News

August 12, 2024 -- Portlanders deserve a city that's affordable, accessible and green. They deserve no less than a top-tier transit system. For this reason, it is time to replace the TriMet Board of Directors and completely change how it is selected.

Recent reporting from the Portland Mercury revealed that, apparently, members of the TriMet Board rarely use TriMet. Sadly, this revelation may come as no surprise to people like myself, who commute to work via TriMet or live near major TriMet lines. It probably doesn't surprise anyone who's paid attention to how poorly TriMet ridership has recovered since 2020 compared to other cities' transit systems.

This controversy highlights the inherently flawed way the organization is run. The board governing public transit in the Portland area should comprise people who actually use TriMet; without that direct experience, board members can't fully understand how well the system is functioning or what needs to be improved. Furthermore, its members should be chosen by people with a real, vested interest in making TriMet succeed.

That's why I'm calling for the current Trimet Board to be replaced. 

Currently, the Board of Directors is appointed by the governor. If elected to City Council, I would urge the state to transfer this authority to the communities that actually use TriMet. 

TriMet serves the Portland region. City leaders from Portland, as well as leaders from surrounding communities like Beaverton, Gresham, Hillsboro and Milwaukie, should decide who sits on the TriMet board. Each city's share of board seats should be proportional to its relative ridership. Board members should be required to regularly ride TriMet. 

The cities that depend on TriMet and the people who actually ride it should be the ones to decide its future.

August 12, 2024 -- Jon Walker is calling on the city to adopt a critical reform to all future "independent" commissions: Anyone who serves on a commission to change some aspect of the city's governance or its districts should be prohibited from running in the next election.

As I canvas District 3, an issue I repeatedly hear from voters is confusion about the new system. There seemed to be an overwhelming desire to get rid of our broken commission system and adopt a city manager, but little interest in the single transferable voting for city council. 

As I'm repeatedly asked,  "Why did we adopt that?" I can't help but conclude it was primarily driven by a share of “independent” charter reform commissioners trying to gerrymander the system to their advantage. Multiple supposedly-independent members of the commission almost immediately launched campaigns for city council after their charter reform proposal was  adopted. Several voters have expressed that they would not have voted for the charter reform if they had known the commissioners were legally able and planning to run.

The whole point of creating a once-a-decade, independent charter review commission is so the elected city council doesn't rig the system for their future benefit. Letting an unelected group rig it for themselves is worse and makes a mockery of the whole concept.

An existing or potential candidate should never be considered a "normal citizen" for these decisions. This is commonly understood in other places. This is why in other states, for example, you can't serve on an "independent" redistricting committee unless you are legally prohibited from running for a position you are making decisions about. 

First, I'm calling on the city council to fix this hugely problematic conflict of interest loophole going forward. The city must prohibit anyone serving on a future citizen charter reform or redistricting process from running. 

I'm also calling on Candace Avalos and Debbie Kitchin to drop out of the race. Neither is in my district or competing with me, but their campaigns are actively undermining trust in the new system. It is deeply unethical to pretend to be independent while pushing for the only election system they thought they could win under. Voters should have been warned about the major conflict of interest before voting on their recommendations. 

August 21, 2024 -- Portland’s new city council is a chance for a new start. One practice we need to end is Portland wasting money on doomed public records request fights. I ask everyone running to commit to immediately setting up an impartial system to stop the abuse.

This month, the city lost a years-long public records request legal battle, which will cost the city over $100,000. In April, the city similarly paid $166,893 to fund a public records request lawsuit regarding the city and Mayor Ted Wheeler withholding thousands of text messages from a public record request made in 2020. Dealing with other needless public record fights forced the city to pay $200,000 last year and $250,000 in 2022. This is in addition to all the other city resources spent on these years-long court battles.

As a former reporter I understand the importance of public record laws to keep the public informed and uncover malfeasance. I have also seen the other side of the issue. As a policy analyst at the Oregon Health Authority’s Office of Actuarial and Financial Analytics, I’m both subject to public records requests and responsible for implementing public records disclosure for the financial records in the Medicaid program.

I can say from experience these fights are often not about merit or even trying to win. The point is often to circumvent the intent of Oregon law by bullying people who don’t have the time or money to fight, hoping the person will simply drop the request. Win or lose, a lengthy battle can keep the important records hidden until the issue is no longer in the headlines or politically even relevant. That is often the real goal.

