At the end of December, a three-person majority of city council voted to ask the state legislature to allow council to have authority over the Portland Development Commission, acting as the agency’s “governing body.” (Currently, council hands over urban renewal money to the PDC, but the agency gets to decide how to spend it.)

Erik Sten, Randy Leonard, and Sam Adams believe that the PDC hasn’t done an effective job of implementing city council’s development priorities, and don’t exactly trust the PDC to reform itself. Their request from the legislature would give them complete control over the agency.

But two days ago, Sten and Mayor Tom Potter collaborated on a memo that pulls back from that plan considerably, saying the current proposal goes too far. So instead of making city council the PDC’s “governing body,” Sten and Potter are proposing something less—making city council the agency’s “budget committee.”

From the memo:

Acting as a “budget committee” grants the Council the right to approve the PDC’s budget and ensures public involvement in that process, while allowing PDC to retain the flexibility to meet market demands as they occur.

Our intent in proposing this change is to increase the PDC’s accountability to the community by aligning the agency’s specific actions with concrete policy goals and priorities set by the elected City Council. Our intent is not to grant to the Council or individual Commissioners line item authority or control over the agency’s budget.

Under this change, city council will set PDC’s annual budget at the same time it goes through the citywide budgeting process. You may not know it, but those budget hearings are open to the public, and community input is at least tolerated. The same would go for the PDC’s budget.

But! Once the budget is set, PDC would have the sole authority to implement it. The agency would still be quasi-independent, and would remain “entrepreneurial in the implementation of the Council’s policy goals; independent of outside influence, and able to quickly respond to changing market conditions and best business practices.”

“It’s close enough to what I was thinking,” Sten says, “but it gives us the authority to step in during years where PDC isn’t following our direction.”

The policy will allow PDC to make changes in the budget up to 10 percent per fund—anything beyond that will have to go back to city council for approval.

Sten and Potter also agreed that the change should be included in the recommendations being made by the Charter Review Commission and should go to voters this May. Tonight, the Charter Review Commission is meeting one last time before sending their final recommendations to council—the first item on the agenda is a discussion of Potter and Sten’s memo. If that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in, they’re meeting at 4pm in the Rose Room on city hall’s third floor.