On Wednesday, Raymond Lee became Portland’s first full-time and permanent city administrator. When Mayor Keith Wilson announced his nominee for the role in front of City Council yesterday, he described Lee’s job as, “a role that will oversee day-to-day operations across more than two dozen bureaus and departments, ensuring accountability, alignment, and service to our residents.”
Lee earned unanimous support from council and never faltered or flinched during nearly two hours of questioning from city councilors and the media. During his opening remarks, Lee shared that he comes from a family of public servants. His mother was a city manager and his father spent 30 years in the Dallas Fire Department. After leaving his hometown of Dallas, Lee earned a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Kansas and a bachelor’s degree in public administration from Henderson State University in Arkansas. According to his resume, Lee has also completed leadership and financial certification programs at Cornell, Harvard, and Yale.
Lee faces the daunting task of realizing the (sometimes competing) visions of Mayor Wilson and the 12 councilors. And whether or not he should even have an opinion about specific legislation and policy ideas is still up for debate. During his questioning of Lee, Councilor Eric Zimmerman said, “The city administration has to have a spine. [Council] will come up with good ideas, but we will also come up with some bad ideas. It doesn’t work if the city administration does not have an opinion on our legislation… It requires you to enter the knowledge void and get into the mix with us about what is good and what is bad policy.”
But during a press conference that followed his confirmation, Lee was asked by Willamette Week reporter Sophie Peel about that exchange. “Do you think you should have an opinion?” she asked.
“No,” Lee clarified. “My role is just to provide our professional expertise and call in knowledge.”
Biking and transportation-related issues weren’t discussed during the confirmation hearing (except for Councilor Jamie Dunphy saying to Lee, “Portland is a weird place, and it’s weird in that we have naked bike rides and Voodoo Donuts and things like that.”). However, I was able to ask Lee a question at the press conference.
After inviting him to an interview-by-bike, I asked:
“Can you share your personal experience with mobility and getting around? Do you ever take the bus? Do you mostly drive? Do you walk? Do you have a bike? Do you ride it? And how will those experiences inform the way you look at transportation issues in Portland?”
To which he responded:
“You know, I’ve done it all. I’ve walked to work when I actually lived downtown in Dallas. I’ve driven to work, so I understand how much time residents and people who work in the downtown area may waste time of their life just in traffic as a whole. And I want to make sure we’re getting people to point A to point B in the safest, securest way possible, in the fastest way possible, ensuring that’s happening at a rate that is adding life back to people — instead of taking away time from their loved ones and the work that they enjoy doing every day.
And that’s looking at, how do we address transportation overall? Not just for today, but also for tomorrow, and ensuring that the plans that we have, that we’re partners with other entities and quasi-governmental entities that partner with us in Portland, to ensure that all of our plans are integrated to help move traffic and transportation forward as a whole.
A good portion of my career has been spent in transportation and ensuring it’s done in an efficient, effective and economical manner. And that’s always been a proponent of my philosophy, ensuring that people are being able to get to their destinations in a safe and secure manner.”
You can watch our exchange in the video below:
Lee faces a daunting task. Our city government and Portlanders in general are restless and desperate for an injection of confidence and civic victories. Mayor Wilson cultivated broad council support for Lee and that effort provides Lee with solid footing to begin his work. But there’s likely to be a big adjustment coming from the relatively small city of Greeley to the much larger, and at times almost ungovernable, Portland.
At one point during his confirmation discussion, Lee referred to Dallas, Texas as a progressive city. That led Councilor Sameer Kanal to say, “If you think Dallas is progressive, buckle up.”
Lee appears to be fully strapped-in and seems undeterred by the challenge. “I’m excited about what the future has in store for this great city,” he told councilors. “And I’m excited about the opportunity to be able to partner with the city council and the mayor to shape what the future will be for Portland.”
Thanks for reading.
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Eager to see what he gets up to.
you and me both. But I’m also ready for the possibility that we might not see much of him at all. I mean, if he really does what he says he’ll do – which is to essentially remain an objective implementer of the mayor and council visions, then perhaps his success will be measured at not only what gets done but in him staying completely out of the limelight.
Uh oh. Sounds like Lee has never biked anywhere. He never mentioned transit.
That part of his answer sounds as though he has a car-brain that focuses on people getting from home to work as fast as possible in a car.
That’s a master class in sounding profound while saying nothing of substance. The flavor of his answer is all about unqualified moving forward – not about moving sustainably or sensibly. Where’s the mention of Portland’s climate goals? Does he even know about them?
The good news is that Lee is supposed to carry out the plans given to him by others – we really don’t want him coming up with his own ideas. So if he is a good administrator, then he should be successful.
