Breaking: Portland City Hall is dysfunctional

Today we learn from an outside expert about the poster child for the chaos in city government: the office of "community & civic life." The home of "a toxic and dysfunctional work culture, punitive management practices, social and emotional harm experienced by employees, a disconnect between the bureau’s goals and its practices, and a lack of resources needed to carry out its responsibilities." 

But hey, with an "equity lens."

Run by Amanda Fritz, then Chloe Eudaly, now Jo Ann Hardesty. An utter disaster from a management standpoint.

It's nice to have voices like theirs on the City Council when that body is making rules. But running silos of arrogant bureaucrats? It's not their thing.

Portland really needs a different form of government. And representation by district. Until then, expect the dysfunction to continue.

And if we're not going to change the form of government, then we need to elect managers, not people with a chip on their shoulder and a bullhorn. 

Comments

  1. Ya; whatever happy to that idea of a different form of government. It go a fair amount of support during the recent City Council election but once that was over the idea seems to have disappeared. I guess once in office they decided they really like have power. If there is going to be change it's will have to come from the grassroots folks taking the lead.

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  2. Mostly agree, disagreeing only on moving to districts/wards, which are incumbent protection rackets. Portland should adopt ranked choice voting in a council-mayor system. That means the mayor is elected directly with instant runoff voting, and the council is elected at large with all seats in play every two cycles (half in one, then half in the other). Each council election, all candidates, including incumbents, must run in one races with X top finishers filling the X seats up for election. This creates a proportional representation system, so that you don’t have gerrymandering and safe (uncompetitive) districts, but any significant voting bloc should be able to elect at least one candidate. Moving to districts is a terrible idea.

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