Hoping to loosen the mayor’s traditional vise grip on the city budget—while also raising alarms over a little-seen pot of city cash worth nearly half a billion bucks—City Commissioner Amanda Fritz is prepared to push a significant restructuring of Portland’s financial apparatus.
Fritz, according to copies of a proposed ordinance (pdf) and other documents (pdf) obtained by the Mercury, wants to carve a separate, independent city budget office from the mayor’s traditional budget fiefdom: the Office of Management and Finance (OMF). The splinter City Budget Office would handle budget forecasts, labor-contract assessments, and financial planning. And it would be run by a director who could be appointed by the mayor but dismissed only by a majority of the city council.
It’s the second time in just a little more than a month that a city commissioner has moved to sap some of the mayor’s power over all things financial—one of the office’s few real powers under the commission style of government. In September, Dan Saltzman won passage of a new rule forcing five-year forecasts to be published twice a year, on specific dates, after Mayor Sam Adams frustrated some of his colleagues by delaying the forecast’s release this spring to avoid telegraphing his plans. Both appear enabled by the political limbo that’s emerged as Mayor Sam Adams’ influence inevitably wanes amid the impending mayoral election.
Fritz’s ordinance, up for a hearing this Wednesday, is starkly clear about its intent:
With Portland’s unique commission form of government, each city commissioner has executive level management responsibilities as well as legislative responsibilities, which mandates the need for direct unfiltered communication with financial planning staff throughout the year and which would be provided by an independent budget office…. Every council member should have access to the information, advice, books and records of the City Budget Office.
There’s another element in play—also stemming from this spring’s budget and Mayor Adams’ handling of it.
Fritz, in keeping with the fiscal hawk persona she’s relying on to help fend off a re-election challenge from State Representative Mary Nolan, wants keener eyes trained on the many internal, back-office funds that OMF also manages.
OMF’s operating budget, which helps pay for things like the city’s insurance programs, human resources bureau, printing services, technical support, and vehicle fleet, amounts to $451 million. The worry is that OMF might have a conflict of interest between protecting its turf and fully performing its other job as tough-medicine financial doctor for the city. OMF’s internal funds finally suffered some cuts this year—after years of generally avoiding scrutiny at the expense of front-line bureaus like Transportation and Parks.
In order to eliminate the possibility or appearance that the Financial Planning Division might not give the same thorough, impartial and critical examination of OMF’s budgets as it does to the budgets of other City bureaus, it is in the public interest to establish financial planning, forecasting, and budgeting functions in a separate City bureau, independent of any other City bureau.
How will this play with her colleagues? I can’t say yet. But it’s not all that often that controversial ordinances are made public without there being some sense of support. Especially when that ordinance dances on another city commissioner’s turf. I’m supposed to be off today, but we’ll try for some updates.
If it passes, Fritz would find herself with some more pretty good fodder for a campaign ad.
This is an interesting move, I’m eager to hear the response from other council members. On one hand, I’m in favor of a strong single executive (like the Mayor) having the financial discretion abilities, simply because it is plainly obvious who is responsible if (or when) everything goes to shit. When you have a bureau running the financial show, the fault of who fucked it can (and always will) be obfuscated by politicians. So, there’s a real accountability trade off being presented here, and I tend to believe that it’s easier for The People to hold one person accountable than it is to hold one bureau accountable. What’s going to happen is that our city’s accounting will get all fucked by this bureau, Portlanders will rally outside the bureau’s offices, and the Council will demand that one or two of the heads of the bureau to be fired – the people will be temporarily appeased, and everything will quickly go back to the same level of fuckedness that it was before. This cycle of appeasement can continue infinitely until the city is bankrupt.
The flip side of this – and I don’t know if this was Fritz’s move, or what her real justification for all of this is – if Nolan is elected our budget is likely to be entirely fucked much harder than it is now, maybe Fritz is doing this to draw attention..? I don’t know. Mary Nolan’s husband, Mark Gardiner, has made his money financing huge public-private “Joint Sponorships.” In simple terms, he uses Tax money and Corporate money combined to build huge projects: PGE Park, South Water Front, the Airport MAX rail line – these are all his projects that he was directly involved in advocating for and financing – this is where he makes his money. If Mary Nolan comes to city council, we must expect her main intention and motivation will be to enrich herself via her husband’s company sucking the teat of Portland’s Budget. Corruption would be the rational and logical thing for her to do: she has every capacity to do it, and she has a history of it. It won’t be Mary running the show, it will be her husband pulling her strings. If Nolan were to work with the future mayor and play favors for financing, this city could have ten more boondoggles on the scale of the WES, South Water Front, Tram, and other projects and Mark and Mary laugh all the way to the bank. So, the flip side is that if this is moved to a bureau, it would possibly be harder for Nolan or future officials to corrupt our budget by trade favors and getting financing. Of course, there’s virtually no way that such a big change would happen by November.
In the end our best bet is just to keep everything the way it is now, and hope that Nolan doesn’t get elected, as I see Nolan as a bigger threat to our budget than the Mayor is. If only Fritz had enough ovaries to go negative on Nolan and take a big steaming shit on her husband’s squandering on tax payer dollars… Just remember: Joint sponsorships mean that You – the taxpayer – pays for it, and someone corporate million-dollar asshole gets to run it and keep the profits. This is Portland’s favorite type of corruption, and it’s rampant.
Here’s an alternative for Fritz: just create a City of Portland Bank, and have the PDC and developers borrow money from it, at interest, and allow the City to budget the assets for the Bank out of the general budget. This way the general budget is “hands off” to special interests and financial/developer moguls while still providing financing for the city’s needs.