Portland City Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney discusses new role

At the beginning of the year, Portland’s new city council elected Elana Pirtle-Guiney as council president in a contentious vote that revealed some of the dividing lines of the new council. Pirtle-Guiney won by a 7-5 vote after nine rounds of voting. In the new role, Pirtle-Guiney will set council meeting agendas and refer council items to a vote that are proposed by the mayor or city auditor. Pirtle-Guiney joins us to talk about her new role and the challenges facing the new 12-member city council.

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. At the beginning of this new year, Portland’s new city council elected its first council president. It took nine rounds for a winner to emerge. The winner is Elana Pirtle-Guiney, who represents District 2. That includes North and most of Northeast Portland, west of 82nd Avenue. Pirtle-Guiney has a long history in Oregon government, having previously led legislative affairs and policy work under governors Kate Brown and John Kitzhaber. She also spent nearly a decade at the labor union, AFL-CIO. In her new role, Pirtle-Guiney will set meeting agendas along with other powers, some of which have yet to be defined. Elana Pirtle-Guiney joins me now. It’s good to have you back on the show.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney:  Thanks so much. It’s good to be here.

Miller:  Your name was not on the council president ballot for the first few rounds of voting last week, leading to the 6-6 tie between supporters of Candace Avalos and Olivia Clark. What was going through your mind when you were watching that deadlock?

Pirtle-Guiney:  Whew, coming in that day, I don’t think anybody knew exactly what was going to happen. But we did know that there were a lot of folks who were trying to figure out, based on policy, based on procedure, based on what we wanted in a leader on the council, where the right place was to land. And there were a number of folks who had been talking about what we needed in a council president and how we made sure to try to bring folks around to find somebody who could lead the whole council.

Miller:  I should say that you were one of the people who said, “I would like to be that person. I would like to be the council president.”

Pirtle-Guiney:  Early on, actually, I hadn’t. I had talked to my colleagues about other leadership positions that I was interested in. I had a few people ask me about running for council president. But I would say [I was] a hesitant entrant into that space.

Miller:  When did you decide for yourself that you actually wanted it then?

Pirtle-Guiney:  In mid-December, I decided I was open to it. But I was still not interested in being part of that first choice. But I told folks that if it came down to needing somebody who could break a tie, I would be open to that, probably a week or two before the vote. Up until that point though, it was not something that had been on my mind.

Miller:  So as I mentioned, this went for eight rounds and many of those were when your name was on the ballot. Eventually, it was just down to two, and then one person switched and you got a majority. Between some of those rounds – and the reporting I’ve read and what I’ve heard – there were a bunch of private conversations. People would pull each other aside for little sidebars here and there. And then there’d be another vote. And then there’d be more conversations.

Without divulging private details about your new colleagues, can you give us some sense for what you all were talking about?

Pirtle-Guiney:  Well, I wasn’t in most of those conversations actually.

Miller:  You were in none of them?

Pirtle-Guiney:  I wasn’t in most of them. Folks were trying to figure out, like I said, what we wanted council leadership to look like. We are a new body. This is a new thing for Portland, to have a city council that is independent from the mayor and the administration of the city. And how we design our council, whether we are focused more on some of the policy work that needs to happen, what our procedures look like, what the way is that we work with our committees, all of those pieces will be developed over the next few weeks to a few months. I think folks were having a lot of conversations about what it meant to lead that process and what they needed in somebody who could work with them to do that.

Miller:  Why weren’t you a part of those conversations?

Pirtle-Guiney:  Once my name was on the ballot, once my name was out there, I tried to give folks space to have conversations about what they felt would be best for the council as a whole moving forward.

Miller:  This vote or series of votes has been described by City Hall watchers as reflecting a split between a more progressive side of the council and more moderate members of this new council. In that framing, Candace Avalos was a progressive pick and you were the more moderate choice. Is that the way you see it?

