives some consistency and predictability for our staff teams. I think there's a really nice balance that you struck there. I wonder if we need to if we have weekly meetings, if we need to reschedule, as you have in a3, or if when there's a holiday on a Wednesday, which is rare but happens, or when there is a recess, if we just assume that those are weeks where a council meeting is canceled. And obviously with nine nine signatures, we can always add something. But I wonder if we actually want to give ourselves the breathing room to just allow things to be canceled, give staff the time off in a more meaningful way. I'm concerned with c. I think that the reason that especially early on, we had things put on our calendars by the administration was a holdover from the previous form of government and a changing of habits. In my mind, we should never have the mayor or the auditor or an administrator putting an executive session or a work session on our calendar without working through the council president's office or council operations. In my mind, how we schedule our time should be sometimes in response to the needs, right? Especially executive sessions are often in response to the needs of the mayor's office and the administration. But it should be our team, our body that is scheduling those. And I worry that codifying that they can't cancel a certain type of meeting actually codifies that they can put those executive sessions on our schedule in other ways. And I, I think if we're worried about overriding meetings, we should say that in here as it relates to our scheduling, but we should be moving away from the past practice under the old form of government, which made sense then, but I don't think makes sense now of having the administration schedule those executive sessions. They often need them. They should request them. We should have a time when our leadership here says, okay, yes, we absolutely need to accommodate that immediately or we hear you, but we have other things that we need to be doing and will accommodate that as soon as we can. So those are just some initial thoughts that I've had reading through this that I wanted to share. I don't see anyone else in the queue for a first round, so councilor Kanal go right ahead.
108 Thank you, madam president. Thank you colleagues for all the feedback here, I appreciate it. I'm happy to kind of condense it down and start looking at what we can do to help build a consensus around some proposal, whether it's similar to this or a little different. Just a couple quick points on a3, c and d on a3. That's just a copy paste from the schedule and the code if it's no longer necessary. It's not text that I think the co-sponsors and I drafted in any way or are tied to. So if that is the goal, I'd love to hear other comments on it, but happy to remove it on d. I. At the time this was drafted, I think it was. This is more would make it more predictable than it is now, but less predictable than the conversation has actually developed in the interceding intervening two months. So I think at the time it was written cautiously saying it might be perceived as going too far. But I'm realizing now that at this stage it may not have gone far enough to creating that predictability. And I'm happy to adjust that and work with colleagues on it. Before I talk about c and here, I'll just note I have reservations about the proposed amendment that are exactly the same as the council president's. I think you made comments earlier, madam president, about there being a need to develop certain things through norms and cultures, and I think that's my preference too. I agree with the other comment as well about the balance of time, and that's why I'm not opposed to it necessarily. But that was my reservation. Why it's a separate amendment as opposed to part of the initial starting point. I do want to put in a defense of what is c in here. I think this is an example of when some things do need to be legislated, and I think it's because there is a culture where and I want to apologize to the auditor's office. You're included in that. Just for fairness, it's not really about the auditor's office. It's about the administrative side feeling entitled to our time. More than councilor Items are councilor Dunphy put up a noise ordinance change that had to wait for months to get on the agenda. The Portland street response resolution had to wait for months to get on the agenda. Because of the consistent attempt to take over our time by the administration, I think we should have a council agenda for councils and for the people and not for the administration, and we should fill in gaps there. I don't want to legislate that. I think that's something that I want to be standing behind the council president, as we have as you have those conversations with the administration. But as it relates to the time, I do think it's important to protect that time because this actually did happen. It's not an attempt to avoid a problem that hasn't occurred. It happened on March 6th with an executive session. It happened on April 2nd with a work session. It happened again on April 3rd with an executive session the entire week, which was, you know, one of two weeks we had in April for council got eaten up by things that were scheduled without our involvement as a council. And I don't just mean the 11 of us, I mean all 12 of us. And I verified that before bringing this in. So I do think it's important to protect it. And what that would do is empower the council president to say no unless we are okay with it and have give the council president a tool that can be used to say, we can schedule an executive session at that time. We can schedule a work session at that time. But it has to has to go through us as a council. So that that's my defense of part c. I'm not you know, I'm open to changes to it. But I did want to indicate why it's so important and why that's in there. I think that it has dramatically affected a lot of the things I mentioned with Portland street response, with the noise code ordinance, because that week just got got taken over. And not just that one week. Those are just the three that I documented at the time of this writing back in may. And I'll just kind of observe one last thing, which is that this was drafted in the early stages of the first part of the budget process. Right? So that week leading up to may 21st, it was in that ballpark. And so there's some context there. And I think it's worth adjusting some of this and in particular d and possibly a3 as well. And I'd love to hear what colleagues think about those as well. But just wanted to kind of give that context. Thank you.
