November 26, 2004
(Updated) Increase Debate, But Don't Muck With City Charter
Revisiting The Ethic Of Accessibility
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
An editorial in today's Oregonian gets it mostly correct, but then veers off track at the very end.
Using some in-session sparring between Commissioners Randy Leonard and Dan Saltzman as a jumping-off point, the editorial calls for more cross-commissioner debate and discussion than has been the recent tradition at City Council.
This is unusual because city commissioners don't normally tread on the administrative toes of other commissioners, as Saltzman and Leonard did Monday. The time-honored approach is that each city commissioner is politely allowed to handle the bureaus assigned to him or her, without much advice from the rest of the council.
But the coming year would be perfect for breaking with tradition, with a new, inclusion-oriented mayor in Tom Potter; councilor-elect Sam Adams' pledge to root out waste; and difficult budget choices sure to be on the table.
They are quite right that there's little legitimate reason for cross-commissioner debate and discussion to be somehow frowned upon, perhaps out of some misplaced sense of decorum. What they are quite wrong, however, is in tying this pointless aspect of Council culture to the so-called "good government" proposals which have suggested re-writing the City Charter to transform local government into something resembling a mayor/council form.
As we've argued before, we don't believe that scuttling our commission form of government would best serve the interests of the City. Having all members of Council elected citywide, rather than by district, should be one of the preferred means of electing Council members concerned with, well, citywide concerns.
Not that it's a guarantee, of course. But the problems we have today in getting commissioners to think citywide rather than back one interest or another isn't the result of our form of government, but a matter of recent Council culture and habit. What's needed is an adjustment of attitude and approach to bring such processes more into line with the ethic of accessibility. What's not needed is a restructuring of the City Charter.
Meanwhile, in the same interest of increasing the flow of conversation at City Council, we're once again pushing our pet proposal to add special Conversations with Council sessions to supplement the more staid and normally one-way Communications to Council which begin any given Council session.
When we first raised this possibility, all members of City Council expressed one degree of interest of another, either in trying it out, or discussing it further. Since next year brings two new Council members (including a new Mayor), we thought it was a good time to see whether or not the incoming Council would be receptive.
Being a holiday weekend, we don't expect to receive responses from either Adams or Potter until sometime next week. When we hear from them, we'll revisit this proposal in some greater detail, examining what Council members current and future think of it, and what other related measures to expand access to Council are expected to be in the works come the new year.
Update
In over the wires early this afternoon was a missive from Richard Ellmyer, weighing in on the same Oregonian editorial.
Ellmyer, however, is not opposed to mucking with the City Charter. Rather, he warns against the ways in which its been pitched in recent years, saying that "a change of that magnitude must be bottom up not top down" and that previous attempts (presumably the Robert Ball "good government" initiative") "presented a public image of a small band of rich lawyers and developers interested in change for their own self-interests."
He goes on to suggest that a change to "a strong mayor or city manager form with commissioners elected at large but residing within defined districts will take at least two to three years." He doesn't however, present any arguments himself as to why the current commission form should be changed at all.