Regulating citizen participation

Editorial

More than 50 years ago, progressive Portlanders brought forth a vision to encourage residents to remain in the city, which had been bleeding population to the suburbs. A dynamic administration promoted a livability agenda that involved giving people across the city a voice in government decisions affecting them, particularly within their neighborhoods.

Plans for freeways cutting through neighborhoods were halted, and a comprehensive plan was adopted to enact a long-range land-use vision. Enacted in 1980, that plan was built on input from citizens in each part of the city.

And how did policymakers know that those claiming to speak for a certain part of the city actually reflected the will of that population? Neighborhood associations.

Only through established, democratically run organizations within defined boundaries could local government know who spoke for a particular area. Some such organizations emerged organically, such as the Northwest District Association, founded in 1969 around a fight to stop the Interstate 505 freeway. But a quilt of neighborhood associations covering the city did not emerge until the establishment of the Office of Neighborhood Associations in 1974.

The City Council funded the office, which in turn provided grants to local neighborhood coalition offices. Funding citizen activity that could challenge government actions was foreseen as a dicey proposition. But this could not be just another city department managed from City Hall. To fulfill its role as a conduit for an independent voice of the people, local government would support but not dictate the goals of neighborhood associations.

The subtleties of this dance of democracy were recognized in the program’s enabling legislation, which endures as City Code 3.96, adopted by the City Council in 2005. To revise the code or rules for performance, the city’s “Office of Community & Civic Life will seek representation from neighborhood associations, district coalitions, business district associations, diverse community interests, city agencies that engage in considerable public involvement activities, and other interested people as necessary.”

That duty was swept away under city charter reform in 2023, which turned the council-adopted code into a rule that could be revised administratively. Three years later, neighborhood activists are just learning they can no longer count on a deliberative process in which they play a central role.

In March, OCCL Engagement Officer Amanda Garcia-Snell notified coalitions of unspecified changes to be adopted by the city administrator on July 1. There would be no grass-roots involvement in defining this process. Neighborhood associations, just as any individual, could testify, but the city administrator would make the final decision.

And what rules or standards would be revised? She didn’t say. Just that changes were afoot and neighborhoods could not head them off at City Council or the court of public opinion.

“The goal of this project is to modernize and clarify the language … to align with the city’s current governance structure and core values,” Garcia-Snell wrote, listing those values as “anti-racism, equity, transparency, communication, collaboration and fiscal responsibility.”

This is the exact opposite of what Portland’s neighborhood program set out to do: to transmit the values and goals of the people to their government. Now the city is defining those values and rewriting laws to bring the people into compliance.

We often fault politicians for checking the wind of popular opinion before making a decision. That is what they should be doing—not to follow shifting views in every instance but to understand the will of the people they represent. Telling the people what they should believe and then using the power of government to turn that belief into policy could not be further from the American way.

In “Animal Farm,” George Orwell suggests that political power corrupts those who hold it, whatever ideology they use to justify their actions.

That is why government officials must hear the unfiltered messages of those living under them. If they use their offices to manufacture the appearance of support, if they have a hand in selecting or steering citizen bodies critiquing their performance, this is not accountability. They are enlisting members into their cheering sections, ultimately in service to their reelection campaigns. It’s akin to tampering with the jury.

Portland’s once vaunted neighborhood system may endure in some form. The danger is that it will become a public relations arm of City Hall, indistinguishable from any other city agency controlled from above.