The stranger

Portland has a new city manager, or at least it will shortly. A fellow named Raymond C. Lee III will get the prestigious job, with a compensation package pushing $400,000 a year, including that sweet, sweet PERS pension. He's Mayor Wilson's pick, and scheduled to get the City Council's confirmation sometime next week. Lee will replace Michael Jordan (no, not that one), a longtime City Hall suit who's seen the new muni charter through nearly its first full year.

Lee comes to Portland from Greeley, Colorado, where he was city manager for about four years, making roughly $320,000 per in the end. The two places are not hardly alike. Greeley, in the northern part of the Centennial State, has a population of around 109,000, compared to Portland's 640,000 or so. And Greeley's city budget is around $565 million a year, compared to Portland's $8.64 billion. 

The politics are different, too. Here is a recent photo of the Greeley City Council:

Whereas Portland's City Council has a much different look:

Now, I know it isn't Portland Polite to ask too many hard questions, but the circumstances of Lee's departure from Greeley raise a few. For openers, his resignation from the Colorado job first made the news in those parts on November 7, and his severance from the government was finalized by the City Council there on November 10. Lee wasn't named as a finalist for the Portland job until the week of November 17. And so unless he had some sort of secret handshake deal with Wilson, which I doubt, he was out like kraut in Greeley for at least a couple of weeks before he had an offer from us Portlandians. If he didn't land the job here, he may well have gone unemployed for a while.

And his severance agreement with Greeley, which is a public document, here, has some interesting language in it. Both he and the city expressly agree not to say anything disparaging about each other. Maybe that's standard procedure, but my spidey sense tells me that the parting of the ways over there may not have been amicable. For example, these provisions don’t sound much like a glowing retirement party tribute:

The City and Employee agree that it is in the best interests of both parties that neither disparage the other, either publicly or privately. Specifically, the parties agree to those terms set forth below.

a. City will not disparage Employee in any way, either publicly or privately, with respect to anything that occurred during Employee's years of service to the City.

b. City specifically agrees that (as with all other employees of the City) to the extent permitted by law, City will make good faith, reasonable efforts to keep confidential and private the Employee's personnel file and any other documents pertaining to Employee's performance of his duties, and will not release the Employee's personnel file or any other documents pertaining to Employee's performance of his duties without a court order or valid public records request requiring the City to do so. The City also specifically agrees that it will make all reasonable efforts to notify the Employee of any requests for the Employee's personnel file or other documents pertaining to Employee's performance of his duties prior to release of any such information. All members of the current City Council agree that they will not waive any applicable privileges associated with any such documents.

c. Employee will not disparage City in any way, either publicly or privately, with respect to anything that occurred during his years of service to the City....

The parties expressly recognize and agree that neither the Employee's resignation, nor this Agreement, shall be construed as an admission of any wrongful conduct or violation of any law by either party. Each party expressly denies any wrongful conduct or violation of any law on its part and also expressly denies any liability to the other party. This Agreement is intended for the purpose of settlement only and may not be used for any purposes other than those described herein.

Around the time Lee quit, another management type, a guy named Paul Trombino, also disappeared from the Greeley city website. He had worked for the municipality in various posts, but when last heard from, Trombino was Greeley's "managing director." City Council watchers over there say they were taken by surprise when the two men left.

Trombino.

Why did they split so suddenly? Well, for one thing, there's a new mayor. The old mayor, John Gates, was term-limited out of office, and on November 4 the voters replaced him with another old-timer, a fellow named Dale Hall. 

Lee and Gates.

Hall.

Maybe Lee and Trombino knew they weren't going to get along with Hall, and that's why they checked out. But I dunno, a mere three days after the election, Lee had already quit, and six days after the election, he had signed an 11-page severance agreement, on which he had had a law firm representing him. It's hard to believe it was just the regime change that led to the resignation. It sure seems like the wheels were in motion, for whatever reason, for a while before the election.

Perhaps it had something to do with a real estate boondoggle that's currently the talk of the town in Greeley. As best I can gather, some developer guy is twisting arms to build a billion-dollar "entertainment district" on the edge of town, no doubt with copious amounts of public money helping it to pencil out. The project is called Cascadia, or sometimes Catalyst. That pony has gotten pretty far down the track, but some alert taxpayers have caught on and are blowing the whistle. They've forced a public vote early next year that would at least delay the construction. A month ago, Lee was the city's main representative on the project. Now his pocket squares are in a moving van on I-90 heading west.

Maybe the guy will turn out to be great. It would be a fine thing for the hard-working taxpayers of Portland if he proved himself worthy of $400,000 a year. But I've seen enough carpet bags arrive in this town over the last 47 years to know that you have to reserve judgment on dudes like this. Ask me again in two years what I think.