The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-05-14
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (37,830 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
On May 14, 2025, the Portland City Council held a work session covering the Community and Economic Development service area and Prosper Portland's budget. Bureau directors presented proposed fiscal year 2025-26 budgets for the Housing Bureau, Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, Portland Permitting and Development, Prosper Portland, the Children's Levy, the Office of Arts and Culture, and Spectator Venues, describing revenue sources, program restructurings, proposed staffing reductions, and decision packages tied to general fund cuts. Discussion topics included the Portland Clean Energy Fund's administrative and contingency structure, permitting bureau staffing and funding model sustainability, graffiti abatement resourcing, homelessness and housing transition strategies, small business support programs, cannabis tax revenue allocation, and the structural relationship between Prosper Portland and City Council budget authority. Councilors raised questions to bureau staff and, in some cases, to a Prosper Portland board member present in the audience. Several councilors indicated intent to introduce budget amendments or budget notes on topics including eviction services, permitting staffing, noise office staffing, arts and culture funding, seismic upgrades for the Keller Auditorium, small business grants and loans, event stability grants, and a proposed reallocation of Prosper Portland's general fund allocation using Strategic Investment Fund resources. No votes were taken during this session; any votes that may occur on related budget items would be reflected in the vote ledger. The council also discussed procedural questions about amendment submission deadlines ahead of further budget deliberations.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
Procedural markers in this session
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0 I think that was a good afternoon.
1 It is 2 p.m. I am convening the work session of the Portland city council. We are hearing our next two. I guess not hearing, but discussing our next two service areas or buckets of information. For our budget work. We will spend two hours with the folks from community and economic development, and then we will have just under two hours to talk to the folks from prosper. Both of these are in work session, so councilors, as we did earlier, feel free at any time to let us know what amendments you are planning on bringing in the future. We'll make sure those get recorded. And with that dca oliveira, would you like to take it away?
2 Yes. Thank you, madam president. Daniel, for the record, good afternoon council. Thank you for making some time for us this afternoon. I hope everybody got snacks and your water and are charged for another four hours of fun. As the next slide, please. So as the council president shared, we're going to go through for the first two hours the community and economic development service area budgets. We are going to cover prosper because it was part of our original deck. But we are going to acknowledge that because we have two hours. Additionally with prosper, director flaherty will cover the slides, but we really hope to have the conversation discussion afterwards. So through the agenda, we'll we'll walk through the bureaus and then take questions. Next slide please. So let's dive right in. So the things we're going to cover today are similar to the prior presentations you've seen. Each bureau is going to share their their proposed budget. The some of the outcomes that we expect to see, we're going to offer up last year's budget compared to this. Discuss the changes in the proposed budget and the potential impacts of cuts that they have that have been included. Along with that, I'll start that off with the changes that come to the service area at large. Next slide please. So as ca administrator jordan shared earlier as a part of the proposed budget for 2526, the service area will be welcoming in the arts and culture office and children's levy to our organizational structure. This is part of the service area reduction a vibrant communities. So I want to thank right out of the gate directors pellegrino and montez for diving right in and joining us today. So you'll hear about their program shortly. One additional change I want to flag that's also a part of the proposed budget for your consideration is the permit improvement team for this fiscal year was in the service area structure. But assuming that the council adopts the decision package to continue, that program staff will be moving into permitting development and bts to continue that work. While we think the analysis is still ongoing, we think the next phase of the work will be implementation based and is better served working within the bureaus to continue to improve our permitting processes. So what you see here is the structure as proposed for fiscal year 2526. Next slide please. So right now we're going to we're going to share the expenditures by bureau. I want to note right out the gate that this is our expenditures as proposed. The proposed budget also contemplates our fund balances which for the service area totals 1.3 billion. Each bureau will walk through that as a part of their deck. But this is how we expect to spend dollars in this upcoming fiscal year and the proposed budget. This represents the expenditures that are specifically within your purview for the prosper budget, so you don't see their complete funding mechanisms, including tif and sif. But this is stuff that the 16 million represents. What this this body will contemplate. You also see that throughout we see larger numbers. And because of the Portland clean energy fund and the housing bureau because of their capital asset funds. Next slide please. Another way to look at this service area is by fund type. We have a diverse funding mechanism throughout the service area. Everything from fees and ppe and grants as you can see. But we also have the taxes like the pcf. And we also have the cannabis funds, arts, the arts tax, tif, of course for the housing set aside. The point being is that to look at the each bureau, we're going to break down how the different funds fund programs within that service bureau. So you can just see the wide range of commitments that we have made and some of the limitations that some of these funds require us to spend on specific programs by bureau. The other thing we'll just note that's highlighted here because it came up earlier, is within our service area through the housing bureau, is the pass through to the county for the joint office iga, which is captured there. And those hash marks under the general fund. Next slide please. Before I hand it over to the director to talk about the housing bureau, the last thing I want to acknowledge is, even though we're working as a service area in coordination, given the fund types, oftentimes the discretion that we have is very limited. So the directors will articulate when those funds, like whether it be pcf or the waste fund or the housing grants that we receive, are really specific towards outcome. So we continue to think about ways to be creative in how we use those dollars, but oftentimes we are compelled by by structure. And with that, I'll hand it over to director to talk about the housing bureau.
3 Great. Good afternoon. Councilors. For the record, helmy hissrich, director of the Portland housing bureau, and I use she her pronouns. I'm here to provide a high level overview of Portland housing bureau's budget. Let's go to the next slide. So the Portland housing bureau in fiscal year 2526, has a $243 million budget and 89 staff in fiscal year 2526. Our budget consists of $14.7 million for staff, $24.8 million is a pass through to the joint office for homeless services and $203 million in funds for affordable housing programs, internal services, and including capital for affordable housing development. General fund for the joint offices pass through was created prior to the creation of the joint office and passes the funds through our budget, but we do not participate in the decision making and the use of those funds. And just for the information for today, the fiscal year 2324 funding for joint office was 33.4 million. In fiscal year 2425, it was revised to 29.2 million. And in fiscal year 2526, the proposed amount is 24.8 million. Has several funding sources. However, our two largest funds are are proceeds from the housing bond issuance, which is shown in in sort of peach color on this, both the Portland and the metro bonds, as well as HUD funds, which are shown in gray on this on the left hand side. On the resources side, I have some very good news to share about HUD funds. We receive both grants and entitlement funds from HUD. We learned prior to coming here that our federal entitlement funds have been confirmed at 14.2 million, which is a 1% reduction from prior years. So we're very pleased we can continue on with our programs that are funded with that. And we also learned that our federal housing grant has been approved fully. So we're good to go starting July 1st with our pro housing grant. We're really happy because that was the one we thought might not get funded. And we will be deploying those those pro housing funds for support of the development plan, as well as for the social housing study that we're working on this year, finding alternative strategies. I want to clarify a little bit about how to read this chart. The graphs that you see here, compare 2324 actual expenditures with current year's 2425 budgeted resources, and then 2520 6 a.m. I getting the dates wrong? Excuse me? 20, 26 2526 proposed budget. Although it looks like there was an increase in funding from fiscal year 2324 to fiscal year 2425, that's actually not the case. The reason for the variance is that our actual expenditures in 2324 is being compared to budgeted funds. And our while our services are budgeted and spent in the same year, we deploy capital for development and our development capital. We budget for in a year, but we expend it over time. And the expenditure, the actual disbursement dates of those expenditures varies depending on the project timeline and on other economic factors. So when fiscal year 2425 is reconciled, we'll actually show a lower bar because it will show the actual money that went out the door that year. And the budget funds will show up. The budgeted expended funds will show up in future years. What? So what is not clear, but what we know is that the trend is what you see from fiscal year 2425 to 2526. Our total budget is actually on the decline because we are spending out our capital resources. So it is we are on on a downward trend currently. So I just wanted to clarify that. One example of that is that we budgeted $275 million in 2324, but actual expenditures were $150 million. So that gives you some context. The expenditures that we show are in two categories personnel, internal materials and services, or ims, which includes indirect cost allocation, overhead and interagency agreements. And the other expense category includes external materials and services that encompasses loan disbursements, grants, subrecipient contracts. Other expenses include debt service and cash transfers. In fiscal year 2526, our personnel costs equated to 6% of our budget and over the average of three years it is about 7%. The majority of our expenses in the external materials and services category include multifamily project disbursements, home repair grants and loans. Down payment assistance for first time home buyers, and our subrecipient contracts for various programs such as the neighborhood housing program and the rental services office, and also property management contracts. Next slide please. In fiscal year 2425, fbe restructured its 17 program, offers offers into seven programs based on function. The graph is an illustration of the major programs. Our equity program is actually presented under admin and compliance, so we've kind of merged those together. While the economic opportunity program isn't showing here is that will be presented by prosper Portland. So we do transfer some of our cdbg funds to prosper Portland. And they for economic opportunity. They will show that in their their budget, about 78% of funds is in multifamily development projects. That's the long bar across the bottom of this chart. That is the funding we're spending on multifamily development. And this program is funded by tif tax increment finance, housing bonds, both metro and Portland housing bonds, pcf and federal grants. Pcf is a relatively new addition to the program to the funding mix. It's partially compensating for the expiring tif and bond resources. New tif resources will be supporting this program in the relatively near future. We think in the next five years, we'll start to see an increase in tif funding for housing development in the newly formed tif districts. About one third of the administration and compliance program budget is rental property management. We manage the ellington apartments, the headwater apartments, the east and east Burnside properties. We manage these through home forward. And so we pass through funds to home forward as the property manager. Our administration and compliance includes $8 million of property management, which I just mentioned, 414 total units. It includes a combination of operating operating costs, property management costs, as well as capital repairs for buildings that we own. These the ellington is the largest of these, and there's 263 units at 0 to 60% of ami in fact, continually needs capital repairs. And that is a project that we're looking to rehabilitate or redevelop. And we're in the process of evaluating the redevelopment of that of that site. Home access and retention programs secured 7 million over the next four years for of federal funding through the pro housing grant, and the funds are shared for programs between ph, b, p and d and we actually are partnering and collaborating on the use of those funds, particularly for the alternative funding of rental housing with prosper Portland. And we've also allocated some of those funds for the tif district work and the creation of additional sort of augmenting the tif planning in the new tif districts. Next slide. So the anticipated outcomes for Portland housing bureau are pretty static since last year. We are anticipating a little over 600 new rental properties to be opened and 150 affordable units preserved through our repair programs. We have approximately 400 new affordable homes for sale through homeownership programs. Both our first time homebuyer program, our down payment assistance program, as well as new construction of affordable homeownership opportunities. And through our developer incentive programs, that has been very successful in encouraging first time affordable home buyers through working closely with planning, we have an estimated 11 almost 1200 people getting educated on first time homebuyer that become the pipeline for the new first time home buyer opportunities. 500 low income households receiving home repairs to their home. Over 3000 households providing landlord tenant education, information and referral services. Those are often incoming phone calls to u, and 385 households provided housing stabilization services directly. Let's go to the next slide. So the decision packages that are before you today, the first is the addition of a home share pilot project. And as we discussed with the homelessness and housing committee, this was proposed originally by the mayor, who has been consistently advising the bureau to work on programs that are more cost effective. We've not done home sharing in the past. We think there's an opportunity through a home sharing pilot to test out the model for a much lower cost approach to addressing housing, for housing stability, for lower income individuals. We don't have the program designed at this point, but we're thinking specifically around the senior population being the target for that. We are expecting or proposing the cut of both the down payment assistance loan program by 400,000. This is part of the 1% cut to the bureau. We had to look at where we could cut, and in cutting the down payment assistance loans, we would be cutting out about 3 to 5 down payment assistance loans for homeownership opportunity. What that really means for us is that we are down payment assistance loan program is heavily funded by the tif districts, which means it can only be implemented in very targeted areas of the city. And so we this would expand into a broader part of the city, and we are losing some of the capacity to provide outside of those tif areas. We are also looking at a cut on home repair grants. This is funding that supports 10 to 20 loans or grants aimed at preventing displacement of longtime community residents. And it it is helps low income homeowners retain their homes through repair programs, foreclosure prevention, counseling, and retention services. We do still will be providing home repair services. What this does is that we currently provide home repair through federal funding, and that limits the amount we can spend per unit. And it also creates some federal restrictions that we don't have with local funds. And so by cutting the general fund, we actually just make our program a little more restrictive. There is a as mentioned previously, there's a 5% ongoing cut to the joint office of 1.6 million and a one time cut of 4.8 million. Again, those are passthroughs. We're not really part of the discussion on those. And I had asked sky broken up from Portland solutions to be here if there's any questions on the use of those funds. That's it. Thank you so much.
4 Next slide.
5 Good afternoon. My name is Eric engstrom. I'm the director of the bureau of planning and sustainability. I'll just start off by mentioning that the budget information I'm sharing today reflects the fact that bts delivers a fairly wide and diverse range of services, including long range planning, management of the city's solid waste and recycling system, administration, several climate related programs and a community technology program. I want to mention a couple details there to help you understand the budget. First, bts has historically been the place that leads the city's climate action work. That baton is shifting to the city administrator's office with this budget, although we retain some roles in administering programs and assisting, and you'll see that in the budget. Second, our waste and recycling team includes graffiti abatement, which is paired with our public trash can program. And so you'll see that in that program. And then finally, our community technology division includes staffing the mount hood cable regulatory commission. So you'll see that as one of our revenue sources. Next slide please. Given that range of programs, we have also a diverse source of revenue, including the solid waste management fund, the general fund and a number of intergovernmental agreements and grants. With the exception of the general fund, all of these resources are generally restricted funds with specific allowed uses. Pcf is obviously the largest of that. The solid waste revenue is our second largest source of revenue, followed by the general fund. And I want to make a note about a couple of things on the expenditures graph that deserves some explanation. First, the 2324 bar there is smaller because the largest pcf programs had not yet been up and running at that point, so the program was still in start up mode. Second, the second year there is larger because we initially set up all of the pcf programs as intergovernmental or interagency agreements within bwp's budget. And then this year, we shifted to separately sending that money directly into the other bureau budget. So the overall piece of budget continues to grow, but the portion of it is now smaller. Just because we changed the way we were budgeting. What remains in our budget are the programs we directly administer through our own contracts, such as the home energy retrofit program or the e-bike program, for example. Our budget also includes the annual community grant cycle. Most of bce's operating budget is staff, which is somewhat obscured by this slide. The external materials and services funding and the fund expenses shown here are almost entirely pcf, and for clarity, this excludes the unallocated fund balance on this slide, which is noted in the left there in the. The small print, which is expressed as contingency in budget terminology, but in reality it just reflects the future programing for the remaining years of the climate investment plan, which is the document that governs how we allocate the piece of money. Next slide please. This is just a snapshot of the overall pcf spending in this year's budget. This shows on the left. In the upper left is what bce's budget includes regarding pcf. The on the lower left is what's going into overall city administration, including the one time transfer of interest earnings to the general fund. And then the right is the funding that's going to the other bureaus to carry out the climate investment plan programs. Overall, pcf has two buckets. Essentially, there's the spending that's directed by the climate investment plan, which is most of the spending. And then there's a smaller bucket for administrative expenses, which is mostly what we're using for pcf program staff and a few staff in some of the other bureaus that are noted there. Next slide please. I think you've seen this slide before, but for the sake of the public who may be watching, this is a slide showing the expected balances of the pcf fund over the five year lifespan of the climate investment plan. The main point here is that the fund balance is fairly large still, because for the first several years we were in startup mode and some of our largest programs had not yet kicked in. Over the next few years, our approved programs are getting underway, especially the larger ones, and we expect the spending to surpass revenue in the coming years. And that fund balance will come down by the end of that five year period. And of course, there is also still a cushion we're trying to maintain because of some uncertainty in and the fact that we're living in uncertain economic times. And as a reminder, the current cip, or climate investment plan extends through 2029. The difference between the 1.6 and the 1.1 billion is just the money we have on hand already, the existing fund balance. Next slide please. This is just a closer look at bce's program funding by the different programs we have. Again, this is just our operating revenue. For clarity, I've excluded the pcf fund balance and the ongoing cip funding here. