A wise man I knew used to say that it's good to know a senator, but it's much more useful to know the mayor. With that in mind, I'm starting endorsement season with the Portland city council.
The Mayor's race is not about whom to vote for so much as it is about whom to vote against. Mayor Wheeler came to the position with a record of accomplishment as a county commissioner (think of the Sellwood Bridge) and as state treasurer. Unfortunately for his reputation he then took on the mayoralty of Portland. His four years in office reminds me of Warren Buffett's famous line, "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."
Portland's City Hall has fairly earned a reputation for the civic equivalent of bad economics, as a government that can barely govern itself. Mr. Wheeler's record met City Hall's reputation, and at the end of his term it is the reputation of City Hall that has remained intact. Against a candidate with a modicum of business and political experience it would be an easy call to give someone else a chance to try and fail and to endorse the challenger.
And yet this year's challenger, Sarah Iannarone, falls short of the mark. She proposes platefuls of ideas, some good, some unusual, and some simply out of the city's realm. She identifies the pressing need to bring the police department back under city control, and then wanders off into creating standards for the lockdowns of public buildings, including schools, which are not under city control. She proposes to "get big money out of politics" (a quotation from her website) but also to establish a public bank, an instrument for patronage politics. If Mr. Wheeler has done too little in facing the challenges of 2020, Ms. Iannarone's agenda is too much. I reluctantly favor giving the Mayor another term.
By contrast, the other City Council race is an easy call. Incumbent Chloe Eudaly faces a strong challenge from the hypertalented Mingus Mapps. Commissioner Eudaly's signature accomplishment of her term has been to impose local rent and eviction control and levy annual registration fees on landlords, a measure on its face designed to protect tenants that has had the predictable effect of encouraging owners of rental houses to sell rental houses to homeowners and get out of the rental business. It's also had the effect of steering apartment builders to friendlier cities. (One prominent apartment developer has shut down its Portland operation entirely.) Construction is still continuing, but in a different form -- in the past two years nearly half of the new condominium projects in Multnomah County have four or fewer units. Instead of building rental duplexes and fourplexes, developers are replacing rental houses with owner-occupied plexes.
Commissioner Eudaly's other major misstep was to propose sweeping changes to reduce the voices of neighborhood associations in land use planning decisions. Although after the fact she said that she intended her proposal to bring more voices to the table, her proposal was directed at reducing neighborhood voices - most egregiously in providing that neighborhood associations would not have to abide by open-meeting laws. The strident voices of neighborhood associations are why a freeway doesn't run next to Division Street. Portlanders may confidently vote to replace Commissioner Eudaly with Dr. Mapps.