Pirtle-Guiney:  I think there’s a lot of ways to divide councilors and everybody likes to go to partisanship first. I actually think that as we start to get into the work of council, as we start to do our policy work, we will hopefully create committees in our council meeting tomorrow where we can start to dig into a lot more of the work that we should be doing. I think you’ll see a lot of different divides come out. That partisan split that is easy to point to, as a first level of analysis, won’t seem quite so stark.

Miller:  That makes sense to me. But I guess that still makes me wonder what you imagine to be the other splits, or other coalitions, or other dividing lines that you think will emerge or that, in your mind, have already emerged. If it’s not as simple as more left, less left, if everyone would define themselves as “not Republican,” say.

Pirtle-Guiney:  It is Portland.

Miller:  Yeah, so if that’s too simple, then what are the other lines that you’re imagining the sorting to shake out with?

Pirtle-Guiney:  There are folks who have worked in and around the government more and folks who are more from the advocacy side, [and] a few of us who have done both. There are people who want our work to be very grassroots driven and people who see their role as more of a representative. There are a lot of ways that I think we will naturally work together and form coalitions.

I do think as it relates to our first meeting, it’s important to point out, though, that we voted on five different topics.  On three of those we had unanimous votes on the first round, including the election of our vice president. So there’s a lot of conversation about splits on the council, but what I see is a council that, on many things, will come together. And you’ll see us trying to move forward for Portland and build this new system, this new form of government for Portland, in a way that has a lot of agreement.

Miller:  So let’s turn to one of those areas of agreement, which, if I’m not mistaken, was unanimous – the partial rules for the powers that you, as this first president, will have. Can you summarize what has already been decided, at least for the time being?

Pirtle-Guiney:  And those rules will actually be adopted at tomorrow’s meeting, hopefully. I assume that the votes will still be there. We were adopting amendments to those rules at the last meeting. And what we have right now, going in, is a set of rules that the past council adopted for us to start us out, and 12 councilors who would like to actually have some say over how we run our business.

So things like how does the agenda come forward? How do we make sure that everybody has the opportunity to put important issues on the agenda, but that we also have some streamlining so that we can be nimble and make sure that we line up items that should be heard together on the same agendas? You have to have some centering of that work around the council president’s office, to make sure that we get the right items together. But we also want everybody to be able to add to the work that we’re doing.

Similarly, with committees, there were conversations around how we form committees and how we seek committees. And, again, making sure that the council as a whole has the ability to ask the president to pause and make sure we have the committee structure right, but that we also can move nimbly and have the president bring forward recommendations on what the committees should be and who the members of each of those should be.

Miller:  Can you just remind us what the committees are?

Pirtle-Guiney:  They don’t exist yet.

Miller:  But, I mean, what the purpose of them is?

Pirtle-Guiney:  Oh, absolutely. As a policymaking body and a body that, in part, will be charged with holding bureaus accountable to doing the work that Portlanders have asked them to do, council will form committees so that we can spend time focusing on specific policy areas and specific parts of government. Every counselor will be a bit of a generalist, but can dive deep in certain areas and make sure that we actually understand the implications of the policies that we’re passing, [so] we can pass good policy and do good work for the people of Portland.

Miller:  So really, we can think about this as the way the Oregon Legislature or U.S. Congress works, where these committees then can put forward bills, which then can be taken up by the entire body.

Pirtle-Guiney:  Exactly. And that’s very common in other councils that have a policymaking charge like we do, as well.

Miller:  How much power do you think you should have as the president to appoint committee members and chairs?

Pirtle-Guiney:  There’s, again, this balance of input versus nimbleness. I appreciate that the new rules we’ll be operating under “allow me to put forward a proposal.” Trying to work all of the pieces of the puzzle out on the dias is hard. You have to balance the different skill sets that you need on a committee; the different interests that folks bring to a committee; balance the geography of the city; make sure that we have multiple districts represented on a committee; and make sure that we also don’t have quorum concerns, where if an entire district got together to have a joint town hall, we might inadvertently create a quorum of a committee.

