Nobody told the Mayor (aka PGE redux)

The item right after the North Macadam Investors deal this morning at City Council was on revising the Subpoena issued by City Council to Portland General Electric (PGE). I stayed to listen and report, as part of fulfilling my ongoing debt of honor to my wonderful campaign volunteer Bill Michtom, who worked tirelessly with me despite my insistence on finding out more from both sides before taking a position on public ownership of PGE.

Here’s what I learned on this one:

1. Nobody briefed the Mayor. When Mayor Potter asked why he hadn’t been informed, the staff person working on the Subpoena said he met with the Mayor’s chief-of-staff earlier this week, to tell her about the revised proposal voted on by the Council this morning. Apparently this item (major litigation involving one of the city’s most powerful businesses) didn’t rise to the top of the list during the two 30-minute Check-in/Council-prep sessions shown on the Mayor’s calendar for yesterday. That calendar shows 3.5 hours for Tuesday, and another 4.5 hours on Monday, of “personal time”, which some have suggested means dialing for dollars for the Charter change ballot measures. I would like to see all Council members prioritizing the most important task they were elected to do – being informed about Council votes on matters of importance to Portland’s citizens. And I would like to see City staff prioritizing giving good, accurate, complete information to Commissioners about upcoming Council agenda items. Several Commissioners said their staff were briefed on the PGE Resolution last week, and did seem well prepared. For the Mayor, paraphrasing Austin Powers, “He’s the boss, he needs the info”.

2. The city is amending the Subpoena because PGE is suing, alleging the current Subpoena is too onerous. PGE has interpreted it to mean that they have to hand over 4 years of discarded paper recycling, which they have been carefully storing for the purpose; and 35,000 back-up computer tapes, also not categorized. Council’s amended Subpoena asks for the organized records only.

3. PGE is challenging the City Council’s right as a legislative body to subpoena them at all. Council unanimously believes it has the right to subpoena records from the utility with a monopoly in many parts of the city.

4. The PGE vs. City of Portland lawsuit is being held next week. The Council has an Executive Session (private) to review it tomorrow. The City declined to participate in the Court of Appeals’ Mediation program for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to me. The explanation of why not reminded me of listening to my three kids plead three variations of “it wasn’t me” – truth in there somewhere, but not obvious where.

5. Sam Adams said, “I’m pleased with the newly-independent PGE, which is very different from PGE under Enron. But it’s important to preserve the right to subpoena records with exclusive rights to operate within the city.” Randy Leonard, voting right afterwards, said, “My confidence isn’t there yet, regarding post-Enron PGE”. Dan Saltzman and Tom Potter had no closing remarks; Erik Sten throughout the discussion was resolute and clear about past directives from the Council and the course needed to move forward. The motion passed unanimously.

Returning to the title of this post, and remembering the Council agenda item below on the South Waterfront lien:

It’s astounding to me, that Council members are not given adequate information prior to Council sessions. I find it frustrating that I don’t have it, as a citizen preparing Next Up at City Council. But the Council apparently doesn’t, either. It’s astonishing that with, what is it, 5,000 or so employees, they aren’t provided with easy access to the documents and summaries they need to prepare for Council votes. When they realize they need more information about an agenda item, the response should be like that of Commissioner Leonard and his staff, when I asked about the North Macadam item. They knew who to ask, and they asked and received more details right away. But fundamentally, an elected official with several personal staff and a host of bureau employees shouldn’t have to ask. Someone in the Mayor’s 23-member staff should have realized he hadn’t been given a summary of the PGE resolution, and provided it to him before today’s hearing. Someone preparing the Resolution should have had such a synopsis ready and posted on line.

We don’t need a whole new form of government to fix communication problems within the City. We need Council members to insist that their staff, both in their offices and in the bureaus, provide them with easy access to important information. Links to a summary paragraph, on all agenda items, so if the Mayor gets home on a Tuesday evening, looks over the agenda, and thinks, “dang, don’t remember hearing anything about PGE in the briefing today”, an abstract (a one-paragraph summary) is only a mouse-click away. If that information is also available to citizens, who may be interested in payments by developers or lawsuits with PGE, and to staff in other bureaus who would love to collaborate more, so much the better. But before we go changing the entire structure, and give more bureaucrats more power to do more stuff without legislative oversight, please, just give the decision-makers the information.