109 Thanks, councilor. That's really helpful context for everybody to hear. At least for me it is. Councilor Zimmerman, I believe you've spoken the least of everyone in the queue. Go right ahead.
110 Thank you. It's been helpful to hear some of these explanations from the sponsors and kind of the thoughts as we got this document. You know, ultimately, the charter outlines our minimal amount of meeting. And I think that that is important. This I'm cautious to use city ordinances. I think the city has a strange practice of adopting too many ordinances with what I would call the, you know, the administrative decision making that the presiding officer has to have. So I'm very cautious about this document in outlining such prescribed do's and don'ts, given the nature in my career and how flexible the presiding officer has to be, at the end of the day, there is administrative work that has to happen and. I think that the decision making and the flexibility that the presiding officer has to build agendas is important. But I think there's strength as a presiding officer is how predictable can you make your work and how you work with the administration? I think that's part of the skill. I don't want to legislate it. I think that's a weakness. And I actually, you know, since the very beginning, even before we were sworn in, I've been saying that I think presiding officer's role is important. And I know others on this dais disagree that there should be hierarchy amongst the council. But I think we elected presiding officer for a reason. I'm struck, frankly, in terms of how some of this is being described. I mean, it really is starting to sound like a conspiracy theory document in practice, and this sounds very strange. Why, there's this idea that the administration is out here pulling shenanigans on us is just not landing with me. And that is what I'm hearing in the explanations. So I would encourage colleagues to not give this any more. Look, this is not something I think would help us be better councilors. I don't think this helps us be a better board. I think we've had very fruitful conversation earlier today, but this looks like an off ramp at full speed with no light at the end. I just don't understand it and I think it would set us back tremendously. So I either great change or let's get back to the previous conversation because I actually disagree. Council president I don't think this document has put us in the right frame for this conversation. I think it's actually set us backwards. So those are my comments.
111 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Morillo.
112 Yeah, I completely disagree. I don't think that we're talking about conspiracies. I think that as we're establishing a new form of government, we are simply addressing the fact that there are different branches of government and that there has to be a balance between the powers of the executive branch and the legislative branch. We are the legislative branch. We have the power of the purse. We have also seen that there has been, intentionally or unintentionally impact matters more than intent, in my opinion, is that the executive branch has been able to subsume most of our meetings with their agenda, and we have not been able to legislate effectively because of it. And there are a lot of topics to cover. But I think that establishing some clear boundaries around that makes a lot of sense. But something that I wanted to discuss. And council president, as you're moderating this conversation, are we going over just both of these proposals from councilor Dunphy and councilor Kanal at the same time? Or do you want us to hold off on some other stuff?
113 Councilor Dunphy has two proposals, so let me clarify to make sure there's not confusion. Councilor dunphy's amendment to councilor Canales proposal, I think, is important to discuss with councilor Canales proposal. I'd ask that we hold off on discussing committee committees and what policies are heard in which committees until a later date on Monday. I think we'll get to that conversation. We'll start talking about, given what we know committees need to do and how committees need to operate, how much time do they need, and therefore, how many committees can we support? And then we can move into talking about what committees.
114 Okay, so I should not be talking about councilor Dunphy's committee proposal structure yet. I will hold off until Monday then. Thank you.
115 Councilor Dunphy.
116 Thank you. Yeah. First, apologies, colleagues. I wanted to share document early, and I really probably should have waited till after this work session to share it. I apologize. Second, I'm really thankful for the conversation around my amendment. I will tell you that personally, I am nervous around relying on norms as a rule, especially because we've been watching on the federal level how quickly norms get disrupted and there are no tools to try and fix them. That was the spirit by which my amendment came forward. However, I am hearing pretty loudly from my colleagues that let's let norms try for now so I won't be pursuing the amendment at this time. However, this is something that is in the back of my mind and will be over the next few months. And I hope that just as we are now having a six month reflection, if we are drowning still, if we are unable to pursue things, I would like to come back to that, but for now I will table my amendment.
117 Thank you councilor, and for members of the public who are in the room with us or are watching online, I want to note that the draft ordinance is now posted on the work session page. Apologies that it wasn't up there to begin with. We had some cross communication, but it is there so everybody should be able to access it now. Vice president Koyama Lane.
