The honeymooner

Portland's next mayor, Keith Wilson, has been in the news this week. He has named Aisling Sinead Coghlan as his "chief of staff" (oh, the pretention). Let me guess, she's Irish. Whatever her heritage, Coghlan is not exactly a change agent, having spent years at City Hall working for then-councilman and forever-westside-land-baron Dan "Legend" Saltzman. She's also worked for the grouchy outgoing Portland congressman, Earl "the Pearl" Blumenauer, and run a bunch of political campaigns.

Under Coghlan's chief-of-staffedness, Saltzman went along with many a foolhardy move by the council, but compared to what's come since then, he was FDR. Perhaps most concerning was Coghlan's involvement in those shady campaign contributions from the crypto kids to the Oregon Democrats in 2022, which of course have been swept under the giant Salem rug.

But back to Wilson. He made more headlines the other day when he announced that city workers need to come back into the office four days a week. This went over like a lead balloon, of course.

At a virtual town hall meeting with around 1,400 city employees Thursday morning, Mayor-elect Keith Wilson shared plans to require them to work at least four days a week at the office – up from the current mandate that they’ll work in person for half of their work week.

Employees immediately flooded the meeting’s chat box with alarm, citing concerns about childcare, parking costs, the climate impacts of transportation to the office, and other issues.

“There is a huge talent pool made up of workers who are more productive, more efficient, and better able to contribute to the City’s mission when they can do that work remotely, at least some of the time,” one employee wrote in the chat. “It is critical that decision makers recognize that remote work opportunities are essential for equity.”

Ah, the almighty equity strikes again. Old Wilson will be tired of that word by spring break at the latest. If he isn't already.

Then there's the new City Council book club to deal with. Wilson and the outgoing mayor, Dud Wheeler, made a joint appearance the other day to brag about how smoothly the transition is going. But on the subject of the dirty dozen on the new council, one sensed a certain delicacy.

Wilson ran his mayoral campaign on the promise to end unsheltered homelessness within his first year in office, and he still stands by that promise....

But that change is not just up to Wilson. Any changes to how the city addresses homelessness or even the decision to open new overnight shelters will have to go through Portland’s new, larger, city council. Where the mayor will no longer sit on the council or vote on council items. Wilson said that so far they have a good working relationship.

“I’ve had seven meetings with the 12 so far. So we can grow a relationship and I can gauge their ideal, their ideology,” Wilson explained, “not one of them have said leaving Portlanders on the street is something they will accept, it has only been positive conversations, in fact many of them said we are behind you 100%.”

Wilson could not give any specific details on what he plans to implement first.

The devil will be in those details. And they'll have to run quite a gauntlet given the motley crew that the voters have installed on the council.  I doubt the likelihood of a rational adult having a "good working relationship" with that bunch for long.

Between the bureaucrats, the unions, and the far-lefties on the council – not to mention the ditzes on the Mutnomah County commission, or the fact that the city is broke – Mr. Wilson is going to come back down to earth quickly. Which is really too bad. Ten years ago, he might have been able to do a bang-up job.