Jamey Evenstar was the policy staffer at former city commissioner Chloe Eudaly’s office who helped develop the city’s Relocation Ordinance, which got as close as possible to rent control by requiring landlords to pay tenants’ moving costs if they increase rent 10% or more. Since then she worked for the Portland Bureau of Transportation and for the Charter Transition Team, and as chief of staff for City Council member Candace Avalos until earlier this year. If elected she would take a critical look at city management claims of personnel savings from consolidating bureaus, and instead investigate whether the city is spending too much money on outside contractors and high-paid managers.
The Labor Press spoke with her via Zoom Oct. 12.
Labor organization endorsers: AFSCME, AFSCME 189, (1 of 4), Protec17, UBC, WFP
More: evenstarforportland.com
Who are you and why are you running for city council?
I’m running because I think that District Four needs some better representation and better results. We’re actually I think far more progressive in general as a district than people give us credit for. We’re like 53% renters, and you know, at a time when we have shifted dramatically into this new form of government, I think we need people who both better represent folks in the district who don’t feel heard, but also who know how to get stuff done. I’ve worked for the city. You know, after Chloe (Evenstar, then under the name Jamey Duhamel, was policy staffer for Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly) I worked for the city of Portland for almost 10 years.
What did you do?
When I was in Chloe’s office, I wrote Portland’s tenant protections, and I led on our transit infrastructure stuff, like the Rose Lane Project (painted bus-only lanes and other street improvements to make buses and streetcars faster). But then I worked for the Bureau of Transportation for a couple years as a coordinator and then an analyst. I actually created their only toolkit for anti-displacement. So whenever we build big things in neighborhoods, how do we do that in a way that actually stabilizes families instead of contributing to market forces and gentrification, or at least minimizing our impact on that? I also did gun violence response stuff in PBOT (Portland Bureau of Transportation), so I helped with creative infrastructure builds to minimize opportunities for things like drive-by shootings and to activate spaces where disruptive behaviors were happening because the spaces weren’t really active and bringing community together. Then I was invited to join the charter transition team, so I spent two years under the city administrator implementing our new form of government. So I have a pretty deep knowledge about how things work at the city. And after charter transition, I was the chief of staff for (District 1) Councilor Candace Avalos until February.
Until February, and you took a leave, or quit from that job to run for office, or what?
The councilor and I parted ways. I think we just realized after the first year working together that she had a different set of goals and priorities. We just weren’t the right fit for each other.
So you’re not employed in a traditional sense now, and you’re 100% free to run for office?
Sure am.
Back to the question of why you are running, you said that you want better representation. What’s wrong with the existing representation for District 4?
Well, like I said, I’m a renter. I’m also a mom of five. I’m a car-free transit rider. There’s nobody on the dais right now in District 4 who understands what it’s like when we increase those fees and that water bill and are just like one rent payment away from eviction. There’s nobody that understands what it’s like to have young kids in the home and all the kind of challenges of navigating the city, or young adults at home who can’t afford to move out. This is also what I’m experiencing. Also, what it’s like to navigate our bus system to get to work on time. Those are the types of real life experiences that nobody quite understands. I also don’t think, since I’m talking to you about labor, there’s nobody on council that has actively helped form a union and been on a bargaining team and understands really what it’s like from the public sector to fight our current administration for contracts.
Can you tell me about that? What was the union involvement?
I was part of CPPW in its original formation. (CPPW stands for City of Portland Professional Workers, a recently formed independent union) Then I was on the original bargaining team for CPPW, fighting for our first contract.
This was when I was on the charter transition team.
We were getting close to a contract. When I went to join Councilor Avalos in City Hall, I had to leave that position. But then I worked internally to make sure that they got their first contract. There was a lot of ways in which city administration I think was trying to pull the wool over the councilors’ eyes about what CPPW was actually asking for and what the dollar amounts were. We struggled to negotiate with the city. This is something that was really eye-opening to me because I had worked at kind of a high management level. I wasn’t a manager, but I worked with managers for a long period of time. So I really gave them the benefit of doubt. I just kind of felt like they’re coming from a good place. It was quite a struggle for me to turn my thinking when I’m on the bargaining team and I’m recognizing the ways in which they are slow walking things. They’re hiding information. They’re digging their heels in. They’re dissembling about things that I know to be fact because I’m in those spaces. I’m in those other rooms, and so for the purposes of the bargaining team, I know exactly what managers are saying behind the scenes. I know what’s possible and what isn’t possible, because I was working directly under the city administrator in the charter transition process, which meant that I had a very direct role with all the highest-level managers at the city. We were reorganizing the entire structure and the bureaus. I was leading all of the employee information sessions, a lot of the manager training sessions. So I was able to provide that perspective to the CPPW members of the bargaining team. Then when I transitioned into City Hall, I was able to provide to counselors the kind of real perspective of what was happening.