118 For see. Like f o r c not the numbers for see here. I believe what it's trying to accomplish is preventing us from having our council meeting cut off because something else is scheduled right after, so I do I do wonder about the ways we can accomplish that. I think we could also, if it's appropriate to put it here or in terms of norms, I could be open to either having it be an affirmative and say that we hold a certain time for these types of meetings, rather than saying, you can't schedule these, but say that there's a designated time and it's not right. After council meetings, I too have felt worried or frustrated when we when something was scheduled on a Wednesday afternoon and we were cut short. I do not believe that was done in any malicious way. I think scheduling is really hard. I think all of us have seen that. I agree with the sentiment of my that my colleague shared about the way we're speaking about interacting with setting some norms around our relationship with the executive branch. And I would frame it in, I feel worried about a pattern that I'm seeing of many of us seeming to view the executive branch as. A group, or people that need to be watched, and that it needs to be an adversarial relationship, and there needs to be a lot of pushing and. I can respect the need to find our place and make sure that we as a council, have power and we have a voice. And I want us to I want to remind all of us that the executive branch also includes 7 to 8000 people who largely really are here because they care about this city and have dedicated their lives to being bureaucrats. And they're watching us really closely. I walked to work this morning with a friend who is a city employee, and this came up and my perspective as someone that's been a worker, a union member, a teacher is, I know the workers. The teachers are the ones that stay and keep things running. And the superintendents will come and go and the administrators will come and go. The politicians will come and go. The people that are going to stay there and keep things going, you know, are the teachers and educational assistants and the city workers. I want us to be really mindful of the tone that we're setting, because it does trickle down and people are feeling it, and maybe sometimes it's appropriate or deserved. But in all, I want us to make sure we're really thinking about the power we do hold. Because for me, this power is very new. Being up here and being able to when I say something on the dais, it is, is taken very seriously. I think a lot of us are new to that, having that kind of power. And I just I want us to be thinking about that relationship. I think we do need to push, but I don't think we have to. I also want us to be thinking about how we can be supporting one another and trying to assume best intent and assume that we are working towards the same, some of the same goals, maybe thinking about how we get there differently. So that's what I wanted to say.
119 Thank you. Councilor councilor Kanal.
120 Thank you, madam president. I think it's an important issue that was just raised. And I also would note that respectfully, I don't need to be reminded about the work that's done in the executive branch. I'm the only member of this council that worked in it, and I think that I've been able to be a champion for some of the jobs that were on the chopping block for it, and those budget conversations that occurred in may and June. And I think it's really important that we keep all of that in mind throughout this process. There is a distinction between management and rank and file workers, and that's an important thing to not conflate here. My comment does not say no work session scheduled by an analyst three no work session scheduled by a csa two my. The text here says no work session scheduled by the mayor, administrator or auditor. And I put the caveat in about the auditor earlier as well. And I think that's a really important distinction. I do think that we share a lot of the same priorities with the rank and file workers of the city at this council, and I think we've shown that with our our votes on labor, but also on things related to non-represented workers and their right to have hybrid work. I think that's come up in a few contexts too, in this council. So I think we've we've shown that, but this is not about those types of issues. This is about whether or not you can get an item on this council to be adopted within less than eight months, which was the timeline when we started for an ordinance, 90 day delays on both committee and on council, two readings which later became one at the committee level, and then the possibility of a gap of two weeks between those two meetings. We have to be able to legislate faster than that. Legislation will never be as fast as an administrative decision, but part of that has been the fact that so many things have been given as a deluge, that the council president has been forced to adapt to in the agenda setting with the, the, the consequences being always dire. And, you know, if you don't put this on the agenda right now, everybody dies from from the administration. And I think that's a really important thing because there's a lot of things. It's amazing how many of these issues came up. And so my intent with this was to create a tool that the council president would have to empower that position to push back, not necessarily on the individual agenda item, but on the capacity that the council has, which is the hours of committee that we have. And I think one thing I really appreciate about the vice president is talking about what happens over 150 years, and I think this is something that would apply, whether it's this council president or council president yet to be elected to office, let alone to that role. And I think ensuring that there are tools available to push back is really vital. And what this does is it allows for, you know, the scheduled by to be is the key phrase here to allow the council president to say, I can do it. It's just that you can't do it. Having said that, I really appreciate your comment, madam vice president, about reformulating it in the positive instead of the negative. And I'm definitely I'm definitely open to that. And I appreciate that point. Thank you.
121 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor zimmermann.
