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The Oregon Government Ethics Commission is asking the Oregon Law Commission, which helps the Legislature fix laws that have unintended consequences or glaring holes in them, to review and make recommendations for changes to the state’s public meetings law.
The ethics commission is currently drafting a proposal for the Law Commission to review, OGEC executive director Susan Myers says. Any recommended changes that come out of a Law Commission review would need legislative approval.
Myers formally asked her commission this month to greenlight the request for a review, but told WW in a phone call that she’s been thinking about making the request for months. That’s in large part due to a new state law that took effect this year that tightened the rules around “serial communications”, or sequential communications between elected officials and their intermediaries that could constitute a quorum. (One of the fundamental tenets of Oregon’s public meetings law is that decision-making bodies, such as the Portland City Council, should conduct business in public. The law prohibits a quorum of a decision-making body from meeting or making decisions in private.)
As WW reported earlier this spring, the new serial communications laws were causing great anxiety and trouble for members of the City Council, who said the rules were hamstringing their ability to communicate with one another about policy.
The OGEC’s authority over public meetings laws is new; it was not until two years ago that Myers’ body was given jurisdiction over the law. That, Myers says, has brought to light underlying issues in existing statutes.
“In the process of adopting the rules and starting to enforce them, there are things that it would benefit to have the Law Commission to really look at the law and see if there are improvements that should be made,” Myers says. “The public meetings law for 50 years had no state agency that enforced it. It’s time for there to be a more comprehensive review.”
Myers says the timing of the review has no relation to WW’s reporting on a group message thread among six Portland city councilors that calls itself “Peacock,” short for progressive caucus.
Following WW’s two stories on the text thread, which revealed that councilors coordinated votes closely in real time during budget negotiations in May and June, the OGEC and the City Attorney’s Office received a combined 21 complaints about the thread, alleging that councilors broke public meetings law.
But both the OGEC and the city attorney declined to investigate the complaints because of a new provision in the state’s public meetings law that says a complaint must be made within 30 days of the communication in question. That’s a provision the Legislature created in 2023 when it tightened the rules around serial communications.
In this case, the messages in question occurred between March and late June. By the time complainants filed their grievances with the city and the OGEC, the communications were more than 30 days old.
That means the commission will dismiss the complaints, and, as for the city, City Attorney Robert Taylor notified complainants by letter Tuesday that the city is required to take “no additional action” because of the 30-day rule. He made no determination whether the law had been broken.
Taylor said he would use the daylighting of the Peacock chat as “a critical opportunity for additional training for our City Council” and, in so many words, urged the Legislature to revisit the serial communications law.
“There is perhaps a real need for the Legislature to take action to provide clarity to local governments, the Ethics Commission, and the public,” Taylor wrote to complainants on Tuesday.
At least two of the complainants took issue with Taylor’s response in emails shared with WW. One complainant wrote back to Taylor: “Your [letter] attempting to dismiss my grievance as ‘untimely’ is wholly unacceptable.”
Another complainant, Talia Giardini, wrote that Taylor’s “suggestion that residents are ‘too late’ to file complaints is wholly unacceptable.”
“Real consequences must be imposed for this misconduct,” Giardini wrote. “Anything less will signal to the public that our leaders are above the law, and that accountability is optional in Portland’s government.”
Four of the six Peacock councilors have stood by the message thread in recent weeks, saying that coordination is necessary to secure wins for their constituents.
Myers tells WW that “a lot of public bodies have expressed concerns about serial communications” but that the entirety of the state’s public meetings law is due for a comprehensive review.
“We want to make it possible, with the commission’s help, to make the law work for people,” Myers says, “and to make it easier to understand and follow.”
