The term "revolving door" describes movement from the public sector to the private sector (and vice versa). Many Portlanders have walked through the revolving door and slowly, bit by bit, Big Blink PDX has been taking steps to surface the phenomenon as it exists in Portland City lobbying data.

The Leaderboard is now filterable by year and quarter! Take a peek at this year’s most active lobbyists: bigblinkpdx.org?year=2025

Q3 lobbying data is online! Overall lobbying is way down from the first two quarters … possibly. More on that in a bit. Big surprises? Nah. The Portland Business Alliance claimed responsibility for more than 40% of all entries, securing the org's #1 spot since 2014. bigblinkpdx.org?quarter=2025...

Next Monday, Portland summer terms out 🍁 and City Hall’s lobbyists have eight more days to get their Q3 policy requests in. One month after that, we’ll be paging through another comma-separated snapshot showing who pushed what concern with whom. End of quarter + 1mo. Just setting expectations here.

Thanks to a trove of City personnel data and two months of unobtrusive changes, Big Blink PDX can answer a question left unanswered by City lobbying reports: Who is this?? Wherever possible, Portland City officials are now identified by the position they held on the date of each lobbying incident.

Not only was City budget season hectic. It overlapped with the first quarter (Q2) lobbyists were allowed to merge multiple lobbying interactions into a single entry. Q2 is online, with a teensy bundle of technical changes that couldn't have shipped before today. Numbers are down, but that's fine:

Q2 data arrives sometime in the middle of next week! In the meantime, work is underway on the feature teased last month. Thanks to recently acquired personnel data, it’s possible to start identifying City officials by role. The lobbying records name names, but neglect to say who these people are.

Quarterly top fives are now viewable in the site's Leaderboard, with totals and percentages representing for the selected quarter. Data for the most recent quarter (2025 Q1) is available at bigblinkpdx.org?quarter=2025..., with Q2 data expected to arrive at the end of the month.

Next Monday, the 2nd quarter of 2025 wraps up, with new Portland lobbying data expected to follow on 7/30 … including a change to reporting requirements that may affect your enjoyment of the Big Blink PDX service. Starting in Q2, lobbying entities may combine multiple related lobbying incidents.

Wow

Introducing date filters:

Lil ish: City Hall expects lobbying entities to self-report their interactions with officials, so people can turn up in City records under different names and even spellings. It's fair play to go by "Dan" in one room and "Daniel" in another, tho software tends to want the same things to be the same.

To spare you a week of hitting reload … … although our first full quarter under Portland’s new form of government (!) wraps up this Monday, March 31, Q1 lobbying data is not expected to be released until April 30. Big Blink should be able to chew through that data in a couple three days. Early May?

The Big Blink would have its work cut out for it if Multnomah County, Metro, and the City of Portland adopted uniform lobbyist registration and reporting requirements! Among local governments the City does the most — keeping track of lobbyists and their activity and publishing the data it collects.

And here’s a direct link to the data for Q4: bigblinkpdx.org/sources/88

Lobbying data for the last quarter of 2024 has been published by the City of Portland and added to bigblinkpdx.org. This data represents the last business conducted under Mayor Ted Wheeler and the outgoing City Council — and also marks the first appearance of Zenith Energy in City lobbying records.

The City of Portland published lobbying data for Q3 2024 on October 30, including 360 lobbying incidents reported by 14 entities. The Portland Business Alliance logged 193 (54%) of those incidents, more than 3x the combined total claimed by proponents of a new Central Eastside entertainment venue