122 I just think that. While we're having discussions about how council meetings, in particular work sessions, items that get put on the agenda and, and executive sessions, we're missing a significant voice. And it sits over there where the city administrator should be. I don't know how we have this conversation with and have it be. Mature enough or academic enough or reasonable enough without that perspective at this table, having been a deputy city manager for two cities in the state of Oregon, I know that there's some really boring stuff that's really important that has to get passed, and you have to go engage your council on it. Does that mean that city managers across the state of Oregon are writing the agendas? No, it doesn't, but they are suggesting presiding officer sir or ma'am, I need this before this date. And that's always a consideration. I think that our committee structure and I and I will just say, I think we've we have forced functioned this committee structure as if it has some sort of role that we haven't quite defined. And so we've added this layer, we've added a delay. My opinion, I think we've just doubled the length of everything to basically since we're going to rehear it all here anyway. So we have added a great amount of uncertainty into the administrative side of this government that I think should be a priority for us to focus on as a team so that we can give direction. One of the things that council should be doing across the united states to their city administrators is giving direction, because that direction is then what they go to execute. But until we figure out that flux that we've created, we remain a very unpredictable body for the administration. And I and I take that seriously. So would I support that? A city administrator can, you know, by law, bring us into session? No it's not it's always a negotiation with the council president, the presiding officer in almost every government. But this idea that somehow it's being used, I just really reject that idea that's being used to keep us from doing other work. I think that this is a multibillion dollar organization with thousands of employees, that most of the stuff that has to get done is the really boring stuff that requires our authority. And that's why a great number of votes are 12 0 or 5 0 or 8 zero, whatever your government is, because a lot of this stuff is uncontroversial. It's just it does require an authority. So I think we're missing a voice if we're going to have this conversation fully. I think the administrator has to be at the next work session for this because we have half the equation unrepresented here.
123 Thank you.
124 Councilor, and I appreciate the that thread of the conversation that we don't always we don't always talk through which is what is happening and what representation do we have. And on the other side of the dais there councilor Morillo.
125 Given that, I would encourage you all to give your your expectations to our recruiter, those conversations are important because what you expect should be known. It should be no surprise. Thank you.
126 Counselors, if you haven't filled out the form from the recruiting firm which was due yesterday, my understanding is they gave us a one day extension. You can still do it today. After this meeting. Councilor Morillo.
127 Thank you, council president. Maybe it's the constitution team nerd in me that's studied the branches of government pretty extensively. So I have I would echo everything that councilor Kanal said about sort of the importance of that balance of powers and the role of the executive branch is to implement the legislative branches vision. We are the representatives of the people. We are representing, districts we are representing a wide swath of constituencies. We have people here who represent business. We have person who's experienced homelessness for the first time. We have immigrants. We have queer people. We are the legislative branch. And the executive branch needs to implement our vision. I would also echo councilor Canal statement that there is a difference between employees who are executives insofar as they are carrying out the vision, but those aren't the people that are coming here and clogging up our agendas. That's happening primarily from the highest leadership in office. And I appreciate councilor Zimmerman's career history as far as having that knowledge base on what it takes to get things on the agenda, things that are mandatory. We're also experiencing that in our committee meetings constantly during the climate committee, we've had to move, having certain more exciting topics to do boring land use stuff because there was a deadline where if we didn't get some of that stuff done, then everyone in Portland would lose their flood insurance and that had to go to council by a certain date. So we're all familiar with some of the administrative burdens that are less interesting or less exciting that need to get done. I don't feel like I need to be lectured on that, but the what we're talking about is establishing a government for the next 100 years, and we need to make sure that the legislative branch is actually legislating, and that the executive branch is actually carrying out our vision. And from what I have seen thus far, I have seen too much legislation coming from the executive in a way that I think is encroaching upon what the legislative branch is supposed to do. And I think that in any other government, while we don't always want to replicate them. Exactly. Because there are things to learn from what goes well and what doesn't go well in congress, the president's budget is pretty much dead on arrival. It's known that congressional leaders are going to pick it apart. They're going to come up with different things. They also have many more months than we did to go through the budget. We had two weeks. We have the power of the purse. We have legislative authority. And I think that we should stand up for that because we are representing districts in a way that has never existed before.
128 Thank you. Councilor.
129 Councilor. Novick, go right ahead.
130 Withdrew my hand, actually.
131 Okay.
132 Councilor Clark.
133 I think it's a little more complicated than just the difference between the branches of government. My only request is that we get an earlier heads up. I know there's a lot of things that we, as elected officials, are required to approve or disapprove, and that's going to go on forever. There's just a lot of business of this city, you know, there's 26 bureaus sort of still in different form, but there's a lot of business of the city that we have to approve. All I want is just an earlier notice, and I understand we have to do this stuff. It's a part of our function. Thanks.
