Blogtown, PDX: Meet the Contenders - Question #12

The Portland Mercury's Blogtown, PDX site has been producing a weekly series of questions for the various candidates running in the Portland mayor and city council races. This series is a great way to meet the candidates and learn about the issues affecting the public and Portland city government. We're reproducing (with permission) Chris's responses here, while also providing links to the original Blogtown posts.

Question #12:

(Original Post from Mar. 6, 2008)

In areas such as transparency, accessibility, and constituent relations and involvement, what can Portlanders expect from you if elected? How have you demonstrated those values in past roles, or in your campaign?

Chris's Response:

I’ve been working to make Portland’s City Government open and transparent for years, and have followed those principles in my campaign.

I was part of the coalition that worked for the adoption of Voter Owned Elections (VOE), and I think we can see from the race I’m in that VOE has opened up the election process to a number of serious candidates who would have had difficulty raising sufficient money to be taken seriously in the traditional process dominated by contributions of $1,000 and more.

I was also a key member of the stakeholder group that developed the City Hall lobbying registration and reporting ordinance and lobbied (pun intended) City Council last year to lower the quarterly lobbying threshold for reporting from 16 hours to 8 hours to make the system even more transparent.

In my campaign we have worked diligently to report our transactions much earlier than required, often on the same day or within day or two (we are allowed 14 days under VOE, which is already stricter than the state’s 30-day standard).

Last year when I co-chaired the campaign to defend our form of Government with former Mayor Bud Clark, we received an award from Democracy Reform Oregon for the promptness of our campaign’s financial reporting.

As Commissioner, I’ll continue to apply these principles to my office and will work to make Portland’s Government even more accessible and transparent to citizens.