The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-07-17
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Session summaryEditor-reviewed
Portland City Council convened its recessed meeting on Thursday, July 17, 2025, at 2:02 p.m., with roll call establishing a quorum and rules of order read into the record. Three agenda items were addressed after a fourth was pulled for a future meeting. First, council heard a committee staff summary and public testimony on an ordinance amending flood hazard area code for FEMA National Flood Insurance Program compliance; testimony addressed riparian habitat protections, tribal consultation, industrial harbor jobs, and concerns about weakening or delaying protections. Amendments were proposed adding language on temporary measures and future permanent rulemaking, adjusting definitional language on functionally dependent uses, and adding an emergency clause tied to a federal deadline; votes occurred on these amendments and the resulting ordinance, with outcomes recorded in the vote ledger. Second, council considered a ten-year cable franchise agreement with Comcast of Oregon, discussing its relationship to potential future municipal broadband; a vote occurred, with the outcome recorded in the vote ledger. Third, council held a first reading and extended discussion of an ordinance amending council rules on mayoral tie-breaking votes, debating definitions of "matters," treatment of absences, rescheduling procedures, and the scope of resolutions and reports; multiple amendments were proposed and voted on, with outcomes recorded in the vote ledger. The meeting adjourned after this item.
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0 Afternoon, before I call us into order. Counselor Avalos, are you online with us? And counselor Smith and Zimmerman?
1 Yes. I'm online. This is Loretta.
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2 Okay, great. And we have six in the room. So for folks who are watching online or in the room, we do have colleagues joining us today remotely. So we have a quorum. I will call us into order for today's the recessed portion of the city council meeting. It is 2:02 p.m. On Thursday, July 17th, keelan. Could you please call the roll?
3 Good afternoon. Koyama Lane here. Morillo. Here. Novick here. Clark Green.
4 Here.
5 Zimmerman. Here. Avalos. Here. Dunphy. Smith here. O'connell. Here. Ryan. Pirtle-guiney here.
6 And linly, could you please read our rules of order and decorum?
7 Thank you. Council president, welcome to Portland city council. To testify before council in person or virtually, you must sign up in advance on the council agenda at. Agenda. Information on engaging with council can be found on the council clerk's web page. Individuals may testify for three minutes unless the presiding officer states otherwise. Your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The presiding officer preserves order disruptive conduct, such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or council deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additional. Additionally, council may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony today should address the matter being considered. When testifying, please state your name for the record. Your address is not necessary. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. And finally, virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the council clerk's calls their name. Thank you.
8 Thank you. Linly colleagues. We originally had four items on the agenda, but item 23 was pulled from the agenda. We will see that at a future council meeting. It was not pulled back to committee just off of today's agenda. So we have three items we will be discussing today. One, we will hopefully we'll talk about this in a minute. Be adding an emergency clause to and passing one is a second reading, the other is a first reading and will just be a discussion. Keelan could you please read our first agenda item for us?
9 Item 20 amend flood hazard areas code to comply with federal emergency management agency national flood insurance program pre implementation compliance measures.
10 Thank you. And claire, you have a committee staff summary for us right? Correct. Fantastic. Thank you.
11 Madam president and councilors for the record, claire adamson, council policy analyst and staff to the climate resilience and land use committee. The ordinance before you document 2025 217 was heard in the climate resilience and land use committee on may 29th and again on June 12th, when it was referred to council with the recommendation to pass the ordinance. Amends Portland city code title 24.150 flood hazard areas to bring the city as a participant in the national flood insurance program into compliance with FEMA requirements regarding development in specified areas within the city's 100 year floodplain. The code amendments incorporate the national flood insurance program, pre implementation compliance measures, model code, and other requirements which consider the impacts of development to fish habitat and require mitigation efforts that meet a no net loss standard per direction from FEMA. The city must adopt the implementation compliance measures in order to remain in the national flood insurance program. While fema's long term compliance measures are finalized. The committee adopted an amendment prior to moving the item to full council. The effects of the amendment on the original ordinance are summarized in the committee staff summary posted online. The full impact statement on this item includes information on economic development and real estate impacts, as well as community impacts and community involvement. At the two committee meetings, eight people provided verbal sorry. Eight people provided verbal testimony during the first committee meeting on may 29th, and three people provided verbal testimony on the proposed amendments discussed at the June 12th meeting. 14 people submitted written testimony on the item prior to committee action. General themes of the testimony the committee heard or in writing included the need for continuous riparian habitat for migrating fish, and the need for riparian setbacks to protect salmon and other endangered species. The role of floodplains and riparian habitat areas as a buffer between river and forest lands. The variance between the biological opinion issued in 2016 by the national marine fisheries service and fema's proposed model code regarding mitigation, urging the city to review development projects with the lens on habitat restoration in order to maintain compliance with the endangered species act and the goals of the city's north reach plan. Concern regarding tribal consultation and consideration of tribal fishing rights. Navigating environmental protection and mitigation alongside industrial uses and industrial jobs in the north reach of the Willamette river, limiting development in the riparian buffer zone to water dependent and other similar uses. And finally, concern regarding properties with certain land use decisions that would not be subject to new regulations. That concludes the committee. Staff summary. Thank you.
12 Thank you very much, claire. And councilors Novick and Morillo. I believe you each presided over one of these meetings. Is that correct?
13 I believe that's right.
14 Okay. Do either or both of you have anything to add to the committee staff summary. I don't.
15 I don't really either. I think it was pretty thorough.
16 Okay. Perfect. And this came from the administration. So we don't have a carrier summary colleagues, are there technical questions for claire before we move into hearing from the members of the public? Okay. Seeing no one else in the queue, I will flag that. I do have two amendments that I will be proposing when we get to discussion. One of the amendments adds an emergency clause to the ordinance. This has to go into effect by the end of this month, or else we may have portlanders who are not able to purchase flood insurance at the same rates that they normally would be able to. So I've requested that we add an emergency clause. The other is more substantive, though I would say not terribly substantive, and does two things. It adds to the ordinance language that recognizes that this is a temporary measure, and that we plan to adopt long term compliance regulations that comply with federally mandated deadlines. Once we have more information from the federal government about what those deadlines are, there had been some discussion about a sunset clause, because we know that there will be different federal mandates in the future, rather than sunsetting and risking having a gap period if those come at a different time than what we're expecting. This language tries to get at the intent of a sunset, while giving us the flexibility that we may need based on where the feds are headed. The other piece of that second amendment returns us to some of the original language before the changes that were made by this ordinance, by removing language that says does not include indirect uses, such as from the part of the definitions that discusses functionally dependent uses, it does keep the original language that says that functionally dependent use does not include long term, long term storage or related manufacturing facilities. Those amendments are posted online, and when we get to the discussion, I'm happy to explain them in more detail. Does anybody else have amendments they plan to propose or technical questions for claire? Okay. Seeing none. Claire, thank you very much. And keelan, could you call up the first panel of folks for public testimony?
17 First? First up, we have heather king, tanya hartnett, sherry spark, and micah meskill.
18 I'm not sure if we have heather with us. So tanya and cherise, if you'd like to go ahead.
19 That's great. I'll go first. All right. Thank you. Good afternoon. Council president pirtle-guiney and council members. My name is tanya hartnett, executive director of the working waterfront coalition. And I'm here today to speak in strong support of portland's harbor businesses, an economic engine that sustains our city and shapes its future. The Portland harbor directs support, directly, supports over 30,000 living wage jobs, many that don't require a four year degree. These are careers with on the job training, union representation, and real upward mobility, especially for people historically left out of portland's prosperity. More than half of all middle wage jobs for those without a bachelor's degree are in industrial sectors like those along the harbor. This is where we make real progress on income inequality. These jobs offer stability, dignity and generational opportunity. Harbor businesses are also deeply committed to equity. For example, radius recyclings portland's workforce is 47% people of color. Vigor's team outpaces regional averages for women and bipoc representation. Other companies hire apprentices from nontraditional backgrounds, including people impacted by the justice system, and train them for careers in clean energy and infrastructure. And these companies don't just employ people, they build and move the materials that make modern life possible. At the harbor, steel is recycled, ships are repaired, and marine vessels, bridges and wears are constructed. Companies also produce and transport cement, asphalt, grain, lumber, semiconductors, insulation, renewable fuels, and advanced components. These are the foundational goods behind our roads, data centers, housing and Green energy infrastructure. Beyond Portland, the harbor's impact is statewide. These businesses generate over 1.8 billion in personal income and support 250 plus local suppliers. Nearly 90% of Oregon exports, mostly small and mid-sized, rely on these inputs and this infrastructure to access global markets. A strong harbor means a strong Oregon. These companies are also leading the way on sustainability, recycling metals, switching to renewable fuels, cutting emissions and managing storm water. Environmental responsibility isn't an afterthought, it's how they do business. But this ecosystem is under pressure. Industrial land is shrinking, permitting is inconsistent, and rising taxes and regulations, like those being discussed today, are making it harder to retain and attract employers. And too often, the public narrative overlooks their progress and underestimates their role in a just Green economy. If we went to Portland, that is equitable, affordable and economically resilient, we must support the harbor businesses building that future literally and figuratively. We ask the council to ensure the ordinance being considered today remains temporary, and that the continued the important collaborative work of building the Portland we all want, where businesses and the hardworking people who sustain them can thrive.
20 Thank you very much.
21 Good afternoon, councilors. Thank you for the opportunity to give a comment today. My name is sherry spock, and I'm the climate policy director at 350 pdx, which organizes thousands of portlanders who care about climate justice. So I am speaking today in support of the amendment to the flood hazard area code that was suggested by the climate resilience and land use committee. I appreciate the work that the committee and the city staff did to make sure that this would bring us into compliance so that we are able to protect the endangered species in our rivers, protect our river health, which contributes to climate health, mitigates the impact on climate change, and therefore is really positive for all portlanders to be able to have a healthy and safe place to live. So I would encourage you all to support this amendment and to pass it. I recognize that it's really important to do this right away so that we can retain our flood insurance. The folks living in the floodplain have a higher incidence of vulnerability, being vulnerable from vulnerable populations than the rest of the city of Portland. So this is really important to make sure that we maintain that flood insurance. And we recognize that this is a temporary measure, and we hope to come back and make these measures even stronger, to make sure that we're protecting our population around climate change. We've all seen the recent floods that have been happening this month around the country, notably in texas and north carolina. Lots of flooding all along the eastern seaboard. And in chicago, these incidents of floods are going to become worse and more frequent because of climate change, unless we do more to mitigate those impacts. The way that we do that is through maintaining our river health and making sure that we have areas like the setbacks and the vegetation areas along the edges of our waterfronts, the riparian zones, to make sure that the flood waters have a place to go, that they aren't endangering portlanders. And this type of protection is not really fully, fully maximized in this particular plan that we're working on here. So we need to come back and make a more comprehensive plan that will address all of the issues to ensure that portlanders remain safe. So we encourage you to pass this today and to recognize that we have more issues to work on. We need to address climate impacts and do that through river health, while also maintaining the opportunity for people to make a living and to live safely. All along our beautiful rivers in Portland. Thank you.
22 Thank you very much.
23 Micah is joining us online.
24 Council president and the rest of council, thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is mike maskell. I'm in the urban conservation director for alliance of Oregon, representing the organization today. As an organization, we have been engaged in advocating for the city to improve its implementation of fema's national flood insurance program for nearly two decades now, as it has a substantial impact on the city's natural resources and the wildlife that depend on it. Along the Willamette river, columbia slough and johnson creek. The process that led to these measures in front of you today was started back in 2009 when my predecessor, the late bob salinger, helped lead a lawsuit against FEMA, asserting that fema's management of the national flood insurance program was violating the endangered species act's protections for federally listed salmon. We were ultimately successful in that lawsuit and the pre implementation compliance measures. Pick'ems in front of you today is the first step in coming into compliance. As you've heard, the plan in front of you today is interim attempts to come into compliance and should be improved upon to meet more squarely the findings from the biological opinion and in the later iteration of this. But we support the current the current proposal to serve as that interim, even though it is an interim plan, it is very important that it does not have a sunset clause considering the risk, the current, the risk that this current federal administration poses and rolling back previous rulings or bedrock environmental protections such as the endangered species act. The protections put in place today are important for salmon, for people and our economy. It protects important habitat for endangered salmon and other wildlife along our rivers and our sloughs and our streams. It will protect, or it will lead to expanded floodplain habitat that will soak up flood waters, reduce flood risks for people and our economy, our structures. It incentivizes movement of development outside the floodplain, thus increasing the safety of the people who live and work in those hazard zones. And it moves the city importantly into compliance with fema's flood insurance program, which ensures residents along the Willamette, columbia, slough and johnson creek can secure insurance for their homes. Of the three pathway options that FEMA offered with their biological opinion, we would have preferred the no new development in the floodplain option, as it takes us in the direction of best safeguarding people, property and environment. But we understand the direction today that the city has taken to find balance in this interim plan. We want to thank councilor Morillo and her office in crafting some earlier amendments that we think strengthens the plan, and we really caution against any weakening of the current proposal. And with that, thank you.