134 Thank you. Councilor.
135 Councilor Green.
136 Yeah, I just wanted to add a little bit of a finer point on the separations of power. Question. What comes to our city charter? Yes. The executive branch must execute the will of council as codified in the in our in our, our legislative actions. But they also have been granted far sweeping administrative rule making power. And there's a lot of implementation gray space, if you will, that gets between executing on the will of council and what the letter of the council directives are. And so we also need to be mindful that we need to provide space for that to a conversation between the administrative branch and city council to have that conversation about that rulemaking piece. I hope that's what our committees help us do. And it also, if we want them to be successful, you know, we need to be issuing pretty clear guidance. I think that, you know, to just bring it back to the question on the table here is, I think that putting it into code to say this is what we expect in terms of how council has priority for certain meetings is a way to provide pretty clear guidance on what sort of expectations are. But you know, before I yield, I'll just say that, you know, in the first six months, I think many of us missed opportunities to prevent to provide grace to individuals on that other side in the Portland building. And, you know, let's let the next six months and beyond, you know, be an opportunity to keep to keep that respect in place. And I certainly, I think, you know, have been guilty of that at times as well. So a lot of learning to do. But but I just the administrative rulemaking piece is, is an important nuance in the charter. That's not so not so clear cut. Thanks.
137 Thank you councilor.
138 I think we've strayed a little bit from the initial topic, and I'm going to risk with my comments continuing that stray, and I apologize for that. But I just want to offer a little bit of perspective on the conversation that we're having. Ultimately, I think there's a tension between how we spend our time in a lot of different places. We talked previously today about the tension between time on the dais and time in in district with constituents. There's also a tension between time on the dais spent creating new policy or changing the policy on the books and doing the work of. Of making sure that we have a say in the daily run, the city pieces that the administration is bringing forward. And both of those are really important and really different ways. As we move through our conversation, both today and next Monday. When we talk about committees, I think it's important that as we think about how much time we need, especially in committees, we make sure that we have time to do both. And there's a lot of different ways we can make sure that happens, but we need time to do both. They are both important. Councilor Clark mentioned needing more time to know what's coming, and I talked about some of the changes that I hope we will get to with our council system to make sure that information is more widely available publicly to portlanders, and also to committee chairs in order to have that information earlier. I've also asked the administration to back up when they file things, and have learned that one of the reasons that couldn't happen is because they needed to have a requested date before something was reviewed through council. We're changing that so that we don't have that artificial barrier anymore. So the goal is to make sure that we all have information as early as possible, knowing that there are also things that come up quickly at times. My concern with this language, I just want to reiterate, is that it codifies a power that doesn't actually currently exist. And I, I asked our nonpartisan, neutral staff, as we've been having this conversation in council operations, if they could scan the code and charter to see if there's anywhere that specifically gives authority to the mayor, administrator or auditor to file things on any of our agendas. And other than the ability to file an item, which the council president then refers to a committee or to full council to an agenda, there isn't anything listed. There isn't anything that gives them the ability to put something or to schedule an executive session for us. Like I said before, executive sessions are usually to address things coming from the administration because of the nature of what we can hold an executive session about. But I really do worry that if we say they can't schedule executive sessions at certain times, we are opening up a part in code that then infers that they could schedule executive sessions at other times. I think executive sessions should be scheduled through our council leadership always, and I think there was a tale early on in this year where the administration was used to just saying, hey, we are going to schedule this. I think we are still dealing now with executive sessions where the administration is saying we're bringing the information, so we will just put it on the calendars and run it. And when we have a new council operations manager will have the ability to say, hey, those things should be running through council operations. They should be scheduling it and sending out the information. And I just would caution us to not inadvertently cede authority over our own schedules and work things that are strictly within our jurisdiction by trying to limit somebody else's. Councilor Koyama Lane.
139 All right, this is the last I'll say about this. I want to be clear that I don't disagree, that there should I believe there should be separation of power. And I actually think that there are many on the executive side that would agree to that and would appreciate some clarifying of roles and lanes. And I also want to clarify that I'm not calling out or speaking to any one councilor. I actually wasn't trying. I wasn't expecting to bring this up today, but it does feel connected. And I had that conversation this morning. So it's at the front of my mind and talked about how I've seen many different administrators or superintendents come in and have kind of seen them fall into three categories one who see the workers, people running the buildings as experts, valued partners where you spend a lot of time listening, there are some that come in and they're like, you do your thing, you can close your door, I'll do mine. I'll leave you alone. And then there are some that try to change everything and really see folks as the workers, as a group to fight or try to change. And there's not a lot of listening. And so I think this is a time that we can just check in. I don't want city staff to be afraid to come present to us, and I'm worried that it's heading in that direction. I think we have time to be aware and make some shifts, and my worry is that what will happen is many of our staff, and I think this trickles down from management to non management. And staff will be afraid and will turn into yes people and feel like they need to come before us and just say yes and we won't get that healthy push and pull of being able to bring different opinions that will make everything better. I think that there are many staff who want to see us succeed and want to help us succeed, and aren't sure what that looks like and how to do that. So I support clarity around roles, what lanes we're all in, and I also want us to get to a place where we're not assuming that there are folks who have an intention to clog our agenda or to take over. I'm not sure that that's a healthy assumption, unless we're really experiencing that.