So there’s a lot of pieces to fit together and having the president with the power to bring forward a proposal, I think is very important.

Miller: How are you going to balance the needs of the council as a whole, with your role as one of the representatives from your own district?

Pirtle-Guiney:  That’s going to be a challenge. And I think in part it’s a challenge for every councilor because we do have this joint charge to do policy work for the city and to work with our constituents, Portlanders who live in our districts, to make sure that their concerns and challenges with the city are being addressed. Even more so …

Miller:  Isn’t it a bigger deal for you?

Pirtle-Guiney: Even more so, as council president. I will probably be in City Hall a little more than I wanted to and in my district a little less than I wanted to. I think for folks who are listening in from District 2, I hope that you see the balance here as well. Having somebody from District 2 in that president’s chair means that I can make sure that the concerns we have are getting the airtime that they need. But it does mean that I’m also less available for those individual constituent concerns, as I might otherwise be able to be.

Miller:  Tomorrow, the council is going to take up an ordinance you put forward to increase individual budgets of city councilors and the mayor. Why?

Pirtle-Guiney:  All of the recommendations leading up to the passing of our budget were to make sure that council and the mayor were staffed to be able to do the work that Portlanders are asking us to do. In our case, [it] is a combination of policy work, oversight work, and also advocacy and support to our constituents. Other cities of our size and with our structure have … I believe the report from the Government Transition Advisory Committee, GTAC, talked about something between two to four, or two to five staff per councilor, plus a robust shared staff system. The transition team working within the city recommended at least two staff members per councilor. The former council gave us one staff per councilor and 10 shared staff – four of whom are dedicated to districts and six work on the back end, essentially making sure that our operations can run.

We can’t do the work that Portlanders rightfully would like to see us do with only one staff person. The mayor also has struggled over the past few weeks to be able to set up his office in a way where he can do the work that Portlanders are looking to him to do. And as we try to take on the policy work, the oversight work and the work with Portlanders, we want to be able to do that well from the start, which is why we’re bringing this proposal forward early. And I suspect you’ll see a lot of conversation tomorrow about what it is that each of our offices actually need. And how we can do that effectively.

Miller: The increase would cost an estimated $4.6 million in the current budget year and more than $11 million in the next one. How do you justify this at a time when the city is already facing a serious budget shortfall? The work that you and your colleagues are going to be doing, a lot of that in the near term, is going to be figuring out where you can cut costs, how you can slash the budget without causing too much pain for your fellow Portlanders.

You’re saying we need more money to do this work. How do you justify that?

Pirtle-Guiney: None of us takes that lightly and the work of the budget is going to be really, really difficult. We also need to be responsive to Portlanders who, through charter reform, charged the council with new policy roles, and new oversight roles, and new constituent services roles that we have never had in the city before. If we don’t do that well, I don’t know that Portlanders will continue to have faith in our city to operate effectively.

We need folks to know that we can represent them in the way that they are asking for. We are going to try to do that as nimbly as possible. We’re certainly not going to add extra to our budgets if we don’t need it. And I suspect that you’ll see us have a conversation about what is really needed. The budget work is going to be difficult, and we keep that in mind as we take on this charge. But we also know that if we can’t be responsive to Portlanders, then we can’t help them navigate the city. We can’t help find the places in our oversight roles where we can do things more efficiently, where we can do things better. We can’t pass a policy that is really good for every Portlander.

Miller: What do you think about the incoming mayor’s plan to end unsheltered homelessness by standing up dozens of new nighttime shelters?

Pirtle-Guiney: We’ve seen the high level proposal and we are working on finding time to sit down with the mayor to get more details. And actually, we’ve asked the mayor to come into a work session where we can have a public conversation so that Portlanders can also hear the details of his plan. I’m looking forward to that. I think we’ll be able to find time for it later this month.

Miller: Elana Pirtle-Guiney, thanks very much.

Pirtle-Guiney: Thank you for having me.

Miller:  Elana Pirtle-Guiney is the Portland City Council president.

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