25 Thank you very much.
26 Heather king. Okay, next up we have sarah taylor, marty glickman and chelsea stewart.
27 I'm not sure if we have heather. So go right ahead, marni.
28 Sure. Good afternoon, councilors and I my name is marty glickman. I testified today as a volunteer for Willamette riverkeeper on behalf of heather king. She is the co-executive director and lower Willamette riverkeeper for Willamette riverkeeper. She cannot be here today because right now, she is being sworn in as a director on the urban flood safety and water quality district board. Heather's testimony is in support of agenda item 2025 to 17, as passed by the climate resilience and land use committee. Willamette riverkeeper does not support further amendments that would weaken the code, risk losing flood insurance, and degrade floodplains. The city should use federal language to codify existing city practice to prevent confusion and ensure federal requirements are being met, any attempts to change the federal language would lead to further confusion, and a lack of clarity on what exactly is required under federal law, as these amendments are needed to ensure Portland residents and businesses can qualify for the national flood insurance program. Muddying the waters with different language could risk eligibility in this program. If there is confusion about what is required, the city should not add a sunset provision into the amendments. These amendments are temporary until permanent ones can be put in place, and adding a sunset provision with a firm deadline puts the city at great risk. If the city has not passed permanent amendments by the time of sunset clause would be invoked, the city would lose eligibility in the national flood insurance program and put the city at risk of endangered species act violations, which could lead to expensive lawsuits. Adding a sunset clause would be irresponsible and impractical, and could cause great harm to the city, its residents and businesses, finally, making non-substantive changes would just slow this process and go against city staff recommendations. The city has already worked on these amendments for many months, and making further non-substantive changes would just slow the process and risk not meeting the July 31st deadline. Please support the amendments as passed by the climate resilience and land use committee without any further changes. Thank you so much for your time.
29 Thank you.
30 Chelsea is joining us online.
31 Hello, council. My name is chelsea stewart with the center for biological diversity endangered species program. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I'd like to first uplift the testimony. We've already heard about how important it is that Portland city does as much as humanly possible to prepare our communities for the flooding disasters that are most certainly in our future. We've witnessed four 1 in 1000 year floods in this country in the span of less than a week. And given portland's geography and the fact that the majority of our floodplain has been destroyed already, it's not a matter of if a similarly disastrous flood will occur here soon. But when and as the council considers amendments that could potentially weaken the floodplain protections afforded by this code, I'd like to remind council that title 24, as written right now, already represents a significant compromise, if you will, for a few reasons. The biggest reason is that the biological opinion called for a prohibition on most types of development in the riparian buffer zone, and permitted only water dependent uses. Habitat restoration activities activities that result in a beneficial gain for species or habitat, and activities that will not degrade or limit natural floodplain functions in any way. We recognize that fema's model ordinance did not require the city to limit development in the buffer zone in this way, due to their own definition definition of beneficial gain, but that is part of why the center for biological diversity, as well as the northwest environmental defense center, Willamette river keeper, and the conservation angler, are currently engaged in ongoing litigation against FEMA. Second, the grandfathering permitted by the city for existing permits for which the start of construction has not begun, is far more expansive than what the biological opinion called for, and we'd prefer to see a much narrower grandfathering clause, especially considering that these measures were supposed to be in place back in 2018. And third, we think the city should at least at least make clear in the code that developers should not only conduct mitigation, should only conduct mitigation activities off site if it's spatially infeasible to conduct those activities on site. I also direct the counsel to the comments submitted by the center and the northwest environmental defense center for further information on these shortcomings. That said, we understand that the council must pass these amendments for Portland residents to continue to receive affordable flood insurance. And that's an effort we support. We urge you, however, not to further weaken the protections afforded by title 24 and to instead revisit the code in the future to strengthen it. If that cannot be done here today, thank you for your time and for taking floodplain protection seriously. For the sake of our communities, businesses, worker safety and wildlife.
32 Thank you very much.
33 Checking to see if sarah taylor has joined us. Okay. That completes testimony.
34 Thank you. Keelan. Colleagues. That moves us into amendments and discussion. If anybody would like to get in the queue for amendments or discussion, please do so. Otherwise I will propose my amendments and I'd like to start with the. The first amendment. If you pull up the amendments, they're listed together. And package one does two things. This would add an additional clause number 27 to the ordinance as it is listed. I'm pulling this up right now as I'm talking. I apologize to the ordinance as it's listed online, which would say the city acknowledges that the proposed amendments represent temporary measures and that the council anticipates adopting long term compliance regulations as required to comply with federally mandated deadlines. As we heard in testimony, we have some stakeholders who expressed worry that if we put a sunset clause on, we might have issues with the federal government if they don't act in the time that we expect, we could end up with a gap. We don't want to do that. I'm my office, and I believe many of your offices have also heard from stakeholders who wanted to make sure that we reiterated that there would need to be more permanent rulemaking at another point. And this language was designed to acknowledge that need for more permanent rules, while also permanent regulations, while also ensuring that we didn't inadvertently leave a gap period, and that this language could be in place until that additional language is developed. The second change here is that there's a portion of the current code language, which was amended in the proposal from our bureau, which is now being partially amended back to the original language. Under what I've brought forward, it's under the functionally dependent use portion. And this is of the exhibit. It is section a. And if you look at that section there was language added to include the term structures and facilities such as bridge piers and later the term and similar uses. Those changes are retained. There was also a change to add language does not include indirect uses such as that new language is removed and it's returned to the original language to say it does not include long term storage and related manufacturing facilities, and that was because concerns were raised that indirect uses, since we haven't had the time to fully define that, could capture things. It was not intended to, but we did still want to make sure that we included the language around this functionally dependent use definition, not including things like long term storage and related manufacturing facilities that are in fact not dependent on being river adjacent. What this does, in effect, is return us to or maintain us at, I guess I should say maintain us at current city policy. What I have heard from our bureau staff and attorneys is that there is not actually a functional difference between the language does not include indirect uses such as and the does not include language, but that it addresses concerns around that definition changing in the future. So I would move the amendment package one that contains those two changes.
35 Second.
36 Thank you. Councilor councilor Morillo. Are you in the queue for discussion on this amendment?
37 Yes. I just wanted to address some of the testimony that we received, and I was hoping that staff would come up to address some of those questions, particularly patricia, on the package. One amendment to confirm the functionality dependent use.
38 I think that makes a lot of sense. Patricia, do you mind joining us up here?
39 Thank you. So I was just hoping if you could confirm for us the impact of the functionality functionally dependent use amendment, just from your own perspective, I think that there's some misunderstandings about what some of the amendments do. And personally, I'm fine with what has been presented thus far.
40 Good afternoon. Councilors. Patricia diefenderfer, for the record, excuse me, I'm getting over a cold. So the what's proposed as the minor changes to this definition, I think it's maybe helpful to explain the definition is just referring to as council president noted, uses that are dependent on being by the river and those that are not. And you can have a site where the primary use is dependent on the river, but there can be proposals for smaller projects within that site that the specific development in question is not necessarily river dependent. We've been giving the example of like a small storage building or a small accessory building on a, on a site that's otherwise a use that is river dependent. So that particular example, that small building is not river dependent and therefore would be subject to the regulations that are being proposed here. So the only difference that that small change in language makes is it just doesn't specify what specifically what uses are indirect uses, although there's long standing practice that staff who implement these regulations in the Portland permitting and development bureau, there's long standing practice around how they implement these regulations. So functionally, it will not change how these regulations are implemented.
41 Thank you so much, patricia I appreciate that. So just to confirm this is not going to change. This isn't this change is not going to weaken the language.
42 It will not change the way the rules are implemented.
43 Okay. Thank you so much. That's all I needed to hear. Appreciate you.
44 Anything else councilor? Okay, colleagues, is there any other discussion to the amendment? Okay. Seeing none. Keelan, could you please call the roll?
45 Koyama Lane I.
46 Morillo I.
47 Novick I Green. Hi, Zimmerman. Hi, Avalos.
48 Hi, Smith.
49 Hi.
50 Canal.
51 Hi, Ryan. I pirtle-guiney.
52 Hi. With ten yes votes, the motion is approved.
53 Thank you. Colleagues, unless anybody else wants to jump in first, I can bring forward my other amendment. Okay. Seeing no one else jump in in that same package listed online or in that same document online. There is amendment package two, which simply adds an emergency clause to the ordinance because we need to meet a FEMA deadline of July 31st and it is July 17th and measures ordinances, take two hearings before council if they're not emergency ordinances and then 30 days to implement, I am asking that we add an emergency ordinance so that we can stay in compliance with the FEMA deadline of July 31st. The reason for the emergency ordinance is simply to accommodate that deadline. Second, thank you. That was councilor Ryan for a second. Colleagues, is there any discussion on this amendment? Councilor Kanal.
54 Yeah, I'm going to end up supporting this for the reasons you gave. Madam president, I think it's worth noting that if and when we do have this item come back, one of the things that caused us to get to this place is that we were given less notice by staff than would have been ideal to ensure that we could have gotten this considered in time. So I would love to get to a place when the next time we are discussing something like this. It's not an emergency because this is an emergency, not in the sense of a flood is an emergency. This is an emergency in the sense that we don't have enough time to prevent putting portlanders at risk. It's still suitable for the clause, but I think it's worth noting that and working towards the sort of preventable emergency being prevented in the future. Thank you.
55 Thank you councilor. And I continue to try to back up the amount of back up from when folks want things past the time when they submit them, so that we can get better and better at that. Councilor Smith.
56 Thank you, madam president. Just so that I'm clear on this, was there a deadline that was running out is the reason why we're doing this now, or do we have to update this every so many years?
57 Patricia, do you mind coming back up and filling in some of the details here for us? Councilor we have staff joining us at the table. To answer your question more thoroughly than I can.
58 Sure.
59 Okay. Thank you.
60 Again for the record, patricia diefenderfer, this is a deadline that was imposed as a result of these interim regulations. The city being informed of the need to update to be compliant with these interim regulations. So July 31st, 2025 is the deadline for that. This is not a there's not a periodic deadline that we have to every so often we adopt these things. This is in response to the current situation of having these these interim requirements being required by the federal government.
61 And so patricia, when did we get those deadlines? When did we get the notice that we need to update this?
62 Sure. We can give you a timeline. So July of last year was when the city received a letter from FEMA saying that by by December of this of last year, the city had to notify FEMA of its approach. The approach, as you've noted, I think you've seen in the materials that there were three different approaches. So it was by December that the city had to let the federal government know which approach we were going to take. And then from that time. So from December until now, the city has been working on the regulations in the city, the bureau, the permitting bureau, published a draft of those regulations in March of this year. And they were they were up for public comment for about three or so weeks. And then we began the legislative process to bring them to council. So it was a very expedited timeline, really, for this kind of project.
63 Excellent, excellent. I was trying to figure out the nexus between why this was an emergency and was this a normal timeline every four years or something like that? But I appreciate your explanation and thank you so much.
64 Thank you.
65 Colleagues, is there any other discussion to the amendment? Okay. Seeing none keelan could you please call the roll?
66 Koyama Lane I.
67 Maria.
68 Hi, Novick.
69 I mean.
70 Hi, Zimmerman.
71 Hi.
72 Avalos.
73 Hi, Smith.
74 Hi.
75 Canal.
76 Hi, Ryan.
77 I pirtle-guiney. I with ten yes votes. The amendment is approved.
78 Thank you. Colleagues.
79 We now have the amended ordinance before us as an emergency ordinance. Is there any discussion to the ordinance? Councilor. No. And, colleagues, I'll remind you that we are working on doing our comments during discussion and not with our votes. Councilor Green, go right ahead.
80 Yeah. I just want to say that I'm going to support this today because because of the timeline requirements that we have and it's unfair to homeowners to sort of hold them hostage when it comes to insurance products. As we kind of work through. Perfecting our approach to this. Right. And. We have an obligation to both be a good steward of our watersheds while also, you know, being good fiscal stewards. So I'm going to support it for that reason. I also that's the reason I supported your amendment, is because I think I did not support a sunset clause, but the sort of suggestion that this is temporary because we are committing to do more work on this got me to that place. So I appreciate all the work that counsel my fellow colleagues have have done on this to get us to this point, as well as the advocates and stakeholders in this process. So that's that's why I'm going to support this ultimately.
81 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Ryan.
82 Yes, thank you, madam president. Actually, I want to acknowledge you for your leadership. I was a no in the committee. I thought that we did need to have more dialog. And I think that we bought ourselves some diplomatic time here, and we're making this land in a way that I think keeps us all at the table. We all know that our working waterfront is a part of portland's history and needs to be a part of our story going forward. Those are some of our best jobs we have in this city, and I think that to councilor Green's comments, we are giving ourselves still guidelines and commitments. And so it's not running away from this, but it's in we're doing our work to bring everyone to the table, the stakeholders, so we can keep working this out. So I thank everyone for your time. There's been quite a few meetings on this topic and I just want to call that out. So thank you so much for your leadership and I will be supporting this. Thanks.