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to see the other programs. Frankly, they'd be too small. So a few notes on this. Aside from pcf itself, pcf funding does touch a few other programs, including a small amount going to planning this year for a policy project related to urban agriculture. Our administrative teams are funded by an overhead model that includes funding from all the different revenue sources we receive on an ongoing basis, proportional to the fte in those programs. So that's why you'll see pcf funding in the bureau of administration as well. General fund historically provided the bulk of funding for our planning program and our climate work. This year, there's no general fund resources going into the climate team. This is now funded at least the rps portion of the climate work is funded entirely by solid waste funds, pcf and grants. As you can see, our urban planning and urban design program is most reliant on general fund just proportionally. And as a result, over time, this program is actually probably about half the size it was 15 or 20 years ago, just from cumulative impact of cuts. This year they lost one fte. We've been able to backfill most of that with grants and one time resources. But again, that's a short term solution. The general fund amount in our solid waste program is entirely the graffiti abatement work, which is general fund supported, not solid waste supported. And I've added a few notes related to the intergovernmental revenue on the right hand side in planning. That's mostly state and metro grants. In community technology, that's mostly the mount hood cable regulatory commission, iga revenue. And then in solid waste, there's a mix of metro and state money there in both planning and climate. A portion of the grant money that are shown is federal grants, which are uncertain, as you all know right now. And this includes funding for our cei hub policy grant, which is a federal grant, and that may be threatened by the current administration. Next slide please. So these are some sample anticipated outcomes for this year. Some of our performance measures that we track I want to just say that especially our planning work and our climate work, these are long term goals that we track. A lot of them, for example, like raising the percentage of portlanders that live in complete communities with easy and walkable access to things they need on a daily basis. That's not a measure that changes much each year, but we have been tracking it for a long time, and we have made progress over the long term, a key measure that we also share with the entire service area is housing production, which is not on this slide. But we did have some good news this year in terms of our housing production. As a result of the code reforms we did a couple of years back. Also not on this slide, but I want to just highlight that in this last year's survey, portlanders shared that they're satisfied or very satisfied with waste and recycling services. As reported in the survey. Next slide. So I'm going to shift gears now to the some of the decision packages. First, the general fund cuts. Our budget includes reduction in our general fund expenditures by a little bit more than 10%. As I mentioned already, most of that was backfilled with one time grant or intergovernmental money. But again, that is a short term solution that will eventually force those programs to shrink over time. I'm not going to go through the details here. We can cover that in questions later. This does also include the transfer of the city chief sustainability officer to the city administrator's office is one of the last items there. Next slide. A couple additions in our budget that I want to note. One is the mayor's proposed budget does include additional resources for graffiti abatement contractors that go to help small businesses cope with those impacts. And again, we manage that program with general fund resources in tandem with our public trash can program. Second, I want to just mention that there's an adjustment being made to the open signal contract to accommodate the new city council format, and bts holds that contract. Due to our role in staffing the mount hood cable regulatory commission, which is one of the primary revenue sources for open signal, and they're their equivalent agency in east county, metro east, the mount hood cable commission plays that role in coordinating that kind of service throughout the county. And then finally, we're adding positions, a couple positions in our waste team to implement state funded waste contamination reduction, which translates to helping people do a better job of not putting garbage in the Green or blue bins. And that state resources. Next slide. Finally, a list of a few PCEF related adjustments. We're making a change to the allocations going to fleet and biz for this year's budget. That's part of the current climate investment plan. We're funding the cso's office to some small degree. There's the pcf increased allocation to the general fund noted there. We are adding staff to the pcf administrative program to manage grants and contracts to scale that work up, and then also those staff track accountability for the money that's going to the other bureaus and our grant program. And then finally, we increased the pcf budget overall to reflect the added programs approved through the collaborating for climate action authority last fall. And I think that concludes presentation. I'm happy to answer questions later when we get to that part of the agenda. And I believe I'm heading it off to david. Thanks, Eric. Good afternoon. Councilors david kuhnhausen, for the record, interim director of Portland permitting and development. I'll be discussing Portland permitting and developments budget next slide please. So this slide provides a very high level overview of budgeted resources or, I'm sorry, revenues and expenditures. On the left we show revenues. Pbd is primarily funded by fees and charges for services, with only 2% of the revenue coming from ongoing general fund. So I want to highlight that while this graph on the left shows what looks like an almost $20 million increase in revenue from fiscal year 2324 to 2425, this is a little bit misleading, as permitting across the city was restructured in 2425, resulting in more programs being housed within the newly formed ppa. And you can see the gray bar there. The middle bars on the graph is wider in fiscal year 2425, as it represents interagency revenue, which is being relied upon to support the public infrastructure, permitting programs that move to ppa. Since those fees are below cost recovery. Overall, the revenue growth is projected to be flat for the coming fiscal year 2526. This slight increase that you see there, it's really hard to see even on the graph, but there is a slight increase from approximately 77.5 million to 80 million next, next fiscal year. That's mostly attributable to the proposed 5% fee increases. Now moving to the right on the expenditures, ppa expenditures are mostly personnel related, with internal city materials and services such as rent and insurance and technology making up the next largest category. Similar to the revenues for fiscal year 24, 25 is the first year showing expenditures for all of pnd as well. That is, with the public infrastructure programs also accounted for, and also similar to how we accounted for potential fee increases in the projected revenues were also accounting for potential staff reductions when looking at projected expenditures for the coming fiscal year. You can see the dark blue here. I think it's dark blue or black, dark blue representing personnel. It shows a reduction which is driven by the proposed reduction of 53 fte filled positions and 12 vacancies, which we'll discuss later in the presentation. Next slide please. This graphic shows a history of the development review, revenue and reserves for pnd and bts for the prior years over the last quarter century. This data represents the core development programs to the bureau. So as you all know, the construction industry is volatile and the bureau's fee revenue is tied directly to fluctuations in the economy. And in 2008, downturn, after drawing the reserves down to almost $0, pnd had no choice but to lay off about 50% of the workforce at that time. Those impacts of the layoffs left the bureau with insufficient staff to support the demands of the development industry. As the economy recovered, and because of this permitting, timelines suffered for years and the bureau had no additional capacity to focus on developing or implementing any improvements to the permitting process until recently. After those layoffs, and put in place policies and measures to help the bureau recognize and respond to fluctuations in the construction industry and financial business continuity plan was developed, and that continuity plan has been used to implement layoffs on three separate occasions over the last six years, most recently in January of 2024. However, however, this current downturn has been different than what the bureau previously experienced. This began at the onset of COVID, but macroeconomic factors outside of the city's control, as well as civil unrest and other social issues that impacted the desirability of Portland as a place to build have all contributed to a prolonged lull in permitting activity lasting much longer than expected, and currently high interest rates associated with financing for construction projects makes the cost of delivering new large buildings, in many cases, cost prohibitive. And we're not seeing developers currently willing to take that risk. So as development activity has bottomed out, pnd revenue has also declined, while the cost of providing services has continued to increase. These dynamics, coupled with the desire to continue improving permitting timelines, led to large declines in bureau reserves and eventually the need to take action on those reserves. Pnd underwent layoffs in January 2024 of approximately 19% of the workforce at that time, and despite the layoffs, the bureau continues to draw on those reserves steadily as we're now facing further staff reductions. Now, before I go on, I do want to note that the data used on this slide for fiscal year 2526 projection is from the original version of the financial plan that was submitted several months ago. I point that out because that financial plan did not account for 53 fte, so that the plus the natural attrition would get us to 100% cost recovery and no decline in reserves next year. But obviously that comes with significant service impacts. Next slide please. The funding pad receives mostly via permit fees, pays for staff and the work that they complete. This slide highlights work. That work that is conducted in some of the core services of the bureau. Staffing in-person and virtual appointments with customers. Mentions 11,500 development services center appointments booked. I believe many of you have heard me say that we average 12,000 virtual appointments conducted over the last three years. This is in line with what we expect in the coming years. Reviewing land use applications and final plat applications continues to be a high workload. That team also is responsible for reviewing all residential commercial permits, zoning permits, and many of the mechanical permits. Intake, review and issuance of thousands of permits. But these numbers here don't take into account permits issued by the transportation team that was recently moved to pad tree planting and removal permits conducted by the urban forestry component of pad right of way sanitary repairs and new connection permits, and accessory short term rental permits, as well as many other permit types inspecting buildings to ensure they are safely constructed and, according to state and local codes, is work that continues to be significant for the bureau. You can see here we're anticipating over 130,000 inspections conducted in the coming fiscal year. That equates to over 500 inspections every single day, and bringing up buildings to code that may be in disrepair or had work done without a permit, is also a key component of the bureau. Also in this group is addressing concerns from the public about public nuisances or derelict buildings throughout the city. Complaints in that team have increased approximately 55% over the last five years. These are just some of the statistics, and certainly not inclusive of all the work that this bureau does, but it does give you an idea of the volume of work that comes in the door. In addition to these technical reviews and inspections, staff across the bureau are fielding calls and emails from applicants associated with these permits, as well as other stakeholders who have a vested interest in that work. And while many of the staff get calls directly to their desk and cell phone, the bureau receives approximately 38,000 phone calls last year, and we're anticipating to receive the same this year. And since the pandemic began, the bureau has made significant progress in timely or setup of permits, timely review of permits, processing of corrections. And as we've updated, we've also updated technology to respond to industry needs, albeit with more work still to be done on that front. And obviously staff reductions, which we'll be discussing next, will have significant impacts on review and inspection timelines. Next slide. On this slide, we want to highlight that the mayor's proposed budget includes two cut packages to the forecasted $14 million budget gap, one eliminates 12 fte vacant positions and the other reduces the bureau's fte by 53 filled positions. This bureau is relying on natural attrition and retirements in the coming year as well. These levels of cuts on the heels of last year's fiscal of last fiscal year's 74 fte reduction, will leave the bureau woefully understaffed to meet the current and future needs of the development industry. Services will be cut dramatically across the bureau, affecting permitting and inspection timelines and adding cost to developers as longer permitting equates to additional carrying costs on those loans. Some programs will also be discontinued altogether. The city will be a barrier for development just when the industry needs staff in place to move those projects forward and aid in the overall economic recovery of the city. So maintaining our workforce is essential in creating an environment favorable to development and attracting investment to Portland, or back to Portland. I also want to highlight one critical addition that is included in the mayor's proposed budget and dca. Olivera touched on this. In the current fiscal year, the permit improvement team is budgeted under the office of community and economic development service area. That team consists of four fte supported by one time funds, but the proposed budget continues. That work of two of those staff under pnd for an additional year, supported by $425,000 in one time. General fund. The third position code and policy development manager director hissrich just provided some good news, will be funded through a federal pro housing grant and that work will continue under fwp. And lastly, the last position, the strategy manager is slated to expire on June 30th, 2025. That's not proposed to be extended into the fiscal year next fiscal year. Next slide please. In this slide, we discussed some of the immediate and longer term considerations. In the immediate term. The proposed budget lays off 53 fte. We have discussed on the previous slide the impacts of these cuts, which would be substantial funding to the bureau to get the bureau through. The current downturn in development activity is crucial in maintaining our workforce and the services we provide to the public. Every $1 million in additional funding equates to about 5 to 6 fte. Development activity is notoriously difficult to predict, and while our projections are for no growth in activity, should the industry rebound in some way, that would provide some additional, much needed funding. However, if that were to occur after we've already laid off 53 employees, we won't have the staff needed to review and inspect those projects in a timely manner. Any other funding source, such as increases in fees beyond the proposed 5%, would also contribute towards closing that funding gap. And long term, we need to address the funding model the city of Portland uses for development. Review revenue from fees that are tied to the unpredictable and volatile construction industry no longer work, and we must have countercyclical funding to provide stability and prevent the need for widespread layoffs. Every time there is a dip, whether big or small, in construction activity in the city, without a stable funding source, we're going to find ourselves in the current situation every couple of years, as we've done so three times in the last six years, and we're constantly trailing industry trends and scrambling to adjust and catch up. This model no longer works, and while a change is identified as a medium or long term consideration, it is a crucial need and necessary for the long term success of this bureau. And that concludes my presentation.
6 Thank you, directors. So at this time we're going to do a little line switch and have directors montez pellegrino and executive director bertini join me.
7 Thank you donnie, for the record, my name is shay flaherty. I use pronouns like he him, and I'm currently serving as the interim executive director at prosper Portland. I want to thank you all for your time. I know you just convened as our budget committee last week to hear about our budget in more detail, as well as from some community voices, and I think we look forward to joining you all in just a few hours to ensure that there's also a good discussion around our budget and the programs that you heard from. So the material that you'll see now may look a little bit familiar from what we saw last week. But as we're here to represent our integration within the service area, I'm going to focus on our general fund outcomes, our cut packages and how we landed on those cut proposals. Next slide please. So on screen you see our total revenues and expenditures as they relate to our city and our service area. Again, you should see a clear gap between revenues and expenditures. You'll recall from last week that the reason there's a gap between those is because we're often carrying project and capital investments over multiple years. Many of these funds are often pre-committed. We're awaiting a certain phase of development or construction before that expenditure is made. You'll also note the affordable housing tiff set aside in the patterned teal bar in the graph on the left. Actually, that's on the right. Sorry. Lastly, you'll note our fte count, which has a slight increase next year to 104.5 positions. That's primarily to account for the new needed capacity to support the new tif districts. As we stop those leadership committees and support those committees to develop the new five year tif action plans. Next slide please. This should also be familiar from last week. You'll note on the left that pcf continues to be a growing part of our programmatic budgets, funding both small business supports and middle income housing efforts. The graph on the right shows each of our key programs and investments that are available citywide, meaning they're not funded via tif, as well as the proportion of general fund cannabis, recreational tax dollars, strategic investment fund revolving loans, pcf federal community development block grants, and e zone funds that all go in in a blend. To make these programs possible. The red bands on that graph on the right show the level of general fund cannabis and cdbg allocated in the fiscal year 2324 budget. To give you a sense of how the 12% cut in general fund and the loss of some one time resources are impacting each of those business lines. Again, you'll note that particularly the office of events and films shows a large decrease due to expiring one time funds. You know, as a reminder, that team's core function really is to support event and film producers to navigate the city and have successful productions. But one time funds from ARPA and general fund allowed them to deliver on projects like the winter ice rink, as well as community event grants and some larger event grants. If we go just a note on those larger event grants, those are really for and we have a partnership currently with travel Portland as well. The focus of those is around events that draw, you know, more in the tens and hundreds of thousands of folks back to the city. We know we want to see folks, folks, individuals and families back in our city. And so those tend to be some of our our larger investments through that office. If we go to the next slide before you now are our annual outcomes. I want to thank you all for your support of this important work. You've heard from many of our partners, program participants and clients during last week's prosper Portland budget hearing. I think you heard from workforce participants, bipoc entrepreneurs getting technical assistance, cannabis business owners, some of our development partners, specifically in south waterfront, event organizers and traded sector industry employers. The numbers on screen reflect what we hope to accomplish in the year ahead, including the number of people served through the workforce and business programs in the districts, our lending targets and our cobid targets, which I note we have historically exceeded. But what's not pictured here? I just want to call out our investment in businesses and organizations from communities that were disproportionately impacted by the prohibition of cannabis. Those investments are being made via the reimagined Oregon program, which deployed 7 million of recreational recreational cannabis tax dollars last year, which was working from a previous city backlog. An accumulation of those is projected now to normalize and stabilize, and to deploy $1 million over $1 million in an ongoing basis annually. If we go to the next slide, I think it's safe to say we'd prefer not to cut any of these programs and that cutting economic development during an economic downturn is never an exciting or a painless prospect. I want to extend my immense gratitude to the members of prosper's community budget committee. You saw their names in our presentation last week, and you heard from some of them in our testimony. They understood that because we have such limited general fund, a $1.7 million cut meant that we were likely eliminating an entire business line, each with an economic ripple effect. The budget committee helped us develop scenarios and select the packages that you see on screen now, including eliminating administrative capacity to venture. Portland while striving to maintain the district supports that went out to those community districts. I want to appreciate deputy director lisa and her lending team, whose work enabled us to absorb 650 k of that 1.7 million to minimize the impacts to programs and community. The remaining cuts were spread out across the remaining general fund supported programs. You saw those in a few slides ago. So mainly thinking about our business supports, our event supports and workforce development. That's really the only places left to cut general fund. I'd like to draw your attention now to the $2 million swap that is proposed from ongoing to one time general fund resources, as you saw in that bar chart just a couple slides ago, the bulk of our general fund is going to those workforce and business programs. And while these programs are kept whole in fiscal year 2526, I just want to be clear that a $2 million cut will likely result in another elimination of one of those business lines. I know that's sobering, but with that, I will pass it to lisa at the children's levy.
8 Good afternoon, counselors, lisa pellegrino, director of the children's levy. And I use she and her pronouns. I can go to the next slide. As you can see from the graphs, tax revenues from the levy are our main source of resources, and they've been declining over the past three years. The pcl budget does not include any general fund. Tax revenues were 24.9 million in fy 24, budgeted at 23.7 million in the current year, and projected in budget at 22.6 for fy 26. Pcl is gradually, as you can also see from the graphs, pcl is gradually spending down fund balance, which primarily accumulated during the pandemic when spending was substantially under budget compared to non-pandemic years. And then the small, very small bar. There is a funds transfer from transfer from parks for compression effects. The parks levy was 454,000 last year, budgeted at 440 for next year. On the expenditure side, you can see the grants are the vast majority of pcl budgets. Currently, total grants are budgeted at 24.9 million for next year. If the recommended grant allocations are approved, we project the total large grant budgets to decline by 4.9 million, or 21%, below those current levels. Personnel budget is at 1.5 million this year and next, and our total fte is 7.6 if you go to the next slide. These are the anticipated outcomes that we expect from our main lines of investment and program areas, which you heard about yesterday. So those include early childhood child abuse prevention and intervention, foster care after school and mentoring services, hunger relief and then last child care subsidies for working families. These estimates are based on an expected decline in current service levels, due to lower funding levels and reallocation of resources among program areas. In the current funding round, all current pcl grants terminate on June 30th, and new grants are awaiting council approval. After new grants are approved and contracts negotiated, we can quantify our impacts more directly and more precisely. Next slide. So there are no decision packages or ads and reductions because we don't have general fund. The primary impact of declining resources is going to be in the number of children and families that can be served, and the level of service that's provided by the programs that are funded. I'll hand it over to charity.
9 Oh, that's okay, I'm pinch hitting here. Okay. Thank you. Director. So carlisle, who's the manager of spectator venues, is out today. So I'm pinch hitting to talk about that. So the new structure counselors, the office of arts and culture and spectator venue sits within the dca's office. This is a probably a temporary situation as we contemplate what the future structure is going to be for these programs. Before I dive into that, one thing I talking point that I didn't share early on was as a part of the original directive from the mayor, the bureaus were all asked to cut 8% of their general fund allocations. And I want to thank housing and prosper because at that time, beyond just their 8%, I asked those three bureaus to pick up the slack of pads, cut to hold them harmless. Given the projected and realized shortfall of revenue, it felt like an extra burden to ask them to cut approximately 840,000 of general fund so that 8% that prosper housing and bts cut also included an additional reduction that picked up the slack from permitting development. So we held them harmless on that. And of course, as you heard from shay, since then, prosper has been asked to cut an additional 2,000,002.4 million. I just want to get that on the record because thank you to the leadership in the collaboration. We were able to probably save an additional fte at pmd. Okay. Next slide please. All right. So at a at a pretty high level, this is the dca office revenues and expenditures. I think the thing to just to capture most is that this is largely carrying the fund balance from spectator venues and the arts funding combined for this coming proposed budget, whereas this year is just the spectator venues. It's a pretty staff light structure, as you can see, largely making up the staff and spectator and arts and culture. The dcs office is just myself and an executive assistant. Next slide please. For spectator venue specifically, the program is responsible for providing oversight, planning and meeting contractual obligations for the city's largest spectator venues, including providence parks, veterans memorial coliseum and the moda center. These large venues host many hundreds of events every year, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity and attracting millions of patrons to portland's central city. While the venues are city owned, they are all operated by private partners according to the terms of long term development and operating agreements. Note that oversight of the city's performing arts theaters, portland's p5 center for the arts, and venues, was performed by the spectator venues program until spring 2024, when it moved to the newly created office of arts and culture. So the total resources in fy 24 and 25 and then 2526 are inflated due to the fact that the program is in the midst of implementing major renovations to the vmc. This project is funded by 54 million in city issued bonds issued in the spring of 24, 100% of the annual debt service on the veterans memorial coliseum. Bond is paid with dedicated resources from Multnomah county visitor facilities trust account. The proceeds from that bond sale are included in the fund balance figures in the slide. That project will be completed by the end of 2026 and future budgets, barring any additional large projects with external funding, will be considerably more modest. The spectator venues fund receives resources from user fees on tickets sold at the venues. Certain rental revenues and allocation from dedicated regional tourism funds. There are no general fund resources in the spectator venues. Budget. Next slide please. So just some general anticipated outcomes. The vmc renovations is a big deal. We'll continue to operate and develop, hold our obligations to our partners. We continue to manage our fund balance for fiscal stability. There's a lot of uncertainty. Something about the blazers in the news recently I don't know. And then we'll continue to partner with cobid registered businesses as we do every year. I just want to note that as far as the materials and services for non capital financing, these are generally pretty low and we typically reserve them for emergency repairs or costs, whether it be providence park or venues that might need some support like a new hvac unit for example. So we try to retain some ems from the visitor the venues fund for those emergency needs. And we have no decision packages in the spectator venues program. And with that, I will now hand it over to doctor montez. Thank you.
