Questions Arise After a Planning and Sustainability Commission Reappointment Process Was Botched

Business and environmental leaders flooded City Hall with outraged emails last week after learning that city officials had chosen not to reappoint a well-regarded commissioner to an independent board.

After Jeff Bachrach’s colleagues raised objections and WW began asking questions of elected officials, the city reversed its decision and promised to give Bachrach another four-year term on the Portland Planning and Sustainability Commission.

But the quiet removal of an outspoken commissioner raises questions about who wanted him gone.

Bachrach, a land-use lawyer who sits on the commission, received a voicemail he wasn’t expecting on the evening of May 11.

It was from a staffer in Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office who told Bachrach the mayor wasn’t going to reappoint him to the 11-member commission where he’d served six years and was looking to serve another four.

When word got around about the decision earlier this week, a slew of Bachrach’s fellow planning commissioners and city business and development groups sent emails to the mayor and Commissioner Carmen Rubio, who oversees the city’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, in the days following expressing their displeasure at the apparent decision not to reappoint Bachrach.

“I was surprised to learn there was some last-minute pushback on my reappointment to the PSC. I’m enormously appreciative that almost every one of my fellow commissioners, as well as others in the community, responded by sending strong letters of support to the City Council,” Bachrach tells WW.

On Thursday night, Bachrach got another call, this time from Rubio. She told him he would be reappointed after all.

“Commissioner Rubio took the lead and responded quickly to clear up the confusion and assure me that my reappointment is going forward,” says Bachrach, who declined to speculate why his reappointment was questioned. “I’m not going to react or to speculate about what caused the pushback.”

Bachrach says he’d been told by Wheeler staffer Sam Diaz last week that candidates were scored and evaluated using a new point system, and that Bachrach wouldn’t be reappointed. Bachrach and his fellow incumbent Ben Bortolazzo had been told in March that no other candidates were being considered for their positions.

The panel who scored candidates, according to panelist Ricardo Lujan Valerio, policy director for Rubio, was composed of four people: Lujan Valerio, Diaz from Wheeler’s office, BPS director Andrea Durbin, and PSC commissioner Steph Routh.

Lujan Valerio tells WW four questions were asked during candidate interviews, and panelists were then asked to privately score each candidate and submit their scores to Wheeler’s office through Diaz, who would tally up the totals and make the recommendation to Wheeler about whom to appoint.

“They’re the appointing body, so we didn’t get to tally up scores,” Lujan Valerio says of the mayor’s office.

The emails sent to City Hall following Diaz’s call to Bachrach, which WW obtained, show alarm and displeasure with both the new evaluation process and the apparent decision not to reappoint Bachrach.

“If that’s true, I’m really shocked,” real estate developer Ed McNamara wrote of rumors that Bachrach would not be reappointed. “I’ve also been surprised by what I’ve heard about the process involved in this decision. If what I’ve heard is correct, it’s quite disappointing.”

Leadership at the Portland Business Alliance, the Oregon chapter of the Commercial Real Estate Development Association, the Building Owners and Managers Association of Oregon, and Oregon Smart Growth penned a letter to the mayor expressing their collective “serious concern.”

“The new process that was developed has been anything but transparent and has led to many questions and confusion. It shows a complete lack of respect and consideration for volunteers who have generously given huge amounts of their time and effort to help ensure that Portland maintains a high degree of livability for all of its residents and workforce,” the letter read.

Eli Spevak, chair of the Planning and Sustainability Commission, said in an email that he was blind to the appointment evaluation for candidates: “I was not included in the review process. Nor did I know how it was designed or who was involved until it was all done,” and he rattled off a list of qualifications and moral characteristics that, if he’d been present, he would have said about Bachrach.

Spevak tells WW that “reappointments have happened without much process at all, so it was an attempt to introduce a process for the first time, which I think everyone agrees is a good thing to do. And somehow between the three parties—it’s a mayoral appointment, Rubio’s bureau, and BPS staff—it wasn’t handled well. It was enough concern to say, ‘Let’s take some feedback from commissioners.’”

When the emails started to flood in, and WW began asking questions on May 20 about the process, momentum appeared to change. And on Thursday night, Rubio called Bachrach to tell him he’d be reappointed.

“We appreciate his patience and that of the whole Planning and Sustainability Commission as we work through this relatively new process. We anticipate working with the mayor’s office to further reconfigure the process and will be communicating that to PSC commissioners,” a spokesperson for Rubio’s office said.

But the emails sent to the mayor and Rubio express suspicion about the hastiness and quiet with which the interview process was done.

Bortolazzo wrote: “This undefined process appeared to have been put together in haste with no warning to us. We were rushed.”

Commissioner Steph Routh wrote in an email to city officials, “I admit I’m still trying to fully understand what happened and when.”

Routh, who was one of the four panelists to grade candidates, tells WW: “I had understood at the beginning of it that it would just be Bachrach and Bortalozzo, and then later was informed it would be two additional. Whether that was a miscommunication or a change in process, I don’t know.”

Routh says she doesn’t know how others graded the candidates ”because we didn’t do a debrief afterwards.”

On May 21, the deputy director of the bureau sent an email to all PSC commissioners, shared with WW, asking that they route any media requests about the reappointment to Rubio’s spokesperson: “There is currently media interest regarding the reappointment status of Commissioners Bachrach and Bortolazzo. Please direct all media inquiries about PSC reappointments to [Rubio’s communication director] as he is leading our collective media responses on this topic.”

He added, in bold font, “To eliminate any confusion, it is Commissioner Rubio and Mayor Wheeler’s intention to reappoint Commissioners Bachrach and Bortolazzo.” He said Rubio would work with Durbin to update the reappointment process to “provide clarity going forward.”

The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment, and Durbin demurred, writing, “Commissioner Rubio’s office is lead on this matter.”