83 Thank you councilor. Councilor Avalos.
84 Yeah I wanted to say thank you to staff and advocates again for their extensive work on all of this, and in particular, councilor Morillo, you really did a lot of work ahead of bringing it to the committee to ensure that we were navigating all of the legal and technical complexities of the FEMA compliance and the protections and local implementation. As I said during the committee, this package doesn't resolve every concern that's been raised, especially around long term habitat protection and development limitations. But it is a necessary and time sensitive step that we need to do to keep Portland eligible for the flood insurance and disaster relief. I think that the city has been really proactive in working to comply with the buy off, and we can't really rely on congressional intervention for further delays in this implementation. I do appreciate that it's an interim measure, and I'm encouraged by the city's commitment to reengage after fema's nepa process is complete in 2026. But I'll definitely be watching very closely to ensure that our long term plan meaningfully strengthens habitat protections and is centering the community in particular and environmental resilience. So thanks all for your hard work. I'm excited to be voting I for this.
85 Thank you councilor. Colleagues, I am in the queue simply because I wanted to acknowledge the work that our colleague, councilor Morillo, did on this. When this first came to committee, there were a number of amendments proposed, some of them a bit at the last minute, and councilor Morillo was presiding over that meeting and was able to take the time to hear from everybody, but also give councilors the time to consider all of those amendments by making sure to delay to another meeting, and then really working to put those together in a cohesive package. And I appreciate all the time that you put into that. Thank you. Councilor Novick.
86 I just wanted to say that I appreciate councilor Rios work, the council president's work, the work of all the advocates. And a special thanks to patricia diefenderfer for all her work and patiently answering all of our questions over the last couple of months.
87 Councilor zimmermann.
88 Thanks. Similarly, I did appreciate the one on one brief that I got with the staff from a couple of the departments being able to go through the, you know, sometimes the deep dive or trying to understand where, you know, just as the amendment earlier, what words have impact and what words signal intent. And I, I, I don't think we always are able to navigate, no pun intended, navigate these waters. So as adeptly as well as as this team did. And I just I'm appreciative of them. And they were able to belay some of my concerns that had come up. So appreciation there. And thank you for bringing those amendments as well, madam president. Thanks all.
89 Thank you. Councilor, councilor Canal.
90 Yeah, thank you, madam president. Thank you to all the same folks here. Councilor Morillo, council president, staff, I appreciate the time the environmental environmental advocates took with my team and I, as well as with working waterfront coalition. There's some things in here that I think are imperfect, and I think those who are in the room on the navigation of the finding compromise did a very good job there. I personally don't have a problem with sunset clauses, for example. I think they are often an appropriate use. If they're not necessary here based on the compromise, then so be it. I'm not advocating it here, but I think there are some things that could probably have been better, and I look forward to revisiting those starting with the same three groups I just mentioned of our staff, industry and the environmental advocates. Over the course of time. I wanted to speak mostly to say that with time, consensus is possible, and when we rush things, we often don't have the ability to get there. And so I hope that this process can can build that in, and not just with these three groups, but the tribes and a whole lot of other folks that are involved as well. Thank you.
91 Thank you. Councilor.
92 Councilors, are there any other comments or questions to the amended emergency ordinance? Okay. And I will just note that I got a lot of thank you there. But that really is shared with my team and emily on my staff, who does policy work, who has been in communication with both city staff and the advocates over the last couple of weeks to help make this happen. Keelan could you please call the roll.
93 Koyama Lane I.
94 Maria well, I got to add a shout out to susie doister, my policy advisor as well, I vote I.
95 Novick I.
96 Green.
97 Zimmerman.
98 Yes.
99 Avalos I.
100 Dunphy oh sorry. Smith. Hi canal. I zion. I pirtle-guiney. I with ten yes votes. The ordinance is passed as amended.
101 Thank you colleagues. Keelan. Could you please.
102 Read our next agenda item.
103 Item 21 grant a cable franchise agreement to comcast of Oregon to continue access to the right of way and operate a cable system for a period of ten years.
104 Thank you. And colleagues. This is a second reading. Is there any further discussion before we move to a vote? Okay. Seeing none keelan o councilor Green.
105 Yeah, I just want to say on the record that, you know, when we considered this, I thought, I think the staff did a really good job at walking the committee through what it means to grant this kind of a franchise agreement to comcast and how that interacts with. The cable. Mhc. But I also want to note that this does not preclude the city of Portland from pursuing a municipal broadband system in the future. So I know that's that's something that my colleagues value as well. And I want to I just want to throw that out there.
106 Thank you, councilor Councilor Kanal.
107 Yeah, I think it's possible dc olivera stepped out of the room, but the question I was going to ask is exactly that about whether or not there was oh, there you are. Sorry. And just to get that on the record, if I have just this one question in the comment, does anything in this document limit the city's ability to explore municipal internet in any way?
108 Thank you for the question. Councilor daniel oliveras. For the record, no.
109 Great. Thank you. That is my has been my only hesitation and I appreciate this. I think it's important that we talk about places where the public sector can be a part of solutions to some of the issues that that portlanders face. Reliability, as has usually been a good thing here. But affordability and access is always a concern. And so I think that as we're talking about potential long term plans, publicly owned broadband is something that I would like to explore. And it's with a ten year franchise agreement, a hesitation I had. And I appreciate councilor Green as well as dcca answering the question. So I will end up voting yes on this.
110 Colleagues, is there any other discussion before we move to a vote? Okay. Thank you both. Keelan could you please call the roll.
111 Koyama Lane I Morillo. I Novick. I Green. I. Zimmerman I. Avalos I Smith.
112 Councilor Smith.
113 I thank you sorry.
114 I was on mute.
115 Thank you.
116 Canal I.
117 Pirtle-guiney I.
118 The ordinance passes with ten yes votes.
119 Thank you colleagues keelan. Could you please read our last agenda item. Item 22 amend council organization and procedure code to include council rule on tiebreaking.
120 Thank you and colleagues. This is a first reading of an ordinance. So we won't be taking a vote today. But it is our time for discussion and any changes. We have a committee staff summary from ashley hernandez. Go right ahead, ashley.
121 Madam president, councilors. For the record, my name is ashley hernandez. I serve as a staffer for the governance committee. The ordinance document 2020 5-1686 was considered at the governance committee on may 5th, where it was referred and referred as amended to full council with the recommendation that it passed the ordinance. Amend city code 3.02.030, providing guidelines for the mayor's tiebreaking vote. The American cast a tie breaking vote in the council. In the council is evenly split on on a non emergency ordinance or procedural matter, and if the mayor cannot vote, the motion fails for tie determination advances, absences and vacancies are counted as a no vote. The committee adopted amendments by moving the item to full committee to full council. The amendments are on the original are on the original resolution draft. Summarizing the in the committee staff summary, one person testified during the committee meeting on may 5th, and three people submitted written testimony. Prior committee action. The testimony focused on in defining what constitutes a thai language, consistency between coding and charter, impact on absences on the vote. On the vote count significantly influences the passage of legislation. This concludes the staff summary. Thank you.
122 Thank you very much. Ashley. Vice president, Koyama Lane. You were both the presiding officer and the carrier here. Would you like to provide any additional context or information about the background?
123 Sure. Thank you, madam president. So, colleagues, this came to governance on may 5th. We discussed this ordinance that was drafted in consultation with city attorney robert taylor, to address the issue of council tie breaking when, the when and how the mayor steps in to break a tie. And as we all know, this has come up several times in our meetings with conflicting interpretations, interpretations of the language in charter and code. So this was brought forward with the intention of not changing, but rather clarifying the process. And that is what we hope to be accomplished with what we bring to you today. Today is time for us to discuss this. As you can see from the strikethrough underlying version of exhibit a attached that documents the governance committee's adopted amendments. That the language was really pared down by the committee in hopes of getting to a place of clarity. I really look forward to hearing what you all think and love. I'm excited to hear all the different interpretations.
124 Thank you councilor. Are there any technical questions or proposed amendments that we should put on the record before we make a call for public testimony? Councilor Avalos.
125 Yes, I have a proposed amendment. It has been posted, so it's on the website for folks to follow along. So I'll say what the amendment is and then I'll explain it. So under j three a essentially I'm adding in here in determining if a tie exists. So changing the language if a vote is a tie making it tie exists. And then essentially it only had one section under a. So I'm adding b which says council must vote 6 to 6 in at least two subsequent rounds. Subsequent rounds would not require a motion to reconsider. So the logic for this is, first and foremost, voters were very clear when they passed charter reform that they were fed up with the old system. And my amendment is about making sure that the legislative responsibilities stay within the city council. There are going to be ties. That's just simple math with a 12 member council. And as I have shared in the past, I'll just give a little bit of background to say that, you know, when the decision to have 12 members was come up, it was the fact that it was an even number really wasn't as important to us as it was to achieve proportional ranked choice voting and multi member representation. So I could go on another tangent about that. Happy to share the history with other folks about that. But I think it's important to say, because I know that there's been folks that felt that, you know, we put ourselves in this hard bind. And sure, it's tricky when you have a 12 or an even numbered body, but there were things that were more important. On that note, then we decided to add a mayor tie breaking to make up for the fact that one we had a tie council, and two that the mayor did not have a veto. All that being said, I believe that policy differences should be resolved between councilors. I don't think that we should be relying on the mayor to settle debates. So what my amendment is doing is just ensuring that we have the opportunity as a council to debate our differences and be able to essentially have three chances to resolve that. I know that there have been times so far that, you know, it ends up in a tie, and I know I look around the room and people are like, well, you know, if I would have had an opportunity to keep talking it out, maybe I could have gotten to another place. I just think this is an opportunity for us to ensure that the legislative decisions stay within our body, and that a mayor tie is an absolute last resort. So that's my amendment. I guess I need a second for that. And then. Yeah.
126 Second.
127 Thank you. Councilors. Councilor Green is your do you have a technical question or an amendment?
128 It's a technical, logical question for councilor Avalos amendment. It can also wait until after testimony.
129 But let me pause and see if we have testimony.
130 No one signed up.
131 Okay. Perfect. Then let's move straight into our discussion. Ashley, I think we're okay. Thank you so much. Go right ahead, councilor Green.
132 Thank you, madam president. Thank you for introducing this. Councilor Avalos. I just want to make sure I understand the kind of conditional logic that's in this amendment. So section j is about clarifying the conditions in which it's appropriate for the mayor to make a tie breaking vote. And your what you're doing here is you're amending section three, which is really trying to get a defining when the tie exists, when the condition of the tie exists, and that we're not counting absences and abstentions or those are no votes. But what you're basically saying is your you're saying we're going to give ourselves at least two rounds before we do that final math on what those what those tie condition votes could be. But then I guess my question is on the third round, are we then saying if we're still stuck, the mayor casts the deciding vote? Can you clarify that?
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133 Yes.
134 Yeah. So it would, you know, anything that would follow after that third round would just continue in whatever the code says that we would do in a tie. So this is just adding a provision to give us the opportunity to debate it before it gets to that point. So I'm not anything left in the rest of the code is as as is.
135 Okay, I think I understand that. Thank you.
136 Councilor Kanal. Oh, I'm sorry, councilor Smith.
137 Thank you. Thank you, madam president. I think that this amendment again, it's administrative overreach. It is changing the process of charter review. It is not doing what the charter review put forward. And I think that. Not only this amendment and others and the entire amendment, it is it is out of order. And it's something that we really need to take a look at, because I believe that we're going to get sued for not following the charter and trying to put something in code to replace charter if we want to make these kinds of changes. These are the kind of changes that we should make during charter review. And that happens every ten years. So I think that this is a moot point. I think we should have had more conversation from other legal counsel. I appreciate our legal counsel, but I just disagree with his interpretation. And so now we're trying to interpret and modify his interpretation of what our charter says in all of it is totally wrong. It it doesn't pass the smell test. And so we're taking the job, we're doing the job of the charter review by trying to put something in code and adding amendments like this amendment, which is totally out of order. And if and I'm glad for the first time, I this is the first time that I've heard a reason why the plain one sentence was put in was because vetoes were taking out of the out of the mayor's hands. And this was, this was a way to give some, some people on the charter review some, some kind of comfort that the mayor will have some sort of power. And it didn't identify any of these things. And if we wanted that, that's where we should have put it. I'm just afraid that we're going to somebody's going to take us to court, and we're going to spend more money out of the risk fund. And we're, we're we're taking away the power of the charter review committee. If we put this in order. Thank you.
