Blueprint to the First 100 Days of Mayor Iannarone

As we prepare to transition into power, Sarah is commited to take bold action immediately.

From day one of her campaign, Sarah has said that we as Portlanders have everything we need today to make substantial progress on the challenges facing our city. We can harness our resources, empower our people, and organize our community to bring the civic infrastructure of Our Portland into alignment with our goals. But the current Portland mayor’s office has proven mismanaged, non-communicative, and ineffective at addressing our city’s most pressing problems in a timely fashion.

The First 100 Days of Sarah’s administration will be focused on how Portland’s next mayor can better coordinate and calibrate the activities of her office, the other commissioners, the twenty-nine city offices and bureaus, and our relationships with outside agencies and governments to achieve real progress on racial justice, housing affordability, homelessness, climate change, and wealth inequality.

Sarah doesn’t see the role of Portland mayor as a corporate CEO; a mayor’s job is to keep corporate CEOs and other high-level leaders in check. As the next mayor, Sarah will be Portland’s community problem solver-in-chief, and facilitator of the many community stakeholders and organizations working hard to improve Portland.

The process to transition from campaign to elected official is one Sarah is excited to undertake, but understands governance is a different endeavour. Sarah is not a career politician, she is a policy nerd who understands local government and works hard bringing people together for better outcomes. The Blueprint outlines how Sarah will go about implementing the many detailed policy proposals that make up her bold Plan for Progress.

Sarah’s workflow will be:

1. Set the vision and goals in tandem with community
2. Develop a feasible plan to achieve the goals
3. Put systems in place to make sure that we, as a city, progress towards the goals even as other unexpected priorities come up, as they undoubtedly will
4. Establish three votes on council required for such policy victories
5. Evaluate, adjust as needed, and persevere until we, as a community, achieve success on said bold vision

Transition: November 4-December 31, 2020

As Mayor-Elect, Sarah commits to:

• End the hierarchical dynamic between Mayor and City Council. Sarah will focus on relationship building to collaborate horizontally with her colleagues to assign bureaus where they all believe they can most effectively contribute to address the priorities of this administration.
• Continue meeting with leadership and staff of the twenty-nine City Bureaus and Offices to develop initial implementation plans and expectations for carrying out a bold progressive agenda. She will continue to build relationships and identify together with staff, frontline communities, and stakeholders what’s working well within each bureau to locate immediate opportunities for bold progressive change.
• Establish a Portland Mayor’s office in East Portland (possibly at EPNO or ECC, as space and COVID permits). Being embedded in the community is crucial, and East Portland is too-often neglected by downtown-focused politicians such as the current Mayor. Sarah will be a mayor for everyone in Portland. She is committed to decentralizing the focus of City Hall presently concentrated in the urban core.
• Continue meeting with community leaders to learn and better understand their relationship to the City. These meetings will span many issue areas where community leaders see the City being able to have the biggest impact on improving Portlanders’ lives. Sarah will work with community leaders and organizations to develop, implement, and put forward policies that reflect their input, and work directly with their communities to vet and further refine them.
• Engage and mobilize her network of urban policy researchers, best practices experts, and elected officials from around the country and the world for ongoing consultation.
• Hire competent and diverse staff, prepare offices, and otherwise execute transition plans with help of CAO/OMF.

Day One Eve: December 31, 2020

• Public swearing in and community celebration to ring in the New Year (COVID physical-distancing constraints considered).

Day One: January 1, 2021

Make immediate changes within the Mayor’s control:

• Assign Portland Police Bureau to Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty.
• Discontinue sweeps of houseless community members.
• Extend moratorium on evictions during the pandemic.
• Complete prohibition on all chemical weapons and non-lethal weapons for crowd control by Portland Police Bureau. Indiscriminate and generalized use of force is an unconstitutional response to individual behavior. Mass-punishment is extrajudicial punishment.
• Begin to establish state legislative priorities in conjunction with City Council to achieve systems change outside the City’s jurisdiction.

Week One: January 4-10, 2021

• Instruct City Bureaus on changes to public records request processes to increase transparency, lower costs for requests, and adhere to predictable timelines.
• Host inaugural Mayor’s Weekly Friday Briefing for Press & Public. Sarah will offer weekly press briefings, office hours availability, and informative broadcasts across a variety of channels. The public should not wait for a campaign season in order to hear from the Mayor through local media. Sarah is committed to creating opportunities for regular, direct engagement with the Mayor’s office for local media and Portland residents.
• Demilitarize the main entrance so Portland City Hall reflects our Sanctuary City status, removes adversarial relationship with the community, and feels welcoming to all.
• Work with City lobbyists to update The City’s legislative agenda for the 2021 Regular Session to best support the City’s new priorities. Understand their needs so the City can clear state-level roadblocks to progressive policy implementation.