140 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Ryan.
141 Thank you, council president. And thank you, council vice president. I thought your story about your walk this morning was absolutely relevant. I think my first of all, I'm hearing a lot of good things. And thank you, councilor Kanal, for getting this. It takes it's brave to put something out like this at the beginning of the conversation. So there was a lot of approval, I think, of moving towards a council meeting every Wednesday. So I hope you're noticing that. I think that what councilor Zimmerman put forth is really important. And I think what's missing, and maybe the next work session, I strongly consider that we have the executive branch here, so we can actually have dialog about this, because I could imagine if everyone is honest, we're all going through growing pains and frustrations. This council and the executive side, that's not good or bad. That's probably makes sense. That would occur when you're doing a big upheaval and change in how you govern. So I think we just have to give ourselves some grace and have the openness to have that dialog. And so I hope that our next session we get to the why and the what a little bit more and not the how, because I feel like we're jumping ahead to the how. But on that note, councilor Dunphy, because you're also brave enough to put something forth. I think that remember that parks and recreation is split between two committees. So the rec side is the economic development and the other side, nature and trees, if you will, is infrastructure and maintenance. That all goes in infrastructure. So I think I think we're just chomping at the bit to figure out how to improve what we currently experienced. But I know that the executive branch would probably like to improve what we currently experienced as well. And I totally believe in the separation of power, and I believe in efficiency. And we're not at an efficient we're not operating efficiently again at a time where we're having so many grim challenges in our city. And so we have to make sure that the city's business, what our constituents experience from our public servants is relevant in our meetings. And we're not just piling on new policy on top of the challenge that we're currently having to deliver services. So I just hope that the next work session is more inclusive in terms of the teams that we work with at the city of Portland.
142 Thank you, councilor. Councilor.
143 And my final comment that I didn't say is, I do think that councilor Canal, I hope that you'll consider the feedback you're hearing about several of your points that I circled on one of these documents. I have two copies, and that is where did they go? I think that c, d, and e, I'll get into some micro administrative rules, and I don't think they're relevant in the ordinance, so I'll just put that out. Thanks.
144 Thank you. Councilor councilor Kanal.
145 Thank you, madam president. As I noted earlier, e and f would both be amended out. They're not relevant anymore. I think d I mentioned would be adjusted pretty significantly as it relates to c, I think it's become a distraction to the broader conversation. And I think there's a misinterpretation of it and also conflation happening. It's not I don't think it's necessary to make the important parts of it happen. And I recognize the concern that the council president raised. I am curious why, if there was no authority granted to those individuals, how it happened on those dates in March and April that we had our council meeting, our council meetings canceled by other parts of this government, and I think that's worth following up with online but offline. But I'm happy to say that if in fact, it does pose a risk because I think you're right that it poses a risk of being interpreted as saying at another time somebody could put something on the calendar. So I'm happy to remove c. I do want to say, you know, I've spent I've filed more items than e council to sit on that side of the table than this one. Still presented 20 plus times on that side. In my old job. I've spent a lot more time up here now. But and so first, I appreciate very much the council change. That is huge. The date thing is it's one of those really small things that nobody really knows about, but it does affect. And I think that's really helpful. And also I think the issue here is about not what happens leading, not what happens once someone is at the table, but what happens leading up to that point. How it gets on the agenda is, I think conversation we've had that is outside the scope of this document. And then there's also what is the capacity, what are the options where something can be placed on the agenda? What is the pool of time that we have available to put an item, regardless of who files it on the agenda? And that's where I think this document is designed to be relevant, is to expand that capacity and protect that capacity. And so again, noting that c and f would be removed by now, two different amendments, I guess, although I might follow them together if that's easier. And then d would be altered pretty significantly, as I read earlier, to ensure that it's clear that the council president can still cancel executive sessions, but also incorporating councilor Clark's feedback around, you know, actually making it more predictable. I appreciate that. And again, I haven't heard anything about a3, so if anyone has anything there, I'm happy to amend that out or not. If that's the case, the only person who's weighed in on it, I think was saying, let's, let's remove it. So happy to do that. I'm completely indifferent on that particular text. But I do think that the broader point here remains, and it's in a and b of expanding the time and protecting it. And I look forward to not only doing this, but also hearing from the conversation we're going to have on councilor Dunphy's separate document to address councilor Ryan's point, which is that we shouldn't be just adding time if we're not also adjusting the amount of committee hours ideally downward as well, in parallel. So that's the I think, the only place where these two are linked in a direct sense, and I look forward to that conversation as well. Thank you.