138 Thank you, councilor, councilor Canal.
139 Thank you, madam president. Thank you to councilor Avalos for putting this forward. I have three broad concerns with the document. This is an attempt to resolve one of them, which is the whether or not on the very first time we cast a ballot or cast a vote, I should say as councilors, that should it result in a six, six or I guess six, five, six, four, six, three, etcetera. Whether or not we immediately are going and talking to the mayor or whether or not we have the opportunity to discuss it, and I think it is appropriate to do so. I seconded, for the purposes of discussion, I have a couple wording questions as well, and I would like to ask about it. So subsequent rounds to me implies that we're talking about three total rounds and that on the fourth or sorry, on the on the third round, we would be asking the mayor for a tiebreak before concluding that third round. Is that correct, councilor Avalos?
140 I'm processing your question. So you're saying by the third round, if it is still a tie, then yes, we would ask the mayor to intervene. Yes.
141 Okay. And that subsequent.
142 So real quick and then like, just like councilor Green was asking me, it would just follow the rest of the code.
143 Got it. There is no. So there I have two, two questions here. One is I don't believe there is any code that that would answer the my next question, which is would we have the opportunity to debate again between the first and second or second and third rounds? And I, I believe that we should have that opportunity to do so, because the only chance we've had to do this was the council president vote, which tied, I believe we're on the ninth round or something like that, ninth or 10th. Before there was a definitive outcome. And I think that the conversations we had between those were in fact helpful. So I would like to see that. And I don't believe that exists anywhere else in code. So I think it would need to exist here.
144 Could I.
145 Could we get.
146 A legal opinion on the interpretation of this? I think that might help answer the question that you're getting at. Councilor Kanal.
147 Thanks. And then the only while city attorney, taylor or representative would come.
148 Up or robert, I don't know which of you would like to address this.
149 While you're coming up. I'll ask the other question, too, which is sort of rhetorical, but might be helpful, I think, in the amendment in the committee removed the idea of having I think it was four total votes at that point, up to three additional times. This would have it be three total times. I'm not sure what that optimal number is for me. I think it's two would be sufficient to total, but I don't know if there's any legal implication that. So I figured I'd float it before you answered.
150 I think, mr. Taylor, that's two questions. The first is, if we were to pass this amendment as presented by councilor Avalos, would you interpret this as either allowing or requiring either one additional debate between voting rounds? And then also, do you have any thoughts on the correct number, the optimal number of rounds of voting, is that correct, councilor.
151 Yes.
152 Thank you. For the record, robert taylor, city attorney. I, I don't have any real opinion on the correct number of rounds, whether it's just you do one round and if it's six six, the American break a tie. If you do a try it again or try it a third or fourth time, the main issue that that that we have identified with having subsequent rounds of voting is normally if the first vote fails, you would have to have a motion to reconsider, go through that procedure. There's consequences if a motion to reconsider fails. If that happens, the item is procedurally extinguished. So that's why you'll see in councilor Avalos amendment this concept that subsequent rounds would not require the motion to reconsider. So that would allow you to just proceed to another round of voting on this question of whether you would be allowed to engage in debate or prohibited from engaging in debate in that second round. If I was asked to interpret this language, I would say that once you are engaged in the second round, it is just back before the body, as if there had been a successful motion to reconsider. It's just right back before you. You can engage in debate, you can amend it, you can refer it back to committee. All of those things are available to you. That's my interpretation of the words. If you want to make that clearer, you could certainly add language to this to make that clear.
153 Thank you. I think that resolves that that concern and I appreciate it. I it could be clearer, but I think having your interpretation on the record is sufficient for my concern. The only thing I would suggest then is I would say up to instead of at least. And I would ask councilor Avalos if we could consider that friendly.
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154 Absolutely.
155 Yeah.
156 Thank you. And while my preference is still if I was picking how I would write it, I would probably just say, let's do it one more time. So a total of two instead of a total of up to three. But I, I think it's important that we have this option and the exact number is less relevant to me, so I will leave it there.
157 Thank you. Councilor. Mr. Taylor, you're up here and I have the next question. And conveniently, it's a question for the attorneys. And perhaps if we're going to further debate between voting rounds, that shows the difference. But I guess I'm wondering about the necessity of this, given that anybody can change their vote at any time. And I, I don't know if from a legal perspective, there is a difference in terms of how we operate between specifically saying you're going to have another round of votes as opposed to just the allowance within robert's rules and the rules that we operate under, that if something should fail, somebody could choose to change their vote in order to take care of the work amongst councilors.
158 Great question. So the under robert's rules, anybody can change their vote at any time before the vote is announced. Once the vote has been announced under robert's rules, it would require unanimous consent to change your vote. So. I, I can imagine a scenario where it would be tricky to get unanimous consent to change a vote if you're tied 6 to 6, the result has been announced, and then somebody wants to change. You're now relying on all of your other colleagues to agree. We you know, if there is an objection, I think there would be a way to suspend that rule in robert's to allow someone to change their vote afterwards. But even that suspension of the rules would require nine votes. So you just have to think about a situation where you are in a difficult policy debate. You're tied 6 to 6. The vote has been announced whether you can achieve unanimous consent or nine votes to allow someone to change their vote.
159 Thank you. That's helpful. Colleagues, I'm considering what I want to do here. And one of the things that was weighing on me was whether this was really necessary or not. I am compelled by the idea that there would be an option for debate. And I understand the difficulty in overcoming the barriers to change a vote. I do wish that it was just one additional round as opposed to multiple additional rounds. I think you take the time to go back to debate and you see if anything changes or not, and then you move forward. And the balance of making sure that we're doing good work and trying to come to consensus, but also making sure we have time for whatever the next work is, strikes me as appropriate. At one additional round, I'll continue to listen to the rest of your comments and think about where I want to go here, councilor Avalos.
160 Yeah, to that last point that robert taylor spoke to, that's exactly it. Like, yes, there are technically ways within robert's rules that you could reconsider and all of that. My point here is to bake in an opportunity for discussion that isn't dependent on having quick robert's rules reactions and savvy. And I think ultimately the goal here is, again, to ensure that we as a legislative body can retain our authority. And we're not, you know, running quickly after every decision to have the mayor weigh in. I'll just say to, you know, code things that go in charter always require accompanying code. So this is not out of the ordinary. We do it for literally everything else. And the whole point of charter is to give you the foundation. And it's our job as leaders to define that. And, and, you know, with the help of our lawyers and the code to add clarity. And that's essentially what I'm trying to do here. Ultimately, as I've stated previously, and I think the rest of the way that the resolution is written, like, you know, I went and spoke to the governance committee, I had a lot of thoughts and ideas about how we could write the language to ensure that, again, we are preserving the council's ability to an authority to make decisions. I think the way that the other parts of this resolution landed are satisfying to me in in doing that, this is just the last piece that I feel should be baked in to again assure that we can retain our authority. So that's my logic for it. Thanks.
161 Thank you, councilor, councilor Green. Oh, I'm sorry colleagues, I wasn't looking at the list of folks who have already spoken, and we have a lot more people signed up. I should have gone to them before councilors Avalos and Green spoke again. Councilor Green, do you mind if I move on to our colleagues and come back to you? Thank you, councilor Zimmermann.
162 Thank you. I was wondering, I have a question. Was, was this aspect of and I'm speaking purely to the amendment right now, was this included or discussed at all when it came up at governance? And I'd be curious if. Well, I'll just did it. Did it was it proposed or did this come up specifically at governance? And then clearly it didn't make it through governance, but did it even come up?
163 Vice president Koyama Lane, would you like to speak to that?
164 Yes. Thanks for the question, councilor Zimmermann. If you look at exhibit a, the one with the strikethrough underlining that version, you'll see that there's a whole whole section in number two that was voted 4 to 1. I was the only one that voted not to cross all of that out. So that was really taken from attorney taylor's recommendation of his his interpretation of is that correct? Mr. Taylor? His interpretation of what we should be doing, and that is what council president, that's what we have been using thus far, is his interpretation. Where it landed. I'm not sure if this is clear for everyone. It is if we have a66 vote and we look right over there, which is happening right now in a council meeting, and mr. Mayor is not here, the vote fails. It's done. We don't come back to it. So I think the question is are you okay with that or would you like a chance to try talking it out and voting again, or would we like to have it in code that this is bumped to another meeting that he can come to. So quite a lot was struck from this. And if someone else on governance, I have a couple colleagues up here want to talk about some of their thought process. That would be great.
165 I want to interrupt a little bit, councilor. I am taking I'm taking your answer just to the specificity of councilor Avalos specific amendment. It doesn't look like the at least two times before we go into the. Doesn't look like that was part of the discussion at governance that that's my that was my first question. I want to make sure I'm not.
166 That I mean.
167 That's not true because I did bring I gave like a whole document with a whole bunch of information. It had this in it. So I definitely brought it to governance a couple times.
168 And did.
169 Did it receive a vote?
170 It wasn't a votable thing. It was like a just a concept that I brought to them and asked them to take it up as the governance committee, since I'm not on it. And then they didn't take this thing up on they didn't take this thing up, which is why I'm bringing it here as an amendment.
171 Councilor zimmermann, can I respond? The it was in the ordinance that mr. Taylor drafted. Part of that was it says here the council may vote again on passed final passage up to three additional times. So in that sense we did discuss it. It was part of the original ordinance. Does that clarify?
172 That's really helpful. Both both of you, I appreciate it. I think this is a great conversation. Councilor canal asked some other questions that I would have, and my interpretation was that of course we would have debate after after each time. And so that's where if this was to pass, that's how I would interpret it. I, I. To the amendment specifically, I am cautious about giving this council another reason to go quote unquote, another round. I don't know that we have been particularly quiet on anything. And so this idea that more debate has to happen is not compelling for me yet, that I think the power of a tie breaking vote is important. And this seems like it is an additional procedure to delay in order to just continue to talk about a thing. And so I, I don't love, love this because I do think if something does get reconsidered, of course it gets continued debate. So on the amendment, I am not going to support it. I appreciate very clear rules, and I think that this is a less clear rule. So I appreciate the debate. And also thank you for the history. Just kind of how the documents changed. Councilor Koyama Lane. And I'll leave, I'll, I'll leave my comments there for at least to the amendment. Before we go on to the rest of the document. Thank you.
173 Councilor Ryan.
174 Yes.
175 Thank you, council president. This meeting may 5th seems like it was even longer. It seems like it was like four months ago at least. And so just know that we're those of us on the committee are trying to remember. I want to also acknowledge that I was kind of a pest to the council president wanting to bring this earlier, and I think because it was so fresh at the time, we actually took a lot of different opinions on this. Councilor smith's point of view is one that I'm really close to. I think that when I talk to voters, many had reservations about not having the veto since most democratic governance institutions have that checks and balance. And the one thing that got them there was the mayor's ability to break ties. So I think when I when I came on board, I assumed for everything that there was a tie, the mayor would break that tie. I have been listening to my colleagues and appreciating the dialog we've had about this. I thought we came to a really good compromise with where we landed with this legislation. We think that with ordinances especially, and also with the land use, that those are issues that are in code that oftentimes have some urgency to them. And we also know that it is legislators opportunity to connect with the third floor of the mayor's office. When those votes are coming up, I think it will be very easy to accommodate the mayor being at our meetings. I don't think portlanders wanted the mayor to be isolated from the big issues facing our city. And I actually think we got to a really good place. I, I moved from thinking it was going to be for all amendments, for resolutions, reports, anything and it it we got it very clean and the or the. I'll just tell you the many conversations on this with resolutions. It was like why would the mayor weigh in on something we're advising the mayor and enterprise to do? And so that's our job to do the follow up and do the oversight. But it made it really clear that we should just stay focused on these two. So I'm, I'm I understand the spirit behind the amendment because we discussed it at length. But I will be voting no on that. And I am supportive of this, I think very clear package that I think voters have been asking for. Thanks.
176 Thank you. Councilor, councilor Novick.
177 Okay, this is going to sound rather frivolous, but I kind of like the idea of a system where we have to keep on our toes, and we were watching to see if it's a66 vote. And do we have to? Well, maybe we could ask the clerk to pause for 30s before announcing the results of a66 vote to give people a chance to change their vote if they want to. I kind of like the idea of having to, the mayor having to know in advance whether he should show up because it might be a66 vote. I confess that my views might be influenced by the fact that, as a baseball fan, I hate the designated hitter, and I love the strategy that we used to have and the idea of the double switch and all of those things. So I kind of like having a system where we all have to, you know, be on our, you know, be on our toes and react appropriately. So I think it would oppose the would oppose the amendment.
