Self-righteous council members upended

NW Examiner editorial

The City Council rejected a proposal by Councilor Angelita Morillo to scale back a program that cleans and removes thousands of homeless encampments throughout Portland each year.

Few things compare to the self-righteousness of youth, especially when displayed by a member of the Democratic Socialists of America elected to the Portland City Council.

City Councilor and DSA member Angelita Morillo attempted an end run around the normal budget process by introducing an amendment to defund homeless camp sweeps via a midyear technical budget adjustment process.

Her cause was clear (at least to her camp): removing camps does not solve homelessness. Of course, letting campsites grow and fester does not solve homelessness either, but who has time for a deeper dive when you’re fresh and eager?

Morillo filed the proposal after 4 p.m. on a Friday with a council vote set for five days later. She apparently believed the necessary seven votes were in her pocket, making any delay just an opening for unwelcome surprises. Speed and stealth were on her side.

There would be only one intervening business day for those not in on the deal to take it in, assess the predicament and somehow mount a plan to head it off at the council meeting.

Morillo, 30, may not have planned the scheme herself, but the five other members of the council’s progressive caucus have a record of hatching political strategies in private, public meetings law be dammed. Seven votes makes anything legal, in their eyes.

Hijacking the midyear budget tweaking process was their ploy. The full annual budget creation process takes many months, beginning with release of a proposed draft in February and ending with council adoption in June for a fiscal year beginning in July. There is a reason for going slow. Public education and mobilization takes time, as does assessment of ramifications and consideration of alternatives, not to mention political compromises.

While a technical adjustment ordinance sidesteps all those niceties, no rule prevents its use for major policy reconsideration. Nothing other than common decency, a respect for the citizenry and for democratic fair play.

Mayor Keith Wilson responded in the usual way one reacts to a live hand grenade thrown onto one’s lap. He hurried back from an overseas trip on Saturday, gathered his troops and began contacting constituencies threatened by changes in the 149 budget line items affected by Morillo’s amendment. The mayor’s team identified several unintended victims of the budget bomb, and some of them got to Councilor Loretta Smith, the precious seventh vote Morillo needed to pull off the blitzkrieg.

Outmaneuvered, Morillo couldn’t even retain a sixth vote. All she had left was her microphone and her indignation, which she played to the hilt. She unleashed a 15-minute tirade full of attacks against the mayor for his supposedly unethical reaction to her back-room stratagem.

After sitting patiently through the whole ordeal, Wilson responded resolutely but with decorum.

“While you may criticize the administration,” he said, “my job is to make you successful. My job is to make the city successful. I do that by thinking slow.

“It is time to measure what we are trying to achieve, to analyze it with a group, with the administration as our partners, building a trustful relationships. We need a professional, disciplined executive.”

It may have been Wilson’s finest hour in his uphill campaign to end unsanctioned camping. Though the plan has been broadly and intensely criticized, many who testified at the council hearing praised it for making the city and their communities better.

Only 31% of the 84 witnesses supported Morillo’s alternative plan. Only 31% of the 1,100 who submitted written comments supported it. If local socialists have tapped into a vein of resentment at the way the city is being run, they opened a torrent of disdain for their ideological and divisive alternative.

Partisanship was the great fear of our nation’s founders, as well as those who created Portland’s nonpartisan charter. Yet we now have partisanship everywhere, including what functions as a political party attempting to run our city.

The existence of one party tends to beget another, so in response to the Democratic Socialists among us, I would propose another. It might not be sexy. It may not even be better than average, but it would be so much better than the alternative. I’d call it The Adults in the Room Party.