The new city council will be mostly made up of people who weren't previously public figures and will no longer control individual bureaus. This creates a unique clean slate. The council should put in place impartial public record safeguards to prevent the city from wasting large amounts of money by abusing Oregon’s public record laws.  I’m asking the other candidates to support making this one of the first actions the new council takes. The new city council has a chance to make a principled decision early, before the temptation to abuse power sets in. 

A transparent local government is likely to be a boring government, and that is what I want.

August 23, 2024 -- Multiple city council candidates, including three in my district (Tiffany Koyama Lane, Angelita Morillo, Theo Hathaway Saner), have been actively promoting the so-called “Renters’ Bill of Rights.” While providing sensible protections for renters is a smart goal, this proposal is terribly designed. I can't help but wonder whether the proposal is malicious NIMBYism hiding behind a leftist veneer. Either way, the net effect would be putting an economic wall around Portland with a large ‘poor people keep out' sign.

While some elements of the proposal have merit, its major components would make it economically impossible for any company to build new rental units in the city. It would also strangely encourage many existing rentals to be sold off to owner occupiers, dramatically shrinking the rental supply in a city desperate for more rentals. 

One provision calls for capping rent of a 1-bedroom apartment at no more than 30% of a minimum wage income. That is roughly $800 a month, which is less than the cost of building new 1-bedroom apartments. This is effectively a ban on all new apartment construction. This could create huge problems for university students, local young adults moving out of their parents' homes, or victims of domestic abuse trying to find a new place to live.

A second provision would prohibit evicting for non-payment anyone who works at a school, or families with children, during the school year. Obviously, we all want to encourage housing stability for families and educators. However, this provision could backfire. No company wants to take on the risk of 10 months of non-payment. Companies would actively try to avoid renting to any school employees or people with kids; they could be prompted to sell their multiple-bedroom rental houses to owner occupiers. 

So while one element of the plan would destroy the market for new 1-bedroom rentals, the other would ruin the market for larger rental units. This would make it extremely difficult for companies to recruit new talent, very hard for medical residents at our top tier hospitals to find suitable housing, and basically impossible for immigrant families to move to Portland.

Meanwhile, another provision calls for capping annual rental increases at 1.7%, just like San Francisco. No one should look to San Francisco as a housing policy model. Its policies caused massive housing shortages, incredibly high home prices, rapid gentrification, and significant minority displacement.

Collectively, this plan would make Portland’s housing crisis dramatically worse. It would effectively stop any new rentals and cause a massive reduction in current rentals. It would make it nearly impossible for anyone to move to Portland or move within Portland unless they were wealthy and secure enough to buy a house. This plan would be extremely NIMBYish in practice, if not in name. 

Any candidate who supports this plan should at least be honest with the public about the real impact of this proposal, which is to keep out everyone but home buyers. Policymaking is not easy. It requires balancing important trade offs. Pretending trade offs don’t exist for housing supply will only make the problem much worse.

August 28, 2024 -- For 59 years, I-405 had been a noisy, ugly, polluting scar right through the densest, most transit-heavy part of Portland, ruining the natural flow of walkability. The city government should create a ready to go, one-size-fits-all plan to cap I-405 in a way that is free to the taxpayers -- by making the air space free to whatever company wants to pay to cap it.

Portland has long thought about capping I-405 for obvious reasons. A highway through the heart of the city noticeably diminishes health and quality of life for people living near it. It reduces foot traffic for local businesses and lowers property values around it. Capping some or all of I-405 would create massive spillover benefits. Yet the scar remains.

To finally fix this issue, Portland should promise to give the rights to air space over I-405 to any company that will pay to cap any block of it. The city should go farther than just a vague promise. The city should do as much preparation work as is feasible, negotiating with any other agencies involved, conducting an impact analysis, creating a clear permitting process, etc. The city should basically create a one-size-fits-all plan on the shelf, ready to be used by any builder who wants to cap just a single block or the whole highway. Simple, fast, and ready to go.

Given the current economic conditions and high interest rates, it is likely many developers would be interested in building on top of I-405 right now, but conditions will eventually change and we need to be ready to take advantage of when they do. The problem with Portland, particularly for a big project like this, is planning takes way too long. If Portland only started working on an idea like this when the economic conditions are finally favorable, it is likely economic conditions would change again before the first shovel of dirt is moved. 

Good stewardship of the government means preparing for the worst, but planning for the best. We never know when conditions will change or when the federal government might want to inject infrastructure money into the states. The point is to always be prepared. The new city councilors should start laying the groundwork to fix some of the city’s oldest problems, even if they might not be on the council by the time these ideas come to fruition. 

