… but it's allowed, thanks to a regulatory change that went into effect the prior quarter (2025 Q2). The change promised "to assist with general compliance, reduce administrative burden, increase disclosures, and clarify reports to the public."

🤔

Hmm.

www.portland.gov/auditor/lobb...

One thing to note is that the numbers are almost surely undercounts!

In the table of lobbying incidents, you'll see a number of entries dated to the full duration of Q3. These entries collect unknown numbers of distinct lobbying interactions. That seems a little weird …

bigblinkpdx.org/sources/95

Thanks for using it! And thanks for the feedback!

Search is difficult to do well and easy to get wrong … and probably will have to include details like entity names and personal names in results. It’s long been in the thinking stage, along with some related means of making the Topic field manageable, for the reason you cite

Currently filters are available on the detail views for individual entities, people/groups, and sources, and those views serve as primary filters. Are there other filters that would be helpful?

Sort and filter settings are recorded in the URL so users can bookmark their preferences. Like this: bigblinkpdx.org/incidents?so...

In the meantime, expect the same old steady stream of imperceptible website performance upgrades.

As always, reach out with questions or bug reports.

Without a doubt, this is the most complex and delicate feature added to the website since its debut two years ago. It’s been important to get the implementation right, to set a good foundation for other uses of this data. And this implementation is pretty close to right.

Peruse the data at your leisure, reach out with corrections and ideas, and stay tuned for site upgrades.

Which is to say this batch of lobbying data comes pretty close to validating the intuitions of the Charter Reform advocates and the will of the voters. Bit by bit, Portland is starting to see something that looks a little like a representative democracy.

Overall, we're seeing things we haven't seen in Portland — maybe ever. For one, there's a set of before-and-after images emerging, showing a clear contrast between the two forms of government. These days, different interest groups are being represented, and different perspectives are being heard.

It turns out that lobbying relationships are as complex as any other sort of human relationship, built on shared interest and reciprocity. Not every City Council member is meeting with the same lobbyists. And the lobbying heavyweights of yesteryear aren't seeing the same audience share they used to.

What's the good news? The reporting changes accompany a nearly simultaneous shift in how lobbying happens in Portland, as lobbyists start to gravitate towards those particular City officials who are friendly to their interests … and those particular officials who are willing to make time for them.

Big Blink might not yet be in a state to showcase all that's changed since Charter Reform. (Working on it! This operation is literally one guy.) But there's some very good stuff in here.

First, the bad news. As expected, the familiar quarter-to-quarter numerical comparisons are basically history.

It was impossible to predict which lobbying entities would take advantage of the updated reporting tools or what combinations we'd see. Even so, these changes weren't the reason the new dataset proved more of a challenge to pull apart and process than the last set, and that's a good thing. Read on:

Instead of wondering, “who is this person talking to a lobbyist from NW Natural on March 24?” we’ll know that it was Dan Ryan’s chief of staff. Good to know!

There’s still an awful lot of coding work ahead before we get there, but the first batch of changes is on track to debut in a week or two.

Not only will the new data (including more than 1500 rows identifying City officials by office, rank, and role) help demystify and make sense of the structure of relationships inside City Hall. It should also go a ways towards making the policy inclinations of elected officials legible to outsiders.