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Portland City Councilors Jamie Dunphy and Candace Avalos received unanimous approval from their colleagues this week to secure a 3.5-year lease for office space in their East Portland district.
The two councilors have sought since spring to find an office in their district since opting not to join fellow District 1 Councilor Loretta Smith, who took over an existing city lease in The Nick Fish, an office and apartment building in the Gateway neighborhood.
As of this week, the duo were still seeking new office space. In a unanimous vote after 30 minutes of discussion, the City Council approved their request to secure a lease as an emergency ordinance. But the matter stirred up impassioned conversation among members of the council because of what happened before.
The three District 1 councilors initially sought this spring to find a space large enough to hold all three council offices. To that end, Councilors Elana Pirtle-Guiney, Tiffany Koyama Lane and Dan Ryan each pledged money from their office budgets to help fund a District 1 office.
Things did not go quite as planned. Smith took over the existing city lease in The Nick Fish, and Dunphy and Avalos briefly flirted with a pricey office build-out in the same building. Though they soon dropped the concept, what transpired led Councilors Smith (who had contributed a portion of her budget to a joint office) and Ryan to retract their contributions.
“Councilors Smith and Ryan decided to retract their dollars,” Avalos explained during the Wednesday council meeting.
Avalos and Dunphy cited a lack of appropriate space when they declined to join Smith in The Nick Fish, and still maintain that the space wasn’t suitable for three offices. But Avalos and Smith told slightly different stories in the spring of what happened during the office talks, and those old tensions briefly flared during Wednesday’s discussion.
“When I was told that I didn’t have the same values as Councilor Avalos, by her directly, I was concerned,” Smith said, recalling the conflict this past spring. “I was concerned that I would be putting my office into a hostile environment.”
Dunphy defended the lease he and Avalos brought forward this week, explaining how every other space the two councilors toured in their district in recent months was woefully inadequate. He also addressed the discomfort of the conversation.
“This is an incredibly awkward conversation,” Dunphy said. “I’m not accustomed to the level of scrutiny that my office budget is being put under. I am a duly elected official, and I am choosing to spend my money in a way that connects me directly to my community. I appreciate good fiscal responsibility; this is as responsible as we can be.”
“This is as good of an opportunity to get a permanent location in East Portland as we could hope for,” Dunphy added.
When Smith and Ryan retracted their contributions earlier this year, that left contributions from Pirtle-Guiney and Koyama Lane for the Avalos-Dunphy lease. Those contributions, combined with money from Avalos’ and Dunphy’s office budgets, total $705,000. The contributions from Pirtle-Guiney and Koyama Lane are enough to cover all one-time costs during the entire life of the lease, city staff said on Wednesday.
“As all costs have been forecast, and the $705,000 in funding already set aside for this project is anticipated to satisfactorily absorb all foreseeable costs through the term of the lease, the probability of needing additional funding is low,” documents accompanying the ordinance read.
Even councilors not directly impacted by the lease had strong opinions on the matter.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate to try to micromanage the transactions that come out of individual councilors’ offices,” Councilor Mitch Green said. “I certainly would not appreciate that myself.”
Koyama Lane said the council needed to stand by its frequent pledge to support District 1, which has historically been disenfranchised. She asked councilors to separate the interpersonal conflict from the lease at hand.
“What I’m seeing are some challenges of interpersonal dynamics and some hurt feelings, and maybe some things that shouldn’t have been said, or should have been followed up on, or should have been repaired,” Koyama Lane said. “I want to separate that from what’s before us today. This is not about these three councilors....I made the choice to give my money based on the fact that District 1 has lacked representation here in City Hall more than any other district.”
