On Wednesday morning, Portland City Council will vote on Mayor Keith Wilson’s pick for City Administrator: former city manager of Greeley, Colorado, Raymond Lee. Lee, 41, was announced as Wilson’s choice on December 2nd. If confirmed he would become the first (non interim) person to ever hold the position of city administrator in Portland’s history.
The city administrator plays a very important and powerful role in our new form of government. It will be Lee’s job (along with his team of deputy administrators) to execute the mayor’s visions and city council’s legislative actions. Among his powers will be the ability appoint, reassign, discipline, and remove bureau directors. According to Rose City Reform, the city administrator will be the, “mayor’s trusted advisor.” and is likely to function as a bridge between the executive (Mayor’s Office) and legislative (City Council) branches.
What’s he likely to do with that power when it comes to shaping our transportation system? I honestly couldn’t tell you. I don’t know enough yet. But I spent a few hours looking at Greeley and Lee’s past work experience to find out what we might expect when it comes to his mobility-related mindset. Let’s dive in….
Lee’s former town is much smaller than Portland. While he made it clear in just about every video I watched that, “Greeley is one of the fastest growing cities in the state,” it still has a population of about 116,000. That’s one-sixth the size of Portland (pop. 630,000). It’s represented by Democrats in the U.S. Senate, but the county it’s located in (Weld County) voted 61% for Trump and only 39% for Harris in the 2024 presidential election and several residents on Reddit described it as “conservative.” Greeley is on the plains just east of the Rocky Mountains and about an hour drive north of Denver. It’s home to a large meat-packing plant, a mid-sized public university and a community college.
From a bicycling perspective, there’s not a lot to write about. The League of American Bicyclist gave Greeley a Bronze award for its bicycle friendliness, but from what I can tell the city’s 85 miles of bike lanes are most just standard, painted lanes — often next to high-speed car traffic. To Lee’s credit, Greeley has recently made more noise for transportation reform: They launched a bike share system in October 2024 and by the following spring they’d deployed 250 bikes along with 80 shared electric scooters (about 25% of all bike share use is on the local college campus).
Greeley declared a goal in January of this year to reach zero traffic deaths by 2045 — and kicked off their effort with a $9.9 million federal safe streets grant. The city had 11 total traffic deaths in 2024, and they even hosted a World Day of Remembrance event to raise awareness about it.
Greeley is currently rebuilding a major downtown corridor into a more human-centric environment with public art, roundabouts, less driving space, and wide sidewalks. In the concept drawings I saw however, there was no dedicated space for bicycling.
Lee will have had some experience with free bus service, an idea that pops up in Portland from time-to-time and is getting a life lately because it’s an idea championed by New York City’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Greeley’s transit system has implemented a free transit pilot for two months in the summer through a state program to improve air quality.
When it comes to Lee’s professional experience, he doesn’t talk about transportation much. In his 12-page resume, Lee shares a long bullet list of accomplishments, yet none of them are transportation-related. The largest transportation project he’s overseen is a $132 million investment into Greeley’s biggest highway — US 34 — which bisects the city. The Mobility Enhancements for Regional Growth & Equity (MERGE) Project will build two interchanges for the freeway in order to reduce crashes and will develop transit hubs where folks can safely connect to transit and other modes.
Before his tenure in Greeley, Lee served a four-year stint as public works director for the city of Amarillo, Texas.
I’ve reached out to a few transportation advocates in Greeley to see if they have anything to add about Lee, but I’ve yet to hear back. If you know anything about his views on transportation, please share them in the comments. I’ll get to see and hear from Lee in person on Wednesday morning, so stay tuned for more about this man who will play a pivotal role in the future of Portland.
Thanks for reading.
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That’s good enough for me. I much prefer a *clean* but “unprotected” bike lane to one of Portland’s wonky experiments that is filled with leaves and trash.
I tend to agree, though it really depends on how much and how fast that traffic is.