178 Thank you, councilor, councilor Green.
179 Thank you, madam president. So there's two things I want to weigh in on at this point, based upon the way the conversation has evolved. The first was I just wanted to make the point that I think that the charter itself grants the city council both the power. And I would also argue the obligation to make code change updates as is necessary to clarify our rules of procedure. So I don't I don't agree with the point of view that this is an overstep of what the intent of the charter is, because it's written into the charter that indeed city council will adopt its rules of procedure to include how how we do this tie breaking. So I just that to me is crystal clear and I'm not worried about a legal challenge there. But then, you know, some interesting questions have been raised about like the need. And I'm glad the council president raised this on whether or not this provision is necessary. And one of the reasons why I think it is, is because that we do have and this is partly driven by Oregon public meetings law. We do have some information asymmetry. And so if we're going through, and especially if we're in a world where there's 12 of us, we need to limit how much we speak. And I recognize this is my second time in the turn. So there's a little bit of irony here. But in order to go back and forth and have us come to a position of resolution where we do have an even number of people having a built in relief for us to resolve the final vote, and then think about the implications of the vote and think about the fact that the vote did not conclude. And resolve gives us the ability to change, gives us the ability to persuade each other further. So I think this is actually pretty elegant solution to that, that problem. Otherwise. I mean, while I appreciate the baseball analogy here, and I think it's useful to stay on our toes, I think we don't all think in the same way, and we don't all process information in the same way, but we're all very smart and we're all duly elected individuals who are supposed to be bringing forward the values of our constituents and passed serious policy. So I think if we have a good institutional mechanism to say we have a relief, we have an opportunity to resolve this at our level, not without without bringing the mayor into, I think, considerations that really are not final in that regard or not appropriate. This to me seems like something I can definitely support.
180 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Koyama Lane.
181 Okay, so we have I it's helpful for me to separate separate out if we should have multiple times to vote again and if so, how many? I will say I don't feel super strongly. I could be fine with one, two, three or if there there aren't enough people to agree to do it again. I do think if there's a pause, people can change their vote. I do kind of. I like the idea of there being a chance to do it once. So there's some sort of an invitation for us to pause, reflect, maybe talk a bit and reconsider. But I'm not willing to fight for that really hard. What I do care a bit more about, and I am interested in my colleagues. I think councilor Novick kind of likes the excitement that it would bring of looking over in the mayor's not here and maybe having to call him. I yeah, or whoever that mayor is at some point. The big chunk that we cut out about what if the mayor is not there is if the vote on final passage remains inconclusive at the end of the meeting, the matter will be automatically postponed and rescheduled to the next council meeting. When the mayor is able to attend in person or virtually at the rescheduled meeting, the matter will come to council in the same form and posture as it appeared at council immediately before the roll call vote that resulted in the tie. The rescheduled matter before council is subject to procedural motions, including, without limitation, those listed, blah blah blah. Okay, I do not think mayor keith wilson, of course would do this, but what if there is a mayor at some point that hides? Are we going to let them do that? If they don't want to vote on something, then they this is an out. They don't have to. So I think that's the question my gut is now make them vote. Make them make the choice. I that's the one that I feel a little bit more passionate about and that I would be interested in amending to try to get that piece back in if there is interest from others.
182 Thank you, councilor, councilor Morillo.
183 Thank you. I like this amendment. I will say I after hearing everything, I think that it needs to be just one additional round. I don't really see what three additional rounds does for us, because I think it's going to become a pattern of us just going through additional rounds as an, as a check mark that we've gone through them, and only the final round is actually going to matter. So I think that it should just be one additional round. We have quite a lot of meetings. There's quite a lot of debate, and we are struggling to get through our agendas at times. So I, I would feel a little hard pressed to do three rounds of this. I am interested in if the mayor is the tiebreaker. As you know, charter has said that he's going to be if something doesn't pass or is tied and he is unavailable, because I don't think it's realistic that the mayor will be able to attend every single council meeting for the entire duration of the meeting, that at the next council meeting, he is prepared to attend and to break the tie. Because I agree, I think that there are something that I find very frustrating in our legislature and other elected bodies is that people get to evade their votes or not be there for the vote or find ways to get around that. And I think that people, the public deserves to have that transparency around where their elected officials stand, including the mayor. So I would be interested in an amendment bringing that information. But on this particular amendment, I think I would be okay with just one round. Thank you.
Procedural episode · turns 184–192
Parliamentary activity detected in this stretch (see the markers above). An editor-reviewed analysis has not been published for this episode yet.
184 Thank you, councilor Navigating folks who are in the queue for a second time right now. Councilor canal.
185 Thank you, madam president, to respond to both council vice president and councilor Morillo I, I do have concerns about the lack of text that relates to the mayor potentially being absent. I think that's outside the scope of this amendment. So I'm going to talk about that after this. For me. I know it was in the same paragraph previously, so I understand why it was brought up. But for me, I think there's I have three concerns. One is the scope of what just for reference, what the scope of what the mayor can break a tie on, what happens if he's not present or future mayor is not present, and how many rounds, if any. Those are sort of my three concerns, so I'll talk about the other two in a minute here when we're out of the amendment. But I would like to request the I'm going to float an amendment and ask if it would be friendly here, and I'm going to read it out to replace the text that's in b, which currently says council must vote 6 to 6 in up to two subsequent rounds. Subsequent rounds would not require a motion to reconsider. That's where we're at now to council must vote 6 to 6 in two rounds. It does not require a motion to reconsider, to move to the second round, and I'd ask if that would be considered friendly. I am the second or the motion, so I do assent to that. Of course.
186 Councilor Avalos.
187 Yes, yes.
188 Can we have a point of order about the intent of that language and what it means before we understand that?
189 Absolutely, certainly.
190 So. So right now, the original proposed amendment was at least two subsequent rounds, which means it would take three or more votes to where we'd get to the mayor breaking a tie. We changed that to up to two, meaning that if a second vote resolved the issue, we wouldn't need a third, but it could go up to three. This would change it to two. An initial vote, and then if that were to be six votes in favor, then we would effectively go back into discussing it. As our attorney just mentioned, it would be as if it was reconsidered, but without requiring that motion would be debating it. And then if we took a second vote and it should remain six votes in favor at that stage, it would be considered a tie, and the mayor could break the tie in that second round of voting.
191 Councilor Zimmerman, does that clarify for you?
192 So two is the number, but did you also get rid of the word subsequent for a reason?
193 I think subsequent implies relative to the first. And we're talking about two rounds. It just I think second was a clearer word personally, but.
194 Just just clarifying. You are a master of the procedures. So learn to cross check everything.
195 Thanks.
196 Point of privilege.
197 I just wanted to note I'm having some issues with my zoom, and that it keeps lowering my hand when I don't want it to. I'm trying to change the setting, but I noticed that I was in the queue and then it lowered my hand, so I put my hand back up. I'm trying to fix that, but just fyi.
198 And councilor, I didn't hear definitively. Is this a friendly amendment, or is this a proposal that you're rejecting?
199 Friendly.
200 Yeah.
201 Okay. So colleagues, we now have a slightly changed version before us, which would say council must vote 6 to 6 in two rounds. Hold on. I wrote this down in two rounds. It does not require a motion to reconsider to move to the second round. So that is now the motion on the table that folks are speaking to. Councilor Smith, I don't believe you've spoken a second time. Go right ahead.
202 Thank you, madam president. I just want to go back to this policy amendment. For me. It is too complicated and it puts into a lengthy process. The charter also gives the mayor. I want to remind everyone he has been given the mandate to drop resolutions and ordinances in the charter. He is already involved in our policy making. We have been pushing forward his agenda this past seven months. The mayor has approved more policies and appropriations, more than any single councilor. He has also proposed and appropriated more dollars in the 2526 budget than all of us put together. We did not do a wholesale change of his budget. So to suggest and to even say we don't need him in this process, he is so knee deep in this process and putting forward his agenda. We don't have a stamp on this council yet, but this mayor does. If you look at all the resolutions and the ordinances that have passed, you need to go look at that. So all of this is way too complicated and too lengthy. And I'll just say again, I will not be supporting it.
203 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Zimmerman.
204 Thanks. I, I, I guess I would encourage us that, you know, if something fails, nothing precludes a team or a sponsor from taking it back behind closed doors or back in their committee and working some things to then find a more palatable solution. And this idea that once something ties, that it's dead forever, I think is, you know, for a long time, government has brought things back once it gets workable. And once a sponsor thinks that there's a second chance at it. So I am not I'm not very sympathetic to this idea that we've got to govern to the lowest common denominator for slowness or for like, let's just have a longer discussion until we can finally get there. I think there is some importance about when something hits the dais. You have that period of debate, and then there has to be some finality to that. And that finality doesn't mean that something can't come back. But in that moment, it's time you move on. And so I really value that. That's why I think a tiebreaking vote is important to have. I you know, I think that this, this charter has made this situation quite confusing. Right. And I think councilor Koyama Lane brings up a very important point about compelling a mayor to be present to vote or not, because and I appreciate that, councilor, because I do think we need to be crafting this system, not to work for the 13 of us, but to work for the hundreds that come after us, that that people's practices and dodging and things of those natures are real, right? Those are real. But I don't think that this amendment does that. I think this amendment just delays something for the sake of more conversation. And I think the better way to bring something back and be more palatable is okay. You know, you had something die on the on the dais. It didn't quite get passed. Now let's go work it and then bring it back. And I think that's a more deliberate way instead of a in the moment way. And so I, I, I just hope we'll think about that a little bit. And like councilor Kanal, I have some comments about the overall piece, but I'll hold those for now. I think this amendment I'm prepared to vote.
205 Thank you. Councilor, before we move on, I just want to give a warm welcome to our guests who filed in here with us. They are from sokcho korea and are here with eddie morales from Gresham. Sokcho is a sister city of Gresham, our neighbor, just to the east. I know we have your mayor, council president, and council member as well as many other community leaders. We appreciate you being here to visit today and making the jaunt over from Gresham to see our fine city of Portland as well. Thank you for joining us.
206 Thank you.
207 Thank you, colleagues, for that brief pause. Councilor Novick, I believe you have not spoken a second time.
208 Yes. And although I know this is not directly addressed to the amendment, I think that it affects the overall context. I just wanted to say that despite my desire for excitement, I'm compelled by vice president lane's proposal that there should be some procedure that forces the mayor to vote. So if we're going to bring that forward, I would support that.
209 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Ryan.
210 I want to get a second time because I think it's important to remember, like when we're sponsoring, when I'm sponsoring legislation and I know it's going to be a tight vote, I would definitely. And I'm not saying I'm counting them, but you can tell by the dialogs you're having. I know we're all trying to dance around that rule that was passed by the Oregon legislature that said, we still have dialog with one another. And so we have a sense of if it's going to be tight. We also have a sense, therefore, that we want to make sure the mayor would be there. We also have the leverage to pull something back to our offices before the final vote is taken. And so you can that happens all the time. To councilor Zimmermann's point. I feel like we're enabling what we get paid to think, we get paid to make decisions. And when I come to this meeting and I see what's on the agenda, I have to be prepared to vote up or down. And when I'm sponsoring the legislation, it's a deeper dive, and I'm doing the best I can to get a sense of what that is. And it's on me to work with the mayor's office, which I think is important to land that. So I, I'm concerned that we're going if we keep adding more to this, we're going to make it more confusing for portlanders who are trying to track our work. And also it puts us more in alignment with most of the other democracy democratic organizations around the country. And I think that's important as well. So anyway, I'm right now still in favor of the legislation that we brought forward without amendments. Thanks.
211 Thank you, councilor, colleagues, I said earlier that I was still weighing this amendment. And one thing that stands out to me about our process and our rules, that's different from some other places, is the limitations that we have on vote counting. And that means that sometimes we bring things forward, not knowing if we have the support or not. In fact, generally always we bring things forward not fully knowing if we have the support or not. And for that reason, with the change to one one round of reconsideration, if you will, I am compelled to support this, because I think there may be times where we bring something forward thinking the support is there. We learn at the vote that it's not there, and to give ourselves one opportunity to say, does a little bit more debate at the dais allow us to get to a majority, allow us to get closer to something that more of us can agree on, where more portlanders concerns, needs, values are represented is compelling to me. I don't think I could have supported it with multiple additional rounds, but I. I am supportive with this change to one round because of the way that our public meetings laws interact with our ability to do our work and to know exactly what will happen on the dais.
212 That's a clarification question.
213 Absolutely.
214 So thanks for being up here, attorney. If you're the sponsor of the legislation and the vote hasn't been called yet, even after hearing all the votes, you could still pull it back to your office before the vote is announced. Is that correct? No it isn't. Okay, so you'd have to pull it before. Okay. And I get that it's not the usual, but it was five, five people. It's 12. So I get there's more legwork that's involved. There's more hustle. But I still think it's on me to have that gut sense. If I need to pull this back to my office to get more support and more importantly, to improve the legislation, that's the point. And we've seen good examples that we just had a good example of that earlier in this meeting. So I just don't know why we're adding more votes. Personally, I just so I like one extra vote better than two. So thank you to the two colleagues that have proposed that. So I'll stop there. Thanks.
215 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Morillo.
216 I just wanted to clarify, to ask a clarifying question about this. So if this passes with the one additional round and then the policy fails anyway, does that mean that it can't go back to committee for reconsideration at a later point? If the chair is okay with it?
