(Updated @ 4:47 with a comment from Nick Fish on rumors that he threatened to drop out of the race if the council didn’t readdress the public financing in his race. Not true, says Fish. “I never told Randy or anyone else I would quit the race under any circumstances. I am not a quitter.”)

Time for the council to scrap over the public financing for the special election to replace Erik Sten—should Jim Middaugh, Sten’s chief of staff, get $200,000 if he makes it through to the primary? Or is that so much public cash that it would tie up a privately financed opponent, like Nick Fish, in raising cash?

“I’ve heard from some in the community that this is changing the rules mid-stream. However, the runoff election hasn’t begun,” Potter says.

“I’ve heard the criticism that we’re favoring a candidate who is privately funded,” Potter adds. He doesn’t see that as true, however, since a privately financed candidate gets matching funds. (The Citizen Campaign Commission, however, discussed that issue on Monday and noted that in a short time frame, matching funds get tricky.)

Erik Sten says there’s a good argument to be made for lesser funding for the runoff election, but he’d like “a little more explanation” of why Potter and Randy Leonard jumped from $200,000 to a little over $60,000 as the figure they’d like to see.

Moreover, Sten says—calling up Leonard’s words from January—that the council earlier decided not to meddle in the special election. Therefore, “I think it was reasonable for those who went to qualify to think it would be treated as a regular election.”

Changing things now “has the appearance of a political motive,” Sten says. He says he’d likely recuse himself from a vote on redoing the ordinance.

More after the cut. It’s getting dirty, fast…

"You [Sten], Auditor Blackmer, and the proponents of the system" had an obligation to really explain this ordinance last week. "You had a particular responsibility to be transparent last week," Leonard says. Sten looks taken aback, that Leonard's calling him out for an ordinance that he didn't even introduce.

"I have this weird feeling that people who vote on things have an obligation to look into things," Sten says.

"That's not how we do things around here," Leonard says. Oy.

He's explaining why less money is the way to go:

"The important date here is when the ballots go out. The ballots go out on June 27 [for the special election runoff]. That's five weeks," Leonard says. $200,000 for a five week period is excessive for five weeks, Leonard argues.

"They can do nothing but sit on a phone from 7 am to 11 pm every night in an attempt to raise enough money to compete," Leonard says of a privately funded challenger to a publicly funded candidate.

Leonard argues that pegging the $200,000 to the special election he won over five years ago—he and his opponent each raised and spent around $200,000—is crazy, since it was the most expensive special election in city history. (True, but special elections have gone up each and every time. It's only logical that the most recent one is the most expensive to date.)

Sten had also accused Leonard of chatting with Fish over the weekend. (The other rumor floating around the building is that Fish told Leonard he'd be dropping out of the race if this wasn't changed; Leonard earlier told me that didn't happen. Fish hasn't responded to my inquiry about that issue to him, sent late last night. "I never told Randy or anyone else I would quit the race under any circumstances. I am not a quitter," Fish tells me this afternoon.) Leonard denied that accusation, and said he didn't speak to the mayor or anyone else about the issue over the weekend, before Potter and Leonard called for a reconsideration of the issue.

Sten's accusing him of trying to fix something on the fly, and Leonard says it's in response to something that was passed on the fly.

"I don't think there was anything duplicitous about this," Sten says, arguing that the phrasing of the ordinance's title—to treat the special election as a regular election for the purposes of public financing—was clear to anyone reading it with common sense. (I'm surprised this blew up, frankly—that's how I read that ordinance title... a housekeeping measure to continue allowing Middaugh to utilize public funding like the other candidates in the regular elections have, since he met the original regular deadline and 'special' rules hadn't been crafted to apply to his race.)

"If you had no idea that 'treat the special election as a regular election' meant exactly that, then it's fair to reconsider this," Sten says. He's also fine with having a discussion about what the right amount is, but he's not happy that the $66K figure just appearing without a process.

Adams has jumped in, asking if the Citizen Campaign Commission (CCC) would weigh in—after hearing public testimony and from both sides of the issue—as opposed to the quick letter they dashed out after Monday night's meeting. Auditor Blackmer is testifying, saying that the CCC felt the their earlier deliberation—that using the regular rules, and $200,000—still stood.

"I am concerned, normally I would have no problem sending this back to the [CCC], but I am concerned about the decision making process for this issue," Adams adds. (He'd earlier said he feels the CCC too often skirts open meetings law by making decisions that aren't on the agenda, so the public doesn't have ample opportunity to weigh in; Blackmer explained that in this situation, the issue came up at the last minute, leaving no time to revise the CCC agenda.)

Blackmer hasn't had a chance to respond to Adams—who's aide delivered him lunch, the lucky guy... I'm starving—because Sten and Potter are now arguing about whether or not the rules were changed last Wednesday.

But back to the real issue! Sten is getting to the meat of the issue—how to calculate "what a reasonable campaign would spend in the last month," knocking out things like routine monthly expenses (office rent, etc) for months they won't be running, but also recognizing that a lot of a campaign's money is spent in the final weeks.

"This is democracy, it's great," Sten says, making nice with Leonard. He doesn't want to name a figure, given his support of Middaugh, and he also thinks anyone else who's made an endorsement in this race (i.e., Leonard, who's endorsed Fish) should also abstain.

Adams: Would the council then be willing to let the CCC contemplate the issue? Blackmer is patiently waiting to weigh in.

"I think the commission would be happy to do that. They tried in some way to respond in the meeting [on Monday]," he says. "Essentially they repeated what their earlier memo to council was, which was 'let's not change the rules.'"

Leonard jumps in again, saying Blackmer's ordinance last week changed the rules. Blackmer disagrees: "There were no surprises in there as to what the rules were."

"I got a clear direction, I thought, from the council. And I got a clear direction from the commission. And that was, it's dangerous to change the rules midstream," Blackmer adds. "That was the impression I got, and I thought you were very eloquent in the dangers, and it's a lose-lose situation... it undermines the credibility of the election..."

"You will concede that that was specific to the conversation about allowing" candidates in public financing to switch races," Leonard shoots back. Adams is interrupting to get them to play nice...

"We're not invited anymore, so we don't have the opportunity" to explain upcoming legislation to the council members' executives at their regular meeting, Blackmer says. "I assumed that everyone understood what the rules were as the system is currently operating," and applying those to the special election was clear," he adds.

Saltzman says he found "that one sentence" in the CCC's letter yesterday to be objectionable—I'm guessing he's pointing at "Candidates who choose not to run with public funds may now be realizing that there may be an advantage to spending one’s time reaching out to voters rather than to wealthy contributers but either way it’s clear that any successful candidate will have to work hard at reaching out to the citizens of Portland"—he wants the CCC to be set aside a bias against privately funded candidates when they consider fair funding for a runoff.

It's looking like the council is in agreement to officially undo last week's ordinance, and send it to the CCC for further analysis.

Adams: "I want to be really clear that I'm assuming that the process the CCC will take" will start with an objective statement of what their purpose in this issue is, and will take public testimony, and will have "a motion and a vote, so there is some formality to this. I have some concern that this commission is operating in an informal matter inappropriately."

He voted aye, as did the rest of the council.