146 Thank you, councilor. Councilor Morillo.
147 Thank you, council president. I think that a lot of the problems that we're talking about will be resolved when we just have additional council meetings to go over some of these things. And that's great to hear, because I think we're coming to a conclusion on that pretty soon. I continue to be confused by some of your comments, councilor Koyama Lane, because as of right now, in the city of Portland, under code, we as councilors are not allowed to talk to staff about their expertise or their opinions. In fact, if a dca doesn't want you to talk to staff, they can actively block that staffer from talking to you or giving you information. So there are people who are gatekeepers of information and access in the city. And I would say that me and my team are very much interested in talking to staff about their expertise on different topics, but we have run into administrative barriers to having that access. So again, when we're talking about executive authority, we're not talking about bureau staff or regular people as outlined in the ordinance. It's specifically talking about high level executive staff. And when we're talking about clogging up an agenda, it doesn't have to be intentional or unintentional. It just means that it's not about demonizing the executive branch. There is a lot of work to do. Ideally with more council meetings. We can do this more efficiently for everybody. But the impact of it is that the legislative branches authority is not coming through. We are not able to legislate effectively. That's all that we're saying. So maybe I'm not understanding based on your private conversation, and maybe you can't share more because it would reveal who the employee is and what they're going through. But in my experience, my attempts to actually talk to staff who are experts in these spaces can sometimes be denied. If a dca or somebody else wants to block you from having access to that information. And so that actually forces me as a councilor to go externally to other advocates or policy experts in the community to get information, because we can't do that with our city employees. So and I'm also hearing people who are nodding along quite firmly with some of what you're saying about the executive power and us not listening to staff be some of the people that have ripped apart our employees when they come forward and push back on things, who were nodding most vigorously with your statements. So I'm again, I think that some of this is just timing and capacity issues, but some of this is real. We don't have full access to information and I think that has to be addressed. And again, I cannot emphasize enough that I'm not talking I don't think councilor Kanal or I were talking about bureau employees. We were talking about people in higher levels of leadership.
148 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Novick.
149 I just wanted to follow up on that, even though it might not be exactly what we're supposed to be talking about. I mean, we had a discussion with the administration about allowing us to talk to staff. An email went out to people saying that it's okay to talk to councilors, but I think that in practice, there's some upper echelon people that aren't allowing that to happen, as councilor Morillo says. And that just seems to be a topic we have to keep on revisiting with administrator jordan in the dca.
150 Sorry. Yeah, you're correct, I misspoke. It's not in code. It's become a cultural practice where there are certain staff who are blocked from giving us information in a way that has, frankly, been very much impeding the work.
151 Thank you,
152 Councilors, for that clarification. Councilor Koyama Lane.
153 Thank you. To clarify, I absolutely believe we need to deal with any administrative barriers, challenges, challenges that are popping up. Those are important. We need to do our work in order to do our work. We need full access to information. I think we need to push for that, I absolutely agree, talking about some of the observations that I am hearing from many city employees on many different levels. I don't think it needs to be taken as an attack, or I don't think we need to be defensive about it. These also, I think some of it's normal. We're we're new. We're going to come up along these things. We're going to have challenges. And I think we just need to deal with them and notice them and talk about them. I understand we can separate bureau employees from leadership and say, who's okay to pick on or beat up on? I guess I also think any. Any tone that we're setting, whether it's with bureau employees or management or leadership, everyone is watching us. I think we need to be careful about that. And it might be that this is not something that we're going to legislate in code. This is probably something we should be talking about in a retreat, which I've been trying to get us to do. And if we don't have a chance to have some of those conversations, then it's going to come out in different ways. I am not blaming anyone specifically. I would like us all just to be aware that we have a lot of power, and we're setting a tone, and even just bringing that up brings up a lot of defensiveness, which I think is important to point out. I don't think there's one person here who specifically is leading everything anti employees. It's something that I want us to be cognizant of, and when we're aware of it, we can separate when we're when it's coming up and I think it's going to make us stronger. And I do think we're going to be stronger when our employees and the executive branch is stronger, too. I think we're interconnected separation, but we're also we also can't help but being connected. We really there are so many jobs in the city that we cannot do without all of the city employees. I want us to remember that every day we really are nothing.
154 Thank you. Councilor.
155 Colleagues, I'm not seeing anyone else in the queue. Councilor canal, I think that there are still conversations to be had that we probably can't have today. We need to work out when we can take actual votes around evening versus daytime meetings. But I think you got some clear buy in on weekly meetings. Some thoughts on whether or not we need a three and see, and I think I heard a number of people support you on b. So do you feel like you have direction for how you want to move forward on this?