First Three Months

The first three months in office will be a key period for kicking off the mayor’s big picture and multi-bureau agenda. Some processes will take years to complete and Sarah plans to respect their urgency by starting those processes quickly upon entering City Hall. The list below is not exhaustive, but offers a roadmap to how Sarah’s administration will approach complex problems facing Our Portland.

Housing & Houselessness

• Establish a Policy Director for Housing and a Special Liaison for Houselessness in the Portland Mayor’s Office.
• Convene Housing All Portlanders task force to begin Five-Year Action Plan for Ending Portland’s Housing State of Emergency (2021-2025).
• Work with partners public and private initiating Community Health & Safety Hubs equitably distributed across neighborhoods providing rest stops, hygiene and health facilities, and critical services for Portlanders in need.
• Deliver 500 units of permanently affordable housing by acquiring at distressed pricing and repurposing hotel and motel properties to permanently affordable apartments. Inspired by Oregon’s “Turnkey Partnership” and California’s “Project Homekey,” Portland can be a leading partner on this statewide initiative to benefit the critical affordable housing/ homelessness crisis in our city. Instead of wasting money on expensive leases to house people, The City will acquire titles so that, at the end of the day, there is a hard asset owned by the city and operated by either by government or not-for-profit partners.

Climate Justice & Green New Deal

• Convene multi-office Green New Deal planning task force involving conservation, environmental justice, Oregon tribes, labor and trades, County and City sustainability offices, and other stakeholders and advocates.
• Develop and implement “Climate Test” to ensure climate progress informs City analysis of policy and procedural changes, weighing the carbon cost of action and inaction.
• Identify potential fees and penalties associated with risky fossil fuel infrastructure.
• Engage the community to design the plan for the phased, just transition away from large-scale fossil fuel infrastructure.
• Initiate Community Infrastructure Investments process.
• Explore potential for Federal Reserve bond security support and prospects for municipal broadband buildout. Recession is the time to be investing in public infrastructure.
• Establish a Policy Director for Community Resilience to begin evaluating activity and coordinating across bureaus to establish a framework of community-driven disaster preparedness and emergency management with the goal of establishing an Office of Community Resilience. Expand current seismic resilience efforts to include community coordination and resource sharing around smoke, flooding, snow/ice, food insecurity, white nationalist threats, etc.
  • Sarah will attend a monthly listening session in each of the seven coalition districts to identify policy opportunities to bring to Council.

Youth Services & Education

• Convene the Mayor’s Youth Equity Advisory Council to engage youth in every community on gun violence prevention, directly engage the Black Lives Matter movement, and support climate justice and other youth led efforts.
• Sarah will hold listening sessions with students, electeds, and administrative officials from each of Portland’s six school districts.

Safe Streets & Mobility Justice

• Sarah’s Policy Director for Safe Streets and Mobility Justice will begin assessing cross-bureau opportunities to ensure safety for all residents across all modes of transportation. This includes coordinating citywide (and working with other jurisdictions and partners regionally) on new models of traffic enforcement, traffic calming, e-bike subsidy and accessibility, and transit subsidy and accessibility. Produce roadmap to fareless transit in partnership with cities, counties and TriMet, including rider perspectives.
• Should the above pass, assign Director to work with Metro Regional Government to coordinate deployment of transportation bond dollars for neighborhood-scale projects which improve transportation equity as a first priority of Portland.

Economic Justice

• Convene Racial Equity Economic Taskforce to craft 30/30/30 plan to close the wealth gap between Black and white Portlanders.
• Introduce pilot program to provide a Guaranteed Basic Income to 125 Black Portland mothers.
• The Mayor's Policy Director for Workforce, Labor Relations & Economic Development will begin working with community partners, labor unions, and contractors with the goal of strengthening and systematizing the city’s Community Benefit Agreement (CBA) processes toward greater workforce and contracting equity.

Gun Violence Prevention

• The Mayor’s Policy Director for Youth, Family & Education will work to align resources, coordinate partnerships, and support systems-level change for vulnerable youth and families in partnership with the Office of Youth Violence Prevention and other related City offices, bureaus, and programming.
• Convene community advisory group (in partnership with other commissioners and Multnomah Youth Commission) to oversee transition from a reactionary intervention model to comprehensive prevention and interruption model and advise us as we shift away from a police-centered to community-centered public health model.

