After three city council meetings, a dozen rounds of deadlocked voting and hours of debate, the 12 councilors on the Portland City Council have officially elected a new council president and vice president. Jamie Dunphy, representing District 1, was elected as the new council president with Olivia Clark, representing District 4, as vice president. Both were notably reluctant to take on the role. As president, Dunphy will be in charge of running council meetings, appointing city committee leaders and serving as the middleman between the council and the mayor’s office. Dunphy and Clark both join us to share more on their priorities for the coming year.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. It took three meetings, 10 hours of often testy debate and more than a dozen rounds of voting, but the Portland City Council finally elected a new council president and vice president last week. Neither wanted the job, but as far as many of their colleagues were concerned, that was a feature, not a bug.
Jamie Dunphy represents District 1 on the council — that’s East Portland. He is the new president. Olivia Clark represents District 4. That’s the entire west side along with Sellwood in Eastmoreland on the east side. She is the new council vice president. They both join me now to talk about their new roles and the future of the council. It’s great to have both of you back on the show.
Jamie Dunphy: Thanks for having us.
Olivia Clark: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: Jamie first – you were pitched as a kind of compromise candidate after, as I mentioned, more than 10 hours of often rancorous debating. You said that while you were neither happy nor excited to have the position, you would accept it. Why did you not want this job?
Dunphy: I ran for city council for two reasons. I’m a policy nerd and I really want to pass good policy. My priorities for the next year really were to try and move a number of pieces of legislation forward. 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. So I was really trying to guard onto that. The second reason I ran for city council was 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.
As council president, I also have to worry about the entire body. So my priorities of policy in 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.
Miller: You maybe started to answer my next question with the end of your last answer. But given your hesitations, did you consider saying no, for real? I truly don’t want this and I will not accept it?
Dunphy: No. In the circumstances as it went, it was a long, drawn out, often ugly process that really worked at odds against what I think almost all of my colleagues are really there to be doing. We have to move the city forward. I love Portland, I truly do, and I want to see a government that works well. If my colleagues believe that I am the person who can help break the stalemate and move the body forward to deal with the really serious challenges we have, I’m happy to stand into that role. It was not something I sought, but it is something I am taking very seriously, and I’m going to do my absolute best to do well.
Miller: Olivia Clark, why didn’t you want to be vice president?
Clark: Well, Dave, I think for some of the same reasons that Jamie mentioned. I have an agenda now as the chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. I have other things I want to accomplish. I’m busy. I was busy on those policy issues, and hopefully the council president and I are working out a committee structure that may allow me to continue to do some of those things. But I didn’t want the added stress either. I was in a groove, and it was going well, and I liked that groove. So yeah, pretty much the same reasons as Jamie, just on my side of the river.
Miller: He just said it was ugly. That was one of his words to describe the very contentious and increasingly personal debates that sort of spilled out as vote after vote … it was deadlocked. What effects do you think that had on the council, that public debate?
Clark: Well, it’s painful. I think that the pain will reverberate for a while. The accusations of racism, some of the petty grievances that were brought up … It just devolved to a point that was very painful and I think it’s going to take a while for us to get over it. But I think that Council President Jamie and I are really dedicated to turning that around, to bringing a more positive attitude, to being more inclusive, to having a different style of government the second year.
Miller: Jamie Dunphy, how do you think the process of selecting a council president is going to reverberate?
Dunphy: First, I think we need to start thinking about what happens next year, now. Many of my colleagues expressed an interest in being council president, and yet we ended up with a president and vice president who didn’t want the job. It is incumbent on anybody who might want to be the council president next year to start that work now and building those relationships, and not just try to get a vote to seven, but to eight or nine of your colleagues to try and support your candidacy.
I will not be doing this for a second year. As I said, I’m honored for the opportunity to do this job, but we are going to start planning secession processes now. Additionally, I wanna really use my time as president to build systems that share power, so that all of our council colleagues see themselves in the process. Maybe that will help cut down some of the personal grievances or some of the perceptions of being disadvantaged in this system. I think that may help more broadly.
Miller: So this gets to one of the things you said last week, that you’ll do everything in your power to make the position less powerful. Why?
Dunphy: There are a lot of leadership structures that exist across legislative bodies everywhere. A strong Speaker of the House in both Congress and in Salem, the strong county chair role … But I don’t think that is what the voters were really expecting in our new form of government. We expanded this new form of government from five to 12 seats with very intentional geographic representation. And we have the most diverse board that we’ve ever had. In terms of age, in terms of ethnicity, in terms of background, in terms of experience.
I think that the people of Portland want to see a process that facilitates all of those voices coming to the table and being reflected in the final policy. So, I think that that, more than anything, is my responsibility; to build processes that let the best argument win the day, but make sure that everyone has a fair share of actually having their voices heard.
Miller: So what does that mean in practice? What do you think is going to be different about your term and the power that you will effectively wield as council president than what we saw in the first iteration, Elana Pirtle-Guiney’s stint as council president?
Dunphy: Councilor Pirtle-Guiney was literally creating something out of nothing. We had no processes. We had no bookends. We had no expectations of what success looks like. She took a lot of that responsibility on, to force our city into a system that actually moves forward. We now have a better sense of what works, what doesn’t, how each of these 12 colleagues work with each other.
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. 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. A 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.
