During an interview on “Think Out Loud” last month, Portland Mayor-elect Keith Wilson said that he was “an admirer” of Interim City Administrator Michael Jordan when describing whom he would want to hire to oversee the day-to-day operations of city bureaus. Outgoing Mayor Ted Wheeler announced Jordan’s appointment in May as part of the voter-approved changes to Portland’s new form of governance and elections using ranked choice voting.
Jordan’s contract was set to expire on June 30, 2025 to ease the transition from one administration to the next. But Jordan will now stay on through at least the end of next year, according to reporting by The Oregonian.
Jordan joins us to talk about the transition and his priorities amid a grim financial outlook for the city’s finances and its departments.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Almost every elected official in Portland is going to change in two weeks as a new form of government officially begins, but one key non-elected official is going to be staying on. Michael Jordan was chosen by outgoing Mayor Ted Wheeler this past spring to be the interim city administrator. In that role, Jordan has overseen day to day operations across the city’s two dozen bureaus and offices, and managed the city’s transition to its new form of government. His contract had been scheduled to end in June of 2025, in six months or so. But earlier this month, incoming Mayor Keith Wilson announced that Jordan has agreed to stay on for up to another year. Michael Jordan, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Michael Jordan: Thank you.
Miller: How did Keith Wilson broach the topic of extending your contract?
Jordan: Well, at the first lunch meeting we had, the week after the election, he asked if I would be willing to stay on a little longer. I think most of your listeners know that Mayor Wilson ran heavily on ending unsheltered homelessness. He wants to devote a lot of his initial first year energy to solving that, and asked if I would stay on, kind of keep everything running for him and not go through that change also of bringing on a brand new administrator – at least not right away.
Miller: Before that lunch, had you been pretty sure that in six months you’d be out of this office?
Jordan: What I have told everybody kind of leading up to the election, whenever asked, it would be that I thought that the mayor-elect, whoever it was, would need to run probably the most robust recruitment process that the city’s ever seen for the city’s first city administrator. I figured that would take a few months to do and I would not be an applicant. That was what I told everybody, and then Mayor Wilson asked, “Would you stay on at least through the year and perhaps to June of the next year.” So that he could work on his agenda, I think, without the distraction of having to bring on a new administrator and then delay that just for a year or so. But I’m not sure exactly how long it will be.
Miller: Why did you say “yes”?
Jordan: Well, for about the last 40 years, I’ve been an addict. “My name’s Mike and I’m addicted to public service.” I started as an elected official in the city of Canby 40 years ago, January, as a city councilor. [I] was gonna run for mayor in 1988 when the city administrator quit about a month before the filing deadline. So I thought it’d be nice to get paid to do the work, because I loved it. So put my name in for the city administrator job in Canby rather than run for mayor … and 10 years as city administrator, then another stint as an elected at Clackamas County as a commissioner for four years, then COO at Metro, COO at the state, and now back in municipal government at the City of Portland.
So I’m addicted. I love it and thought that I could be helpful to the new administration.
Miller: How does your current position compare to the other administrative ones? You mentioned Metro, the regional government, and also the Department of Administrative Services. I think some Oregonians, they see those words on license plates. Half of the state’s fleet, it seems, has DAS on it. But a big administrative role at the state, before you ran a bureau at the city. How does your current job compare broadly to those other ones?
Jordan: Well, they’re all a little unique, but probably compares closest to the COO job at Metro in that I was accountable to elected officials directly, served at the pleasure of the council and had overarching administrative authority over a multiple line of business agency. And so the City of Portland, even bigger than Metro, from an employee and a budget basis, but similar in structure in that it’s a multi-line of business organization. I’m accountable both to the mayor directly under the new form of government, but also accountable directly to the council with a nine-vote majority. They can remove me unilaterally.
So it’s a similar job in that you’re accountable to elected officials directly and you have broad oversight over multiple lines of business.
Miller: For people who haven’t been paying close attention to the transition so far, can you give us a sense for what has already changed? We’re talking about the future form of government, but there’s this funny thing over the last six months where a lot of the internal changes have already happened. So what has already changed?
Jordan: Sure. So the election was November of ‘22, where the charter amendment was passed by voters. And we pretty much immediately started the process of implementing the charter changes, so we had to create districts. We had to have a salary commission to set salaries for the elected officials. We had to change all of our election code so that we could get it to Multnomah County early enough. We had to do that by April of ‘23, so that they could change all of their software to be able to run a ranked choice voting election by November of ‘24.
