Wow, I am grateful for today's message. "Costs less and Delivers More". If the details offer evidence, this is a winning message. I am going to get aboard. Let's get informed.
While I applaud any effort to merge the City’s and County’s governments to achieve a more streamlined governance structure, I must confess that living part-time or full-time in San Francisco for the past 45 years where the County and City governments are one in the same, I did not see a governmental structure that was efficient or effective in doing anything more than building an incredibly bureaucratic and costly administrative machine that stifles efficiency and spends an unconscionable amount of taxpayer money.
I was happy to sign his petition. We talked for about 10 minutes while he was gathering signatures at the PSU Farmers Market. I told him he had acted on an idea I’ve had for years: What is the purpose of Multnomah County today, other than as a legacy, increasingly duplicative layer of government that made more sense when large parts of what is now Portland were still unincorporated?
He seemed very likable, and I hope he can get enough traction to at least get more people talking about the idea.
Metro is a funny creature. Its existence really shows the problem: a lot of the region’s biggest issues make more sense to manage across a larger area than one city or county. TriMet is a good example. A transit system that covers Portland, Beaverton, Gresham, and the surrounding suburbs makes a lot more sense than having a patchwork of separate city transit systems. In that way, Metro may be less an extra layer of government than proof that the old city-and-county structure no longer fits the metro area we actually live in.
Perhaps the better solution—although probably much harder to pull off—would be to merge Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties into one regional government and simply call it Metro. Clackamas County might be a tough sell, but merging Washington and Multnomah counties seems pretty logical given how closely connected the two have become.
My biggest concern with his proposal is that it assumes merging county functions into the existing city bureaucracy will somehow produce better results. Given the current quality of leadership on the Portland City Council, that is a pretty bold assumption. If diversification is a good idea with a stock portfolio, there may also be some wisdom in not putting all our governmental eggs in one dysfunctional basket.
The most consequential words in this account may be the seemingly innocuous promise of “a two-year process of official analysis and citizen engagement,” because whether consolidation produces genuine reform will depend heavily on who government recognizes as the public, whose voices are given institutional weight, and how that engagement process is designed.
Portland and Multnomah County increasingly seem to have moved away from engaging citizens simply as citizens — individual voter-taxpayers with an equal stake in their government — toward a model in which government identifies particular “communities,” recruits nonprofits and advocacy organizations said to represent them, and gives special weight to participants chosen for identity and “lived experience.”
We have seen versions of this in the Portland charter-reform process, the Waterfront Park redesign and, most explicitly, Multnomah County’s Climate Justice Plan. In the last of the three consultative projects, the County assembled representatives of designated “frontline communities” through community-based organizations [1] and has gone so far as to instruct that “lived experience” be recognized as “technical expertise.” [2] Ordinary public surveys, hearings and open houses may still occur, but they sit alongside a much more structured system in which selected organizations and constituencies enjoy a privileged role in defining problems, values and priorities.
That is not quite the same thing as citizen engagement. It is stakeholder engagement based on a particular theory of who legitimately speaks for the public.
This matters enormously for MultNoMo. The basic question is admirably concrete: Would Portlanders be better served by one government rather than two overlapping governments, and would consolidation improve accountability, performance and cost? A two-year process could illuminate that question. But under the prevailing engagement model, it could just as easily become an elaborate exercise in commissioned nonprofits, identity-balanced advisory groups, equity frameworks and “lived experience,” with the original question gradually disappearing beneath the machinery of consultation.
Any renewed consolidation effort should therefore concern itself not only with the rules governing merger, but with the rules governing the two-year process itself. If this is to be citizen engagement, citizens — not government-selected intermediaries purporting to speak for various “communities” — should remain at its center.
[1] Multnomah County Office of Sustainability, “Developing the Climate Justice Plan,” Phase 1: Frontline Community Engagement. The County states that its Climate Justice Plan Steering Committee was “composed of members from 13 community-based organizations representing frontline communities.”
[2] Multnomah County Office of Sustainability, Climate Justice Plan, Community Forum #5: “Contribute to Climate Justice,” Nov. 13, 2025, p. 8. Under “Recommendations/Concerns,” the presentation states: “Continue to prioritize engagement with frontline communities and recognize lived experience as technical expertise.”
Wow, I am grateful for today's message. "Costs less and Delivers More". If the details offer evidence, this is a winning message. I am going to get aboard. Let's get informed.