COVID Response & Recovery

• The Mayor’s Director of Small Business & Entrepreneurship, will begin evaluating Portland’s small business and entrepreneurship ecosystem, align strategic partnerships and investments, and serve as liaison between City Hall and various business organizations and advocacy groups (across sectors) citywide. Director will scope a clear set of deliverables based on the City’s and Mayor’s equity goals. They will also lead on streamlining Small Business Administration support for Portland small businesses, investments in data collection and sharing systems, and support for underrepresented entrepreneurs and employers to scale up their share of the economy.
• Establish a community-based small business center. This storefront, outside of downtown in a neighborhood commercial corridor, will assist founders and entrepreneurs to start and grow companies by navigating red tape and roadblocks that prevent business launches. Serve as a one-stop-shop to help small businesses navigate and recover from the COVID-19 crisis by identifying business practice recalibration and government support and programs available.

Civil & Human Rights

• Support Commissioner Hardesty as she transitions to Police Commissioner and lend the full support of the Mayor’s Office and necessary administrative personnel to the efforts to negotiate a new PPA contract and fully implement the police accountability measure (in the likely event it passes in November).
• Collaborate on ‘Equal Enforcement’ Protest Response Plan with help of the Mayor’s Civil & Human Rights Policy Director.
• Transfer one of two City of Portland FTE (1.0) “ADA Title II Manager” positions to serve as “ADA Coordinator for Urban Development,” ensuring a proactive and coordinated response across the urban development bureaus to address the housing, mobility, and other needs of Portlanders with disabilities.
• Support Office of Equity and Human Rights in convening a citywide process engaging disability communities to develop a collective vision for how people with disabilities engage with and receive services from the City. Create an action plan based on this vision to make Portland accessible to our disabled communities.

Arts & Culture

• The Mayor's Director of Arts & Culture will work with cultural institutions, community groups, and wider creative industries to mitigate the negative impacts from the lockdowns and economic downturn and identify opportunities to jumpstart the recovery process, starting with culturally specific organizations.
• Work with Portland Film Office to streamline the permitting process and get productions of all sizes filming faster and easier.

Good Government & Charter Commission

• Convene all bureau directors (and relevant commissioners) to verify that they understand their bureau’s contributions to the city’s largest objectives and that they can communicate any barriers they foresee and how those barriers might be addressed.
• Determine initial metrics that will be used for a publicly available City Performance Dashboard and set baselines for key initiatives addressing each area.
• Begin participatory budgeting process for 21-22FY budget.
• Launch interface allowing Portlanders to submit ideas to the Mayor’s Office that city residents can upvote. Launch with a commitment that the Mayor will seriously consider, review, and potentially implement the most popular submissions.
• Track the convening of the Charter Review Commission and participate in those efforts where/when possible to assist in laying the groundwork for structural changes that the commission should be addressing as part of their work. Make it clear that their charge is not only to clean up charter language, but to truly engage the community in a robust discussion about governance of our city.

Completion of 100th day in Office: April 10, 2021

“City Hall Open House and Community Summit” updating the public on progress made under the First 100 Days of Sarah’s administration. The public will be able to see and evaluate tangible evidence of the first steps of a major transformation in Portland’s provision of services and administration of the public good. Some changes can be and will be immediate, especially for our most vulnerable community members and those directly impacted by our most pressing crises. For more substantive, longer term advancements, Sarah commits to taking concrete first steps and laying out a clear path forward to successfully roll out a new vision for our City and all of the people who call Portland home.

This First 100 Day Plan is a roadmap, not a binding contract. This document is not exhaustive, and there are many policy shifts Mayor Sarah will begin work on as soon as elected that aren’t necessarily included here.

Sarah makes the following guarantee to the City: "As Mayor, I pledge that my decision making will be done through collective and inclusive processes. I will not operate alone or oppose the popular will of Portlanders. The people of Portland are the right people to make decisions about the future of our city - not just by electing me Mayor, but by holding me accountable to do what I say I will do. And while my Plan for Progress is important to me, and important to Portland’s future, I will remain nimble in addressing all the ongoing crises our city faces and any that may emerge. I am committed to making sure the Portland’s mayor’s office functions efficiently and effectively by staying connected to and activating our city’s civic network. I will work hard to transcend politics and bring all Portlanders together to realize a truly progressive future for this wonderful place we call home."