Along with that, we realized, or at least I realized, that we were gonna have to hire the first city administrator after the mayor was elected in ‘24. I was envisioning what that recruitment might look like. Your listeners will probably recall that the City of Portland, under the commission form of government, had 26 bureaus and offices who reported to five elected officials that the mayor would assign.
Miller: So, those members of the city council, these commissioners, they were both lawmakers passing resolutions, but they were also executives in charge of the Water Bureau, or Bureau of Environmental Services, or Parks – a funny combination, which is what voters got rid of two years ago.
Jordan: Unique among big cities in the United States. Back to the changing of the organizational structure, which was not mandated by the charter change, but I believed, and I think others did also, that if we were recruiting for that first city administrator, they saw the announcement, went onto our website and looked for the organizational structure of the city in the old structure, they would have seen 26 offices and bureaus that would have reported directly to them. And there’s almost no way to keep your eyes on 26 different lines of business all at once. If they were worth their salt, they would have realized that if they took the job, they would have to reorganize city government.
When you do that, you almost always get executed after a couple of years because you’ve just pissed off enough people. So I thought that we should do it for that person. We wouldn’t get it all right. They, of course, would change things in the future, but they wouldn’t have to do the wholesale mass reorganization of the city. So we took that to council in November of ‘23 for them to approve the new organizational structure ...
Miller: The idea is that there are now something like six deputies, who each have a portfolio of these different offices or bureaus.
Jordan: Correct.
Miller: And then those deputies … interims so far, right?
Jordan: Correct.
Miller: [They] report to the city administrator, you?
Jordan: Correct.
Miller: Now that you’re going to be staying on for longer, how many of them might also?
Jordan: Well, we’re going through a discussion with the mayor about some of those things. Most folks realize, because we’ve said quite a bit about it in the last few months, that the city faces a pretty significant budget challenge going into this year. And it will last for a few years. We can talk more about what’s brought that on, but we will have to make some cuts in this budget.
One of the things on the table is the organizational structure. Can it be even more streamlined? Can we realize some savings by doing some merging of different parts of the organization? We haven’t come to conclusions on that yet, but it’s certainly part of the discussion, not only at the service area level, but within the service areas and some of the internal services that are provided. So things like communications or engagement, HR, IT procurement – those kinds of internal services will be under review. There’s no question, we’re gonna have to do some really tough discussions about the budget.
Miller: I wanna hear more about the budget in a few minutes. But when we talk about the organization of government, it’s really important because it has a direct bearing on how government functions. But it’s so easy for it to seem so abstract. I think most Portlanders don’t really care about the internal structure or the organizational chart of city government. They want city government to work for them.
So with that as the sort of the main lens now, how do you assess, in these early stages, if the new form of government is better or worse in terms of actual Portlanders’ lives?
Jordan: It’s a great question. It is a little difficult sometimes to know or assess whether you’ve gotten it completely right really early, because the outcomes and outputs from a change in organizational structure often don’t occur until longer term. Drawing boxes and lines on a piece of paper to change organizational structure usually does not instantly change the culture of an organization. And by culture, I mean how people behave in the organization, how they work with each other or not, and how smoothly business processes work. That takes time, and it also takes a further examination of things like business processes, duplication of effort and those kinds of things. In an organization that has over 7,300 full-time equivalents, that usually takes some time.
So it’s usually difficult to see the instant betterment of government by just an org chart change. However, I will say since Mayor Wheeler took all the bureaus back on July 1 and we are attempting to run the government like it will run next year – we’ve been doing that, as you mentioned, for the last six months – I’m seeing changes in behavior right away.
Miller What’s an example that you’ve seen?
Jordan: I meet daily with the six deputies regarding the changes, what’s going on in the city and how we can do things better. And I am seeing collaboration and problem solving across multiple bureaus that would have taken us months to figure out in the past. I’m seeing them happen almost in real time. I had a person come up to me that works up at OHSU in government affairs, after a meeting about two or three months ago. And because I had mentioned something about that culture change that’s gonna take time, this person came up to me and said, “Well, I want to tell you it’s already happening. We’ve been having a problem we’ve been working on for months and months and months. I called one of your deputies and I had it solved in five minutes.”
That’s anecdotal, it’s not data driven. But I’m already seeing the lights come on over people’s heads about how they could do things now in a collaborative way, among multiple bureaus, that we would just have had a very difficult time doing in the past.