217 I think we should direct this question to the attorneys, mr. Taylor, because the second vote is not technically a reconsideration. It's something different from that. If that second vote failed, would we have the opportunity to reconsider and send back to committee, or would after the second vote, the mayor automatically vote if he were here? And if the mayor weren't here, would we then have additional opportunity to send back to committee?
218 There's a lot there. I would say that the first vote is tied 6 to 6. You would then proceed to the second round of voting without the need of a motion to reconsider if that second vote results in a tie and the mayor is not there to break the tie, then the vote would fail. That failed vote would be subject to a motion to reconsider, according to the normal rules that apply to a motion to reconsider. So that second vote could be reconsidered if council wants to. Once it's reconsidered, you could refer it to a committee. The other option, of course, is just after that first round of voting. Once it's back before you again to debate again, you could refer it to committee. At that point if, let's say, at the at the end of all of that, the second vote is tied six six. The mayor is not there to break a tie. It fails. There's no motion to reconsider. That item would be procedurally extinguished. But somebody could always introduce a new item that's similar and that could go through the normal process. So there's the just because an item is procedurally extinguished at council doesn't mean the idea is extinguished forever.
219 Thank you counselor, does that answer your question?
220 That does. And thank you robert. So much appreciation for you answering all of our questions on the fly.
221 Okay. I councilor Avalos, did you have an additional comment?
222 Yes. Hold on. Let me get my brain together. Well, I think one thing that's important is as it relates to the like, well, you go and workshop it behind the scenes, yada yada conversation we're having. I think the goal here too, is to have. The discussion, the rehashing, I guess, in public. So that's another big part of this for me, especially given the points everyone's making right about our limitations on being able to collaborate ahead of time. I think that just gives us this opportunity in public to do so. Yeah, I had other points, but I can't. My brain hurts. I'll leave it at that.
223 Thank you. Councilor colleagues, seeing no one else in the queue. That's a legacy hand, right? Oh, yeah. Okay. Just checking. Keelan, could you please call the roll on the amendment, which, just to clarify, now reads council must vote 6 to 6 in two rounds. It does not require a motion to reconsider to move to the second round.
224 Koyama Lane I.
225 Morillo I.
226 Novick. No Green. I Zimmerman.
227 No. Avalos I.
228 Smith. No.
229 Canal I Ryan.
230 No.
231 Pirtle-guiney I.
232 The amendment fails with six yes votes and four no votes.
233 Thank you. Keelan. Colleagues. We are now back to the original ordinance. Is there any other discussion on the ordinance? Councilor Koyama Lane.
234 Yes, with some encouragement from some of my colleagues, I moved to consider. Is that right?
235 Are you moving to propose an amendment?
236 I moved to.
237 Proposing an.
238 Amendment proposing an amendment to add the language back into two from. If the vote on final passage remains inconclusive all the way to the end there, from the strike through version, it is the language that outlines. How we invite how we have the mayor come back and break a tie and makes it so no mayor can hide and not vote.
239 Second.
240 So crossing out, eliminating those first two sentences, and starting at. If the vote on final passage remains inconclusive all the way to the end, does that make sense?
241 So we are going back to. The original language. We're not making the other changes. We're not taking out vote fails. And number three, but we're going back to the language that was removed from the original two in your proposal. Okay. Which has been seconded by councilor Novick councilor Zimmerman.
242 Thanks. Well, councilor Koyama Lane, I appreciate the effort. This is not the method in which I would support this. I, I think that it needs to be much more clear a single sentence. I. So when I signal my support in my comments on the last amendment, I certainly was not signaling that I thought number two needed to all be brought back. In fact, my comments on the overall when we got to the overall ordinance today, I was going to appreciate that the committee had actually struck paragraph number two and made it a single sentence with a period at the end. To be quite clear, I think these have to be clear, and I think we can I think we can achieve the mayoral question more clearly than what's being proposed. So I am not going to support this today as it's currently put. And I would appreciate after this, passing it and having a more in-depth conversation, because I do think there are very important. I would like some opinions, frankly, from community and thoughts about compelling another elected and how what mechanisms we have to make sure that, you know, dodging a vote doesn't happen. I don't feel like I've got enough to even if we rewrote it here in the moment, to be able to do that responsibly. And so thank you for the effort, but I will not be supporting this. Thank you.
243 Thank you. Council president, director spohn, I appreciate that. And if this doesn't pass, I would be interested in looking to see if there's something brief, more brief that you would feel comfortable with. And no worries. I was signaling that councilor Novick suggested that he would support, so I wasn't expecting. But I would always appreciate your support.
244 Councilor Kanal.
245 Thank you, madam president. Thank you, madam vice president, for introducing this. I think I am similar in assessment to councilor Zimmerman in that I also think the problem assessment here is correct, and I'm not sure about the particular solution. I think it might be workshop able. I this is one of the three problems that I identified with this document, and I just want to quickly read a couple portions here of charter section two 401, which begins, the mayor has the following responsibilities. And I want to emphasize responsibilities. Advance the city's core values of racism, equity, transparency, collaboration, communication and fiscal responsibility. That, to me does not imply an option. I think we would all interpret that to mean that the mayor must do these things. Second, advance the city's efforts to mitigate the human made climate crisis and prioritize environmental justice initiatives. Exercise a careful supervision over the general affairs of the city. These are, abcde says, introduce such matters as the mayor deems necessary. It has that that clause in there to say the mayor could, if he chooses, as the mayor deems necessary. And then we get to e! Again. Mayor has the following responsibilities e is vote on matters before the council in case of a tie when the mayor casts the deciding vote. So for whatever we determine, the scope of this is and whatever we determine constitutes a tie in that scenario, the mayor has the responsibility to do it. I agree with the council vice president that I'm not particularly concerned about this. In the context of mayor keith wilson. I am concerned, as councilor Zimmerman pointed out, that we are trying to do something for the future. And so I do want to find a way to solve this. I understand that the mayor may be absent, so I do I do see a tension there, the same way that any of us might be absent. Right? We also have a responsibility, but nobody's interpreting that to mean you can't use the restroom. If you might miss a vote or you can't have a crisis or something in your personal life, and you might need to be absent. So I do think that we have to resolve this, and it will be a requirement for me to feel that this code change would be in line with the charter, that this be resolved for me to vote on the underlying ordinance. In terms of the particulars of this text, I also would like something shorter. I don't really know what it is. I think the governance committees. Solution was clear, but I think fails to recognize that the mayor at some point does need to be able to be reached and brought into the conversation. If that requires a will, we'll revisit. We'll consider it unresolved until the next meeting of the council. That's an option. And it would require, I think, one sentence to say that I don't have the text yet, so I just wanted to flag that. Thank you.
246 Thank you, councilor, councilor Morillo.
247 Yeah, I think that this can be done in one sentence. I would also encourage my colleagues that if they like an idea, but they don't like how it's written to propose a written version that would make you happy. I think that would be good collaborative spirit. I would say that we could add one sentence, and I'm sure legal will check me on this. That just says the mayor is required to attend the following council meeting, where the policy will be reintroduced to full council to cast the tie breaking vote. Can it be that simple or is that.
248 Mr. Taylor? I want to let you respond. I also know we need to just flag for folks where we are in the language, because I think not everybody caught where we were headed. If you look in the materials that are posted, there are a few. I'm pulling up the exact piece here. There are a few different. Amendment versions listed, and if you click on the strikethrough underline version, this shows the changes from in committee. If you look down to paragraph two, there is a significant amount of text crossed out in red. And the amendment before us is to add that text back in. So I just want to note that. Mr. Taylor, the question before us was whether the sentence could be added, that the mayor must attend the next meeting. And I don't know what we do there. If the mayor is on an extended vacation in the hospital, has some conflict, and isn't able to attend, but I'd be curious to hear the response and linly did you have a comment before?
249 Robert answers that. I just want to make sure I'm clarifying that with the strikethrough. The proposed amendment removes the language that's currently in blue that says vote fails and then adds the red back in in number two, because otherwise.
250 It keeps the clarity. The vote fails, but then adds back in the vote. Starting from where okay, where the vote on final passage and we would say fails as opposed to is inconclusive.
251 So it removes result of the tied vote is deemed inconclusive.
252 I believe so councilor Koyama Lane. Is that correct?
253 Can you repeat that?
254 Are you returning to the original language without vote fails, or are you keeping the clarity of the vote fails and then picking back up at where the vote on final passage instead of is inconclusive? It would say fails. The council may vote again.
255 I'm picking back up right here if the vote on final passage.
256 Okay, so we're actually skipping linly two sentences. So if the mayor is unavailable either in person or virtually, to cast the tie breaking vote on final passage during the meeting, the vote fails. Skip two sentences. If the vote on final passage, we're going to say fails at the end of the meeting, the matter will be automatically postponed and rescheduled to the next council meeting. When the mayor is able to attend in person or virtually at the rescheduled meeting, and then continuing on to the end of the paragraph. Is that correct?
257 Yes. I would also be open to just simply saying the vote fails. The mayor shall cast the deciding vote at the next council meeting. They attend or they're present at.
258 Okay. Councilor Morillo.
259 I think it does need to be that simple. I think the only other concern is like in it, in the event of an emergency, like if there's a family crisis, if he's in the hospital, whoever is in that position. But yeah, other than that, I don't think it should be further complicated.
260 May I add something to the conversation? I, I think I think it may be confusing if we say, on the one hand, if the mayor is not available to cast the tie breaking vote, the vote fails, which is conclusive. And then, on the other hand, to talk about what happens if there's an inconclusive vote. So my effort to restate this in a way that gets us to the one sentence principle would be keep the language in j2 and say the result of the vote. Is deemed inconclusive. So say the result of the tied vote is deemed inconclusive. Period. If the vote on final passage remains inconclusive at the end of the meeting, the matter will be automatically postponed and rescheduled to the next council meeting. When the mayor is able to attend in person or virtually. Period. So, so that idea that if it's tied at the end of the meeting, it's inconclusive, it will automatically get rescheduled to the next meeting where the mayor is available.
261 I like that. Okay. Who seconded this originally?
262 Councilor think I did. I like that too. Okay, I second that too.
263 Councilor Morillo did you have anything additional?
264 Cannot be reread.
265 Mr. Taylor, can you reread that, please?
266 Yes. So the full text of j2 would say if the mayor is unavailable either in person or virtually, to cast the tie breaking vote on final passage during the meeting, the result of the tied vote is deemed inconclusive. Period. If the vote on final passage remains inconclusive at the end of the meeting, the matter will be automatically postponed and rescheduled to the next council meeting. When the mayor is able to attend in person or virtually. Period.
267 Councilor.
268 Novick legacy have.
269 Okay colleagues, I have some major concerns with this. I understand that folks are concerned about a mayor dodging a vote. I am concerned about a mayor delaying action, and given that we don't have the ability to compel the mayor to attend our meetings, I fear that we are setting up a situation where we have a piece of legislation that is sitting, waiting for a mayor who may choose to just not come to a meeting for an extended period of time. If something fails, we know what's happened. We can start over. We can continue the work. If something is sent back to committee, we can work amongst ourselves to get to a better place. But if we're truly doing this because we are worried about a mayor dodging a vote, I think we are actually setting up a situation where a mayor can hold something in limbo, which is far worse in my mind than dodging a vote, allowing something to fail, and then giving council the opportunity to start over and do our work. For that reason, I will not be supportive of efforts to delay the opportunity for the mayor to weigh in. Councilor Zimmerman.
270 Thank you. I have some I have some similar thoughts, actually. Council president, I think this this language, while I appreciate its clarity. So that part I am I am good with the clarity on that. But by using the word when he is able to, I agree that we're establishing a way in which the dodging or the delaying, whatever the correct word would be. So I find it very strange that we have a city attorney on the dais, and we're all trying to write very legal language in the moment, and my timbers are not shivered. I am not going to just vote on this. I set it very clear. I would like to work out a legal opinion about the compelling of another elected official to reach the end that we've identified as a need. And so this is the right direction. But I don't think that this amendment should go forward. I think we should pass the original document as is as an incremental. And if this can get further review later, I think that's a more appropriate manner in which to do it. So we understand all of the unintended consequences, which I think this council should be very aware of. Thank you.
271 Thank you, councilor. Councilor canal.
272 Thank you, madam president, with two caveats. I think I agree with everything that councilor Zimmerman just said. My concern remains around the same place of when the mayor is available. I think it would probably be better if we were to do something like this. We would say it happens at the next meeting. If the mayor is not available, it's considered a no vote, just like anyone else's, which we're doing in, I think it's three a absences will be considered, you know, a no vote. So I think that's the appropriate way to do it for, you know, this is only for non-emergency ordinances. So there isn't as big of a time consideration. If we were to do it, I'd prefer to just see it with the next meeting, not the next meeting. When the mayor is available. The two notes I would add is I'm probably going to end up being a no vote on the underlying ordinance. I don't think we should adopt something that is problematic if we believe that, and I currently do, and then revisit it, I think we should just not do it. I want to resolve this issue. This is the one of the three of that I'm looking to get resolved. And then I'd like to see some sort of assessment or maybe like a those like wildfire indicators for when someone's timbers are shivered going forward. The level to which that is true.
