Portland Business Alliance files legal challenge to keep measure to change Portland city government off ballot

The head of Portland’s most influential business group filed a legal challenge Friday seeking to keep off the ballot a proposed measure to change Portland’s form of government and the methods by which City Council members are elected.

The legal action, filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court, hinges on Portland Business Alliance President Andrew Hoan’s argument that ballot measures put before voters by a local government body must address only a single subject according to the state constitution.

The city’s elections office used that “single subject” rationale to keep a similar proposed measure to change City Council election rules and the roles of the mayor and council members off the ballot in 2020, the lawsuit notes.

The lawsuit names Portland Auditor Mary Hull Caballero and Portland Elections Officer Louise Hansen as defendants. Both told the Oregonian/OregonLive via a spokeswoman Friday that they would not comment.

While the city has historically enforced the single subject rule when deciding which local measures make the ballot, lawyers in the Portland City Attorney’s Office have argued this year that the requirement does not apply to Portland measures put on the ballot not by citizen signatures but by the City Council or a three-fourths vote of the Charter Commission, as happened in this case. Ballot measures put on the ballot via signatures are called “initiatives” while those put before voters by an elected governing body are known as “referrals.”

Hoan’s lawsuit, however, takes the position that the single-subject rule and other standards apply to all proposed changes in law brought about by a vote of the people, not just to those put on the ballot via signatures.

The filing came just hours before James Posey, co-founder of the National Association of Minority Contractors of Oregon who ran for mayor in 2004, filed a separate lawsuit challenging the ballot language city officials wrote for the proposed measure.

In his lawsuit, Hoan argues that the proposed changes to the city charter related to mayoral powers and City Council election rules should be split into several separate ballot measures to give voters a meaningful say. Some provisions in the measure are wildly popular while others are unusual or even unheard of among large U.S. cities and could be extremely unpopular, the lawsuit says.

The measure would, for example, end Portland’s unique approach of having individual City Council members act as administrators over the city’s many bureaus and departments. That idea has shown to be wildly popular among voters and policymakers.

It would also, among other things, create four new districts so that council members are no longer chosen citywide; create a new city administrator, who would be appointed by the mayor, subject to City Council approval; have three council members elected from each district, expanding the council from five members to 12; switch from holding a primary election in the spring followed by potential two-way runoffs in the fall for both mayor and council members to electing those officials through ranked-choice voting in a single fall election.

No other city in the nation has voters elect multiple city council members to represent a single geographic subsection of the city.

Hoan’s attorney, Steve Elzinga, writes in the legal challenge that Hoan “supports the absolute and unequivocal need to remove the legislative branch from the executive and provide the mayor and a city manager with the responsibilities and, more importantly, the accountability for the city’s administration.”

But, he writes, Hoan “is concerned that the coupling of the good and expected reforms to the city’s administration will be brought down at the ballot by the improvised concepts advanced through the new form of elections that the Charter Commission has bundled together into a single proposed measure. (Hoan) wants the Charter Commission to re-submit the same charter reforms to voters in multiple measures so that Portland’s voters have the choice to agree with all, none, or some of the charter reforms.”

Portland City Attorney Robert Taylor and one of his deputies outlined in a five-page memo in March why they don’t believe the constitution’s requirements for ballot measures brought as initiatives apply to the measure to change Portland’s form of government.

They assert the single-subject rule applies only to initiative petitions. “We have found no case law defining ballot measures referred by a local government – including ballot measures referred by the Charter Commission – as initiative petitions,” they wrote.

Caballero, the city auditor, gave a similar rationale earlier this month when she turned down a request by the business alliance to reject the ballot measure as flawed on single–subject grounds. She wrote that her office had no role to play in approving or rejecting the measure as to its basic form. “A Charter Commission proposed measure is not an initiative petition and does not require signatures,” she wrote.

Elzinga, however, argues the Oregon constitution says otherwise. In a section regarding “the initiative and referendum powers reserved to the people,” it states that “a proposed law … shall embrace one subject only and matters properly connected therewith,” he notes.

Betsy Hammond; betsyhammond@oregonian.com