Miller: Speaking of cultural differences, what do you see as the managerial differences between Ted Wheeler, your current boss, and Keith Wilson, your soon to be boss?
Jordan: That’s not a fair question. [Laughter]
Miller: It is a very fair question.
Jordan: I’m kidding.
Miller: I’m asking this on behalf of Portlanders.
Jordan: Sure, sure. Well, I think Mayor Wheeler is, first of all, very experienced. This is, I think, his 18th year in being an elected executive. Multnomah County and the treasurer before that, before he came to Portland as mayor …
Miller: The kind of experience that I imagine meshes … I mean, it literally meshes with yours, in terms of state experience, county experience. So you speak the same language. Is that a fair way to put it?
Jordan: That is a fair way to put it. And Mayor Wheeler’s obviously been on the job now eight years and so is a very known commodity. You know how he acts, you know what’s important to him. You know he’s built a number of programs from scratch. Our homeless response at the city is basically his architecture that he built, and quite frankly, up until very recently, ran out of the mayor’s office. We run it now out of the administrative office. So a very definitive leader and [he] knows what he thinks about things. You don’t have to guess what Mayor Wheeler thinks.
Mayor-elect Wilson is still kind of a new commodity, especially in the role that he’s never been in before, let alone the chief executive of a big, public organization. He’s never ever even been elected to any role, yet. So, a little bit new, and we’re still trying to figure each other out a little bit. But I will tell you in the month or so I’ve had to work with him, I have found him to be incredibly earnest about what he believes. There’s no pretense at all. He’s very clear, very open about what he thinks and why he thinks it. He asks very good questions when he’s getting briefed on things, very detailed questions that you might not expect with somebody with that level of experience. And it is really difficult not to feel how good a person he is at his core. And for me, as an administrator, there are things you can’t teach somebody. I can help him learn about city government and how government works, but I can’t teach him to have a great heart. And I think he has that.
Miller: Do you, as a city administrator – in this case, the city administrator – need to believe, yourself, in the policies that you are enacting?
Jordan: Well, that’s a good question. It’s not my job to do that. It certainly makes the job easier when you believe that this is the right thing to do. Very seldom in my entire career have I been asked to do something that I thought was just dead wrong. I certainly have opinions about how something we’re doing could work better or what aspect of the policy could have been changed and it might have been easier to implement or more effective.
Miller: And I imagine, in those cases, depending on the relationship you have with your boss, you can express that.
Jordan: Oh, I’ve always been able to express it.
Miller: But then at a certain point, if your boss says “no, I was elected and this is what I’ve promised I’m gonna do,” or, “this is what I think I should do,” then it’s your job to carry it out.
Jordan: That’s right. In the new form of government, it gets a little bit nuanced and we don’t have a lot of experience with this yet, so we’re learning and we will learn for some time. But we have an elected legislative branch now with 12 new councilors. And it’s their job to make public policy and their job to appropriate money to implement that policy.
Miller: A classic legislature.
Jordan: Exactly. And then it’s the executive’s job to implement policy, run the day-to-day in the most effective way possible and be responsive to that counsel when they have given direction. So it’s really a nuanced dance, if you will, between the executive and the legislature to be able to make the local government run as effectively as possible. I view my job to be accountable to both branches, and really trying to understand how best those 7,000 folks and the $8 billion that we spend each year, how to make that the most effective for Portlanders.
Miller: Before we go, I do want to come back to the budget. What kind of cuts to services can Portlanders expect in the coming years?
Jordan: We have been given direct guidance, I should say, by Mayor Wheeler to look at 5% to 8% cuts in the general fund budget. And he has extended those cuts across all of our lines of work, except that he has held harmless public safety – which means police, fire and emergency communications. We’re going through an exercise right now where all of the bureaus and service areas have submitted cuts that add up to at least 8%. We believe that we will have to make at least that many cuts to match up our revenues with our expenses on a regular basis in the next year.
We also have a significant, in the tens of millions of dollars, one-time funding cliff. Through the last five years, with funding from the federal government through ARPA, we have started the programs which address houselessness, livability issues, cleaning up garbage and graffiti, and public safety issues. And we are coming to the end of that funding. So not only do we have to balance the regular cash flow budget, but we also have this one-time cliff that we have to figure out in the next year.
Miller: Michael Jordan, thanks very much.
Jordan: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Miller: Michael Jordan is Portland’s city administrator.
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