Yep; generic political claptrap from a throughput guy.
I give him a pass on the non-specific answer. It’s his first press conference in a new job in a city that is clearly very different than his previous experiences. I’d probably be hesitant to make any bold claims in that scenario as well.
Exactly. This is the reasonable, empathetic take.
You’re probably right. That kind of language is really grating to my ears: answering a question by *asking* “how do we…” is such a managerial class cliche. But he’s not running for office and making a speech or anything.
Yeah to be fair, he was asked if he should have opinions and said “no.” So when asked for his opinion on transportation, he basically said “Yep, I’m aware of transportation, and whatever we do with it, I’m more interested in getting parties together and making plans than what the actual plans are.” I respect that actually.
Interesting fellow.
I would have preferred him to be honest about not biking rather than dance around your question. Greeley is as car dependent of a place as any. A great answer would have been if he acknowledged that the conditions for biking were lousy in Greeley but that he looks forward to trying to bike more now that he lives in Portland.
“‘My role is just to provide our professional expertise and call in knowledge.”
Amazing. The new city administrator basically said his job is not to have an opinion — which is exactly what you want when you’ve got an inexperienced DSA-heavy council and Mayor Wilson, who could charitably be described as… room-temperature chamomile tea. What could possibly go wrong….
Why do you want an unelected administrator to have ideas and opinions??
He should do the job he is paid a lot of money to do, which is just make the city run as efficiently as possible.
Why do people think this position should an advocate for anything?
We elected a Mayor and a council, they set policy and this person carries out the policies. I am not sure why we need to pay someone $370,000 a year to do that job, but we do. I want a competent manager, not an ideologue.
Exactly. We don’t need an ideologue in the administrator’s seat — we need someone who’ll look at the DSA council’s latest ideas and say, ‘Hold up, are we running a city or planning the next season of The Hunger Games?’ We need a competent manager, not a wannabe revolutionary. The last thing Portland needs is someone who’ll sign off on a policy that makes free kittens for everyone sound like a reasonable solution to the housing crisis.
Angus, you seem to have a basic misunderstanding about the role of the city administrator in this form of government. The city administrator needs to manage the city bureaucracy and work to carry out the policies as set by the council and mayor as effectively as possible. Don’t like those policies? Work to elect different leaders, but the administrator is an enabler of our electeds, not a check on them.
He can be consulted for feedback but ultimately it isn’t his job to decide matters of policy. If he goes rogue and doesn’t do what the “DSA-heavy” council (er, I think Mayor) tell him, he’s out.
If your boss tells you what to do and you do something else, you’re fired.
The way he talks about the value of speed is definitely concerning. But, Wilson seems to really get multimodal transportation so I expect that value to change for him fairly quickly.
I fear that not having opinions is not going to work very well in the way our government was set up. Deputy City Administrators wield way too much power over agency directors for there not to be an agenda.
Yeah, I really dislike it when people focus on transportation being this terrible thing that takes time away from loved ones and thus our focus should be on moving people as fast as possible over long distances. Sure, that’s an understandable way to think about it, and for some people without good options, it’s a real problem, like if someone has a job downtown but has to live really far away and depends on public transit. But if we try to make driving faster, all we do is encourage people to move further away, take jobs further away, and induce more car trips. A better approach is to try to get people and jobs and other destinations closer together, so that walking, biking, and transit are short trips in the first place, and driving starts to become impractical for more trips since you then have to deal with congestion, parking, etc.
I agree. When he inevitably looks at the huge street maintenance backlog and the chronic lack of funding and unwillingness of Portland voters to raise taxes, public transit and bike infrastructure looks comparatively cheap and practical.
Well, since we’ve been burned by the Arts Tax, the various Homeless Taxes, PCEF, the school bonds, and Pre-school, do you really blame us?
Pre-school for all is probably the best thing to happen to this city in my lifetime. If that’s getting burned, what would not getting burned look like?
These programs were all voted on to do specific things and they do those things, despite all the whining. None of these were for funding roads or maintenance, so clearly yes, we do have an unwillingness to raise taxes for that.
Unwillingness of Portland voters to raise taxes? Then why are referendums passed every year that raise my taxes?
We never vote NOT to raise taxes. You don’t have any idea what you post about Portland. We just voted a Large parks tax increase. We voted for a tax (PCEF) that has so money they don’t know how to spend it.
I can’t remember a ballot measure tax increase that failed.
We don’t get much for our money and vote in awful people is the problem.
As someone still new to the city and the issues, thank you for the write-up!
It seems to me that “the fastest way possible” is not always in the same realm as “making sure we’re getting people to point A to point B in the safest, securest way possible.”