Portland District 1 City Councilor Jamie Dunphy listens during a meeting at Portland City Hall on Nov. 12, 2025 in Portland, Ore.
Eli Imadali / OPB
After three city council meetings, a dozen rounds of deadlocked voting and hours of debate, the 12 councilors on the Portland City Council officially elected a new council president and vice president last week. The council’s new president is Jamie Dunphy, who represents District 1. Olivia Clark, who represents District 4, was elected to be his vice president.
Dunphy joined OPB’s “Think Out Loud” to discuss the recent election and future of city council. The following are highlights from the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Why he didn’t seek out presidency
“My priorities for the next year really were to try and move a number of pieces of legislation forward. And I know that with additional responsibilities, I think it’s probably less likely that I’ll be able to do nearly as much policy work as I’d hoped.
“I ran for city council to be unapologetically pro-East Portland. To be the voice that my neighbors in East Portland need to demand when these systems don’t serve my neighbors, to make them work better. And, as council president, I also have to worry about the entire body. And so my priorities of policy and East Portland are still going to be my two top priorities, but I also am eager to try and make this city council actually work and work for the entire city.”
On changing the power of the council President
“I want to share a lot of that decision-making processes. Now that we know how the council clerk’s office works, how the council ops team [works], we have a city administrator, we have a mayor with a year experience under his belt, and we have deputy city administrators across all the different service areas, we have the experts in place. And we now can share a lot of those leadership decisions that are not things that are inherently political.
“Setting the agenda should be a process, it shouldn’t be a power struggle. Committee composition should feel like everybody on the council has an opportunity to give their input. Councilors should have the venue to have honest debates about their policy priorities, and especially the areas where we disagree. But that should be a process, that should not be something that I am dictating.”
Why he wants to create a new policy committee
“The ‘Committee of the Whole’ would functionally be a body of all 12 city councilors to talk about specific issues that do affect all of us. In my mind, that would include issues around governance, how we carry ourselves on our as a city council, how the city operates, how we do things like turning a bill into a law, how we appoint people to volunteer jobs on committees and boards.
“Some of the biggest conflicts we’ve had and some of the biggest drains on our time at council are issues where it went to a committee, but somebody who really cares about that issue wasn’t on that committee and couldn’t attend the hearing. By taking some of those issues and putting them onto a ‘Committee of the Whole,’ where we aren’t inviting public testimony, we’re not asking for a more formal process like a city council hearing would be, this gives the the council a slightly less formal opportunity to actively debate and amend and futz with really important issues that everybody’s gonna care about.”
On working with Mayor Keith Wilson
“I have gotten along really well with this mayor, even when I’ve disagreed with him. I have not been shy about voicing that disagreement both publicly and with the mayor directly. And it has always been coming from a policy perspective. I’m a policy nerd and I really care about making sure that we get these things right and we use the government tools for the maximum good.
“As council president, I really believe that my job is to facilitate those conversations, get those pieces of legislation into the committees where the councilors can debate them, where the public can testify, get them to a full city council hearing where we can hear from the broad public about their thoughts on these things. I will still do everything in my power as a councilor to hold the mayor accountable for where he is spending dollars and the outcomes he is receiving … but as the council president, I will facilitate a balanced approach to getting the priorities of the city heard by the legislative branch.”
Portland City Council President Jamie Dunphy spoke to “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller. Click play to listen to the full conversation, which also included the council’s new vice president, Olivia Clark:
