A ballot measure promises to transform the dysfunctional local government in Oregon’s largest city.

 Portland, Oregon

• Voters will have a chance to replace their antiquated commission form of local government, in which four commissioners and the mayor serve as both city councilmembers and as heads of the various municipal bureaus.
• The November ballot measure, numbered 26-228, goes much further than past unsuccessful attempts to replace the commission system. The single, all-or-nothing question would triple the ranks of the city council, create the office of a professional city administrator, and introduce multi-winner, ranked-choice voting.

Shifting commissioners around the bureaucracy has resulted in unaccountability, inefficiency, and worse municipal services

• Commissioners often run their bureaus as silos
• Cross-cutting citywide goals on issues like transportation can't be met given the lack of inter-bureau collaboration
• Running multiple departments while voting on council business leaves commissioners with little time and energy for constituents-a dynamic made worse by a lack of electoral districts

Homeless camps have proliferated, creating garbage-strewn environments of lawlessness and drug abuse that have spilled into residential neighborhoods.

• Tenants in one working-class apartment building feel trapped, unable to move out of the building where they routinely find addicts shooting up in common bathrooms and sleeping in stairwells.

November's ballot question represents a vital chance for Portlanders to arrest their city's decline

• 63 percent of Portlanders would like to see more police officers in their community; 61 percent want greater enforcement against quality-of-life offenses.
• If the ballot measure passes, Portland would become the first large American city in some seven decades to use multimember districts in local elections
• Scrapping the low-turnout May primary in favor of a single November general election would reduce municipal costs and promote higher turnout

Opponents have raised concerns about the all-or-nothing nature of the proposal

• Separate proposals would allow Portlanders to overhaul the commission system without such a complicated, experimental, and radically different replacement
• Another reason behind the opposition stems from the costs that would accompany such an expansion in the size of municipal government
• Portland's budget office projected that the change would cost between $900,000 to $8.7 million annually, or 0.1 percent to 1.4 percent of the city's discretionary budget
• Place city bureaus under professional administration, which would expand the possibilities for interagency collaboration, might offset the costs associated with an expanded city council

https://www.city-journal.org/portland-dysfunctional-local-government