Mayor Potter has announced his bureau assignments. The biggest innovation is that he is placing the long-range planning functions of Parks, Transportation, Environmental Services, and Water under the supervision of the council as a whole, instead of under the aegis of individual commissioners. He has accepted the resignations of the administrative heads of Water, Transportation, and Emergency Management (meaning that he has asked them to step aside, and they have).
The Mayor is keeping Planning, Police, Finance, and the Portland Development Commission. Commissioner Adams gets Environmental Services and Transportation. Commissioner Leonard gets Water (the day-to-day operations) and Development Services. Commissioner Saltzman gets Parks, and Commissioner Sten gets Fire and Housing. (The complete assignment list, which includes bureaux I haven’t named, is here.) His list is different enough from my prediction that I’m fairly confident that I’m not him.
Buried in his announcement is the welcome news that he’s separating land use planning from the issuing of land use permits. That is, the people who are in charge of issuing development permits won’t be the people tasked with finding reasons not to issue them. That bodes well for business. I think we’re in for some lively action between Planning (under the Mayor) and Development Services (under Commissioner Leonard). On the whole, I think the Mayor made some thoughtful choices, including his cheerfully sly assignments to Commissioners Leonard and Sten: Mr. Leonard, a former firefighter, got the symbolically appropriate Water Bureau, and Mr. Sten, who had the Water Bureau during the firestorm over the failed billing system, gets the Fire Bureau in its place.
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What’s with the x’s? This ain’t France, pal.
Non?
Actually, the x’es are a mild eccentricity that I adopted after reading that Metro’s head had adopted an official seal for the Metro Council with the dual legend “Metro Council” and “Conseil Metropolitain.” David Ogilvie had written that one should adopt one’s eccentricities when young, to avoid having them mistaken for a sign of mental decay when old, and I figured that having a few quirks of this sort would camouflage my lack of a distinct or memorable personality.