FILE - Portland City Council during a November 2025 meeting.
Eli Imadali / OPB
Change is coming to Portland City Council’s crowded and clunky meetings.
This week, councilors will review a plan to overhaul the number and makeup of council committee meetings. Committees are still relatively new in City Hall — they were introduced as part of the government transition that went into effect in January 2025.
Council meets weekly as a full 12-person body. Council currently has eight policy committees focused on certain city issues, like transportation or finance. These committees are made up of six councilors each, who meet biweekly for two hours. This structure has led to long meetings with unclear goals.
Portland Council President Jamie Dunphy wants to scrap that plan and create five new committees. Under this proposal, which he drafted with Vice President Olivia Clark, the committees will continue meeting every other week, but their meetings will be allowed to run up to three hours.
Some of the new committees are straightforward, like Housing and Permitting, Community and Public Safety, and Public Works. It also includes “City Life,” a committee that would focus on business and workforce issues, arts programs, and any other economic development topics.
Related: Portland council couldn’t finish meeting intended to fix drawn-out meetings
The fifth committee, Committee of the Whole, is unique in that it would include all 12 councilors and focus on citywide issues, like finance, city operations, governance rules, among others. Unlike the full city council meetings, this committee wouldn’t allow public comment, and would offer councilors another forum to discuss citywide issues before they head to a council vote.
“This gives the council a slightly less formal opportunity to actively debate and amend and futz with really important issues that everybody’s going to care about,” Dunphy told OPB’s "Think Out Loud" last month.
This year’s council meetings began with a fractious council debate to elect a new council president, which underscored the political — and social — divisions between the council’s more progressive councilors and its more moderate leaders. Those closely following City Hall have been waiting to see how Dunphy, who leans progressive, will divvy up council committees following the public clash.
Each committee has representatives from the city’s progressive caucus (although some have distanced themselves from the “Peacock” label following the president’s election) and from the more moderate group of councilors.
Every committee also has representation from each of the city’s four districts.
Each councilor is either a chair or vice chair of a committee. And every councilor has a spot on three committees, with three exceptions. Dunphy, who presides over all full council meetings as the council president, is only on the Committee of the Whole. Council Vice President Clark is on the Committee of the Whole and is Chair of the Public Works Committee. And Councilor Dan Ryan is on the Committee of the Whole and City Life.
Related: Portland City Council considers changes to public meetings
Dunphy’s memo breaking down this new structure, sent to council on Feb. 9, introduces another new council feature that is neither a committee meeting or a standard council meeting: a “public airing of grievances.”
This is a nod to the president’s election meeting where, after a number of councilors made accusations about each other, Councilor Steve Novick called for the council to have a frequent meeting to “air grievances.”
Dunphy proposed a non-obligatory meeting with a still-undetermined frequency as a place to “discuss concerns of the body before they become problems.”
“This is not a venue for belligerent behavior, or public admonishment of an individual councilor for their personal or political disagreements,” he added.
Councilors will discuss the committee overhaul at a Feb. 19 city council meeting. If adopted, the changes would go into effect by the end of March.