10 Good afternoon, madam president. City council, for the record, my name is charity montez. I am the director of the office of arts and culture, and I, she and the pronouns. Last year, city council expanded on the previous city arts program to launch the office of arts and culture, and in doing so, created a center of gravity and a home for the arts at the city. Our vision is arts at the center of public life in Portland, and our portfolio includes arts, education, cultural planning, grant making, performing arts venues, as Olivia just mentioned, and public art. We do this work and more with six fte, and we leverage a staff sharing model in collaboration with grants management and Portland parks and recreation. On this slide, as as previous slides, you see our total revenues and expenditures at a high level. Arts and culture is multi funded with sources including general fund, the city's portion of the arts education and access fund, or arts access fund for short, which is generated by the arts tax and the percent for art fund. In fiscal year 2425. We also received a one time, $1 million allocation from pcf for supporting the arlene schnitzer concert hall roof and cooling tower. As with other funds mentioned today, the arts access fund and the percent for art fund carry over a balance to cover obligations across fiscal years. Those funds are restricted per code and on the revenue side of things, on the left. In fiscal year 2425, we received $4.4 million in general fund, and the proposed budget considers $3.6 million in general fund allocation on the bar in the middle bar for fiscal year 2425. The revised budget also shows $3.5 million in arts access funds that the revenue bureau projected to disburse to the office of arts and culture for grants, but it does not show the actuals of the $2.1 million that we received. So that means that our fiscal year 2526 beginning fund balance, which is the little asterisk at the bottom, we're showing 3.6 million. That should actually be $1.4 million less, for a total of 2.2 million. This will either be corrected in the adopted budget or in the fall bump. And in the fiscal year 2526, proposed budget revenue is planning to disburse $1.8 million from the arts access fund to our office. Those funds are for arts education coordination and grant making to arts organizations, and the decreased disbursements from the arts access fund due to lower tax collections and higher increased costs for the arts tax will have a direct impact on the amount of funds available for grants to arts organizations. It's also worth noting that the person for art fund was not initially budgeted with arts and culture. The person for art program requires that capital projects built by city bureaus dedicate a percentage of costs to public art, and that funding historically went to a third party service provider directly from the capital bureaus. But that has been in transition this year, and $1 million of the beginning fund balance for fiscal year 2526 is 4% for art. On the right side, expenses are relatively straightforward. The personnel costs are those six fte that I mentioned earlier, and the bulk of our expenses are external materials and services. Which includes funding for grants to individual artists and arts organizations, as well as managing the city's public art collection. Next slide please. Anticipated outcomes for arts and culture include 80 nonprofit arts organizations receiving $2.5 million in unrestricted general operating support grants, as well as 300 artists and organizations receiving more than $1 million in project grant funding and 28,000 public elementary school students receiving a high quality arts education. This school year, there were 114 certified arts teachers that were funded in part by the arts access fund, and we have 1700 pieces in the city's public art collection that we manage and maintain. We do have a decision package in the mayor's proposed budget, a 357,000 general fund reduction to achieve the 8% cut target. And I do need to note that due to a technical error, that 8% cut was taken twice in the mayor's proposed budget and a technical fix is needed to adjust it. That's just a hazard of being in one service area and transitioning to another service area in the middle of the budget process. The impacts of the cut include reduced contracted services for public art collection management, reduced funding for public art murals, and reduced maintenance dollars for certain public art. Our thinking behind this cut package is that we were already seeing lower arts access fund disbursements, which, as I mentioned, directly impacts our ability to fund arts organizations. So we didn't want to reduce any general fund dollars for grant making. And while we do have an unfunded maintenance backlog in the public art collection, there are a number of large capital projects in the works that will include significant percent for art budgets in the coming year. We're also in the process of hiring a new public art administrator, which is a first for the city. So to mitigate impacts of this cut, we will focus on process improvements in the percent for art program overall. With that, I'll hand it back to the dca.
11 All right. Thank you. Next slide please. So we sort of covered this already but just at a pretty high level. The office itself is going from 7 to 2 because the permit improvement team is moving into the bureaus assuming that decision packages are approved. And then next slide we'll talk about the other impacts. So the three decision packages that are based in the dc office are as follows. There is a redirection of 400 k and ongoing general fund from prosper Portland. And this is largely as a placeholder to support the new structure that is a part of the service area in line with the mayor's new organizational structure. So because prosper staff aren't necessarily able to be moved into the service areas, whereas other bureaus might be moving staff around as part of this reorg, that's a placeholder for that as a part of the permit improvement work. This is we have a decision package for approximately 970,000 that continues the work related to the website redesign, which is much needed to improve our customer service approach and permitting. And then the last move, which is related to the staff size change, is the enhanced service district coordinator will be moving from our service area into Portland solutions within the city administrator's office. And this is really a strategic move that aligns the work that pmo and esd do. We think there's value add in having those groups coordinate more strategically so that staff position will move as a part of the decision package and the proposed and I believe that wraps our presentation I think next slide. Yeah okay. So council president that concludes our presentation. We're open for questions.
12 Perfect. Thank you. Councilors I'm probably going to have us run a little bit over on this section to make sure everybody can get their questions in. But if you can try to keep it to 5 or 6 minutes apiece, that will help us stay on track. I know that folks may have amendments they're proposing that might take you a little bit over that. Councilor Green, would you like to start?
13 Thank you, madam president, and I'll try to be brief and cover all the different. Areas for the Portland housing bureau. Director. Hissrich, I see that the mayor restored the city administrator's proposed cuts to the eviction services department.
14 Yes, there was a proposed $400,000 cut that has been restored by the mayor.
15 I just want to publicly applaud that.
16 I think that's a really good expression of priorities. My question is, is that enough?
17 We no, I mean, the demand is greater than what we have budgeted budgets for. You know, the fact that there is a restoration of the funds, it's very important. And the amount of funding that we do, we do work also with the county for eviction, legal defense. We're not sure at this time what our budget, whether we will get the budgets from the funding from the county. So there's always a greater demand than what we have funding available for.
18 Thank you. I might I might introduce a budget note to sort of study what the appropriate level is going forward, because we're going to have waves of evictions on our doorsteps. Thank you. That's that's it for housing bureau. Also glad to see that we've got the grant. That makes me so happy. That saves me from another amendment bureau planning sustainability. I think my questions are mostly related to PCEF funds. Thank you, director engstrom. So I calculated from your slide a total of $340 million across all of the. Purview that PCEF funds through the three different categories that you showed just briefly, is was all that approved by the cip last December and or the 18 million that's coming in, or are there expenditures outside of that that would require council to take contemplation on new uses of PCEF funds? Does that make sense?
19 The overall the funding that is within the overall PCEF bucket has two flavors. There's administrative funding, which is things that qualify for that are, for example, the bts team that administers the bcf, cip development and decision making in the grant, coming and going and administrative administration of contracts and grants. Then there's the outgoing money, which is for the climate investment plan implementation, which is either contracts or grants or disbursements to other bureaus. So those are the two overall flavors. The things that are in the cip, in the budget are, are approved through the cip. If that's what your question was.
20 I think my question is, is there anything in the overall mayor's proposed budget that are new draws on pcf that were not already contemplated last December by council, or this one specific $18 million transfer?
21 It's the councilor.
22 The one step is still sorry, Eric, is the interest transfer council will still have to take action on that. It's technically in the mayor's proposed, but the next step would still be that there would have to be a code change that allows that usage. But to answer your question, yes, everything in the proposed is either in the cip or is within that admin 13% cap. That is for the administration of the fund.
23 There's some fine tuning with the fleet and bts allocations, but those are existing pcf programs in the cip. That's not new proposals.
24 That's great that that that addresses my concern. Thank you. And then the finance committee heard this week a franchise agreement with comcast that's not been finalized by council yet, but that would result in a reduction of the allocation from 3% to 2%. Does the budget in here reflect an assumption of us adopting that decline in revenue, or is or are we facing a hole there?
25 No. And to clarify, the mount hood cable commission is a quasi independent agency. And so you'll hear their budget outside of the budget in another coming council agenda item, the way that it connects to the budget is that we receive an administrative payment from mount hood cable commission for our administrative staff services. And that's not changing because of that peg fee change that is in our budget. But it's not threatened by that change.
26 Perfect. Thank you. And then the 23 new staff in bts. Is that staff related?
27 Yes. And I'll clarify, the number is somewhat of an artifact of budget math. We're only actually adding 14 positions I believe in in two of those are waste positions. The others are pcf. Some of the extra counting has to do with moving some positions from other revenue sources into pcf, and as well as some things that got added mid-year since we last since last year's budget. But there's the decision package for pcf only it's ten new positions and for converting existing limited term positions to ongoing.
28 Got it. On the topic of zoning and code, is that is that as as relates to housing, is that in your shop or is that now in director district shop?
29 No. Zoning code is part of the long range planning group. And yeah, as I mentioned that that group did take a general fund cut because their general fund supported.
30 Is that going to impact the code packages that are we expecting to come before council? And basically this broad sort of urbanist kind of like we want to accelerate housing production stance right now, are we.
31 Not this year because we were able to backfill most of that with, with one time grant funding. But I, I do want to caution that we are going to face a cliff at some point within that program in the next year or two, because we are on borrowed time there and then. I also noted that we are in our budget right now, is some resources from a federal grant that may or may not actually come through. And so there's a piece there that we may need to address.
32 Councilor. And I just want to offer on the planning side, and also put on my old director hat. Historically, planning has taken the broadest hits of general fund reductions at bts. And so Eric alluded to it. But this is the lowest staffing levels that planning has ever seen at the city of Portland. And they're doing a great job with the staff we have. But if council if this body continues to think about new concepts and codes, we will have to evaluate resourcing some of those new ideas.
33 Thank you for clarifying that. That's going to be a priority. I think, as we move through may 21st. I just have one last question. I'm trying to be as quick as possible. Do the for pnd. Do the revenue projections for permitting. I know it's a function of expected build and permits. Does that reflect any assumptions about the recently announced mayor and governor? 5000 homes challenge?
34 No. Great question councilor. It does not, because that hasn't come to fruition yet, and because this was put together several months ago, it did not account for that proposal.
35 And is there like a lag? So let me just express my concern because it's easier to do that than ask a question. I am concerned that if we adopt a budget that results in that deep of a staffing cut, and then go to try to hire those folks back, when we are scaling and ramping up production, and for this program that we will have sort of shot ourselves in the foot. So can you speak to that?
Procedural episode · turns 36–51
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36 Great point? I share that same concern we have had staff basically say that if we burned a bridge at this point, as noted, we've gone through layoffs numerous times and staff, well, some of them have been able to be retained by the bureau, have gone through this process of, you know, the potential of a layoff time and time again. And I anticipate many, once they are positioned elsewhere, will choose not to come back even if called upon naturally.
37 And I see your rule of thumb $1 million is about 5 to 6 fte. So I'll keep that in mind as we consider amendments that might come before us. That's that's it for me. Thank you very much.
38 Thanks, counselor. Counselor Zimmerman.
39 Thanks.
40 Can I just ask a point of order question before we move on?
41 Yeah, go right ahead, counselor.
42 Okay. Thank you. Council president. There's been some confusion behind the scenes as far as how we actually get amendments forward. And now I'm hearing some things that are saying that we needed to. That we needed to actually verbalize our amendments on the dais during these work sessions in order to have them included for discussion on the 21st. But all of the guidance that I've received has said that we can submit written amendments to ruth levine by the end of day this Friday, and that that would be included. I've been waiting on some information from bureaus on some of my amendments, and I like to make sure that things are more finalized before I say things on the dais, because I don't like making promises to community members I can't keep. So could we get some clarity on what amendments are going to actually be allowed to be heard? Or if I just don't know where this requirement came from.
43 Let me let me see what I can do here to add some clarity. So I would call it a best practice to throw something out during a work session so that your colleagues all know what's coming that allows staff to capture it, follow up with you if they don't hear from you and all of your colleagues to know what's circulating. We have a public list of things that have been stated in work sessions so that everybody can be on the same page. Knowing, though, that many people want to have cbo that their amendments, but are waiting for data from bureaus before then. Cbo has given a deadline on Friday to get them information to be vetted for amendments. So we've got the best practice of putting it out during a work session. But the hard deadline of it needing to get to cbo by Friday. The other piece here is how things ultimately get presented next week. So on Monday, I've asked the finance committee to consider whether there are some amendments that have been proposed that have broad support. They've been proposed by multiple people. They got a lot of nods when somebody was talking about them. I should say. The Friday deadline for cbo is at 5 p.m, and if you have not put something on the table in one of these work sessions, your colleagues on finance may not know that you're putting it out there to discuss in our conversation on Monday. So if you have something that you've sent to cbo by Friday but have not sent, have not put on the record in one of our work sessions, and you'd like your colleagues on finance to consider it on Monday, it's probably worth letting us know that everything that the cbo office gets by Friday, or that has been put out in one of our work sessions that you then share with cbo afterwards. So either cbo first or after will be filed in a package. I guess not a package, but will be filed as an amendment with your name on it. Cbo is going to be filing all of those with the clerk for us, so that it's all in one document on Tuesday, so that it can be posted in time for us to consider on Wednesday. Does that help a little bit, counselor, or does that just add to the lack of clarity?
44 I think it's I just feel like that's kind of the best practice thing. Seems unspoken. I mean, I guess moving forward towards the end of this session, maybe I'm just going to take up extra time and read a bunch of things I should have read earlier, then I don't think that was known to a few of us.
45 Okay, that's been in the memos that we sent out. I know that there's been a lot of incoming, and I have a number of things that I have not read in because they're not ready yet. I'm still waiting for data coming back that I'll likely be reading in tomorrow, even though they're unrelated to the topics before us tomorrow. So you are not alone in having a list that you're still waiting on. And just as much as you can read in in advance, the better.
46 I have a point of order as well.
47 Related. Point of order. Yes. Okay.
48 Is anybody going to read those between 5 and 11:59 p.m. On Friday? Why is that deadline? 5 p.m.
49 The deadline is 5 p.m. Because that is what our staff have asked for, so that they have Friday evening and the weekend to do their reviews. I don't know when Friday evening in the weekend they're doing it, but I don't want to cut them short anytime. It's pretty quick turnaround for them. Thanks, counselor Zimmerman. Go right ahead.
50 Thank you. I'm on page 179 of the proposed budget, which Eric, and I'm going to preface this just because every time I seem to talk about this topic, there's a whole group of folks who are so incensed about the idea that anybody would talk about a large fund in the city, that we never hear the second half, but. There have been some discussions about about how can PCEF continue to fund and relate to other climate related topics, but that's not usually picked up in this conversation. But I'm just a little bit curious. On page 179, I look at the actuals for fy 2324 and it says the ending fund balance within your bureau was $675 million. And then the very next year, the year we're in now, an ending the ending fund fund balance will be $5 million. And then there was a pretty different change in how we are accounting for expenditures, where we see hundreds of millions of dollars pop over into expenditure totals. And if I'm on the next page, the peace Portland clean energy fund goes from a couple dozen million to hundreds of millions in terms of their fund size. You had a slide that presented, I think, $575 million in contingency. And I recognize that that is a five year accounting mechanism, because at some point, this council made a choice to fund the next five years of what looked like projects related to climate. And I can understand that part. What I, what I don't and I, you know, I think it's a reasonable argument about whether or not funds should be spent in the year in which they are collected, which is how almost all the rest of government goes. But what I'm really hung up on is previously I've been briefed that the PCEF is holding $100 million actual contingency fund, and you noted in your comments just a few minutes ago, Eric, due to the uncertain economic times. I am really trying to understand why this government would allow PCEF to have a contingency fund more than 33 times the size of our entire general fund contingency for nothing. That is a core service. We have been talking about reserves and we have been talking about contingencies given uncertain economic times, but we're nowhere near 100 million. And so if I am correct, PCEF collects about 200 million a year, and we have a contingency fund of 50%. What uncertain economic times are we planning for with a 50% contingency fund?
51 The outcome we're trying to avoid is a situation because the cip has committed a certain amount of money over five years to a variety of sources, including bureaus, as well as community grant expectations. And now third party contracts with with providers like the home energy improvements. Those are those are five year planning level commitments, obviously not not budgeted yet. You all have to budget them each year. But many of those programs are large activities that that take start time and need continuity for a couple of years. And so. That's the rationale. We there's been some volatility as you know, in the pcf forecasting. And we hope we're better at that now. But we're we're not 100% like we don't have. It's a new fund for the city. And so if we were off by 10%, just given the sheer volume of the PCEF fund, that could be a substantial amount of money. And we're trying to avoid kind of the situation that the county found themselves in with commitments more than the, than the, than the than what's available. And having to tell either the community grants program or one of our existing contractors or one of the bureaus that, sorry, you're going to you're going to lose, you know, 40 million that we already promised you but didn't budget you yet. That's the outcome we're trying to avoid. 100% agree that the city ought to manage the money that it has on hand to the best advantage of the city. So that's that's also a conversation that's being had, I believe.