273 Thank you.
274 Councilor Green.
275 I see that there are hands up from councilors Novick and Koyama Lane, so I'll hold my conclusive thoughts until they've spoken again. I suspect there's probably further discussion, but I just want to say, whatever we do here, we got to make sure we're not creating opportunities to dodge. So whatever the final rule is, if I can support it, I think we need to call it the randy johnson rule, because you cannot dodge a pitch from randy johnson. Or you could in that 1990s.
276 Thank you for that appropriate era of baseball reference. Given the new folks entering the hall of fame this week. Yes, very tall diamondbacks. And mariners, both councilor Koyama Lane.
277 Thank you for the discussion, everyone. I just want to clarify, this is an ordinance, so it's just a first reading. I do believe that this is part of the work that we're supposed to be talking about this and changing it in real time. We have our our city attorney here also. My vice chair, vice chair Ryan and I have talked about we've been waiting a while for this to come, and we talked about it in governance. I don't believe that we haven't put a lot of thought into it. And I actually appreciate all this conversation because my mind has shifted about some of these things. I appreciate a lot of the comments. I think it is stronger because of these comments, and I am happy with changing the last line to the matter will be automatically postponed and rescheduled to the next council meeting. And we can make amendments in our next council meeting. It will also mean that then we can't pass it without emergency ordinance. And this clarity that we've been wanting for a while will then be pushed out longer. So it's just a choice.
278 Councilor Koyama Lane was that just floating something or are you asking to change the amendment?
279 I'm asking to change the amendment. Is that okay with you, councilor Novick?
280 Yes.
281 So I'm going to try to read this and make sure that we have it right. If the mayor is unavailable, either in person or virtually, to cast the tie breaking vote on final passage during the meeting, the result of the tied vote is deemed inconclusive. If the vote on final passage remains inconclusive at the end of the meeting, the matter will be automatically postponed and rescheduled to the next council meeting.
282 That is correct. I believe that that addresses some of your concern.
283 I believe it creates an inconclusiveness that I'm still not comfortable with, but I can speak to that later. If I haven't used my two turns, I'll have to check and see on my notes. Councilor Novick.
284 I.
285 I was going to let's see. Councilor Koyama Lane do we think that we could. I kind of like the way that councilor Kanal phrased it. Councilor Kanal can you remember what you said about, you know, the next meeting? If the mayor is not there, his vote will be considered a no vote like anybody else's.
286 Yeah, yeah.
287 Go ahead councilor. Thank you.
288 Thank you.
289 What I said is that. If. If the mayor is not so, it happens at the next meeting. Full period. If the mayor is not available or not present, I guess would probably be the better word. His he will be considered. It would be considered a no vote, as in three a, which I believe it. Below it says that absences count as as no vote. So I think instead of we could either reference it or just copy and paste that particular section which explicitly says absences will his absence will be counted as the mayor's absence will be counted as a no vote.
290 Councilor Koyama Lane is that acceptable to you?
291 That is acceptable to me.
292 Madam president. Do you think that might address some of your concerns? Because it would not allow the mayor to postpone anything by more than one council meeting.
293 Give me 30s to think about it. The original language left me concerned because there was an inconclusiveness if the mayor wasn't there a second time. And this does address the inconclusiveness give me 30s as I try to also capture this, to send to our clerk and attorneys so that they're looking at the same thing. Councilor Ryan.
294 Thank you, council president. I'm actually mulling over what councilor Kanal just said. So I look forward to whatever this update is. When we were in that committee meeting, as you recall, I, I right. I'm the I'm guilty as the one that did a lot of the red lining because I wanted some certainty where it seemed very uncertain. And that's what I keep hearing from people in Portland. And I'm open to the dialog we're currently having, of course, about the mayor. But we're also in this scenario planning that's really complicated and body politic. That has a lot of uncertainty at the moment. So I just don't know what planet we live on where a mayor would be a mayor very long if they dodged these kind of votes. And but you say that in 2025 with what's going on in our country right now and you're like, you know, so I get that we're trying to nail this. I do, but it's not adding any clarity or certainty for me to change my opinion at this moment. And I still don't think you would survive in Portland, Oregon as mayor if you dodged votes all the time. So I just don't see that scenario playing out in my lifetime. But.
295 Councilor Morillo.
296 I'm not that paranoid about things. So no.
297 I am. I, you know, as someone who's lobbied at the state legislature on bills and watched a lot of state legislators just walk out so that they could kill bills and never address them. They hold on to their seats for a long, long time. And it's quite painful and terrible for all of us involved. So unfortunately, I think it is a very real possibility that we have to address. And I am definitely interested in the language that was proposed in the this final round of discussion.
298 Thank you, councilor. Councilor Koyama Lane.
299 Thank you, madam president. The only thing I want to add is that I do believe it will be fairly rare that this happens. And I want to point out that we're about six months in, and we actually haven't had a situation where it was non emergency ordinance that the mayor needed to tiebreak. So I do think it won't come up often. And so when it if and when it does, I do want to make sure that we're ready to work with the mayor to see when there's when make sure they're at the next meeting. And yeah, but want to point out that this hopefully won't be happening all of all the time and hasn't come up yet.
300 Thank you. Councilor colleagues, is there any additional discussion? Councilor.
301 Thanks. I just want to make sure that I'm following exactly the new language. So could I just have that repeated one more time?
302 Yes. And it looks like councilor Koyama Lane. You and I sent slightly different things, so I want to make sure we clear up the discrepancy. If the mayor is unavailable, either in person or virtually, to cast the tie breaking vote on final passage during the meeting, the result of the tied vote is deemed inconclusive. If the vote on final passage remains inconclusive at the end of the meeting, the matter will be automatically postponed and rescheduled to the next council meeting. If the mayor is. And I said again, not present, you just said not present.
303 We can add in again.
304 It would be considered a no vote as in j three and I'm going to recommend that we add a there that's oh it's three. You're right. There is no b as in j three.
305 Yeah that's great councilor Avalos I can message that to you if that's helpful.
306 Yes.
307 Okay. Colleagues is everybody clear on the language before we move to a vote? Okay. Mr. Taylor.
308 Just in in aid of interpreting this in the future. It's tied six six. Mayor is not there. Gets automatically rescheduled to the next meeting. Mayor is not there again. Do you still have the opportunity to debate, amend? Discuss, or are you just receiving that item as six six? Mayor is not there automatically. He's a no vote. You don't have a second bite at the apple at that meeting.
309 I would suggest that in the language we don't clarify whether we have another vote or not before it goes to the mayor. And if we have different people present and absent on council, that may create things where we turn to you, mr. Taylor, and ask you how to interpret it. And those aren't clarified right now in this language.
310 So this.
311 Hate to throw a monkey wrench here, but you brought this up.
312 And this would be your opportunity to choose what you would like to do. So if when it comes when it gets automatically rescheduled to the next meeting, do you want to have an opportunity to debate again and vote?
313 I well, the vice president's question was can you always move to debate? But because this is something outside of what is within robert's rules, I believe it's probably something where we would need to clarify what our rules are, because there's not guidance for a situation like this. Council councilor Koyama Lane you've brought this forward, do you want to, before we move to a vote, clarify what happens before the mayor votes, whether there's debate whether council takes an additional vote, and what happens if you have different councilors present at that later meeting than you did at the first meeting or not?
314 I'm interested in what councilor Novick might also say. As the seconder, I am inclined to stick with keeping it shorter and clearer, and I think we could kind of keep going and playing out all all of these different scenarios. At the end of the day, I think we can also turn to the presiding officer to have them make the decision, talk to the attorney. That's their councilor Novick.
315 I my personal preference would be to clarify just by saying that she'll be referred to the next meeting, or whatever the language is, for the sole purpose of having the mayor cast the deciding vote. And then if the mayor is not there, then that's considered a no vote. So there would be no further debate discussion. It would just be if the mayor is there, the mayor votes or the mayor is not there. The mayor is a no vote boom.
316 I appreciate how clear that is.
317 So.
318 That's so close. Now with council.
319 Members so close. But I'm hearing not quite close enough.
320 With this.
321 So I, I'm going to jump in here just to ask a clarifying question to the attorney on this, which is if that language were added, it comes back to that next meeting for the sole purpose of the mayor casting a tie breaking vote. Do we have a legal problem if the councilors present are different, or does that first vote hold over even if those councilors are not present?
322 I think if you adopt the language that councilor Novick suggested, then I would then if you if you're tied at the first meeting, six six gets carried over to the next meeting for the sole purpose of the mayor casting the tie breaking vote, then I don't think you have a problem with different attendance at that second meeting. The sole purpose is for the mayor to come in and say yes or no on that item. There would be no additional debate or testimony. That's his only job is to come in and say yes or no. If he's not there, he's a no. And I appreciate that clarification. That's very helpful.
323 The sole purpose. Okay. Councilor Smith.
324 Thank you, madam president. And so with this new language, if a if a mayor doesn't want to come, he's not compelled to come. And if he doesn't have to come or be compelled to come, why why are we even doing this?
325 I believe councilor Koyama Lane would like to respond to that.
326 I think that's a great question, councilor Smith. And I think this brings me back to councilor Ryan's position of at that point, if a mayor truly is dodging that, it will be very clear and obvious.
327 Well, it'll still be a no vote, and it may be something that people need him to, to weigh in on. And so I think all of this we're doing this is much to do about nothing. It's very complicated. And then it's very simple. I think we just need to squash it and move on to the original vote to see where we're at, because we're solving for a problem that we don't even have yet, because we haven't passed the original intent of the ordinance that's on the table.
328 Thank you, councilor, and I'll just clarify that, because this is a non emergency ordinance, we actually won't vote on the underlying ordinance today. We will have the vote at a second reading, presumably at the next meeting. But I do hear your intent. Councilor Kanal.
329 Thank you, madam president. The only thing I wanted to add here is that in the event that the second meeting, I think to resolve the concern you brought up in the event that in the second meeting, the vote would be less favorable than it's kind of a moot point anyway, because it would fail in the event that it's more favorable, there could be a reconsideration. In the event that it failed, then members would still have the ability to reconsider the vote. After the mayor broke the tie. Right.
330 The sole purpose would be for the mayor to vote. Right?
331 But after the sorry, after the vote would be taken, that the document would have a yes or no would either pass or fail. At that point, someone could reconsider using the existing motions.
332 I see what you're saying. So the mayor comes in and votes no. The item fails. Then at that, at that juncture, the motion to reconsider could be made. Now, of course, then the challenge you're going to have is you have to have voted on the prevailing side, right, to move for reconsideration. So you would have had to have voted no. And you don't have the same opportunity to change your to change your vote necessarily.
333 Right? So my point is that I think the existing rules provide a solution to the concern that was raised without any need for a change to either those existing rules or this text is my underlying point there. Thanks.
334 Councilor Green.
335 Yeah, I just want to say I'm comfortable with the sole purpose language. I also just want to float that they're still here in case where it's possible we can contemplate a mayor that still refuses to come or can't be present. And so there's still sort of the next available council meeting always rolls forward. And I think if we're in that position, colleagues, I would be prepared to introduce a resolution that censured the mayor, because that's a that's an abrogation of the duty, the charter, if the mayor just doesn't come ever to take to avoid this, this, this vote, I, I again not keith wilson I can't contemplate a member of mayor doing that. But that's a very clear denial of the charge of the office, because the office, the charter says the mayor, has a duty to cast a tie breaking vote. I would also expect if I was in a position where I just never showed up for a vote, I would expect my colleagues to do the same. Or I don't know if censure is the right word, but but some sort of formal resolution to say, shame on you, councilor Greene. And then we always still have the opportunity as a body if we're like, oh no, we're stuck with a mayor who won't show up, we can't go back and reconsider or we can't go back to change our votes. Then we can always suspend the rules to settle a question that way. So I just kind of think the edge case is an interesting thought experiment. I do think this one for the sole purpose of casting the thing is enough for me, because it's simple. It does reconcile an issue of like one nonattendance because he's got a family emergency. But but in the in the event of the larger crisis that we've contemplating, I think we have a political obligation in the tools to deal with that. So that's all I'll say there.
336 Thank you. Councilor, colleagues, is there any more discussion to the amendment? Does anybody need the amendment? Read again.
337 Oh yeah.
338 If the mayor is unavailable, either in person or virtually, to cast the tie breaking vote on final passage during the meeting, the result of the tied vote is deemed inconclusive. If the vote on final passage remains inconclusive at the end of the meeting, the matter will be automatically postponed and rescheduled to the next council meeting for the sole purpose of the mayor casting their vote. If the mayor is not present, it would be considered a no vote as in j three. Councilor Novick.
