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The Oregon Government Ethics Commission voted unanimously Friday to investigate a private meeting held in August by the six members of the Portland City Council’s progressive caucus, called Peacock for short.
The five-hour meeting in question, held Aug. 6 at City Hall, was attended by Councilors Candace Avalos, Jamie Dunphy, Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal, Tiffany Koyama Lane and Angelita Morillo. Avalos scheduled and coordinated the meeting.
An ethics commission investigator offered his findings that the six councilors may have violated Oregon public meetings law if they discussed policy items that could reasonably come before any of the four council subcommittees of which there was a quorum present at the meeting.
The meeting in question was held the same day WW published its first story examining the text message thread exchanged between the six Peacock councilors during public hearings.
The ethics complaint, filed by former City Council candidate Ciatta Thompson on Aug. 21, alleges the councilors’ conduct “risks further eroding Portlanders’ confidence in their government and reinforcing the perception that elected officials are unaccountable to the very laws they are sworn to uphold. Portland residents deserve leaders who conduct the city’s business with integrity, transparency, and accountability.” (Thompson filed the same complaint with the City Attorney’s Office in August, but it denied the claim.)
Four Peacock members who spoke to the ethics commission on Friday maintained that their August meeting covered only interpersonal matters, not policy questions. Avalos described how the private meeting had taken place shortly after a contentious budget session and that it was necessary for Peacock councilors to repair relationships and understand each other’s communication styles. (Budget season saw moderate councilors tangle with Peacock councilors, but also saw some Peacocks tangle with members of their own caucus.)
An attorney representing the councilors, Ben Haile, said that had any one of the councilors brought up a matter of policy for discussion, another Peacock would have stopped them in their tracks.
“If one of the City Council members had brought up a topic that was within the scope of a committee’s decision- making, another would have said to stop,” said Haile, an attorney with the Oregon Justice Resource Center. “These councilors care deeply about maintaining transparency in governing and the transparency and the work of their committees.”
Ethics commissioners took particular interest in what was listed as the last item on Peacock’s agenda, penned by Avalos: “vision and strategy alignment.” While the councilors maintained that they never reached the last agenda item and that, in fact, the meeting agenda had changed between its writing and the meeting actually taking place, commissioners were unsatisfied by councilors’ answers.
Haile said the commission’s preliminary report on the matter “relies on too many faulty inferences about what people could’ve intended to eventually say if they had reached the last agenda item, even though they didn’t.”
After a brief discussion Friday, the ethics commission voted to investigate the Peacock meeting by a 7–0 vote.