52 Okay. So if I'm if I'm the street guy, right. If I'm a PBOT guy and I've got a little bit of PCEF money that's now taken care of, my thing that I do, and I also have a five year cip. In some sense, I guess I'm considering that that if in year three something goes awry or what this budget is signaling in year one, we want to be prepared in year one, not to tap the next five years, but to make sure we have an additional $100 million contingency to deal with that. I'll just say that seems like a very aggressive and the most aggressive contingency fund I've ever seen in my career, especially given five years of planning, because there's no one else who is allowed to put five years of their operating costs in a bank account. And I feel like since that we are we already have a built in contingency. And this seems pretty aggressive. And I and I say that without any attack on the programs have been funded, I think I've appreciated the breadth of which PCEF is being used now. I think that's been a great way to keep climate focused projects moving forward at the at the community based level and at the city level. But that's a very aggressive contingency fund.
53 I think what you're the question you're asking is largely a question that is for the city administrator and the and the city's overall policy on financial management, the PCEF program itself is responding to our the previous audits that we received, which asked us to be more thoughtful and more strategic about the overall approach. And so that's why we pivoted towards the climate investment plan as a tool for giving certainty over a five year period and tying that to desired outcomes. So from a program perspective, we're trying to be responsive to the audits that have been that have already occurred. But I.
54 Don't think the audit said have a 50% contingency. I don't think they said that.
55 Councilor I want to flag this, I the $100 million reserve policy is not codified. It's a concept that staff had put out as frankly, we still think I support it as a good mechanism to have. But this council or the, you know, the administration has like made that a final like this is what we have. And I would just offer that dca and I have had this conversation. The city needs to look at reserve policies across the board. I mean, pad has reserve policy that may not have been as useful as we needed, but I do think it's appropriate for the city to look at our reserve policy policy and think about what what the best practices are. Two things are true here. I hear what you're saying, that $100 million reserve policy, when you're sitting on a $500 million contingency doesn't make a lot of sense. But is it now the time for us to evaluate what the appropriate amount is in year five? When we get to year three and four, we're looking at that fifth year before you all contemplate the next cip, what are we? What should we have as a mechanism to catch in case things we can't guarantee become real like revenue, because we, the cip currently commits $1.6 billion over five years, of which we're only sitting on 500. So we put a lot of faith that that 200 million annually is going to keep happening. And in the event it doesn't, is it best practice to have $100 million set aside to deliver on the contracts and the grants that we've signed off on? That's a question that doesn't have to be answered right now. But I think that's what the reserve policy was trying to get at.
56 The other the other thing I'll just mention is that the let's just say for a moment that we do want to allocate more money to PCEF using some of that 100 million. The process that is outlined is through an amendment to the cip, and we're trying to aim for fine tuning of the cip annually. And we did some last fall, mostly to respond to evolving forecasts. And so we anticipate another amendment to the cip this fall, not on the scale probably of last fall, because we're more confident in the forecast. But procedurally, that's the system we're trying to set up is a fall cip amendment process fine tuning again, probably it could be reductions to if we find ourselves in a position where revenue isn't isn't on track, and then follow up with those decisions in the budget process. So that's where we're going. If that's where the council wants to go, it's their prerogative. And that would be the process.
57 I appreciate you said that because I think at the end of the day, there's only one budget committee in this organization and their name is the city council. Yes, correct. But boy, have you all built a group of people who think that there is no say by the city council on how PCEF dollars are utilized, because I have now been told by a variety of different employees, community members that the city council isn't the deciding authority, and I just really am going to and I know you don't agree with that. I can see it on your faces. I know that you understand it. I cannot think of another fund right now where I would be required to pass an ordinance, pass a pass an amendment to some other document in order to deal with a budget question, as we all, as we have set up as it relates to PCEF. And I say that being a person who would like to aggressively use some PCEF on some climate related topics, but we have emboldened this sector and this group of employees and this whatever group we call them, as being some sort of implant for the actual budget committee. And I think that has really gone way too far. I, I recognize, donnie, the numbers that you mentioned in terms of and I and I think that I have, I have come around on the 575 in terms of its five year forecast and how to make sure if we're going to be collecting $200 million in, in revenue each year, I think we will. I don't see that changing. And to be able to get those all those projects out, I do see that the $100 million contingency is significant, and I think that there are some areas within our climate resiliency in the city that we could we could put that money to work now and to where general fund dollars are being used in a way that is very much complementary to the mission of PCEF.
58 Where are you moving toward amendments? Because we are running short on time.
59 How many service areas or bureaus are recipients of PCEF dollars as we are now?
60 I think that was one of our slides. If we have.
61 Seven, eight, nine, at least 11.
62 About 50% of the city's operations get PCEF money. Yeah. Thank you. That's all my questions.
63 Councilor Smith.
64 Thank you, madam president. Quick question. And I want to go back to PCEF. There are some notations in the mayor's budget, like the 450,000 that he said he came from. Pcef. If all the money is locked up, how is the mayor able to pull monies out of PCEF? And we're not.
65 The I believe the additional decision packages that were related to cfr on the administrative side. So if it's if the PCEF is in two buckets and there's a limitation on the amount of money that can be used from PCEF for administrative purposes, and I believe that the money that's going to the chief sustainability officer is from that administrative bucket. It's not part of the externally facing climate investment plan budgets. So those are the two fundamental pieces.
66 How much is in that administrative fund.
67 It's limited to what is it.
68 About 13%.
69 13% of the whole.
70 It's a rolling number. We can get you that number specifically councilor.
71 So could you kind of you want me to do the math in public?
72 We can.
73 We can follow up.
74 Yeah. We can follow. Yes.
75 Am I talking about 13% of 575 13%.
76 That's what we're going to we're going to ask our finance team to get that number for you right now.
77 That's a huge number.
78 It is a large number. Correct.
79 So we can actually appropriate money from that particular fund.
80 To help us manage the fund. That's correct.
81 If it's for the purpose of managing the PCEF fund and administering the piece of programs.
82 So for example, councilor Resources from PCEF have now gone to they go to the revenue division, procurement cbo h.r. 311, because all those staff and those those staff in those bureaus are supporting the funds management and oversight of the resource.
83 So PCEF.
84 A PCEF. Yeah.
85 So all those folks, 311 they manage PCEF.
86 They help they they support the funds implementation. So for example.
87 How do they do that?
88 So I think dca morrissey mentioned it. So we are heat pump program that supports hvac units and trying to get is it 15,000 out in five years. Those calls now go through 311. So for a home owner wants a and I'll tell you.
89 That that's a stretch right. Because 311 is supposed to really be for people who are calling to get help with bureaus in the city of Portland, they're having problems. But to say that it's a self-supported item is.
90 Self generated. Calls were substantial and we exceeded bp's ability to handle them.
91 Yeah. Councilor when during the last heat crisis last summer, the call volume was substantial.
92 Well, that could be anything. Any. Do you realize how many calls? Three. One one gets?
93 Absolutely.
94 You could say that about any bureau in this in this city should get funded from a certain fund because they get a lot of questions about what's happening to my streets, when can I get a new sidewalk and all those things. So I think that's a that's a stretch. I really do. But I want to get off that. In fiscal year 23, 24 through 2425, prosper had a beginning fund balance in the range of about $350 million. 24 had a range of three, 54, 25 had a range of 361. But the proposed 2526. It is expected that they will have a 216,000,461, 660 beginning balance. And I got your financial summary, and I talked to your folks about it. And I still haven't gotten a line item in terms of the expenditures. So what did you all spend, $145,512,904 on that made that pot so low.
95 Thank you for the question, counselor. And I'm fortunate, fortunately, can share that our cfo is actually here with you today to answer questions in detail. If I could call tony up. Thanks.
96 Councilor councilor Smith. Yes, given that we have over an hour specifically with prosper after this, do you want to hold that question? So that we don't have too much churn here?
97 I don't.
98 There's just a flag that we do have time specifically with prosper after this for our prosper questions.
99 Okay. But while that's on my mind, madam president. Can I get a expenditure spreadsheet of what happened to the 145,000,512 904?
100 Yeah, absolutely. For the record.
101 Top of your head. What happened to it?
102 Sure. Absolutely. Tony barnes, cfo, prosper Portland, for the record, councilor the balance of that beginning fund balance is programed in the current fiscal year. So in the expenditures for each tif district in the revised fiscal year 2425 budget, there are action plan projects, loan programs, grant programs identified in the budget document in that budget column, specifically fund by fund detail in the appendix of the document that has very specific projects outlined.
103 And does it have it for that particular. Okay, if you could if you could just email that to me. Because when we were looking at it, we didn't we didn't see that. And that's what I needed to find out. And dca oliveira there are several operational efficiencies proposed within the mayor's budget. And my question to you is, would it be more efficient for Portland solutions to be under the Portland housing bureau, as opposed to the city administrator's office?
104 Thank you for the question. Councilor Portland solutions covers a wide range of services and outreach programs that while there may be some nexus, I think on the whole it's covering things beyond the housing bureau's responsibilities and typical jurisdiction.
105 And then one last question, madam president, on cannabis, we can we continue to see dwindling funds from cannabis tax revenues. And across these service areas, we can see these dollars do important work for a lot of different communities. Can you name opportunities for existing cannabis businesses who want to do business development, and who would like to use some of those resources that they actually put into our system to help them create a bigger, bolder, better business. And I've been told that those cannabis businesses were told by prosper that they can't get any of those dollars for business development. And I wanted to find out if that's the truth or not. If there are businesses, cannabis businesses that can receive money from prosper to help them do business development.
106 Thank you. Councilor. It's a great question. Two potential answers here that are relevant. One is there is a portion of the recreational cannabis tax dollars that come to us as part of the inclusive business resource network, and that funds work through our partners at new project, which provide business technical assistance to cannabis entrepreneurs to help them, you know, grow, scale, refine their products in terms of direct access to capital for cannabis businesses, I'd refer you to the reimagine program. While none of the there were some cannabis businesses that applied in the previous round of recreation of reimagine Oregon, none were actually successful and scoring above the threshold, but we are encouraging them to apply into the following round as well. I will note that. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
107 But reimagine was cut in this budget.
108 It wasn't cut. We're just now at the level of ongoing funding that it should have been. We had a we had a backlog to work through when it came over to prosper Portland, to the tune of 7 million, but ongoing. It's a little over $1 million a year. And so we are encouraging cannabis businesses to apply to that fund.
109 Okay. I just wanted to make sure, for the record, and we get about $7 million in cannabis funding.
110 I think that's correct across all the different bureaus.
111 Across all the bureaus. Thank you so much.
112 Councilor Morillo.
113 Thank you. I just have a few questions and then I'll read one of my amendments. This is directed to the Portland housing bureau. Do you know what happens to PCEF funds if a program funded in part by or. No, I'm sorry. This one is to Eric engstrom. My apologies. Do you know what happens to PCEF funds if a program funded in part by PCEF is cut during the budget negotiation process? And what is the process for reallocation?
114 The I mentioned before, our process is to consider annual updates to the cip. And so we're tracking spending across the different programs. I assume you're talking about bureau funding, but it would it may also apply to grants. If some grants that we awarded money to don't pan out and we end up not funding the full grant. So we'll evaluate that spending rate each fall. And that's where there's an opportunity to fine tune the allocations.
115 Thank you. And I have a question for the Portland housing bureau. Yesterday I asked about your capacity to support additional rental assistance programing. Would you be able to speak to rfbs capacity to support additional funding and programing in support for housing, for transitions to permanent housing or supportive housing services?
116 I can speak to? Transition to from shelter to permanent housing. Currently, it is an area of focus that we have. We don't have funded the transition from shelter to housing primarily goes through the joint office with coordinated entry. We have been engaged in conversations with prosper Portland and the joint not prosper, excuse me, Portland solutions and the joint office to actually dig deeper and develop a strategy for funding for, for actually speeding up the pipeline from shelter to housing. But we don't currently have any funding in in place to do that implementation. What would the other question was regarding?
117 Sorry. So you're saying that essentially you would be scaling up existing services if given more funding for this?
118 Yes. Well, actually, yes, we actually are trying to develop a strategy and what we're trying to do at the moment without funding is, is work, develop an acquisition strategy for apartment buildings that we could then convert into permanent supportive housing. Working with national fund that is doing this in large cities across the us. It's called community solutions. Community solutions has a fund that is primarily creates lower cost acquisition capital by through partnership with foundation investors. And so we've been engaging in a dialog with community solutions and proposing to develop an acquisition strategy that would help us specifically help expand the number of units available for folks exiting shelter. It's this is a longer range strategy. If we had additional funding, it would certainly speed us up in terms of advancing that plan.
119 Okay. That's a really wonderful to hear. Could you tell me the name of that program once more? I just want to write.
120 It down. Sure. It's called community solutions large cities fund. We can we are actually in the process of drafting a paper for the city administrator's office, and we can certainly circulate that quickly.
121 Okay. I would love to learn more about that. And thank you for answering my questions. I think that making sure that while we're looking at shelter programs, we're also actually investing into getting people into long term housing is really critical. So I appreciate you and all the work that you're doing on that very much. I also just wanted to state for the record, now that I'm preparing an amendment to provide funding to. To reestablish the enhanced level of rental assistance programing that they oversaw during COVID with federal funding. Also potentially interested in this community solutions as an investment as well, as was discussed in the work session the other day, fb had stated that they have the capacity to administer $1 million worth of additional rental assistance programing, and there is little indication that public appetite for these services has declined, even though the heightened level of federal funding has dried up. So this amendment will not fill that gap, but it will get us to a place where fb service provision gets closer to the public's need. And keeping in mind that housing is a critical piece to the effort of solving our housing and homelessness problems, this will likely be an addition of $1 million, consistent with what hb said in their testimony. They had capacity to take in. Thanks.
122 Thank you, councilor Councilor Avalos.
123 Oh, okay. Thank you. First I have a comment and then I have some questions. As it relates to PCEF, I think what's important to understand about how PCEF works, you can't point to other things like PCEF because that's actually the whole point of PCEF. This was created by community passed by voters to ensure that the people most impacted by climate change actually have a say in how those life saving resources that they fought hard for get allocated people who have often been left out of traditional environmental investments, particularly my district. And I think what's important about that, too, is that this concept of community members making decisions on how dollars get allocated is actually not new. That's exactly what the new tif districts are doing. And we all understand that. The city council, of course, has the final say. But the whole point of these kinds of structures is so that we have a legitimate way for people to have influence on dollars, right? There are so few things that average citizens can weigh in on and have a meaningful impact. Pcef tiff community tif districts are perfect examples of that, and for me, they are examples of the kind of city I want to lead where we are ensuring people have a voice in how their dollars get spent. A perfect example of this dynamic is how it works. At PSU, I oversaw the student fee committee. The university president always has the final say, but we create really good systems, bylaws, culture so that all students are making those decisions for how to spend their student fee dollars. When it comes to the university president. Sure, they could just scrap it and throw it in the trash and say no, but they don't because there's trust that gets built. There's process that we can all depend on so that we know that the students are making decisions that are informed by good information. They're being guided by people that are helping them make those decisions, and then they can defend them strongly to the university president. And it is really hard for the president then to say no, right. This is exactly what we're doing here with PCEF, with the community tif district. So to be clear, it's not new. It's actually really people forward. And that's the kind of city council I want to lead. On that note, I want to talk a little bit about first about the increases to open signal, because I think what I want to understand is do the increases for that which are great. And I want us to have more dollars to be able to do more things with city council. But it's my understanding that that's only half of the problem, that the other half is being able to staff up and council ups. So are those increases for open signal contracts and all of that which are for our meetings, are those being coupled with more capacity so that we can actually increase our meetings?
124 There are a few things in different places. There is the open signal contract. There are additional positions for some of our support groups that were captured in the mayor's proposed. I will also be bringing an amendment forward. I don't have the numbers on it, which is why I haven't proposed it yet. That ensures that the things that weren't captured in mayor's proposed. So we want to make sure we have clerk. We have council ops. We have there are a few other things that have been brought forward. I'll have an amendment making sure that we can consider the increases needed for all of those groups as well.
125 Okay. Thank you. I look forward to hearing more, because I think it's a good step to be able to increase the capacity. But again, it's my understanding that's only half of the step. I want to ask about the graffiti line item. So there's a plus up of 1.5 million for graffiti removal. Can you first tell me what the current amount is for graffiti removal? Is that number quickly on hand for you?
126 We've been operating largely on one time money since the pandemic for graffiti removal. I think the ongoing is a couple hundred thousand, right?
127 No, no, ongoing for current allocation is about 800,000, but that's largely for staff and a modest amount of like maybe 200,000.
128 For the contract.
129 For the contracts. But our burn rate is much closer to about, you know, between 1 million and 1.5 annually for the graffiti removal contracts. So this one time ask would be a little bit more than our current operating.
130 Are you saying it's doubling it then. So it's 1.5. So 1.5 is your kind of your current service level amount to.
131 Our current need? The ongoing budget is, as donnie said, 800,000, but half of that is staff. So our ongoing ongoing budget is a is probably less than a third of our current level of service. And we've been patching each year for the past 3 or 4 years. We've had one time allotments from the mayor for this program, and this is so this is not new, but it keeps us afloat for another 12 to 18 months at current service levels.
132 Okay.
133 So and maybe slightly above current service levels.
134 Okay. So that's what I'm trying to get at. So what is current service level. Is it 1.5.
135 It's probably 1.2 ish.
136 And this 1.5 that is being added is that plus 1.2 or is it essentially.
137 Plus 300.
138 Oh 800 okay.
139 And so yeah. And this to be clear this is contracting that bts manages that that funds contractors to help small businesses clean up the graffiti on private property. And some, some small amount of that also goes into helping with kind of strategic opportunity sites that are identified by Portland solutions. But it's primarily private property cleanup that we're talking about. Okay.
140 So what I'm I guess getting at I'm just trying to understand what is it that we're responding to with this money? Are we saying we need more money right now to do more graffiti abatement, or this is just simply to keep it at the same? I want to understand.
141 A little bit of a mix. If this wasn't added, our service levels will substantially fall this year. The amount added is enough to increase our current service level slightly, or to let that drawdown last a little bit longer.
