Rebecca Esau offers insights, advice as retirement nears
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Source: Rebecca Esau offers insights, advice as retirement nears ↗ Last modified: Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:08:00 GMT
Rebecca Esau was appointed interim director of the Bureau of Development Services in April 2017 and promoted to the permanent job the following October. This promotion followed more than 20 years of service to the City of Portland in various bureaus and positions dealing with development review.
Esau is retiring ↗ on Dec. 18. She sat down to offer her candid perspectives on development review processes in Portland and advice for her colleagues, the development community and the public.
What are you most proud of from your tenure as director?
I’m incredibly proud of the management team I’ve created, as they are all great leaders and have been great partners with me in prioritizing customer service, equity, and creating a culture of continuous improvement. I am also very proud of the many improvements we’ve made in how we provide services to the community. Also, I am very proud that we were successful in getting the City Council’s support to consolidate the City’s development services and permitting functions into a single new entity ↗.
What did you hope to accomplish, but didn’t?
I had hoped that the City would consolidate the development review and permitting functions years ago, so I could’ve helped navigate that transition, as I have been a proponent of this change for many years. But I am glad to have gotten us this far with it, with the resolution that City Council approved in August 2023. This is the biggest, most consequential change that was needed as the foundation to make improvements to the City’s ability to deliver these services to the community, and to continue to build a consistent culture of customer service, and to have a cohesive agency and clear lines of authority and accountability, rather than having these services spread across seven bureaus.
As you look back on your career, are there any decisions or policies related to permitting or the Bureau that you would approach differently in hindsight?
We’ve seen the benefits of assigning a single point of contact to assist customers, for example, with the Field Issuance Remodel Program, the Facility Permit Program, and the Process Management Program. In retrospect, I would have expanded that model sooner, as it’s very effective. Along with that, forming interdisciplinary teams around project types (such as new single dwelling residential projects or commercial alterations, etc.), is another improvement that I wish we could have made, but before we could do that, we needed to do the consolidation of the development review and permitting services into a single entity. Once that’s done, having project teams would be a big benefit to our customers.