What narrative would you give about the budget? We’ve had two years of basically cost cutting, budget shortfalls. If you’d been on the council, what might you have done differently? What would you like to do if you are on the council in the next four years?
Well, this is also an area where I learned a lot being on the charter transition team. We currently have councilors who think it’s a core realignment process that we need to go through. That you know, if we really do a lot of realignment of our old government structure, we’re going to find all of these efficiencies that are going to magically solve a lot of our budget problems. I also thought that when we first started this process. But what I learned is that we’re not actually going to find that many cost savings in just a core realignment structure. And a core realignment process is going to result in layoffs of people who provide direct service, and that’s not great either. I think where we’re going to find the greatest cost savings and where we are most misaligned in our budget and just absolutely unsustainable is in our management structure. We have way too many managers in the individual bureaus. PBOT is a great example of this. I mean, I love PBOT. I think it’s one of my favorite bureaus. Amazing, visionary, brilliant people, and they have created a system where we have like a manager for every five people, eight people. It is bananas how many managers are in there. I mostly blame our classification system, which has to be renegotiated because if you have any sort of longevity at the city of Portland, you end up being a manager because that’s the only track that our classification system provides. You can’t continue in service to be like a subject matter expert, for example. So everyone ends up in a management class, and it’s just extremely top-heavy. But the other massive issue is that because our highest executives were bureau directors at the time, we didn’t have a higher layer than that. Really, those salaries were always politically negotiated because they were appointed by the commissioners in charge of those bureaus. Because of that, they were often negotiated out of market. What that created is a whole compression of salaries at the top. When we created the additional executive layer above bureau directors, we had to pay the deputy city administrators even more than we probably should have because we already had salaries too high at the top level.
So in my opinion, we have to make some really hard choices about our management structure, about reducing those salaries over time through attrition or however we do that, and definitely through a renegotiation of our salary class. The current classification of those salaries is based on the compression that existed when those roles were created, so we really have to push all of that down.
Explain compression. I’m not sure I quite grasp what you’re saying.
I’ll give an example. In our previous form of government, we had commissioners who were in charge of bureaus, because we didn’t have a city administrator style government. So bureau directors were often political appointees. They came out of city hall. They were people that were recruited, and those salaries were negotiated from a position of political advantage, so they’re hiring their buddy.
And they’re giving their buddy a very above-market salary? Is that what you’re saying?
Right, they weren’t consistent, and a lot of them were negotiated out of market, so they were really high. And then we created the extra layer of executive branch on top of it, we created deputy city administrators to oversee the bureau directors when we put the bureaus together in our new form of government. We had to pay them even more.
So it’s just that first top tier or two that you’re looking at then?
That’s where a lot of it is, but I’m also looking at the ways in which the bureaus themselves have become extremely top heavy, like PBOT, for example. We have a lot of managers.
Looking back at the budget narrative, are you thinking that there were some unnecessary cuts to frontline staff because they hadn’t done what you’re suggesting — a hard look at the management salaries?
That’s one part of it. I think that I know these managers, and obviously they spend a lot of time together. I think that it’s really hard for managers to make suggestions about cutting their own classification. That’s really difficult.
But I do think there are ways in which our outsourcing of work at the city of Portland is pretty excessive. Because each of the bureaus operated in silos, they did a lot of outside contracting, outside vending, outsourcing of work, and in many ways replicated similar work across bureaus with different vendors, different contracts, different sources. So we are replicating spending in different bureaus for the same work when we could be in-housing that, and having one or two full time staff doing the work of several different contracts. We’re paying for administrative overhead. We’re paying for all sorts of things.
It wasn’t on the agenda before this year, but apparently a billionaire bought a team, and so it is required that all sorts of things be done to renovate the stadium that the city now owns. There was a vote on that, on the term sheet. What would your vote have been, and why?