339 I was just wondering, did any of us formally move that?
340 I believe that you accepted that friendly amendment that councilor Koyama Lane had put forward, but let's confirm that you both are still on board here.
341 Yes, yes. Thank you.
342 Okay, keelan, could you please call the roll?
343 Koyama Lane?
344 Yes.
345 Maria,
346 I.
347 Novick I.
348 Green. Zimmerman.
349 No. Avalos I Smith. No.
350 Canal I.
351 Ryan I.
352 Pirtle-guiney no.
353 I thought you were. Knee amendment is approved with seven yes votes and three no votes.
354 I didn't think I was being tricky. I thought I was clear, but.
355 Wow.
356 Colleagues, we are back to the now amended resolution. Are there further comments or amendments on the resolution?
357 Councilor Kanal thank you, madam president. So I want to discuss the third concern I have, which is the this was an amendment that was made during the governance committee meeting, and I'm going to propose an versus it. And it's the removal in part one of the words resolutions comma reports. There's a comma at the front end of that to again we the charter section says the mayor has the following responsibilities. Vote on matters before the council in case of a tie. When the mayor casts the deciding vote, there are three core parts. There matters before the council in case of a tie, when the mayor casts the deciding vote in case of a tie means emergency ordinances are outside the scope of this, 8 to 4 isn't a tie. When the mayor casts the deciding vote means a55 vote doesn't involve a mayoral tiebreaker because he wouldn't be the seventh and deciding vote. But matters before the council has been explained to us as different from matters of the council. And that's why the council president vote are internal rules are separate, and I agree with the attorneys on that. But there are items that are not internal in focus, but which are excluded here to resolution reports and resolutions outside of the scope of internal council policy, which the existing text already rules out and doesn't need to be reiterated. Here. I'm talking about reports. Reports that appoint people or are submitted pursuant to some previous piece of legislation or requirement upon the city. I'm also talking about resolutions like the social housing report and street response resolution, which are policy direction, not talking about those internal matters. And I want to be clear, this isn't what I would write if I was writing the charter. This is what I think the charter says. I think the charter gives portlanders enough information to interpret this as saying the mayor breaks these sorts of ties. I agree with councilor Smith on many of the conceptual parts of her argument, most notably that the charter is the charter, and that's it. My reading of it is if it's not about internal council stuff and it's not an emergency ordinance, the mayor breaks a tie. And it's also not amendments, which, if I was writing it as someone who's put up six different amendments that have failed six six, I would obviously love if amendments had a had the mayor on the record either way, but that's that's outside the scope here. My point is, I think this is one of those things where it is really about the question of, are we changing what the charter says? And this to me is a really important part of why I would support it or not for the underlying document. So I'll stop here and I'm happy to engage in a debate. I move to restore the words, resolutions and reports to section one, and I'd ask for a second.
358 Second.
359 Councilor Smith, are you in the queue to discuss this motion?
360 Exactly.
361 Right ahead.
362 Could keelan put up what the charter says? I think my staff gave her something so that people who are online and who are in the council room, they can see exactly what it is. But sometimes you see it better when you when you read it.
363 Councilor Smith, are you seeing that now? Great.
364 I don't see it because I'm on a I'm on an iphone. But let's see here.
365 We have it up for us. And on the tvs within the council chambers.
366 Okay.
367 Perfect. I'm going to go back to this again. My. My concern is that we're trying to solve for problems that we don't have. And I'm going to read this charter section 2-401e states the mayor has the responsibility to vote on matters before the council in case of a tie. When the mayor cast the deciding vote. Now, what is the definition of matters? No one has given a definition of matters, and he has the responsibility. But is that a mandate? So we can we can really get technical with this if we want to. And we can we can second guess what the charter members intended to do. But I think it was very clear that there was a lot of pushback on giving the mayor veto power and instead giving him the ability to be able to put resolutions and policies on our agenda, and to being able to cast the last vote. It is not specific enough, and I don't think any number of amendments that we add to this original amendment is going to make sense to me. And people have called my office about this. It's not going to change it. Y'all can try to put lipstick on any number of animals and try to make it different, and it's going to be the same. You are not following, you are not following the charter. And so we've spent virtually almost an hour or so on trying to wordsmith for something that we're not even going to take a vote on until the next council meeting. And so this is this is the part that the public can't follow and don't understand. So that's why I asked keelan to put it up so that they can actually see it. You did read it exactly that way, councilor Kanal, but I wanted to make sure that people could see what we're talking about. And it is very simple. We're trying to make something out of nothing, and we're going to go to court on this at some time soon because we're breaking the charter. So again, I will not be supporting any of these amendments to the original amendment because I don't think we need to because we already have direction. Thank you.
368 Thank you. Councilor, is there any other discussion to the proposed amendment? Councilor canal.
369 Thank you, madam president. I'm happy to defer if councilor Koyama Lane. Okay. So I'll be honest, I don't know if we'd get sued for this or if anyone would sue would have standing I maybe and that's that's worthwhile as a reason. I don't need that reason personally for this. I think this is one of those really deep underlying values for me, because I'm in an awkward position to say, if I was writing the charter myself, I'd probably do something a little different than this, but I'm supporting this other way of doing it. And the reason for that is that's the job. And I'm here because an election put me here. An election. Put the ballot measure here, put this charter in place. And if that ballot measure is changeable other than by someone other than the broader electorate that approved it, then someone other than the broader electorate can say that the election of a councilor or a mayor or a president can be unrecognized. It makes the election of officials less legitimate. If we undermine ballot measures from and metro to preschool for all the county to police accountability piece and, yes, charter reform at the city. And so obviously we have we're talking about the year we're in and the context we're in. We have a president who still thinks it's okay to declare that the 2020 presidential election shouldn't have mattered. So given all of that, I don't know how I can support the underlying document. If it's restricting something that I think is fairly straightforward in what it says. And I think we've gotten the interpretation. I would sort of adapt what councilor Smith has said. My matters before the council has been, I think, defined to some degree by our attorneys in the earlier meetings. And I think January about it being things that we vote on that are not about our internal processes. I'm some I'm not a lawyer. I'm not don't hold that in a legal sense. But I'm summarizing for ease of understanding and a resolution and a report is that unless of course, it relates to those internal matters. And we've had some that don't from the. Social housing resolution to the mlk resolution, to the, the, the Portland street response resolution. And we've also had reports that don't. So for me, the only way to ensure that this underlying document complies with that charter text, that that was on screen is to ensure that it reflects what a plain text reading of that text would lead you to, which is that reports and resolutions other than the ones that are already excluded by other texts in that paragraph, which are the internal matters of the council, have to be within the scope of a mayoral tiebreak.
370 You councilor Councilor Koyama Lane.
371 Thank you for your points, councilor Smith. I really appreciate them and appreciate what you're bringing to this conversation. I, I believe that what you asked about the matters and defining that, I think that's what we're doing right now. And just to clarify, the interpretation from our city attorney is that it would include non-emergency ordinances, resolutions, reports and quasi judicial matters. But through a lot of debate and talk in committee, resolutions and reports were taken out. And I genuinely am interested, because when I have heard you talk about this, I would assume that you would actually support having resolutions and reports in there, because I hear you oftentimes saying, and I want you to be able to speak for yourself, that that the mayor should be breaking those ties. And so I, I am I'm kind of curious why you wouldn't support adding those back in. I don't feel extremely passionate about it. I would be fine to put that back in. I think I agreed, was convinced by my colleagues in the governance committee to take them out and have it just be the ordinances and quasi judicial matters, but something that kind of does change me a little bit is I think about the budget which the mayor brings before us. That is something that is definitely from the executive side. He would break the tie on that. So if he if he was, if he had to break ties on reports and resolutions, I, I think that would be fine and would also hope that this wouldn't be coming up all of the time.
372 Councilor Green, go right ahead.
373 Yeah. I think just my view is that anything council, city council has to vote or take action on at this dais in public is a matter before council. And if we are choosing a council president or if we're choosing our own rules of procedure, that's a matter of council because it's of our own creation. So. I support the broader plain reading interpretation of this.
374 Councilor Smith.
375 Thank you. I wanted to go back and answer the vice president's question. I don't support any of it. So there's no way that I can justify it. And you do know that you can disagree with our city attorney's interpretation. That's not a bad thing. I genuinely agree with his with his. Advice. But for this, I have a different interpretation. And I think something like this should be decided by a judge, not by us. Because the way I'm looking at it, I'm looking at the plain language councilor Green. And matters are matters are matters, whether it be a, a parking ticket. A report, an ordinance, a resolution, a budget, a matter is a matter. And just because our attorney's office said this is what he deems the definition of a matter is, that does not make it so. And I really wish the charter commission would have dealt with this and figured out a way to deal with this. And, you know. Things change. And so as far as I'm concerned, we're we're going down a rabbit hole and we're digging deeper and we're getting layers upon layers about this very simple one sentence that doesn't require all this. We have so many more important things that we need to be talking about. When this was settled with charter review, and for us to have to come back and do this again and try to repair what the charter review left open ended of sorts. But I'm taking it for what it says. There were there were no clauses, there were no extra stuff. It's very simple. It's just matters. So us it's really funny listening to the arguments because we're trying to solve for something that was not complete. And I bet you if you line up 20 attorneys, they're all going to have a different messaging or interpretation. And that's why I said, I think we're going to be taking a court. Because the average constituent who looks at this, they're going to see matters. You have a very keen eye for law and case study and that that we don't even have. The city attorney, robert taylor. But the average person, they're just looking at this on what they read in a matter is a matter is a matter as long as it is on our agenda, it is a matte. So we're we're spending a lot of time. And I appreciate you trying to fix this vice president, but I just think that it's it doesn't change for me. Everything relating to the underlying ordinance, I'm not going to vote for it or vote for any of the amendments because I don't think we have to. We already have direction. Thank you.
376 Thank you, councilor, because two of our colleagues who are in governance aren't here. I just wanted to take a moment to speak a little bit to why this change was made. I don't know if either of them would be compelled by the discussion and change their position if they were here today, and perhaps they would be. So I don't want to speak for them, but I want to bring up some of the things that were part of that discussion. There was a conversation about reports and resolutions coming out because of what they generally are. Resolutions are often the place where we give direction to the administration on things we'd like to see done. And there was a discussion around whether or not it was appropriate to allow the mayor to weigh in on if we wanted to give direction to the mayor and the city administrator and the bureaus on reports. Those are generally things we are receiving from the administration. And there was a conversation around the appropriateness of allowing the mayor the opportunity to break a tie on whether or not we should accept something that the mayor would likely inevitably want to accept, since it came from the administration. If half of council felt strongly that the report was in the wrong direction, and we should in fact not accept it without changes. And so those were very intentionally removed because of what they represent, how they come to us or what they do and how they interact with our relationship with the mayor, the bureaus and the administrative branch broadly. I just wanted to make sure to point that out and have that as part of the discussion here today as well. Colleagues, is there any other discussion to the amendment? Councilor Green? Okay, seeing none keelan could you please call the roll.
377 Koyama Lane.
378 I.
379 Morillo I.
380 Novick I.
381 Green.
382 I Zimmerman.
383 No.
384 Avalos. Councilor. Avalos.
385 Hey, I'm sorry, I'm not feeling well. What are we voting on right now?
386 Councilor Avalos, this is the proposed amendment to add reports and resolutions and resolutions back into the items that the mayor would cast a deciding vote on in the case of a tie.
387 I. Smith.
388 No.
389 No. I Ryan.
390 No.
391 Pirtle-guiney.
392 No.
393 The amendment fails with six yes votes and four no votes.
394 Colleagues, is there any other discussion to the amended ordinance or additional amendments to propose councilor Kanal?
395 Just a question, madam president, and maybe it's for the attorneys on this document. When we come to a vote on it, would this be considered a matter of the council or a matter before the council? Would the mayor, under our current interpretation.
396 Be.
397 A tie on this? I, I agree with what was just stated that the mayor should not be breaking the tie on this. I just wanted to make sure that that we were all clear on that. I think having early clarity may be helpful.
398 Mr. Taylor, is this of or before council?
399 I guess. What I would say is this is a rule that of procedure that council is adopting under it's separate and distinct charter authority to do so. And as we have previously advised, on matters of the council's rules of procedure, the mayor does not break the tie.
400 Thank you for that clarification. Colleagues. Is there any other discussion or proposals of amendments? Okay. Seeing none, we will move this ordinance to second reading at our next meeting. I will note that if things are amended upon second reading, they cannot be voted on for five days unless they have an emergency clause. So if further amendments are proposed when this comes back for second reading, we would either need to hold it over to the next meeting after that for a vote, or add an emergency clause and receive nine votes in order to pass it. That is the last item on our agenda today. So with that, I will close today's meeting. Thank you all and have a good afternoon.