Conforming City Code with City Charter

On Dec. 4, the transition team completed its ninth and final presentation to council to update Portland’s City Code and align it to the amended City Charter changes. This is a significant milestone because all 35 titles of code have been reviewed and presented to council for official updating. 

The work of code matching with charter updates began in April 2023, when Chapter 2.08, Election of Candidates, was updated to implement ranked-choice voting methods. In September 2023, Chapter 3.02, Council Organization and Procedure, was updated to provide a framework for the 12-member council to do its business. Finally, in June 2024, updates to the city’s organizational chart were made to ensure that the future mayor and city administrator are able to more effectively oversee the City’s bureaus and programs. 

The transition team was required to coordinate the reviews and revisions to all code titles by Jan. 1, 2025 (when the new form of government goes into effect). The team worked with City Attorney’s Office and subject matter experts in each bureau to make edits to code. The following edits were required to be made in nearly every code title to ensure it conforms with the amended city charter: 

Remove Commissioner-in-Charge. Starting Jan. 1, 2025, the City will no longer have commissioners responsible for managing bureaus. Instead, the day-to-day operations of the city will be managed by the mayor with the aid of a professional city administrator. This means where the code states commissioner-in-charge, it must be replaced with mayor, city administrator, or councilor, whichever is most appropriate. 

City Administrator authority. A city administrator is a new position to the City of Portland and their role needed to be defined more fully in code. The code updates give the city administrator the authority to direct the work of bureaus, adopt administrative rules, and approve contracts or other agreements. The city administrator may delegate these authorities to any person, program, or bureau for the efficient running of the city. 

Remove administrative sections. The future city council will be focused on setting policies, while the mayor and city administrator will be focused on the day-to-day operations of the city. This change requires that any section which is focused on administrative work be removed from the code. This will help to keep the future council from accidentally crossing the line into the work of the mayor and city administrator. All of the sections being deleted from code will be reviewed, and, if necessary, will be added the city’s administrative rules, also known as Portland Policy Documents. Administrative rules are where the day-to-day procedures and policies of the city can be found. 

In addition to the required edits, staff agreed that a few other edits would be useful for clarity and consistency across the code. The first additional edit was to remove gendered language such as ‘he’ or ‘she’ from the code for equity purposes. These identifiers have been replaced with either the person’s title or the word, ‘they’. The second additional edit was to replace the word, ‘shall’ with either ‘may’, ‘will’, or ‘must’. This change was made at the request of the City Attorney’s office and should make the intent of the language clearer. The final addition was to ensure that the new city organization was reflected in code by correcting bureau and program names. 

In the new form of government, policy and code-related decisions will be decided by council. Below is a table we shared earlier to outline the difference in roles between the new mayor and 12-member council.