July 14, 2004
Don't Throw The Baby Out With The Bathwater
'Meddling' In Bureaus Is Not Proscribed By Commission Government
It's not a common occurance for us to agree with an Oregonian editorial, but far be it from us to not admit it when we do -- although we must caution the reader that we don't endorse their opinion here wholesale, and a fair amount of criticism of it is to be expected.
In this case, the editorial in question also happens to give us an avenue into a couple of comments we've wanted to make for some time. Unfortunately, the intermittently-flaky website used by The Oregonian doesn't seem to have put the editorial online, so we may have to be reduced to quoting rather substantial portions.
Yesterday, the paper weighed in on the controversy surrounding an attempt by Commissioner Jim Francesconi to introduce a resolution regarding reforms at the Portland Police Bureau. As we've reported previously, this prompted a rather blunt retort from Mayor Vera Katz, who accused Francesconi of engaging in little more than election-year politics. More than that -- and this is the aspect which fascinates us -- the Mayor scoffed at the very idea that one member of the Council had any right to interfere in the policies of the bureaus of another member.
(And this doesn't even get into today's Portland Tribune article, which reveals that for all of Francesconi's name-dropping of the Albina Ministerial Alliance, which recently presented a Police Bureau reform proposal of its own, the Alliance doesn't actually support Francesconi's proposal.)
Having recapped the controversy, then, this is where today's Oregonian editorial comes in:
The city of Portland has an anachronistic "commission" form of government in which commissioners not only serve as legislators, setting policy, but as administrators, managing bureaus. Although city commissioners are elected at large, and ought to care about the entire city, the system builds moats around city departments. It tends to keep commissioners from stepping into each other's realms, or even peeking over each other's shoulders.
...
... Portland's form of government stifles meddlesomeness that is in the public interest. How much is a city commissioner worth if his or her standard oeprating procedure is MYOB?
Now, the premise that commissioners should be able to "meddle" in each other's bureaus is one with which we do agree, and we said as much last week when this all hit the fan. We do, however, reject the editorial's use of the word "anachronistic."
While strictly true from the standpoint of the dictionary ("chronologically misplaced"), use of the word is meant to convey that there must be something fundamentally and inherently wrong with the fact that Portland still utilizes the commission form of government. With this premise, we simply and emphatically disagree.
What The Oregonian does here is confuse the form of government with the rules in place for its implementation. There is nothing inherent in the commission form which precludes commissioners "meddling" in each other's bureaus. Rather, it is specifics in the City Code which make it difficult to do so. As we all learned last week, the initial requirement for the introduction of an ordinance (or resolution) is the signature of the commissioner in charge of the relevant bureau being addressed.
But even with that particular rule in place, there are ways to force the issue without that signature -- either by securing the signature of the independently-elected City Auditor, or by securing the agreement of four of the five members of the Council to place the item on what's called the "four-fifths" agenda.
These avenues may or may not be too cumbersome or inefficient, but the fact that they exist at all proves that it isn't the commission for of government itself which is interfering with the ability to examine, challenge, or propose policy across bureau assignments, but the rules we've instituted to make use of that form.
There's something of an incessant drive in Portland to change our commission form of goverment to some sort of mayor/council system, usually with district-based elections thrown into the mix as well. It's possible (we haven't done a search of old editorials) that The Oregonian is an enemy of the commission form of government anyway -- which at least would explain the intellectual laziness which causes them to fail to distinguish between the form and its execution.
So we certainly agree with the editorial board of The Oregonian that there should not be overly-problematic roadblocks in the way of commissioners taking issue with the policies of each other's bureaus. However, it isn't necessary for us to take potshots at our form of government in order to make that point.
At a later date (and we might have alluded to this previously), we will have a great deal more to say about the commission form of government and the alternative that is often promoted, and just as often defeated by Portland voters. For now, we simply wanted to stress that it doesn't help the discussion if the conversants' understanding of the specifics are muddled.