142 And then I guess, is it not enough? Is 1.5 actually not enough technically to you?
143 Well, it's the not enough part is that it's one time we. What we really need at current service levels is a 1.2 million ish budget annually, ongoing until the problem is solved. And so this I think the theory of this is to push up the service levels this year in tandem with all the other things that are happening around livability, and with the hope that the ongoing need is lower in subsequent years.
144 Okay. That's helpful. I think that's all for now. Thank you.
145 Thank you, councilor, councilor Dunphy.
146 Thank you.
147 Director. I don't expect you to be an expert on homelessness, but you are one of our.
148 Experts on housing. I have been hearing from a lot of housing advocates who have concerns about our homelessness response, and are urging us to move towards a system of rapid rehousing. If our city were to pivot our strategy towards rapid rehousing vouchers and getting folks rental assistance, do you think that there are enough vacant housing units in Portland right now to meet the need on our streets? And further, do you think that bringing more urgency towards getting the vacant, affordable units filled would meaningfully impact the situation on our streets?
149 I'm sorry, what was the last part of that question? Do I think more vacant?
150 Well, getting the currently vacant affordable housing units, we've heard that there are a few hundred, perhaps permanently affordable units that are unable to meet the need right now. But should we be doing more around getting those with a potentially more rent vouchers or things like that?
151 We absolutely do have vacancies that could be filled, and I think that's one of our strong areas of interest, is to fill vacant units, especially vacant affordable units. And that's part of our work program with respect to shelter exits, really speeding up the shelter exits. I can't just sitting here, I can't answer the question is, is there enough vacant units to address the homelessness crisis in Portland? We'd have to do some more analysis and come back with a response on that. But I think there is sufficient vacancies that we can actually make a dent in the number of folks. Finally, I will say on rapid rehousing, it works well with some populations, I think, particularly with houseless families, that's a very important population to have a rapid rehousing model for. And I think there is a strong, a strong group of people. We are participating with the homelessness response action plan with the county on these kinds of conversations that are targeted to specific populations. And I would support a rapid rehousing strategy.
152 Thank you.
153 My next question is for director kuhnhausen. If he's still here.
154 He is awesome. Hey.
155 Director, in your comments you had talked about and I fully agree that the model for funding permitting is unsustainable and needs to change. Do you yet have a proposal for what a different funding model could look like?
156 I do not, quite frankly. I know that this topic has been discussed. I believe there's outside sources that are working on this. I, I, I recognize the challenge from a citywide budget perspective, asking for general fund for the bureau, while other bureaus are also asking, you know, those same have the same requests, puts us in a precarious position. And so for that reason, I believe there's someone else working on this.
157 Fair enough. You know, but but it is undeniable that your bureau and your, your colleagues in permitting development are taking the largest lion's share of the of the staff reductions. You know, the mayor's budget proposes to cut over 50 employees. I was looking at the chart, though. The bell curve of our development demand and how how low we are now. But I also I can't tell I'm not smart enough to know whether or not this is a downturn in our local new economic norms, or if this is a return to a pre 2012 market normal with our permit requests so low, what are those 50 employees doing right now with their time? And as a result of them having less demand on their job, have permit times decreased.
158 Permit times have actually decreased. And those 53 positions are spread across all of the divisions within the bureau. They perform plan review, they do inspections. There's enforcement. There's the public infrastructure team. There are building plan reviews. So life safety plans, examiners, they're doing that work currently. As a reminder, we've already laid off 74 employees, so that workload has already increased over the last year. There is a misconception that permitting is down. The permitting numbers is down. The valuation is down. The numbers that we've seen for permit intakes and issuance over the last four years is actually grown, so that work is still required to be done by the staff that are currently there.
159 Great. That's a really important point to note, because I think that there is an idea that there are 53 employees just sort of sitting around playing tetris, and that's not the case, that they are, in fact working, that there is action moving. It's just not paying the bills right now.
160 Correct.
161 Because we're in the moment right now where we are announcing amendments. I will be offering an amendment with regard to permitting development. Colleagues, I am looking to restore a coordinator, one position that is currently at the noise office. This is a two person office that is proposed to be cut in half, and I have a package of policies coming forward later this year that requires a functioning noise office. And so I will be asking for my colleagues to help restore that one fte. Also, the person in that position is phenomenal.
162 So.
163 Thank you. That's all the question I have for you. I think that this is probably going to dca. Oliveira. We've talked a bit about the difference between spectator venues and p5, but can you be a little bit more explicit here why we treat the spectator venues different from the performing arts venues?
164 Thank you for the question, councilor. That's a very large question that gets into our coordination with metro with p5 historic vision about the regional, you know, arts culture is more than just the city of Portland. But in short, I mean, there's a lot of similarities that these are city owned facilities that we contract out to, you know, other parties. I think that there's I don't think there is a, a analysis being done with metro about the future of p5, and that will be delivered to the city administration and metro's leadership later this fiscal year. And that will probably get us thinking like, what comes next there? The last thing I'll just offer is there was a time before the this recent change that those programs were managed together and coordinated together. So there's the similarities are pretty evident. And I think as we, you know, bring arts and culture back in, we'll contemplate how we coordinate again like that. But there are some similarities there that are pretty straightforward.
165 Great. Thank you.
166 And my last comment for this first part is colleagues, I will be also introducing an amendment with regard to arts and culture. I will be proposing to bring an additional $1.5 million to their office for the purposes of expanding on our kinds of grants and uses to activate public spaces to try and focus on activating downtown off of vacant office space or retail space. Also, some early conversations about how the city might be able to help support some of the organizations that just had their nea grants cut, including a theater group that found out on opening night that the grant that was funding the opening play that evening was cut. This is a relatively minor amount of money compared to the broader arts and economy budget right now, but this is specifically focused on what I honestly what I ran on for office, that the arts are a tool for community development, economic development and public safety. Those are the things we keep hearing about, and I think that we need to lean into the folks we have who know how to make that happen. So I will be introducing an amendment for that as well. And that's all my questions for right now.
167 Thank you.
168 Thanks, councilor. Councilor Novick.
169 Thank you, madam president. Director kuhnhausen I my question actually is designed partly to inform a discussion we're going to have about councilor Zimmerman's proposal to reduce the number of tree inspectors. And the question is this if we're doing 92,000 residential inspections and 39,000 commercial inspections a year, how many staff does it take to do that?
170 More than we currently have.
171 How many do we currently have doing that work?
172 I don't have the let me give me one second. I'll tell you exactly how many are in our inspections division. I believe it's 68 currently. However, there are one, two, three, four, five, six and supervisors. And there's a number of admin staff as well. So that number is probably closer to 40.
173 So there's 40 people doing 140,000 inspections.
174 Correct.
175 Wow. My next question really relates to next year's budget rather than this year's budget. I have to note that on June 5th, 2027, we will obviously be having a massive multimillion dollar celebration of the accomplishments of lionel hollins, bobby gross, lloyd neal, larry steele, dave taussig, herm gilliam, robin jones, johnny davis, wally walker aka the who, bill walton, maurice lucas and coach jack ramsey, and winning the 1977 nba championship and that date is the spectator facilities program. Planning for that and looking for money for it. Is that something the council has to be thinking about independently?
176 Good knowledge councilor First and foremost, I, I think the question of the future of all of our venues, many of which have overdue maintenance, is going to be coming up both from our side, but also for your contemplation on how to finance the overdue improvements. So yes.
177 Thank you.
178 Councilor Kanal.
179 I'm going to keep it there. First, I you mentioned the uncertainty around the blazers and just for the for the folks who might watch this in the future. If anyone wants to buy the blazers and keep them here, I support you. My office is at your disposal to help not only to keep this incredible 55 year civic asset here in Portland, but specifically in district two. And if, on the other hand, anyone is interested in buying the blazers and moving them, I encourage you to abandon that thought right now and go somewhere else. Portlanders love our team. We'll fight to keep it here, I sure will. Questions for director. Is there any limitation for you in the current budget in terms of getting the social housing study done?
180 Now that we learned that the pro housing grant is funded, I think we're going to be in good shape.
181 Thank you. Thank you.
182 To bts. On the graffiti side, I believe you mentioned having $600,000 in staff to manage $600,000 in contracts. Is that correct? I mishear that.
183 That's not all they do. They're they're also there's three, two staff that are existing and one that's additional. They also work with Portland solutions on larger sort of strategic problem solving. They attend a lot of the Portland solutions neighborhood meetings for, for problem solving. And then they also work, for example, with the police bureau on follow up to graffiti and some of the prosecutions there. So it's not just managing those grants.
184 Okay.
185 Bts graffiti program acts as like the air traffic control for all the other programs, including our state partners. So incoming comes to them and they figure out, is it parks? Is it private, is it PBOT, is it ODOT Portland solutions? And then they so they do a lot of that as well.
186 Yeah. And relatedly.
187 Pbot clean and safe pmo, I believe all have contracts for graffiti abatement or work in that space. If we were to get down to 1 or 1 plus clean and safe, which city entity should own this work?
188 There's reasons why councilor That's, you know, like PBOT, for example, because they manage the right of way. So it seems pretty logical. Parks has services as well. I guess it's a it's a conversation that's been happening. But I will say that over the last year and a half, two years, the coordination has been fabulous, both within the city and with our state partners and regional partners. We would want a reason, a strategic reason to do it other than to say consolidation makes sense. It might be this. This may be the right moment because pmo is allowed to. Portland solutions is allowed to be so much more agile because they're not behind a computer grinding out, you know, work orders and contracts that are out in the public. They're getting the information, they're bringing it back. Like I said, PBOT and parks actually has the infrastructure. So there is a little bit of like, you know, method to this madness right now that I think is working out for the city.
189 We've centralized the reporting and the dispatch, essentially. And if we tried to have one entity do all the work, we'd still need to coordinate the access to the property and things like that.
190 Okay.
191 I got four more. So I'm going to rush through a little bit. Does this open signal increase give us enough to cover what we're already doing, or is it designed to cover what we might do in terms of the future of you know, there's a proposal to go to weekly council meetings that I introduced, for example.
192 It's a placeholder number based on our experience in the first part of the year since January. So it probably will change again next year as we learn a little bit more. And I know things are a little bit in flux, but we're it's a five year contract, so this gives us enough flexibility to keep going.
193 Yeah. And I know it's weird that you even own this contract at all for us. So I recognize that too. But appreciate that. Switching to pnd, I just want to note slide 26 was pretty grim. And if you could pull that up so people can see what I'm talking about, why are the fees below cost recovery and do the proposed changes that we've already talked about get us back to cost recovery?
194 So the fees in the public infrastructure bureaus, I don't have it in front of me. I apologize.
195 Is it the one that said considerations. Is it that slide. Oh it's.
196 Up 26.
197 That one. And then the questions unrelated I just wanted to make sure that got back up on the screen for a moment.
198 So most of our fees are at I don't believe it's the fees are below cost recovery. It's that our current expenditures exceed our revenues. So while there are certain groups that joined pnd where there is not sufficient permit revenue to cover those expenditures, specifically in those groups, generally speaking, if we're at if we if we have a higher amount of permit activity with higher valuations, it would cover the costs.
199 Got it.
200 For this one, this slide 53 filled 12 vacant fte are proposed for eliminations. Two questions. How many of those 65 are managers and how many are non managers. And of the non managers how many are cp?
201 I wouldn't be able to give you the cp information, but I'm happy to follow up there. But it's 47 represented employees and six supervisors.
202 And then of the are the fte the vacant fte are any of those management level.
203 I.
204 Believe they I'm going to ask my finance manager to verify that I believe there are. But let me give me one second.
205 While you're doing that I'll just make my comment, which is I would like to see and I may introduce a budget note to ask specifically for ppe and to develop options for a better long term funding model related to what councilor Dunphy asked. By the time the budget recommendations from the city administrator come out next year, just to have some starting point to that conversation.
206 Okay.
207 I have one question after this.
208 Let's see. Coordinator positions. Those are represented. Engineers represented. There was one, to two non reps that are current of those vacancies.
209 So it's eight total of the 65 six in the four in the of the 53 and two of the remaining. Thank you. Okay. Last question is for dci oliveira. And before I ask it I'll just say I appreciate that you put in a lot more detail than in terms of funding sources on this overall presentation. Didn't get a chance to say that up front. My question is, why is the esd coordinator moving into Portland solutions? My understanding is that we're trying to move away from having temporary solutions to long term issues. I hope that we fulfill the stated intent of both our previous and current mayor, that we eventually move away from having a Portland solutions and move this work into the service areas, unless we make Portland solutions a service area formally, which I'm not opposed to. And I hope that we have a conversation about moving the non graffiti portion of pmo along with esds, into public safety. So I'm curious why the idea is to move it to Portland solutions.
210 Councilor. Sincerely, thank you so much for this question because I it's a moment in time. So if I can offer this the 30,000 foot view enhanced service districts around the country are used for things sometimes much different than we're using them today. We're in the middle of like we're livability is the priority. So we're focused on cleanup and graffiti and, and all sorts of services that are really just in the ground. But other places use them to throw block parties and have more experiential, you know, commercial district fund things. And we will get there one day. But in the current zeitgeist, given the work that Portland solutions is doing, what esd's are doing today are so much more aligned that from a practically speaking, they're already coordinating. Let's do this in in schuyler can vouch for this. This is, in our mind, a temporary, you know, maybe a few years temporary. But for now, this is us solving for this moment in time, because that's where the resources are going. It makes more sense to coordinate as we get past where we're at today, and we're more in a celebratory, prosperous. Everybody's feeling good. There's absolutely a reason to move esd's back into community and active, because we'll be doing things that are celebrating our business districts in a way that are more consistent with how esd's are managed nationally. That's not to say we're not going to do things like, you know, cleanups and public trash service, etc, etc. Maybe even security still. But that's the current zeitgeist. That's what we're solving for.
211 Thanks. And then I'll just close by saying, I'm going to cosign my colleague, councilor Avalos, point on pcp in terms of philosophy and principle. And I'm also interested in learning why $100 million makes sense as a reserve fund. Thanks.
212 Councilor Ryan.
213 Yes.
214 The good part about waiting a while is almost every question that I had has been asked. So I've raised a lot of questions. I will say, after a little over seven years of paul allen's death, it's great that we finally got news yesterday that the estate is putting it for sale and councilor Novick I was so impressed that you got like every player on that team. That was cool.
215 I cheated.
216 Calhoun was mentioned.
217 I don't think he should be because he wasn't on that team, was he? Yeah. You weren't alive yet. Anyway.
218 That's how he cheated. They looked up whether calhoun or walker was on the team that year.
219 Yeah.
220 Anyway, I went to that parade in 1977. It was a lot of fun. Anyway, that's why we're here, right? I have to say, you must be experiencing this. Most of the people that I've seen, because we've been in this meeting before, right? Yesterday. Okay. So I'm also trying not to repeat everything that happened yesterday. I will make this comment. And that is just thank goodness that you're implementing the much needed ppe and transformation transforming that culture from bts to ppe. And that's the current work, and I applaud you for staying on the course. I think this new culture system will allow us to implement creative ways to help alleviate customers frustrations for decades. This is one reason I'll be bringing a budget item that will allow self-certification for some building plans and permits, and I know we're in touch with your office. We won't do this as a surprise anyway. Time is money. I know you know that. I look forward to working to time with your team on that. Who said this? Charity. Montez. You said there was a technical fix, and I couldn't tell by listening to you if it was a restorative fix or a damaging fix. We all make mistakes. Is it a mistake that we enjoy or. No.
221 Thank you for the question, councilor. We loaded the 8% cut to meet the cut target in our budget when we were still in vibrant community service area, when vibrant community service area staff manage the budget. Then in the middle of the process, it transferred over to community and economic development service area and it accidentally got added a second time. So our general fund with the 8% cut should be about $4.1 million. But right now it's showing in. The mayor's proposed at $3.6 million. So the technical fix is to get us back to the 8% cut instead of a roughly 17% cut.
222 Okay. Well, good catch you. All the other items are actually more related to prosper Portland, and I understand after a break, madam president, we're going to actually have a focus on that. Correct. All right. Good to see you all again and again this week. Yeah. Thanks.
223 Councilor Clark.
224 Did you did you call my name?
225 I did, I'm skipping over myself to make sure everyone has time. Go right ahead.
226 Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. I was really pleased to hear donny mention the overdue maintenance of our p5 and spectator venues. You're singing my song. I do have a couple quick questions regarding those venues. So the veterans memorial coliseum, when were the bonds be retired?
227 I have that data point. Councilor one second.
228 And also what what was the fund you said is being used to retire that debt?
229 Well, the resources are coming from the county's visitor facilities trust account. And while the projects due to be completed in 26, I'll have to look to our finance director to give me that. When the bond.
230 You can you can give me that answer later. Thank you. Do it now. And if the blazers, I, god forbid, actually leave town. Do we have an outstanding liability at the moda center?
231 Councilor, thank you for the question. That's a that's a very complex. And I think we probably want to have that conversation a little bit later when we have more information to work from. But we are the owner of the moda center now. We do have an existing lease agreement through 2030 with the blazers, regardless of ownership. And during that time, we'll contemplate our next step.
232 Okay. That's fair. On a different note, I'm really anxious for the conclusion of the p-5 committee that's working, and I'm hoping that they're exploring public private partnerships. And I know there's going to be followed by a market analysis for what the community can support. But I'm just very anxious for that to conclude. And in the meantime, I'm just wondering, have we looked into or pursued any resources for seismic upgrade at the keller?
233 No, not at this time.
234 Councilor. Okay, I'll just let my colleagues know that I'm going to introduce an amendment or a budget note that would begin the process to phase in a seismic upgrade and improvement for the keller auditorium. Second part of my questions is really on the directed to Eric. You mentioned the cei policy grant from FEMA and that there was some uncertainty around that. Should that money not come through, do you have a plan for addressing the cei hub?
235 We're committed to the project, but we will have some staffing problems should that grant not come through. So we will we will be forced to prioritize our existing projects and stop work on something in order to continue that work.
236 Thank you. Eric. My colleagues, I'm going to introduce an amendment to create that table or continue that work with additional fte. And those are my two issues. Thank you, madam chair.