Miller: But the two examples that you mentioned – well, I guess you mentioned three, but to look at Salem or D.C. – deciding what is actually going to be taken up, it is a very political decision and that’s based on leadership. How is it gonna work if it’s a free-for-all? If one person in the end isn’t saying yet, “this is what we’re gonna talk about today, this is what we’re gonna talk about tomorrow and this is how the committee assignments are gonna be,” how will it not be a free for all?
Dunphy: At the end of the day, the buck will stop with me. That is going to be my job. I will propose a new committee structure that is going to change how we do the work, but I’m going to ask for all 12 of my colleagues to give input into how that process might change. We’ve all experienced how it’s currently working and I think all 12 of us would agree that it’s not working great. I want to know what my colleagues’ priorities are for the coming year, where they would like to be involved, what committees they’d like to sit on and what they think success might look like. I’m gonna take all that input and then we’re going to create a new committee structure.
My goal also is to create, within that committee structure, fewer committees so that the chairs of those committees can come and meet with Vice President Clark and I on a regular basis to determine: What is the pace of certain policies going through committee and onto the council agenda? What are we prioritizing? How are we doing this work? But I don’t think it’s my job as a council president to say to an individual councilor, “You can’t have a hearing on your bill. You can’t pursue your priorities.” It’s my job to facilitate what’s best for this body and then let those debates happen.
Clark: If you mind if I add to that? Another thing that’s coming is a priority setting session, and that’s not something that we’ve had in the first year. I had hoped that we would all get together, talk about our values, find our shared values and come up with a list of priorities, and we never did that. This time around, we’re doing that.
Miller: But do you have, as 12 people, some people who identify as progressives, some as moderates ... Do you have shared priorities? I feel like that’s not a legitimate question because I know that there are significant policy differences among the 12. So, what does it mean to have shared priorities?
Clark: I think that we will have at least four shared priorities. A much longer list is possible. But I think that the council president and I have talked about, let’s have a short list. It’s the way we get there.
Miller: OK, maybe that’s the important distinction. You’re saying we all maybe agree that we have to somehow address homelessness or transportation, but the ideas among the 12 of you of how to do that could be very divergent.
Clark: Exactly.
Dunphy: I think that the composition of our new committees will also be reflective of some of the basics. We understand that there are some things we have to do. You said homelessness. Absolutely, the city needs to be in a very strategic and intentional way, understanding how we are responding to the homelessness crisis. How we are getting new units of housing built, economic development, public safety – each of those things look different to each of the 12 of us. But we all agree that we need jobs, we need public safety, we need places for people to call home, we need people to feel proud of this community. And that will help us get at least part of the way toward where we can have those honest disagreements.
Miller: President Dunphy, you have talked about another committee – a committee that doesn’t exist now – the Committee of the Whole. What is that and how is it different, if it were to be formed and to meet, from just a regular old city council meeting?
Dunphy: It’s different in some really important ways. 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 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. Additionally, issues involving finance. We had a really long, prolonged budget fight last year. A lot of that was because information didn’t flow in the way that some of my council colleagues wanted it to.
Additionally, 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, specifically, inviting public testimony, we’re not asking for a more formal process like a city council hearing would be … this gives the council a slightly less formal opportunity to actively debate, amend and futz with really important issues that everybody’s going to care about.
Miller: But in a context where there would be no public testimony and you couldn’t do votes on actual legislation on ordinances?
Clark: Yes, exactly. In fact we just had an example of that, I think last week (wouldn’t you agree?), was the session we had on homelessness and housing. [It] was a perfect example of a Committee of the Whole. Some people were there, some people weren’t, some people felt they already knew the issue [so] they didn’t attend. But we had some dialogue. It was an opportunity for the council to learn about an issue.
Miller: Jamie Dunphy, your new role requires, I would imagine, some kind of close partnership with the mayor and his or her team in the future, working to make sure that the mayor’s priorities are going to get some time at the council. At the same time, you’ve been critical of some of Mayor Wilson’s cornerstone policies. In particular, his focus on emergency shelters. How are you imagining working with his office and pushing forward your own policy ideas and making space for his?
Dunphy: I have gotten along really well with this mayor, even when I’ve disagreed with him. And I have not been shy about voicing that disagreement both publicly and with the mayor directly. It has always been coming from a policy perspective. Again, 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. So from that perspective, I’ve had some criticism. But as council president, my job, again, 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 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, and the big question of what comes next, now that he has declared victory on his shelter goal. I don’t feel that, as a councilor, I can possibly let up on that fight. But as the council president, I will facilitate a balanced approach to getting the priorities of the city heard by the legislative branch.
Miller: Just briefly, Vice President Clark, how do you want to see the council this year use its oversight or investigatory powers? These are essentially new tools for this new form of government, and we didn’t see a ton of it last year.
Clark: You’re right, Dave, and that’s actually something that we discussed in the Governance Committee. I think that we’ll continue to tease that out. What exactly does oversight look like? We haven’t really had that discussion yet. What are the parameters? How do you call a bureau in? How is that conducted? We really haven’t had that conversation. But I think we intend to, in a governance committee or a situation like that.
Miller: Olivia Clark and Jamie Dunphy, thanks very much.
Dunphy: Thanks for having us.
Miller: Jamie Dunphy is a Portland City Council member from District 1, newly elected president of the city council. Olivia Clark is one of the council members from District 4, newly elected council vice president.
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