September 4, 2024 -- The current city transition team has made a series of concerning decisions related to our new city council system. The most glaring is about the appropriate size of the new city council members' staff. Since it is the people who are registered as candidates who will actually be dealing with the issue, the city should survey them about what level of staffing they think they need.

The transition team has decided each new city council member should have a staff of just one. They have made this determination without proper justification, like releasing an analysis of staffing levels in similar cities. They have not made clear even what this one staffer’s job would be. Most importantly, the team seemed to make this determination based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the city council will work, assuming constituents will not report their issues to their representatives. 

This goes against the intent of the charter reform, which promised that a larger council with districts would be more directly responsive to voters. It is also not how any legislative body works. Voters bring complaints to their representatives. Addressing those complaints is an important part of the job and how city council members learn which issues to work on.    

The city should survey all the candidates about their intended staff size and publish the results. It would serve three goals :

• First, the wisdom of the crowd would give the city a proper number for the size of staff they should be preparing for. The new council will already have enough work to do without needing to address this issue. 

• Second, candidates are still behind the veil of ignorance, since we don’t know who will win. Choosing a number now would reduce complaints that the new city council is wasting money inflating their staff. 

• Finally, It would give voters a sense of how each candidate plans to run things. 

My personal belief is that the minimum number of staff for this position is 2.5. A city council member would need a minimum of a policy staffer, a constituent coordinator/communication staffer, and at least part-time help from an office administrator who could be matrixed across multiple council members. With only one staffer there is a high likelihood a medical or family emergency could leave the council member with no support. It's critical for an elected official to be able to stay abreast of all the city’s policy concerns while also responding to constituents.

September 10, 2024 -- Portland has long outsourced many of its functions to nonprofits via grants and contracts. The results have been less than ideal. We need to establish a minimum service ratio to assure our money is going to services and not overhead.

The idea of a minimum service ratio (MSR) is based on the minimum medical loss ratio (MMLR) regulation in health care. At the Oregon Health Authority, Jon Walker enforces the medical loss ratio in our Medicaid program. This rule says that when a medical provider gets Medicaid funding from the state, it has spend at least 85% of that money on medical care instead of profits or overhead. Jon has first-hand experience implementing this rule, successfully ensuring that tens of millions of dollars were spent on care or recouped by the state -- instead of going to profits or bloated salaries.

The recent example of the financial trouble at Community Cycling Center is an all too common example of what is wrong with Portland -- we had a nice sounding idea but with terrible implementation. The nonprofit received $700,000 in Portland Clean Energy Fund (PCEF) grants in the past few years and just won another $443,000 last week, despite the fact that the organization is on the verge of shutting down due to massive administrative bloat. Clearly our current financial oversight of grants and contracts is broken if an entity with such obvious issues could qualify.

Before any nonprofit gets a large contract or grants from the city, it should be required to prove its finances are in order -- that it doesn't have a wasteful level of overhead, and it will spend the money on services. The city needs to better vet nonprofits and should be able to get back money when it is clear not enough is being spent on services versus overhead. 

October 3, 2024 -- Jon Walker is calling on the city of Portland to convene a special group of architects, safety officials, and permitting experts to create special rules and a streamlined process for office-to-apartment conversions.

The basic reality is that the use of office space in downtown Portland has plateaued at a rate much below pre-pandemic levels, just like it has in many other parts of the country. It has left the most heavily built and transit friendly part of the city heavily underutilized.

We can try to fight against both the advance of technology and the clear preference of knowledge workers, hoping that things will magically change. Or we can try to turn our urban core into a mixed use area, where plenty of residential plus commercial spaces as well as entertainment venues make use of the infrastructure we have built.

To do that we need to either tear down many existing office buildings to replace them with housing units, which is costly and can be very environmentally wasteful, or find a way to convert them into living units. 

I have often heard that conversions are too difficult because residential buildings don't have the same code as commercial buildings, but ultimately the code is a policy choice we can choose to change. As long as a building has a roof, running water, and is not a death trap, you will find people who want to live in it at the right price and find a way to make it a home.

This is what happened in New York City in the 1970’s. Faced with deindustrialization, artists were allowed to turn old factories and warehouses into lofts. These lofts didn’t meet the requirements around the number of windows per bedroom or layout, but that didn't matter. Now they are some of the most desirable places to live in the city.

The city should form a special group to specify only the requirements truly necessary to ensure safety and let the people of Portland show their creativity. The longer we wait, the worse and harder it will be once we finally accept reality.