156 Yes. Thank you. And I'd ask colleagues to reach out to me if what I'm about to say doesn't make sense. But my intention at this moment is to amend out a, three, c, e, and f to make the alterations that I noted about d as well as the. Based on the comments I heard today and I can run, I'll email those out to everyone and to modernize the language that refers to dates that are now in the past. May I ask a question to you, madam president, which is the intention? We have a meeting next Wednesday. Is the intention that this would ideally be on that agenda, or is there a special meeting coming within the 90 days that I'm not aware of?
157 Sorry. I'm looking at the calendar to remember what next Wednesday is. That's our regular August 1st meeting of August. So if you feel like you can have amendments ready in time, that's a morning meeting. So we should have some flexibility around timing. I haven't yet looked at what's coming Wednesday versus Thursday. I believe we'll probably use the Thursday overflow time, but if you feel like you can have your amendments ready, I think we could have this on that broader agenda next week, either Wednesday or Thursday.
158 Thanks. And just to clarify for everyone that that would be a first reading, because this is as of right now, it is a nonemergency ordinance. Thanks. Yes.
159 Councilor Clark, did you have something to add?
160 Yeah. I don't want to prolong this meeting by any means, but I do want to understand why this has to be in code. Why does it have to have the force of law and lock us in so tightly and take away discretion from our leadership?
161 I would say that it doesn't have to be, but I would like to give councilor Kanal an opportunity to share why he proposed it this way.
162 Just to clarify, it does not have to be in code and this would not put it in code. So similar to the earlier ordinance that was put up by councilor Zimmerman. When we added to additional one off meetings, we moved one from the evening to the morning, and we added a meeting for the budget in that one. That was done through a non code ordinance. This one, if you look at the portion of the code that that talks about the council agenda, it says council may adopt a schedule by ordinance so cannot be done through resolution. That's in city code 3.02.010.3.1. Council may adopt a schedule by ordinance. So that's why it's an ordinance. And I discussed this with the attorneys that it could be in code if we wanted it to be the permanent schedule forever, or it could be via and that would be done through ordinance that changed the code, or it could be done by ordinance that that established it as a schedule that we could still revisit. And that's the option that it was written as if we'd like to make it actually changing the code. So this is our forever schedule. We could do that too. But either way, it has to be by ordinance.
163 Absolutely not. I it's I don't want it to be our forever schedule. I want to have the maximum flexibility.
164 So this is the more flexible the two options that we're given.
165 So we're most things that just affect our rules for how we govern ourselves can be done by resolution. Because this says specifically can be changed by code. We have that limitation. Councilor Kanal I want to make a slight amendment to what I shared about meeting schedule. I got a frantic reminder from our clerk's team that today is Wednesday, so the filing deadline for items for next week's agenda was yesterday. So we may need to. Get a 9/12 to put this on. Depending on how amended it becomes. I will follow up with you after I check in with them, but I just wanted to note that to flag for our colleagues that we may ask for those signatures to get this on the agenda.
166 Okay, just want to clarify, this was filed.
167 It is filed.
168 Yes. So you're saying that the filing for the agenda specifically for next week because we're we're up against the code, unless there's another meeting before August 28th. The next week's meeting are the only meetings before the 90 days are up.
169 We have time held in case we need it on the 13th and 14th as well. I think we can get this on next week. I because it has been filed as an item, but not for that agenda. I need to check with the clerk and see if we can treat it like we would something coming out of committee or not. But I just wanted to note that we may need those signatures in case we have to come back to people. I don't want there to be any concerns or questions about why that changed.
170 Thanks for clarifying.
171 Councilor Ryan. Did you have some final comments?
172 Yeah, if that's what it is. I'm just asking council president, when I mentioned earlier that I think that we still have more socializing of this in work session, I the fact that we're not hearing from the mayor or the c and the d a's in this dialog is worrisome to me, and I won't be able to make a vote until we have that type of transparent dialog in public.
173 I think it will be important to make sure that we have some of their voices here when this comes before us at a council meeting, and I'll specifically request that the city administrator be here for that.
174 And I'm disappointed we didn't get to do that in a in a work session prior. I think that would be the better way for us to have that conversation than in a rushed format with amendments flying at us.
175 Understood. Thank you. Councilor.
176 I just want.
177 I just want balance, I want efficiency, I don't care about who has more power. I just want it to be balanced and for it to work for the constituents.
178 Colleagues. Does anybody else have any final comments before we close our work session today about any of the topics that we have touched on?
179 Okay.
180 Seeing none, thank you all. I think this is an important discussion. I know it's sometimes hard with everything we have to do to take time for these internal conversations, but I appreciate everybody taking the time today and really bouncing some ideas off of each other. With that, I will close the work session. Thank you very much.