237 In the one minute we have left, I want to note, colleagues, that I will be bringing an amendment forward to ask you all for a policy set aside that's money in contingency with a specific purpose. Around $4 million for ppe. And in order to staff back up more quickly once permits start coming in so that we don't have a lag time. I also in 30s am hoping to ask about the 15 additional staff for PCEF that I think I saw in the slides are those staff who were requested through the committee that PCEF had as part of their plan when they passed the community investment program. Is that a new addition? What is the story behind that? That seems like a very large increase for that group.
238 That's administrative staff. So PCEF resources, again, are divided into administrative staff that run the program and then the programing that's through the cip. So no, the staffing at dps does not go through the PCEF committee. It's supporting the running of the committee. It supports the grant agreement process. It supports the contracting that we do. Piece has been basically ramping up to full scale over the last few years. And so this is a consistent with the growth we've had in that program for the last couple of years. As we scale up to be fully staffed to handle the volume that we're doing.
239 Okay. I have a number of other questions about some of the pieces around those programs and what general fund buys, but I will hold them. Counselors, it is 416. We have time to ask questions of prosper Portland this evening, but I'd like to give us a quick break. I'm going to have us recess until 430. Please be prompt. Coming back. That will give us an hour and a half with prosper, which is about 7.5 minutes each. Thank you. Councilor Morillo and counselor Clark. Are you both back with us?
240 Yes.
241 I'm here. Just started being able to hear you.
242 Perfect. Yes, perfect.
243 I'm just making sure we have a quorum. As soon as we get the prosper folks up at the front, we will get started.
244 Sorry, council president, do you want the entire team already up here?
245 Yeah. Let's just in the name of time, bring the entire team up since we don't have a presentation.
246 Thank you, thank you. This year.
247 So we are reconvening after a short recess, and we are convening the prosper Portland work session of the Portland city council. We convened as the prosper Portland budget committee on may 8th. Today we're meeting as a council in a work session to discuss prosper portland's budget. This meeting was posted by the council clerk as a work session for today. I know that there was some confusion about what the official title of today's meeting is, but this is a work session of the Portland city council to discuss prosper Portland, and we will reconvene as the prosper Portland budget committee, which is a separate entity we meet under on may 21st when we formally adopt the prosper budget or move to the next phase with the prosper budget, I guess it will go to task after that. So just wanted to give us a quick clarification there. And councilors, when we met on the eighth, we got prosper's presentation but didn't have time to have any discussion with them. So today we are skipping the presentation. We have an hour and a half. I would note that that is on average 7.5 minutes each. In order to discuss what we heard in the previous presentation. I believe that presentation is posted on the website in case folks want to refer to it. And with that preamble, councilor Green, you are in the queue. Would you like to kick off our conversation today?
248 I would love to. Madam president, I'm going to start a timer here. I just want to start by saying, thank you so much for coming back and rearranging your schedules to accommodate this. I was a little frustrated last week when we ran out of time to not ask questions, and so I just want to say thanks for seeing that and letting us kind of do the back and forth we need to do as the budget committee. So my, my questions are going to kind of start from kind of grounding myself as a member of this budget committee as, as given by charter chapter 15 105, which gives us clear direction on on how we're to sort of engage with your budget process. So firstly, the charter requires that prosper portland's commission submit an annual budget to the mayor and council and a report that evaluates the activities of that of the commission with respect to the city's visions and goals. For, you know, in reflection of the previous year. And so my question is, did that presentation happen last year? Yeah.
249 State of the city.
250 So yes, I believe we did. We took the state of Portland economy report to city council. And presentation of that report was both comprehensive of that year's activities and of previous activities.
251 Okay. I think the charter. Noted I'll just leave that one alone. I think the thing I'm struggling with, though, is the strategic investment fund is a relatively new creation of prosper Portland. And as I've tried to understand it through the proposed budget, the financial sustainability plan, advanced Portland. I don't I don't see much discussion of what's happening there. And so I don't really have a lot to go on in terms of what last year's expenses were from that fund, how that is sort of contributed and aligned with the city's adopted policies and goals. So I wonder if you guys can give me a sense of very specifically what was allocated. I see that there was something like about $21 million spent from that fund across both economic development. And let's see here property redevelopments. So you can can you give me a rundown of what that was.
252 Yeah. I think while while our cfo, tony, pulls up the exact projects, I'll just name a few that off the top of my head, the predominant ones I remember us funding over the past year have been middle income or mixed income housing. If you think about the short stack mississippi project as one, I think I believe there are two conversions office to residential conversion pilots that are leveraging sif.
253 And old town. Yeah.
254 And then made an old.
255 Town know those projects.
256 In old town. That's right. I was going to say.
257 Old.
258 Town old town.
259 Action plan.
260 There's the falcon building and then there's.
261 No that one's not.
262 Not sif. Okay.
263 So council, there was about $10 million dollars in loan commitments from the sif fund over the last year and a half. That includes the short stack project, as well as a number of small business loans, looking for the exact number of small business loans that range from 50,000 to $200,000. The vast majority of volume loan volume was related to small business lending rather than commercial lending, but we did have several larger commercial loans, including the short stack project that made up the about a third of the spending.
264 That's a good point, tony. I'll just add, I think the main reason, again, for the sif as a revolving loan fund is to make sure that we have available resources citywide, and not just inside tif districts, as it's been. A pretty regular call for us to provide that over the years.
265 Yeah, I think I understand that. And in your budget, I forget exactly which page. But there's a there's a bar chart. Stacked bar chart that talks about sort of the near-term projection of the different sources of prosper portland's funds. There's the declining existing tif resources. Then there's the sort of ramp up of the tif resources. There's that that gap that the general fund covers in that space. And then there's the growth of like reliance on the strategic investment fund. And I imagine that's that's the purpose of the revolving loan fund. I think the thing that I'm, I'm struggling with a little bit on this is I understand that the balance of that fund going into this year is about $50 million.
266 The estimated beginning fund balance councilor is for next fiscal year is $36 million. There is an estimated beginning fund balance of the current fiscal year. At the actual beginning, fund balance is $53 million, so there's a spend down between 53 and 36 through the course of this fiscal year. I anticipate that some of that balance, however, will roll over into next fiscal year so that $36 million total balance will be closer to $50 million. As we amend the budget through the fiscal year. Some of that will be committed through projects depending on the pipeline, and some of it will be uncommitted but available for future projects.
267 And I see that there's $38 million in contingency for this current fiscal year for that fund, and then proposed 30 million, roughly for next year in the proposed budget for contingency. So I'd like to understand what restrictions are there on the sif fund?
268 A lot of the restrictions are set forth by our board in that financial policy has to do with returns, as you alluded, with our financial sustainability plan, given that historically, tif and tif admin played such a large role in supporting a lot of the general funded programs that prosper Portland deploys as tif has dwindled, we've looked to diversify our revenue sources. Right. So there's both the additional tif boomerang that supporting those programs. And then long term, we recognize we'll need to have other sources. And so the base the corpus of the strategic investment fund, the 50 million, the idea is to have that revolving loan fund and interest be able to support those programs and staffing over time. So you're right on that is the intent is for us to be able to, over time, be less reliant on things like general fund.
269 But it is a internal choice on how to spend that, because I see that there are resources scattered throughout all the programs that make up the delta that we've lost from the general fund in the slide deck. So in that in that vein, colleagues, I'm going to introduce a budget amendment that that reduces the city's general fund allocation to prosper Portland for this upcoming year to zero. We will make hole that that reduction with a transfer from the sif fund to fully fund the programs that were listed in. Let's see slide, slide 29 of your package where you show the fy 2425 levels. My intention is to transfer an amount sufficient to fund those at the 2425 levels. Because I heard a lot of good testimony last week that talked about the impacts to communities most harmed by the historic practice of urban renewal, and I want to remain a commitment to that. I will also be adding to this amendment, funded through sif, bringing back the repair and restore grants so we can have resources to respond nimbly to folks who have broken windows in our community and support our business districts as well. And I think that's the level of detail I'd like to offer at this point, but that will provide us a general fund resource for our broader negotiation as we move forward.
270 Thank you. Councilor.
271 Feel free to comment.
272 On that. I'll just note that as part of the sif guidelines that our board approved, sif investments have to return roughly 5 to 8% back as far as those revolving loans.
273 I would just say that that's the decision that the board should consider in the context that the mayor has introduced $100 million in fiscal cliffs overhead because he's responding to a crisis. The crisis is unsheltered homelessness. It's livability. He's trying to do it in a way that is responsive and also humane. We've had to cut several hundred positions in the city of Portland. I see the mayor's sheltering plan is an investment in economic development, because the thing I hear from folks time and time again is that the number one barrier to investment in Portland is the crisis of unsheltered homelessness. And so we're all kind of making decisions that are a little less than ideal in the absence of, you know, perfect revenue pictures. So I think the commission needs to consider that in this in this context. But that's that's going to be my budget amendment as a member of this budget committee.
274 Thank you, councilor. I think I would I would offer from the board's perspective, and obviously we'll take this back and they will review all the amendments that are presented today. I think we equally to the to the charge that we have to make Portland livable and vibrant again. We also know there's quite a problem with our availability of housing supply. We've heard time and time again that tif resources being limited inside the districts is a is a constraint. And so having tools like sif to place that capital around the city needs to be a part of the equation. But I appreciate the point and we'll definitely take it back.
275 And just to be clear, I didn't want to take all of the strategic investment fund. It was very de minimis amount in fy 22. There's been a pretty aggressive growth in it. So this is just a modest reduction in that fund to support our broader city in its time of greatest need. So thank you.
276 Councilor Dunphy.
277 Thank you.
278 Madam president. Before I make my comments, though, I want to just say something really quick. Earlier this morning, I heard something on this dais. I had a reaction. It was based off of my values. But on further reflection, I spent time thinking over our lunch break about the things that councilor Smith said to me specifically. And on reflection, I really realized that I approached that situation incorrectly and I should have approached it differently. And for that, I am sorry. I greatly respect you and definitely need your your partnership in this. As with all my colleagues, I will hold us all accountable. But there are better ways to do that. I did not think about the optics and the history of power and dynamics between incalculable things that I should have thought about. And so for that I do apologize.
279 Thank you, and I accept it. Thank you so much.
280 You're welcome.
281 Any clarification real quick, madam president, I neglected to say that this was a co-sponsored amendment with me and councilor Dunphy.
282 Thank you, councilor.
283 Thank you.
284 And to that also to the prosper Portland presentation. Yes, councilor Green, thank you for your collaboration on this. This has been a number of great conversations about how we can respond to the moment that we are in and the crisis that we are facing and the need over the next 12 months versus the next five years versus the next ten years. And I think that the amendment that councilor Green and I are bringing forward is the right solution for right now. Thank you guys for coming back. I appreciate that you are here to help us get some additional clarification. Clarification on the record. I am disappointed that the last meeting ran so long because now we don't have the ability for the public to be able to hear that about the deliberations. But thank you for coming back. Regardless. I have been I have expressed my concerns and I remain deeply concerned about the about prosper portland's role as the city's economic development agency. We've created an arm's length structure that lacks direct electoral oversight, and that may sound innovative in theory, but in practice it just results in unaccountable decision making, vague justifications and missed opportunities. And I believe we have to revisit the question of not just how is prosper funded, but whether the structures continue to serve the needs of our residents under portland's new form of government. So with that in mind, I have some questions. Shay, director bateman, sorry, during your presentation, you or someone on staff, I think it was someone from the prosper staff specifically said that the arm's length relationship between prosper and the city can actually lead to new creative opportunities and new approaches. Can you identify are are there specific outcomes that prosper has achieved that required this arm's length structure? And how do those outcomes compare to city bureaus in terms of community engagement, flexibility and measurable impact?
285 Thank you councilor. That's a fantastic question. And I'll probably let my colleagues weigh in. But I'll start off by saying when I, I think I brought that up at the dais primarily to refer to the nimbleness of our systems. One of the benefits of having a quasi governmental agency that's operating under a state charter is that we do manage our own systems, which means having our own it, our own procurement, our own specialized legal team that specializes in, you know, real estate transactions and business lending. And so I think that kind of nimbleness and being able to speak the language of the private sector to engage in public private partnerships is a specialty that allows us to not only deploy funds more quickly. I can't count the number of times that city council has allocated funds from projects that have sat and just, you know, encumbered funds over the years at city council only to come to prosper Portland and we get it done in a year. So that's mainly what I was referring to.
286 I mean, that's not wrong. You're absolutely right that that our bureaucratic systems are slow and we are an enormous machine. And the bigger the machine, the slower the cogs turn. But also some of that sometimes that flexibility also leads to some decisions that lead to some public scrutiny, like even outside of prosper's policies, the $7 million loan for the shoe manufacturing in old town, for example, comes without that sort of guarantee of public accountability. To that same end on in your presentation and in the budget documents, I've noticed that the general fund grant funds from the city and the cannabis tax funds are in a single line item. Are those actually combined in the budget? Are they intermingled or do they are they accounted for individually?
287 Thank you councilor. Those are in the on the general fund section of the budget document page. 30 of prosper portland's proposed budget details out in a corresponds to what's included in the city of Portland mayor's proposed budget as well. So there's a reference there.
288 Thank you. I didn't see that getting into some specific programs with regard to the film office, my office was told that the universal film permit is it remains aspirational and that the film office and this project in general is perennially at risk. Hasn't the hasn't the greatest challenge to this office been the fact that they are trying to issue permits in a different city, in a different government structure, and that by having the film office in prosper, it creates some additional challenges.
289 I would say the office of film and events is not obviously a permit issuing body, but they're there to help applicants navigate that process with a lot of expertise and background in that. It is one staff person, but I think she's doing a fantastic job in driving over $100 million in spend locally b. Filming productions here in Portland, but we would fully subs here locally when filming is done, so we'd love to work with you on that.
290 Just adding to that, I want to applaud elise and the staff's creativity because we understand we're in this changing moment, new form of government and previously, where we know our bureau partners might be looking to a commissioner in charge to kind of determine whether or not they move forward, despite all these changes and kind of the opportunity we have now before us, the film office has been able to set up intergovernmental agreements with partner bureaus around timeliness of those permits and guarantee those to film producers. So I think, you know, we all aspire to that universal permit. And I think that it's a it's a north star. It's something that has been able to happen in the city of seattle, where we know that the events and film functions live in the economic development department, and they we frequently consult with them. I'm really hopeful that in this new form of government, we can actually get to there.
291 Yeah. Well, I mean, to that end, though, in this new form of government, if a major part of the film office's job is issuing or is coordinating permits so that a film director doesn't have to go to PBOT and police and parks and all the different bodies, does it make sense for this office to continue to reside in in prosper's portfolio?
292 I think if we look to the city of seattle, it does just, you know, they a good example. City of seattle has a separate arts department, right. And it has all its art staff, public arts, and its specifically its large event music and film all resides under economic development because it's operating within the private sector. Obviously, frequently those operators are pursuing this work in the form of a business, right? They're trying to generate revenue or they're trying to have an economic impact and deliver their product. So I would I think it's a good fit. I'd also add that the other side of that work is also the business development work of trying to recruit films and working closely with our state partners, and going to film festivals and highlighting Portland filmmakers and, you know, the success of our ecosystem. And so I think given both of those functions, economic development seems like the logical choice.
293 I mean, I don't disagree, but we also do not have a community and economic development work area or service area in the city. And the city of seattle is maybe not a great example because they just closed their office of film.
294 That's right.
295 So partially because of that, partially because of the funding mechanisms and the sort of arm's length component of it. Since it has been a model that I have been watching for a long time, extremely disappointed that it's doing. But however, in that situation, the county is picking up a lot of the slack as well. Sorry, I'm going to wrap this up as quickly as I can and I apologize. With the strategic investment fund, it sounds like it is a I hear the that the board has has set good parameters around it and expectations for it, but a large I've never seen a tiff budget that didn't have every dollar accounted for. And so I'm a little confused about how the dollars became how how this fund grew so exponentially compared to where it historically has. I always know that there's always some closing balances out of tiff districts. I know that certain property sales and things like that that are one offs have fallen into that. But. When it comes to some of the dollars that are in there, is there are there things that didn't get built that were supposed to be built or investments that didn't get invested in as part of these retiring tiff districts?
296 We could.
297 Get back to you on that in more detail specifically. But to my knowledge, all of the investments that went into siff were from, like you said, districts that were closing that had already completed action plans many years in the past. And so there weren't necessarily outstanding community expectations for those dollars. I do think, you know, the portfolio of return that our board expects from those dollars, they did contemplate, you know, a should the siff have more of, of a grant function. Right. And I think ultimately they wanted to maintain the corpus of the revolving loan fund. So this wouldn't just be a flash in the pan. We've had so many examples of resources over the past five years that were available at a one time basis, and so spending this fund down as quick as we can, when we know that a revolving loan fund could benefit the city for years to come. I think that's our board's reasoning.
298 Just to add, we'd be happy to share with you, of course, the $10 million that tony mentioned and committed loans from the fund. The intent is not at all to make it untransparent, and it is reported to the board, reported to the public, reported to the community as we're making them. So there's no intent to be transparent in that way.
299 I don't mean to be implying that you are hiding the ball. I do not think that that is the case. To wrap up. Okay, my last my very last question is with regard to the office of small business. Again, I spent when I my last tour of duty in this building. I spent over a year researching offices of small businesses and other districts and other cities, found that the biggest community need historically was permitting help. And again, with regard to being an arm's length reaction between the permit issuers and prosper, I found at the time that the model didn't make sense for our old form of government, and I've not considered it in the new form of government. But what is the model that this office is being based off and does it? Is it the right fit for Portland right now, especially considering that permitting is permit? Navigation is historically the biggest question that is needed, and this office in prosper would not necessarily be able to do that.
300 I think the feedback we're seeing from the business community, you know, small and large, but really small throughout the city of Portland, is that it is needed right now. The office is for people. The website will go live in the next week or so, but a lot of those people have already been out in the community with listening sessions, with districts, meetings with many of you, and permitting is one of the biggest needs. But permitting really does range from a whole bunch of different types of permits that small businesses might encounter. And then there's a whole bunch of other needs related to resources that they might be eligible for, technical assistance programs that we otherwise have, that provides a front door to all of those types of things to the city. So that's really the intent is to try to make it very simple and clear and accessible for all small businesses across the city, and perhaps ways that they haven't experienced before.