While I applaud any effort to merge the City’s and County’s governments to achieve a more streamlined governance structure, I must confess that living part-time or full-time in San Francisco for the past 45 years where the County and City governments are one in the same, I did not see a governmental structure that was efficient or effective in doing anything more than building an incredibly bureaucratic and costly administrative machine that stifles efficiency and spends an unconscionable amount of taxpayer money.
I was happy to sign his petition. We talked for about 10 minutes while he was gathering signatures at the PSU Farmers Market. I told him he had acted on an idea I’ve had for years: What is the purpose of Multnomah County today, other than as a legacy, increasingly duplicative layer of government that made more sense when large parts of what is now Portland were still unincorporated?
He seemed very likable, and I hope he can get enough traction to at least get more people talking about the idea.
Metro is a funny creature. Its existence really shows the problem: a lot of the region’s biggest issues make more sense to manage across a larger area than one city or county. TriMet is a good example. A transit system that covers Portland, Beaverton, Gresham, and the surrounding suburbs makes a lot more sense than having a patchwork of separate city transit systems. In that way, Metro may be less an extra layer of government than proof that the old city-and-county structure no longer fits the metro area we actually live in.
Perhaps the better solution—although probably much harder to pull off—would be to merge Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties into one regional government and simply call it Metro. Clackamas County might be a tough sell, but merging Washington and Multnomah counties seems pretty logical given how closely connected the two have become.
My biggest concern with his proposal is that it assumes merging county functions into the existing city bureaucracy will somehow produce better results. Given the current quality of leadership on the Portland City Council, that is a pretty bold assumption. If diversification is a good idea with a stock portfolio, there may also be some wisdom in not putting all our governmental eggs in one dysfunctional basket.
The most consequential words in this account may be the seemingly innocuous promise of “a two-year process of official analysis and citizen engagement,” because whether consolidation produces genuine reform will depend heavily on who government recognizes as the public, whose voices are given institutional weight, and how that engagement process is designed.
Portland and Multnomah County increasingly seem to have moved away from engaging citizens simply as citizens — individual voter-taxpayers with an equal stake in their government — toward a model in which government identifies particular “communities,” recruits nonprofits and advocacy organizations said to represent them, and gives special weight to participants chosen for identity and “lived experience.”
We have seen versions of this in the Portland charter-reform process, the Waterfront Park redesign and, most explicitly, Multnomah County’s Climate Justice Plan. In the last of the three consultative projects, the County assembled representatives of designated “frontline communities” through community-based organizations [1] and has gone so far as to instruct that “lived experience” be recognized as “technical expertise.” [2] Ordinary public surveys, hearings and open houses may still occur, but they sit alongside a much more structured system in which selected organizations and constituencies enjoy a privileged role in defining problems, values and priorities.
That is not quite the same thing as citizen engagement. It is stakeholder engagement based on a particular theory of who legitimately speaks for the public.
This matters enormously for MultNoMo. The basic question is admirably concrete: Would Portlanders be better served by one government rather than two overlapping governments, and would consolidation improve accountability, performance and cost? A two-year process could illuminate that question. But under the prevailing engagement model, it could just as easily become an elaborate exercise in commissioned nonprofits, identity-balanced advisory groups, equity frameworks and “lived experience,” with the original question gradually disappearing beneath the machinery of consultation.
Any renewed consolidation effort should therefore concern itself not only with the rules governing merger, but with the rules governing the two-year process itself. If this is to be citizen engagement, citizens — not government-selected intermediaries purporting to speak for various “communities” — should remain at its center.
[1] Multnomah County Office of Sustainability, “Developing the Climate Justice Plan,” Phase 1: Frontline Community Engagement. The County states that its Climate Justice Plan Steering Committee was “composed of members from 13 community-based organizations representing frontline communities.”
https://multco.us/info/developing-climate-justice-plan
[2] Multnomah County Office of Sustainability, Climate Justice Plan, Community Forum #5: “Contribute to Climate Justice,” Nov. 13, 2025, p. 8. Under “Recommendations/Concerns,” the presentation states: “Continue to prioritize engagement with frontline communities and recognize lived experience as technical expertise.”
https://multco.us/file/cjp_forum_slide_deck_-_contribute/download
Good insights. A better-structured government will alleviate some problems but not all--not even most--of the ones bedeviling us.
Sounds very naive