How did Portland decide to adopt its unique commission form of government? You can blame a hurricane. by Joe Streckert After more than a century, Portland is transitioning away from a commission form of government. Compared to other major cities, it’s been an unusual method of governance, with each member of the Portland City Council running for at-large positions and then taking on roles as the head of different city bureaus. But it wasn’t always this way. Portland adopted its current form of government in 1913. Before that, the city government was very different. The city was divided into different representative districts known as wards, and each ward sent a representative to the City Council. Portland also elected a mayor who acted as its chief executive. The way wards were drawn and representatives were allocated tended to favor some parts of the city more than others. “It was historically weighted to the west side, where the original population was,” says Carl Abbott, professor emeritus at Portland State University and author of several books on Portland history. In the early 20th century the lopsided ward system buckled under two pressure points: changing population, and widespread corruption. During that time Portland’s population grew primarily on the east side. However, the boundaries of wards and the number of representatives for those wards didn’t change to reflect the changes. “The east side of the city wasn’t adequately represented,” says Abbott. “The east side was the rising middle class neighborhoods… the system hadn’t caught up with the changing demographics of the city.” There was also the small matter of corruption. “Portland’s government had gotten some very bad publicity. A vice commission had investigated all the places of sin in downtown Portland and identified how widespread that was,” says Abbott. Prohibitions on gambling and sex work were publicly flaunted, and outsiders began to notice. “The New York Bureau of Municipal Research did a report on Portland that was scathing,” says Abbott. In the early 20th century Portland had a reputation as being one of the worst-run cities in the nation. Merely electing a reformer as mayor wasn’t enough. In 1905 Portland elected Harry Lane as a progressive mayor, but Abbott and Johnston both characterize his tenure as largely ineffective. He couldn’t get meaningful change past an entrenched City Council. If Portland was going to change, it would need a whole new way of doing things.  “[The change in government] was a reaction to what progressive reformers considered to be the corruption, disorganization, and inefficiency in what they thought was inherent in the council model,” says Robert Johnston, professor and director of the Teaching of History Program at University of Chicago Illinois and author of The Radical Middle Class, a book about Portland in the early 20th century. “The critique was that these council members could be bought off by monied interests very easily. It was easy to pick off members if nobody except their constituents cared. Whereas if you brought everyone together in a city-wide election people would actually notice…. Corruption would be much less likely.” Reformers found a new system in Galveston, Texas. “On September 8th, 1900 we had [a hurricane that] we refer to now as ‘the 1900 Storm’,” says Dwayne Jones, the executive director of the Galveston Historical Foundation. “It was devastating…. They lost count of how many people died.” Jones estimates the loss of life as somewhere between 8,000 and 15,000 people. Galveston had a system with wards and a mayor, but after the 1900 hurricane, the city government had ceased to function, both because of the loss of infrastructure, and because several government officials had themselves died. Galveston needed to organize itself quickly. City elites proposed a new form of government to get the city back on its feet. Jones characterizes Galveston’s post-hurricane system as prioritizing efficiency. “They broke it down by function,” he says. Instead of city officials being elected to represent geographical areas, commissioners would oversee different city services and jobs. The idea was to get the city moving again as quickly as possible, and rebuild in a way that the older system supposedly couldn’t. Jones also notes that this empowered citizens who were struggling in-post hurricane Galveston. “They could approach the person who was in charge of a function and felt like they were getting a better response,” he says. Reformers looking for an alternative to electing ward representatives saw Galveston’s commission form of government as a more modern, efficient, and professional way to run a city. Reformers like Lane, the former mayor, hoped that by emphasizing functionality in government rather than geographic representation, they would do away with the old system of favors, social relationships, and machine politics. “There was a sense that it was a more efficient way to run a government,” says Johnston. “There was some elitism in that, but at the same time it does take expertise and talent to run a government. If you wanted to have a municipal utility system, you actually had to have people who knew how utility systems worked.” In May of 1913, Portland voted to change up city government in a close election. The new charter passed by a mere 292 votes, out of 34,342 votes cast. “It was the new [middle class] neighborhoods on the east side… that helped provide the margin of victory,” says Abbott. “The affluent and middle-class tended to vote for it. The working class people did not vote for it. They saw their interest as being better served by the ward system.” Johnston notes that while the commission form of government had progressive champions back in 1913, it didn’t necessarily lead to progressive outcomes.  “A lot of historians think that the move to this commission form throughout the country was profoundly anti-democratic.” he says. “Council members may have been corrupt, but at least they did serve their communities. And it was much more likely that, say, a plumber or a barber would be elected to the council. But if you only had five people, business executives and lawyers had much more city-wide visibility. And that happened in many cities. They moved away from lower-class and working-class representation.” Johnston notes that the entrenched elites and machine politicians didn’t care for the new government, but it didn’t take long for them to acclimate themselves to it. One of the first mayors to take advantage of the new system was George Baker, an old-school conservative politician who became Portland’s longest serving mayor. “When Baker took power in 1917 he was very happy to be able to control positions on the commission,” says Johnston. “Effectively, starting in the late teens and early ‘20s, the conservative business forces within the city felt very comfortable having a commission form of government.” However, according to Abbott, the commission form of government was eventually successful at achieving some of its goals. “If you looked at Portland over the last 50 years it was very efficiently run with good services and a very low level of corruption,” he says. He also notes that by the 1970s most city bureaus were largely professionalized, with city commissioners relying heavily on the staff to keep things running. Commission forms of government became less and less common as the years passed. Cities that had opted for this modern and professionalized system tended to move toward other forms of local governance, including Galveston. According to Jones, Galveston moved away from the commission system in order to become more democratic.  “I believe [the end of the commission system] had to do with racial politics,” he says. “By the mid-twentieth century Galveston had a very large African-American community…. There were questions about serving that community. Breaking it down allowed for them to serve, as well as women.” Time will tell whether similar democratic reforms play out in the same way for Portland.