301 I think I'll also just add to that that given that prosper does host the preponderance of small business resources and speaks the language of small businesses, it. I think it makes a good sense from the point of view of customer service to have it live with economic development. And I'll note that I think we have Mitch doherty here from the office of small business. He's had nothing but success connecting with bureau partners, and we've heard already great resolution, but not just across permitting, but everything from water and bs and utilities. Like there's so many touch points with an with a small business. Certainly permitting is a is a large one. But who else besides prosper who interfaces across all these different bureaus as part of our everyday work, could actually, you know, help navigate. Folks.
302 I'll just I'll just close by saying we desperately need economic development. We desperately need small businesses. We're a small business town. We're not a big corporate town. And you all, you three specifically, and the folks in the audience and the people you work with are doing really good work. My concern is not with the work that you are doing, but rather I have a structural concern about the, the form and the relationship between the city of Portland and prosper. But I do thank you for all the work that you're doing, and I want to continue that conversation. So thank.
303 You.
304 Councilor Avalos.
305 Hey.
306 First of all, happy birthday, shay.
307 Thank you. Councilor.
308 I had to embarrass you. And I know you're getting some tough questions on your birthday, but you're doing great. So I feel like my question, I kind of have two, but I really want to start with this. It's a bit philosophical, but it's clear to me that many of my colleagues here feel uneasy about the fact that our economic development strategies are structurally and politically outside of our purview. Given prosper's charter. And yet, as leaders of the city, people are specifically looking to us and holding us accountable for the city's economic recovery, not necessarily prosper. The spotlight is on us. And so my question is somewhat philosophical, but also about how you kind of square this. But also, I'm curious if you have ideas or maybe even general interest in finding ways to close this structural and political gap so that we can have more of a say on the economic development strategy.
309 That is an excellent question, councilor. Thank you. And thank you for the for the kind note as well. I think historically and in the future, we've always appreciated and enjoyed council engagement across everything from selection panels for how we deploy resources. I think you've all been invited to not only invite folks to the tiff action planning committees that are the tiff leadership committees that are being envisioned, but we've also worked with individual districts on on selecting those committee members. I think having an open seat for council and their staff to attend those meetings, being able to stay abreast of all the of all the new developments, I think all across the board we see nothing but collaboration in the future with this council and not only from a responsive but also a proactive way as projects, decisions, decisions come forward. There's so much overlap between the tif districts and now the new city council districts. It just makes a lot of sense that we stay coordinated and collaborative with you all. How we enshrine that formally, I think that, you know, this moment every year when you all gavel in is our budget committee is crucial, but then also just regular engagement throughout the year. Now we have our our, you know, our community economic development service area as an added layer to that. But we still remain, you know, at y'all's service like we're here to support. And we just welcome all in all, future and possible engagement.
310 I appreciate that answer. I think there's more discussion to be had. And I'll just I feel like I've noted this before, but I'll say again that I hear quite often from my constituents their concern about tif districts. They're feeling that we, as their councilors, aren't necessarily plugged in or have a say or are weighing in in that. And sure, we could go to meetings and all of that, but I, I don't know that that feels to my constituents as meaningful as me, actually, as their, you know, representative being more active in what those how those dollars get allocated. Because at the end of the day, this is city money that we are saying we're putting sticks and bricks. And I think I feel a little disconnected from it. I'll just say, and so I would like to talk we could talk offline about what that looks like. But again, I think the larger thing that you hear in a lot of my colleagues is just, again, this just feeling of like, what is exactly our relationship to prosper given this structural charter difference? And how do we, you know, really be involved in the economic development strategies? So I'd like to just keep talking about that.
311 Thank you. Councilor, if I could add one thing, I think as beyond our budget committee, the fact that you all by charter and by state statute, approved both the tif plans and tif action plans every five years are critical. And I think, you know, this goes back to the earlier conversation. I think we're interested in making sure that we honor, ultimately council. Ultimately, you are the decision making authority for the tif plans and the action plans. And we also have to balance, you know, the feeling of community and uplifting those voices through the leadership committees. So I think I'm looking forward to those conversations, because honoring that dance of both your authority and the community's is critical to us.
312 Yes. And you know very well that I care deeply that community has a meaningful say in how we allocate their dollars. My last question is just about the office of small business, I guess. Well, first I'll say a couple of us d one councilors went to a venture Portland thing and we had the office of small business there. They were very enthusiastic. And so just kind of hearing from them directly some of your staff there what how they're planning to, I guess, measure their success. But I want to hear from you directly, you know, because this is a new office, because it is clearly really important to the city that small businesses have support. You know, I'll just make an anecdote to say, my nail artist, she uses chatgpt to navigate the city, which I think is crazy. I mean, I think it's kind of cool, but it's also crazy that, like, people are really turning to other things because they don't feel supported by the city. They don't feel like they have easy ways to navigate all of our processes. So how are you all measuring your success? What are the performance metrics or outcomes that you're looking at over this next year to see the effectiveness of that new office?
313 Yeah, at a high level, the goal is to support over 500 small businesses in the city with the new functionality that the small business office has a team of four, and they have, as shay mentioned, a great background. The manager obviously started built Oregon really familiar with consumer goods products, the entrepreneurship network here in the city. But then they also have strong legal and financial support that they can offer directly, but then they can bring people in and help them access other resources that prosper or other parts of the city, or even non-city can offer. So as far as metrics and benchmarks, we'd love to work on driving some additional kind of awareness of outcomes that come from that. It's been remarkable that they've even helped resolve some utility bills, like very large ones, for businesses that were not in a good position to resolve some of those yet before they've even launched. So some of that is hard and anecdotal to measure, but we'd love to tell that story quantitatively to your point and work with you on that.
314 Yeah, I totally agree that. Hard to measure and also really important to be nimble. That's what I hear in what you're saying. And I want to encourage that.
315 I know like business touch points themselves doesn't really tell you a lot like I'm saying 500. And so again, you want to know more. And so we'd love to work with you in terms of how do you measure some of the outcomes beyond just the total number of businesses supported.
316 Yeah. And I think this is a good example of what I was speaking to in the last question. Right. How can we be better partners on some of these strategies. So thank you for all your hard work. That's all for now.
317 Thank you.
318 Councilors, I do want to point out that we do have a prosper board member with us now. So when these questions come up about board authority versus council authority, shay, if it's helpful for you to call board member higgins up. She is in the audience now. I know she's behind you. So you may not have seen her come in, but you have a phone, a friend and councilors. You have somebody else you can ask questions of if it's helpful. Councilor Ryan.
319 Thank you, madam president. It's good to see all of you. Was it Monday night? Was that when we had the budget session with prosper? So just two nights ago.
320 Thursday, last Thursday. Thursday.
321 Great. All the days are blending together. I did notice that half the colleagues were gone at that time, and I thought it was the best testimony we've heard in this chamber in a long time. One, we heard testimony, which was great, and then two, we heard testimony from, I thought, the most diverse group of portlanders that are actually working their tails off to try to make their businesses work in Portland. So I will acknowledge it. Prosper was the one that brought that type of testimony to the dais, and I appreciate it. And for those of you who had to leave, I hope you have a chance to see it. Thad frisco's comments were particularly strong. I thought, because I hear it over and over again, but you don't hear it in the chamber as much, and that his college educated children are not returning home. I want my fellow portlanders to catch that his college educated children will not return home. Period. End of story. And he said it hurt because that's just not the Portland story. We're built on multigenerational families wanting to come and invest in Portland, and it's not what's going to move us from doom to bloom. And so you are the part of the city's enterprise that helps us be relevant, to try to do something to fix that story. And the other common theme I've heard since I was first elected in the fall of 2020 is our small business storefronts. They just continue to struggle. Every year. We keep thinking it'll get better. And then every year you've heard me in this time of year, ask you that we have to replenish the restore and repair grants. You know this, it's been happening for the last three years. So my question is we need to restore it. More money. But what when did we run out? Like, how much more do we need? I'm just every year we have a short. We short changed. And so many of them are frustrated that they can't access those grants.
322 And I can start, maybe shake and add. But appreciate what you said about the testimony, the breadth and the depth of people's real life experience. With that, I just want to emphasize that many of those programs would not be possible without general fund support. Investing into the implementation of those programs in a way that sf could not sustainably replace. Period. It just wouldn't happen. So all of those outcomes that you saw up here, I mean, that is heavily general fund dependent. And that's why even though it's not a large portion of our budget, it is so critical for us to have the storefronts that exist outside, which most of them do, of tif districts. They, for example, would be relying on a lot of that support as well, because they're not eligible for tiff spending that biscoe. He's got an incredible story. He runs a company called Portland kettle works. There are metal fabricators in northwest industrial district, and it would be cheaper for him to go to, you know, to Washington to go across the river to operate there. And he's a champion for Portland. He wants to stay. So that's why I think it hurts him so badly that his own children don't see that opportunity. So the general fund that goes into his business is really the traded sector work that we do in metals and machinery to help lift up his company so that they can hire more and be successful here. That's why I think the general fund is so important. And when you have voices like thad's, it really makes a difference because that's his reality.
323 Thank you. Thank you.
324 Thank you andrew. And then we're fortunate to have up here with us amy nagy, who is one of the development managers in the development investment shop, whose team actually deployed all the repair restore resources as well as the winter storm relief that they had to pivot and do last year just to support all the broken pipes and all the damage that happened. So, amy, I know if you'd like to share around the fund.
325 Good afternoon. Nice to see you all. So I think a couple of things councilor Ryan is there has been a pretty obviously consistent demand for it for the grant. We've pivoted. We've offered it for five years, right. And over time. So since 2020 and it's evolved over time just trying to meet the needs. So that nimbleness at this that we've all been talking about with kind of prosper's ability to do that and adapt to business needs, is kind of this is a key example of where that's happened, where so where it started out with more of outside repair, and the goal was really just making sure that businesses could stay open, right, that they felt safe, that they could have a board up, that their doors could stay open, as well as that the kind of street environment felt safer then it's evolved into being able to go into the actual space and, and actually provide more inventory, right? So when inventory is stolen, etc, nobody wants to file insurance claims because people were starting to become ineligible for insurance, which is the worst kind of case. And so folks were pulling actually out of their own savings in order to do this. Winter storm was another example where that was an unforeseen impact and we were able to do that. So I think we've seen and thanks to a lot of the esd work and the cleanup and the safety kind of efforts that have been made there, we've seen a lot of improvements. But the but the break ins still do happen, right? And so the window is still broken, etc. I think to answer your question on the estimate of how much do we need, it could be an ongoing program, you know, and I think and I will, as the person who oversees the team that does that each year, we think that this is going to be the end of the program. Right. And it just and it continues to need more. So I would say having it it you know, the range of which the average is about $6,000 is what a business usually applies for. It can go we will set a max of up to 10 to $25,000. That actually allows them to come back. So for folks that are in areas of repeated break ins, that's been very beneficial for them. So I would say anywhere really making it meaningful is a minimum of 500,000. I would go even higher because also you think about administering the programs, what that takes it also. So that takes staff. Obviously, by the time word gets out. Et cetera. It's a real disappointment to have to tell folks when your grant program is closed because the funds are exhausted. And that's happened to us multiple times.
326 Everything you said was easy to follow. And what I keep hearing is what you said about insurance availability. So now they just can't afford insurance, so they're not even offered insurance. I we're dealing with issues in Portland that we've never experienced before. So we can't even get they can't even get insurance. So when you say should this be a longer term program, I think we're answering the question right now. And so our office will be having an amendment to make sure that we can restore that. We'll be in touch with you to get the numbers that you were speaking of, because two times in the last month I've heard this quote, and that is I'm one more broken window away from going bankrupt. And these are people that aren't making money, but they just are trying to survive. Another prosper initiative I heard about in the budget session was we were talking about the small business office, and I heard the conversation that just took place, but I couldn't tell. If you're going to have one person staffed in each district. So there's one per district. That's correct.
327 Right now we have.
328 Sorry.
329 Go ahead. Yeah.
330 We have we have two staff that are doing two districts each. And then we have one who's more focused on online intake and online systems.
331 What does that mean?
332 Well.
333 We have a full website that andrew mentioned is going to be launching next week that not only has, you know, other accessible in language supports, we're trying to be as accessible as possible, but there's also resources, there's guides, there's everything from how you navigate certain parts of the city to how do you start a business across six different industries. So it's meant to be a comprehensive resource. So while we have the two folks and again, we'd love to start with one per district, but it's just the amount of funding that we had. So we have one person covering, I believe, districts one and three and then one doing two and four being out and about, boots on the ground and community. And then we think of the third person as, you know, manning the shop, home base.
334 Okay, we'll dig into that further. And I can't tell right now if it if it's in the right spot, like should it be in donnie's dca world, this office or is this the right fit for it? Did you say what month you ran out this year? I'm sorry, on the repair grants.
335 So we ran the program. We closed the applications in December of 2024, and that gave us a couple of months to process the applications for eligibility disbursements. And so the funds were exhausted by the end of February, early March.
336 I wonder everyone wants to talk about this. Okay, so they have not had access for almost six months.
337 That's correct.
338 Okay, great. I mean not great, but thanks for the information. The high vacancy rate is something we talk about a lot with our commercial spaces, but where we have a low vacancy rate doesn't get a lot of attention. And that's in our industrial land. And we have industrial low industrial vacancy. And that's the good news. Bad news is we don't have a lot of availability. And I know that you do have corky collier from columbia corridor as one of your community advisory members, but I'm not hearing enough. And this is Green companies is our maker spaces. These are trades jobs. These are living wage jobs. And Portland is still that working waterfront city. And I'm not hearing enough of promoting where we actually have an asset. Can you tell me why when I'm in this position for the last four and a half years, we don't talk a lot about the opportunity that we could have by drawing in more makers and more Green jobs for these industrial slips.
339 I think you're right, councilor Ryan. We should be talking about it a lot more. As you mentioned, corky, columbia corridor association, swan island business association is on the community budget committee that we have, and we work closely with him through our industry liaisons that we have in our traded sector work. We would love to continue to work with bts and others so that the economic opportunities analysis reflects the need for continually ready and available industrial land. Because you're right that many of these jobs are not necessarily four year college degree jobs, but yet they do have high earning and high mobility potential to them. So we need to continue to create them more and more here in the city of Portland.
340 I appreciate that. I think we're lacking that vision and chutzpah on this topic, and it really is an economic driver, and I don't think we're spending enough time and focus on that. And I'm confused why that's been the case.
341 We wish we had more space. And frankly, some of the acreage is brownfields, so it needs to be remediated, which obviously drives up the cost and makes it a little bit more inaccessible to create new plants or new businesses. But we should be investing in what we have to create those types of jobs, especially.
342 To lines.
343 Of.
344 Course, both the Willamette river and the columbia river. And we have a lot of those in our in our district.
345 Councilor one one good thing to add, just as a bright note in this space is that I'm very excited. The partnership with our bureau of planning and sustainability with an additional PCEF allocation, I believe, just recently for the clean industry hub. And so, you know, that's that's a sizable investment that we think could, you know, jump start some initiatives in this area in a really exciting way.
346 I want to just thank prosper for being a part of the coalition of public private partners that have gone down to Salem to move the bill along, to actually have the infrastructure to sustain our festivals on the waterfront that is the state's waterfront. And we are expensive for our current festivals every year to recreate all the temporary infrastructure you're seeing right now with rose festival. And it's such an important time to get this ha roi investment passed. Do you have any update on how that's doing down in Salem? And I can get that from sam as well.
347 We really appreciate what representative nguyen has done to champion this for us, and we.
348 Thank you for acknowledging that.
349 Yeah, we think it's making good progress both in terms of the infrastructure, but then also, importantly, the support directly to event producers who we know have had a rough go of it over the last five years. You're right that it's critical for downtown revitalization.
350 The collective impact of who was there was quite startling. I think it even woke up people from rural Oregon that have an r next to their name, and they seem more open to this than most Portland investments, because people do want the economic center of the state to come back. And they do have memories of going down to our waterfront and enjoying their time in Portland. So anyway, thank you for answering those questions. I look forward to working with your office on a couple of these amendments. Thanks.
351 Thank you.
352 Councilor Smith.
353 Thank you, madam president. Thank you all for coming. I wanted to go back a little bit about prosper during the finance committee on April 28th, 2025, councilor Novick requested performance data on small businesses supported through the strategic investment fund. And in that discussion, selection criteria were mentioned, including addressing community gaps, targeting main streets and supporting minority and women owned businesses. And just wanted to know, did you do any follow up to that? Did you give any specific performance criteria that's being used when you select businesses for assistance?
354 Yeah.
355 So that's actually something that's about to go in front of our board in the coming months. We did hear that, and it has been something that the team has considered as we make investments. But in terms of that, the formal criteria have yet to be adopted. But we're operating with kind of those general themes. One example I neglected to mention earlier when we were mentioning sif investments was the flock food hall. Right. Knowing that it has such a great impact for allowing, you know, east Portland businesses to have space downtown, allowing diverse business owners to activate a part of our city that desperately needed it. But we will be taking those. We will be reviewing and discussing those guidelines with our board for potential adoption.
