Everybody loves Raymond

To no one's surprise, the Portland City Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to hire Raymond C. Lee III as the new city manager. They held a two-hour love session with him before taking the vote. All that was missing was the Barry White music. 

Never in the meeting was heard a critical word. I watched only about half of it in real time, but nobody seemed the least bit curious about why Lee left his last job in Greeley, Colorado, or why his two close subordinates there have also packed it in. Everybody in Portlandia seems to be settling for pat answers, when the guy's severance agreement forbids everyone in the know from saying anything else. So I guess we'll never find out what really happened over on the prairie. But at least I and some others asked the questions. Portland was warned.

Not that Portland really wants to listen. I can't believe that the lazier among the local media keep repeating the vague press-release references to Lee's supposed economic development achievements in Greeley. Here's the O's anemic version from yesterday:

Portland officials, including Wilson, have touted a number of Lee’s achievements as Greeley city manager. Among them, they said: leading downtown revitalization efforts; the creation of a 300-acre entertainment and housing district; and launching sustainability and climate initiatives.

The bit about the "entertainment and housing district" is especially galling. That project, a billionaire's pipedream alternately called Catalyst or Cascadia, has torn Greeley apart. A large segment of the population doesn't want it built, and they've succeeded in getting one aspect of it placed on the public ballot early next year. As best I can tell, the project hasn't gotten further than a groundbreaking ceremony.

The real story is that the City of Greeley has mortgaged basically all its buildings to raise money for planning and designing the "district." It may never get built, but already the city's taxpayers are holding a pretty big bag.

Willamette Weed has been relatively quiet on the subject of Lee, although their reporter Sophie Peel at least alluded to the issue of his leaving Greeley. In the old days, you would have expected Pulitzer Nigel to let the guy start the job, and then promptly do a Jack Ruby on him. That's what they did with Sam Adams and the Beau Breedlove debacle, remember? Sam the Tram was on duty less than three weeks when the Double Dub lowered the boom. They could have done it before he was elected, but they waited until he was sworn in and we were guaranteed to suffer through four years of the guy. Maybe that's going to happen here, but I wouldn't count on it.

Though nothing new surfaced at the City Council rubdown regarding Lee's exit from Greeley, there was one startling revelation: In addition to paying the dude a base salary of $370,000, the city's adding unidentified perks that push his first-year compensation package to $535,700 in cash and benefits. Query whether anybody's worth that kind of jack, much less this guy.

The give-and-take at the hearing was a horror show. Most of the council members I saw behaved not too differently from how they'd act if they wanted to sleep with the guy. And the far-left rhetoric and bureacratic jargon were so thick on both sides of the table that it was like they were speaking Klingon. 

At one point, council member Loretta Smith mentioned Lee's "severance package," and of course my ears perked up, but get this: She was talking about severance provisions in his new Portland employment contract, and Smith boasted that she was going to make sure that they were more favorable to Lee than what was in the draft she had seen! I am not making this up.

And at that juncture, Smith launched into an extended soliloquy that was pure Portland politico-babble. To which Lee's response was his own interminable torrent of bureaucat-babble, even longer and louder than Smith's. It was that way all morning. Lee said the word "organization" about every 90 seconds. He must have said it 50 times in the hour I watched. The words flew out of him as if from a salad shooter, but there was less content than you would get from even a Jessica Vega Pederson speech. The saddest part was watching the council members so eagerly nodding in agreement with the utter nothingness.

It doesn't take too much reflection to realize that hiring a figure like Lee defeats the whole purpose of the charter change. The selling point was to get politicians out of managing the bureaus, because they were in over their heads. The city manager is supposed to be the highly qualified grownup who keeps the idealism and ideology in check by constantly administering strong doses of reality. Wednesday's meeting revealed a much different dynamic. When the politicians rattled off their socialist and discrimination-victim talking points, the new manager amplified them with even less coherent statements. If the City Council hearing was any indication, Portland is going to miss people like Dan Saltzman and Ted Wheeler very soon.

If you're still a believer in Mayor Keith Wilson, then the Lee hire, which is the mayor's baby, should have you worried, if not alarmed. What is Wilson thinking? Maybe it's a genius move, in which he now has a fall guy if his initiatives fail – a fall guy with self-proclaimed "lived experience," which makes it harder for the far-lefties to throw brickbats. But more likely, I think, it's just a big mistake. In a choice between competence and political signaling, Wilson went with the latter. Odds are that he will pay a steep price down the road.

UPDATE here and here.