I would not have voted for the term sheet. The primary reason is because I don’t think it gives the best deal for Portlanders. But more than that, we don’t even know what they’re asking for. The Moda negotiators, (new Blazers owner) Tom Dundon, has not even given the city of Portland an itemized list of what they need that money for, what they’re asking for. They gave a general ballpark number of $600 million, for what? That’s the question, right? Sure, we own the building. I imagine there are some maintenance issues that maybe we should be on the hook for. You know, there’s certainly some upgrades that may be our responsibility. I don’t know. I don’t know how much of that $600 million is fixing pipes versus building luxury boxes for increased profits for Tom Dundon. So until we actually have some kind of understanding of how much money they are asking for, for what, and until we have a good understanding of where we would even find that money, I don’t understand why we are negotiating a term sheet at all because we should not be raiding PCEF (Portland Clean Energy Fund, the voter-approved tax on big corporations that funds grants for projects that reduce carbon emissions.) This is not a climate emergency that we should be diverting hundreds of millions of dollars for, and there’s no other source of funds. If we had $100 million, we would be spending that on keeping people in their homes. We wouldn’t be laying off 100 employees, right? We would be doing basic services for Portlanders instead of spending it on a sports stadium. So even if all of those questions were answered, the term sheet itself I don’t think went far enough to really deliver for Portlanders. We’re in an affordability crisis. This is our building, and so if we’re going to be investing in it, I want to see returns that actually land in the pockets of more Portlanders. That’s things like street level pricing. That’s certainly like labor agreements. I definitely would want some form of private investment from Tom Dundon himself or any of the other really rich people in the city of Portland. We want to see the Blazers stay, but lots of folks could be investing some of their money into this endeavor. I would want to see things like free transit to sports games, and then I would want to see a greater expansion of use of that stadium in general. If we’re going to be putting money towards it, it’s not just NBA or WNBA stadium. There’s lots of other ways in which it should be benefiting.
You’re talking about affordability. What are big ideas of what city council could be doing for working people in Portland if if you were in there?
Well, affordability and housing stability are my primary issues right now. And I think the number one way in which we impact affordability is by increasing wages and keeping costs low. Increasing income, decreasing costs. It is really difficult for the city of Portland to impact wages. But there are ways in which the city of Portland can do more to support labor.
One of the things that’s on my platform is the creation of a local labor board that actually reports to city council, like we see in other cities like Seattle, where we have an external labor board that can evaluate labor issues that are happening in the city and report to council and make recommendations around different regulations, conditions that are happening. I think there are things that the city can do to incentivize small businesses to increase their wages. What I would like to see is a business tax exemption for small businesses that voluntarily close their wage gap and start paying their lowest paid employees more, and in exchange we subsidize that through the business tax exemption.
I also think that we need to do a lot more to lower costs. I would like to see an across-the-board exemption of any of our fees or increases to folks making I think it’s $120,000 up to like $200,000 for a family, so that we’re making more progressive tax.
What kind of fees are you talking about?
Well, when our water bills go up, although I don’t know how much we can impact the water bill structure. That’s something I need to look into. But we do all sorts of things like the arts tax, for example, or all of these other ways in which we increase the tax. The thing that Councilor Dunphy tried to do, where he reformed the arts tax and exempted people making like I think $30,000 a year. I don’t think that went nearly far enough. That’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about.
A flat tax for people that are on the federal poverty level.
Yeah, that didn’t go far enough. But really, my passion is housing stability. I am really concerned. I think what we’re doing at the City of Portland is really backwards when it comes to stabilizing people in their homes and providing for homes. The City of Portland’s primary book of business is housing. When we’re thinking about the homelessness issue, right now we’re spending about $40 million a year in homeless services, providing shelters and other services, doing sweeps, those kinds of things, and that’s actually the job of the county. The county is the health authority of the region. It’s their job to provide sheltering and mental health services and addiction treatment. The city, 10 to 12 years ago, decided to get in the mix so that it could calm everybody’s fears and concerns, and started providing sheltering and homelessness services, and took their eye off the ball of what is actually what we do to solve homelessness, which is housing. So today we have more homeless people than ever, because about 4,000 new homeless people a month are entering the system, the vast majority of which are people who cannot pay their rent, and they’re being evicted from their homes. So, if we diverted that $40 million we’re currently spending on sheltering, and put even just half of it, based on current eviction rates, towards like rent assistance and stabilizing people in their current homes, we can turn that spigot down so that we don’t have the massive amount of new inflow happening and the need for more and more and more shelters, and we can divert another portion of that money towards a revolving loan fund where the city can start building publicly owned mixed-income housing. We need to really get serious about the city taking full responsibility for providing housing for all income levels.
Is there anything we haven’t covered that you feel like our particular audience really should know about you?
I guess I would say that I am a longtime supporter of labor and unionizing. The way I actually got into this whole business and the way in which I met Chloe was through the formation of Portland Tenants United. I was one of the original founders. I’m still a dues-paying member, number five. I just deeply believe in the power of people to organize. I think it’s the root of our democracy.
