The Portland City Council has taken an early, but big, step down the path of campaign finance reform at the local level. According to this entry from my dialing-for-dollars buddies at OSPIRG (which will doubtlessly be balanced off with an account in The Oregonian later this morning), the council voted unanimously yesterday to have the Mayor, Commissioner Sten and City Auditor Blackmer put together a plan whereby candidates for Portland elective offices could get free public money to finance their campaigns. In exchange for those funds, they'd have to agree not to accept donations from any other source.

Although the system would be voluntary, in at least one other place in which it's been tried -- Tucson, Arizona -- no candidate so far has dared to decline the public money and try to run based on private contributions. Apparently politicians fear that that would make them look too beholden to campaign donors' demands. As a consequence, there apparently are no campaign donors down there any more -- except for taxpayers, who pay for the system involuntarily. (Something similar is apparently working in Maine.)

I think campaign finance reform at every level of government is long overdue. Here in Portland, a spotlight is being thrown on this year's elections, including Commissioner Francesconi's million-dollar war chest and some interesting contributions to Commissioner Leonard's suddenly contested candidacy from some people whom he's in a position to make even richer than they already are. In fairness to those two candidates, the public is just waking up to a problem that's been present for many years. Old-timers in Portland have seen many a City Council decision made in favor of corporate and other interests who just coincidentally dropped a well-timed $10,000 into a campaign bucket or two. (You youngsters out there, head down to the library and check out the story of the Hollywood Fred Meyer store sometime.)

But I see a number of issues lurking in Portland's plan for a new system. One of them, of course, is the Oregon Constitution, which is pretty strict about government tinkering with free speech. Maybe the new system could survive a constitutional challenge, since it's nominally voluntary. But it would certainly have to be drafted carefully, with those legal obstacles in mind.

The other super-sized issue is political: whether Portland taxpayers really want to pay for the new system. The plan apparently calls for 0.1 percent or 0.2 percent of each city agency's budget to be diverted to the candidates for office. Supporters of the new system think that Portland voters will go for that, but I'm not so sure. I think that when they actually see how the system will work, the majority of taxpayers may well say no.

I help friends with their income taxes every year, and one question that comes up on every federal tax return is whether the taxpayer wants to designate $3 of his or her taxes for public funding of presidential election campaigns. The idea behind the federal "check-off" is the same noble goal that underlies the Portland proposal -- the desire to eliminate or minimize the influence of wealthy campaign contributors over the candidates after they are elected. Not a single person whose taxes I have done has ever told me to check the box "yes." Indeed, many of them have said something like, "I don't think tax dollars should be used to pay for political campaigns. Let the rich people pay for the campaigns." Paying for political ads is the last thing they want their tax dollars to do. No matter how hard I try to sell "clean" campaigns, they check that box "no," even though, as they well know, it does not affect the tax they owe or the refund they receive.