I’ve written a short version for the Oregonian as a letter, but I wanted to expand on this issue.

I’m distressed to learn that a series of technical decisions made by the City of Portland and Multnomah County are likely going to produce illegitimate results in the city council races. Due the county’s inappropriate ballot design choices which doesn’t follow standard best practices and the incorrect advice of the county, we are likely going to see results that aren’t an accurate reflection of the will of the voters. I’m not claiming that the votes will not be counted – only that they will be processed in a bad way. Going forward the city must change how city council elections are run to allow the ranking of all candidates.

The theoretical intent of Single Transferable Voting (STV) is to create a more representative group of elected officials by letting voters express their honest beliefs at the ballot. It was promised as a way to eliminate the need for tactical voting by assuring your vote eventually goes to your highest choice that can win. There should be no “penalty” for voting your conscience since your vote will be eventually reassigned if your top choices are popular enough. Instead we got the opposite.

This only works if the system has you rank all the candidates. In Australia, Malta, and Ireland you have a paper ballot where you are able to rank all the candidates running. In Cambridge Massachusetts, one of the only jurisdictions in America to use STV, the scantron ballot lets you rank up to 15 candidates. 

You can also try to migrate the problem dynamic thresholds for determining who wins seats based on the number of exhausted ballots. Multnomah county/Portland decides to do neither. 

Problem one is Multnomah County only allows voters to rank 6 candidates – but with around 30 candidates in each district, there are likely to be a lot of exhausted ballots.  (For example, it’s possible you could vote for six candidates, and none of your choices could win a seat.) This defeats the main purpose of the new system. The Australian Senate, one of the only places that uses this form of voting, takes significant steps to avoid this problem. Not only can you rank all the candidates but there voters are required to rank at least 12 individual candidates (or 6 party line votes). 

Problem two is that the city code sets the threshold it takes to win a seat based entirely on how many votes were cast in the first round. 

2.08.030 says:

The election threshold equals the total votes on active ballots counted for active candidates in the first round of tabulation, divided by the sum of one plus the number of seats to be elected, then adding one, and disregarding any fractions.

The city will not lower the threshold as ballots are exhausted. An exhausted ballot is when all the candidates selected by that voter are eliminated. This significantly compounds problem one. Voters under our system still should engage in tactical voting, but it is now even harder for people to understand how to.

This can have huge implications. Imagine that in a district, 99,996 votes are cast in the first round and only about 8% of the district is ultra conservative. Under the city code, the threshold for winning a seat would be set at 25,000 (=99,996/4 + 1). After multiple rounds of reassigning lower choices from voters, two liberal candidates cross the threshold and about a third of ballots are exhausted. The result could be an ultra-conservative candidate wins with just 8% of the vote because they had the highest share of the remaining four candidates in the final round. This is not at all in keeping with the will of voters.

One solution, which is how every other place with STV does it, is to let people rank all the candidates and make it easy to do so. This greatly reduces exhausted ballots. If people in Portland got to rank all their choices, there is no need for strategic voting and you get this result.

The other solution is to use a dynamic threshold where the threshold lowers as ballots are exhausted. This is arguably more in keeping with the charter reform (which is different from the city code), which says: 

The threshold is determined by the number of seats to be filled plus one, so that the threshold is the lowest number of votes a candidate must receive to win a seat such that no more candidates can win election than there are seats to be filled. 

Under this scenario, instead of the ultra conservative being declared a winner, the extra 9,000 votes above the dynamic threshold will be reassigned to those voters' second choices.

Most of the second choices for the liberal candidates will go to the center left candidate resulting in the center left candidate winning instead of the ultra conservative one. The dynamic thresholds treated exhausted ballots as if the person didn't vote at all. A dynamic threshold assures we are at least not punishing people for voting.

Under the current system, we might actually “punish” people for voting.  If you are a Center Left voter, but fail to rank any candidates that make it to one of the final rounds, you could be helping to elect an extremist by having raised the threshold. It would have been better if you never voted at all in the city council race and kept the threshold lower. 

What the city and the county have done is created a form of STV which is the worst of all worlds with no justification. It still means voters should still vote strategically and not vote their conscience. Yet now it is significantly harder to figure out how to vote tactically and now if you don't vote tactically you could end up actually making the outcome worse by having voted at all.

Going forward I’m calling on the city and county to make sure we never allow another STV election to take place under rules that don’t come anywhere close to meeting established best practices. For STV to actually function as promised and intended by the charter reform voters need to be able to rank all the candidates they wish to rank.