356 Okay, perfect. And so I want to go forward. I'm hearing some of the same things from community members about small businesses needing access to capital, access to technical assistance. And I'm wondering, you know, what that looks like. So I want to enter into the record an amendment to the mayor's budget for 2526, in regard to small business assistance, it would be to allocate and decrease 5 million from the community development block grant, the cdbg money federal funds in prosper and or in the housing bureau to increase the budget for civic life initiatives through the targeted small business grants and loans for fiscal year 2526. And the background to this is that small businesses serve as the backbone of portland's economy, fostering community development, creating jobs, and enhancing neighborhood vitality. Considering the economic challenges that are faced by many small businesses in district one, I believe it is essential for the city to strengthen its support mechanisms through financial assistance, thereby promoting equitable economic growth and community engagement, and the proposal is to approve an increase of $5 million to existing civic life budget and to be sourced from the cdbg. Federal funds. Designate these funds to establish and expand a small business assistance program that provides grants and low interest loans to low and middle income folks for 2526 and ensure equitable outreach and distribution, prioritizing underserved communities, minority businesses, and entrepreneurs who are disproportionately affected by economic hardship. And this amendment will bolster. That's what I believe. I believe it will bolster portland's small business ecosystem and it will stimulate the economy and enhance community engagement and vitality throughout all the neighborhoods. And the reason why I picked the cdbg money is because there are a lot of small business owners who who make under $100,000 a year. Those small business owners that work with the gateway association, the sole district park rose business association, those are really small potato type of businesses, and they just need a little bit of help and they're not getting it from us. When people see that we're waiving system development charges for market rate developers, that's not a good look. If we're not doing something similar to help the small person in a neighborhood who has a coffee shop, who needs assistance with quickbooks and all those things, because the bookkeeping piece is the piece that's that's keeping a lot of folks back. And I've always said, and I've been on this track, even when I was in Multnomah county, the only way that you can help our small businesses to make sure that they get public contracts is to get them cobid, cobid certified. And we need to have these community based organizations that are out there helping the businesses in their communities to get cobid certified so that they can take on the aspirational goals that we have for the cobid certified businesses at the city of Portland. They can go and apply for those for those additional dollars at the county and at the state and get on the list at the state. That's the game changer is to be able to be a COVID certified business. And I know we're having some problems right now with with the federal government, but the only set aside that you can do that's you can have is federal money. And to be a dbe, they have to set aside so many I don't know what it is right now. Shabri you may know that I don't know what the percentage is, but it's in the 20. I think it was like 23% of their of their monies that come through ODOT that are federal. They have to set aside for dbe contractors. And that's what that's what that's where we should be heading. We should be trying to get these businesses and use that infrastructure that we have to help them get cobid certified and become dbs. I mean, I think that's the ball game.
357 Councilor you're speaking my language. I just appreciate this comment so much. Prior to coming to the city, I ran an incubator for latina and immigrant business owners called the Portland mercado, and this is what we dedicated ourselves to. So I would love at some point in the future to introduce you to business resource network that we fund, because this is their work, right? We're talking about incubators at miso hacienda. These are in community service providers focusing on business technical assistance and development across, you know, quickbooks legal incorporating at the state, navigating other state functions like cobid. I just a quick note, I appreciate the note on cdbg, and I will acknowledge that the team, I think, is going to be joining the workforce committee tomorrow to speak more to coep. But cdbg, just so you all know, can't speak for the housing side of the equation. And perhaps director rivera would love to comment. But for prosper, at least, we receive around $2.1 million in community development block grants. Those are split between our contract with work systems, inc, as well as some of those partners that have the capacity to serve lower income business owners, because those are the restrictions on cdbg, it's predominantly income.
358 Yeah. So on in the mayor's budget on page 308. Which I'm not quite sure because I looked at the previous fiscal years in 23 and 24. So I wasn't quite sure how much money we actually get. I saw a note for 11 million. I saw something for 15, 25, 26 has 10 million. So I'm not sure what our actual amount that comes through, but I know some of it goes to our housing bureau, and I'm just trying to figure out what is the number. And I'd like to know a little bit more about what that number is, and if there's some ways in which we're using the cdbg money right now in the housing bureau, I know we've historically spent it on housing, but that is not the only use. If you look at the cdbg monies, it is used for economic development as well, and you all are using some of that over in prosper. But I think the main thing that I'm trying to put forward is that we need some more money for small businesses. That's where I think we're going to get a lot of bang for our buck.
359 Yeah. You make a great point about COVID certification and the needs that small businesses have for grants and loans. I would just offer, respectfully, that I think prosper is uniquely positioned to be underwriting and overseeing a lot of those loans that are going to different businesses in the community because they have the capacity at the staff level in terms of people who have worked with craft3, with banks, with others that are actually out there in the community issuing those loans. So that's really where we want to have those kind of loan activities.
360 And that's yeah, that's good. But so, so that you're hearing me correctly because I'm going to give you this amendment and it is going to say grants and loans, because I want some of these to be grants. If we're granting and waiving system development charges for, like I said, market rate developers, we need to be granting some money to these small business folks. And that's why I say use the cdbg money, because you're going to you're going to get those businesses. You all can give loans to other folks in the middle area. But I'm concentrating on these folks who are who make less than $100,000 a year, and they're barely trying to make it, and they're mixing their money with the private and the and their business money, and they just need some technical assistance on how to do stuff and then how to go about going to get approved to be cobid certified.
361 The, the, the as she mentioned, the lion's share, the majority of all cdbg that we receive gets reinvested into our workforce development programs. But your point is well taken about the small business needs.
362 I just I just think.
363 We need to do more.
364 I have the number here. It's 8.3 million total cdbg. And then 2.1 comes to us via the housing bureau and.
365 8.3 to the city.
366 8.3 to the city, 2.1 of that 8.3 comes to us.
367 So it said it had 10 million for 25, 26 for.
368 So the 2526 entitlement amount that was forwarded to us by fbp that just came out yesterday was 8.3 total and prosperous formula for economic opportunity is 2.1 of the 8.3.
369 So am I mistaken? Does it have 10 million on three on page 308.
370 I don't I'm sorry council I don't have the city of Portland budget up.
371 Okay. It said something like it was either 10 million last year and 8 million this year. And the year before that it had 11 million. So I wasn't quite clear if we were getting extra money because of ARPA.
372 I believe.
373 Councilor, while they're looking into that, I'm just going to note that we're at about 11 minutes.
374 I, I just want to make one additional note, just on the on the loans that we spoke about, for businesses that face certain barriers, that is our philosophy, right? Our loans are often here not just for large development projects, not just for middle income housing or mixed or market rate housing. One of the points of the sif is to be able to do those loans at banks won't. And I'll give you one great example, probably the one I'm most proud of the team right now is javelina. The city's first indigenous owned restaurant was able to get a loan, right. And that wouldn't be possible if we didn't have this city wide fund to do this kind of work.
375 And councilor Smith, can I also offer. Thank you so much for really highlighting the importance of grants. When I think about our work with reimagine, in the first year that the dollars came to us, we were able to get out $7.1 million to small businesses and then other organizations that specifically support economic opportunity. And I know that, you know a bit about that program, that program, instead of being reimbursement based, actually utilized trust based philanthropy models to give the dollars. And we work to give the dollars directly based upon a budget. And so I, along with director flaherty, agree with getting those dollars into the community that needs it is exactly what we're doing. And we've been able to realize that in the first year with reimagine, we intend to do that. We're in the midst of the evaluation process for year two, and our plan is to get out 1.3 million directly to small businesses and some nonprofit.
376 And nonprofits, because mainly reimagine is nonprofit.
377 It's mostly small business. Is it? Absolutely.
378 That's good.
379 Yeah. And we can we can always bring more information on what the breakdown of that is. So the vast majority are all small business. And in fact, this year, as we move through the 1.3 million, we plan to get out, 900,000 of that is just for small business and 400,000 is for nonprofits.
380 And that's why I want to do more. I look, I'm not wedded to the cdbg at all, but I am wedded to making sure we put additional real resources, like $5 million, 900,000. I think we can do better than that. We're look, when I hear we're we're waiving $137 million in system development charges, we better be doing some stuff in a big way for our small folks who really need the help.
381 When you get us those recreational cannabis tax dollars, we get them out the door. So I will say that kudos to the team that that worked to move it to us. We were able to get those out within higher the team and get out 7.1 million within six months, and have established a process that allows us to continue to do that. So I look forward to sharing more with you about that.
382 Excellent, excellent. Thank you.
383 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Novick.
384 Thank you, madam president. I want to go back to councilor Green's suggested amendment to zero out the general fund for prosper, which I have to say I'm intrigued by. And I wanted to see if you could take a couple of minutes to give your present sense impression of what the consequences of that would be for this next year, and also ask if you could maybe send a written, more detailed response to that idea, an outline of what you think the consequences would be over the next couple of days.
385 Happy to do that. I can tell you just on the record now, if all of our general fund is zeroed out, then we would lose not only all of the programs for the outcomes that you saw earlier on the slide, which include access to capital, small business retention, expansion, competitiveness, small business supports through the ibr and office of small business, our office of events and film, our workforce development partnership with work systems or business capacity building inside business districts. Not only would all those go away, but you would lose roughly 30 staff as well.
386 And you couldn't make up for that by reprograming the money.
387 I would say that our because our board has dictated that that is part of the financial sustainability plan that has to have a 5 to 8% return. You could do a spend down rate on those for a year, but then we lose our city fund within, you know, a year or two because we're supporting staffing and programs. And then I will say historically, it's much harder to add back ongoing general fund than it is to remove it. And I would be concerned about our ability to add back in those programs with general fund after the cut is made.
388 How much would how much could you make up with the spend down that you think would be would be authorized?
389 What our board has authorized was some of the interest from the work that the team did to deploy cif. So when you saw earlier, when I was laying out the existing 1.7 general fund reduction, the 650 k that we were able to internalize that was specifically from interest and other activities that cif was able to place, which is the long term idea of the cif, right, that we're able to internalize staff costs and reduce general fund reliance on general fund. But any further would would, you know, cut into the corpus and pretty much reduce the point of the fund?
390 Okay. Thank you, madam president. I don't know if this is at all appropriate, but this would be a pretty dramatic financial decision. And I'm kind of curious about how many of my colleagues are interested in seriously considering this idea, because I think that will play into how we think about a number of other things in terms of amendments over the next few days.
391 We cannot take a vote while we are up here.
392 Can we have an expression of interest?
393 I. We are even more tight on things when it is prosper's budget, I believe, because of the way that they need to do posting. What I think we could probably do. You know that we have two people who are co-sponsoring that. I don't know if they've talked to any of our other colleagues. Counselor Green, go right ahead.
394 Yeah. Councilor Novick, I just want to be clear on what my amendment did. The amendment reduced the general fund allocation, but simultaneously directed prosper Portland to transfer funds to make whole the loss of that general fund allocation. So it's incorrect to say that this would be a loss of those programs. That is the commission's decision on whether we want to lose those programs. This body has the authority to set prosper portland's budget, so long as it is aligned with the adopted policies and goals of the Portland city council. And my argument is that keeping whole the dev side of this that was bearing the brunt of this cost is aligned with advanced Portland, which is a policy document we adopted last year or maybe two years ago that tries to center and focus investments in bipoc communities and do inclusive economic growth. So I just wanted to correct the record on that. The commission may have a different opinion, but the amendment was not just a cut. It was also cut in a transfer to make whole.
395 Councilors at the end of your line of questioning.
396 I yes.
397 Okay.
398 Councilor Kanal. Thank you, madam president. I want to cosign the initial comments that councilor Green and Dunphy made. I'm not leaning one way or another, but I can say I'm interested in the proposed amendment. I'm also interested in the conversation councilors Dunphy and Avalos weighed in on philosophically around ensuring that elected leaders are leading the economic development strategy of the city. I do appreciate the comment about joining or inviting others to join the tif action planning committees, but I think that more broadly than that, that's joining prosper structure instead of shaping it. And there is a distinction there. Both are valuable. I also want to say I share councilor Ryan's concern as a long time ago I was a college educated kid who didn't get to come home. And I say get because I couldn't find a job here that paid enough to live on. And so I went to seattle and new york and seattle and dallas and seattle over a decade, and want to make it easier for young adults who leave town to go to college to come home, as well as those who come here for college to stay, and all the people who don't go to college at all to live here as well. So a lot of these questions may be boring and numerical, but they're really in service of making sure that the income that you make here can pay the rent and leave enough left over for a decent life. So let me start with asking a big picture question. Do you disaggregate women owned businesses from minority owned businesses, or do you lump those together into a single category?
399 We disaggregate not just by race, gender, ethnicity, gender orientation within a lot of our programs, including the inclusive business resource network.
400 Great. And since you just mentioned that, my next question is, is that line item not being cut by $700,000 in this proposed budget, or is there something else under the inclusive entrepreneurship program outside of.
401 The inclusive entrepreneurship programs being reduced by $200,000? I believe venture Portland is the other business impact I would point t. At $380,000. The. I think if you're referring to the ongoing the switch from ongoing general fund to one time at the tune of 2 million, that essentially puts the problem into next, not this coming fiscal year, but the one after where we'll have to determine which business line gets impacted. And likely that would be a business, either a business support or a workforce development support. But essentially, yeah, the burden is impacted at 200,000 not 700.
402 Okay. I'm seeing 4.2 to 3.5 on page 207 under inclusive entrepreneurship. So that's my reason for asking. And I'll be building back up to this. But sorry.
403 Is that sure.
404 I think I can provide some clarification for this. I think when that switch from ongoing to one time was loaded by the budget office into the budget system, it was mainly collected in that line item, and I don't think so. It shows a change in or decrease in one time or ongoing resources there. I have to reference that page in the city budget document.
405 Back with relation to the large event stability grant program, which funds events like the winter light festival, waterfront blues festival. I see two different numbers in two different places. What is the reduction to that relative to the current fiscal year? And I have three questions on this. I'll just tell you all three of them now. The other is how large is large? I'm concerned that we're losing events now. And there's a trailing indicator aspect to this where it takes time to get out of an event. Once you started the process of leaving the annual cultural festival, which my community and the broader population have come to in the thousands for 25 years in pioneer square, moved to Beaverton last year. And that's there's several events that reasons why events leave, but costs are often one of them. So I'm curious about that. And then the third part is what's the impact here? So what's the number? How large is large for eligibility. And what do you expect the impact to be.
406 So I'll start with. In terms of how large is large it depends on the program. We've had one program called scale up that looked to have at least or at least event producers that were bringing at least 10,000 people, I believe was the number. And we can send this all to you after for the larger scale events. A lot of that was done in partnership with the visitors development fund, and so we received funds through vcf and travel Portland and partnership with them. And there I believe the number was much higher. I don't have it off the top of my head.
407 But I think it might be 10,000 attendees.
408 We have public, transparent guidelines for both programs. But to your point, the scale up is really meant toward the smaller to growing size event versus the large event, just to add different types of capacity building throughout the process. As events stay and grow in Portland.
409 I'd say the other guidelines that we spoke through with travel Portland, a lot of it. They want to encourage hotel stays in the city, so they were looking to invest in those larger scale events that would prove that they could attract out of town visitors.
410 Yeah, that's great, and I support that. I want to make sure that we're also supporting the cultural events for the people that already live here, so that we can stay here and don't feel a need to, you know, that that sort of those things that tie you to a city.
411 We did have one term, one time funding that was supporting a lot of that. We had a community event round that funded hundreds of small business owners across the city central city, east Portland, north south that we lost that one time funding last fiscal year. It would be fantastic to have more. So we are just working again. The point of the office of events and film is to have that film navigator and that events navigator supporting those owners and organizers and producers with technical assistance, and they're able to deploy resources when we have them. We're just entering into a time where we have less of them. And that's what you can see reflected in the in the loss of one time funds there.
412 And can you do you have the number on how much we're losing in that in that particular grant program.
413 Do you have.
414 It's we can get you the exact number. It's about $2 million.
415 Copy that. And then my last question before I have comment to close out, I my understanding is you had 500,000 last year for one time funding for repair restore. I heard the conversation with with councilor Ryan about it running out there. But then I also heard that you need 500 at minimum for a year. So if it ran out in six months, like, can you clarify, was it 250 last year that was left? And that's why we need 500 for a full year of funding.
416 No. So it was it was an allocation for fiscal year 2425. We slow rolled it a little bit because we wanted to make sure that we were concerned that there would also be impacts of the winter again, as well as we were honestly being thoughtful about the federal election outcomes. And what if there was additional property damage there? And so we closed the application at the end of December. And so the funds went went sooner. And so what I'm saying is the 500,000 is a minimum of what is helpful to have in order to serve the number of businesses that we would need to be serving and a meaningful timeline. Right, because one of the risks and one of the things I think that's getting highlighted is one time funds, repeatedly creates this kind of fast and furious frenzy, if you will, and you can even do it. We've done it in multiple ways where you do rounds, etc, to try and pace out the pace, out the dollars, but it goes very quickly and then you have to close it down again.
417 Yeah. So I guess help me understand here if we're giving you the same amount of money, would you be just sort of artificially slowing down relative to this, this current fiscal year to spread out the same amount of money over 12 months that was spread out over six this year?
418 Well, I'm happy to come back with you with like an actual number. If we're talking about what are the number of businesses we'd like to serve, what's the period of time we'd like to cover, etc, we can absolutely give you provide that information if that's helpful.
419 I would like that. And this is my pivot into and I don't know if these are in the proposal from councilors Green and Dunphy. So or someone else might be to it. In which case I won't actually do this. But otherwise I am interested in proposing a replenishment to the large events stability stability grant, and that might include a budget note on the people that are close to and getting to that line of 10,000, as well as proposing replenishing the repair restore grant fund with one time dollars. At the current level, I think that there's a need to look long term, and that might be a budget note as well saying how? Let's look at what the long term solution is for funding there. I do view large events as a strategic investment. I also view repair restore as a strategic investment. And so I think that makes sense to me that if that that would be bundle able into those amendments. And I'd also note that some of this money is like 1% of the $50 million we're talking about here. And I understand the concern about not getting the yields from from the amount that would be spent down. But I do think that that might be a good use of this instead. And I'll leave it there. Thank you, madam.
420 President, if I may, thank you for both of those amendments. Really appreciate the support of those programs because they are so badly needed across the city right now, just in terms of the number of businesses that we might be able to serve with, repair, restore, it will depend a little bit on the criteria for eligibility. We know a lot of the businesses that have already been out there applying for them legitimately have already hit the $10,000 cap. So we'd love to work with you in your office on what the most accessible, appropriate criteria would be to broaden out the impact as much as it's needed. Because, like councilor Ryan said, we wish it wasn't needed, but we know it is. It's highly demanded.
421 Yeah, and I'll just say, I know there's at least two other offices that are interested. So please, you know, reach out to all of us. I imagine there's more. Of course, this is one where we just, you know, we know it wasn't funded, but our appreciative of the work that's been done in there.
422 So thank you.
423 We're repeating each.
424 Other and councilor to your to your point on the strategic investment fund, I do think, you know, one thing I haven't raised is if we were to pursue this path and the request to our board to spend it down quicker, it is part of our agency's financial sustainability plan. And so in all the projections tony has made, maintaining both the service, the current levels of service and our across our business lines relies on that income. If we were to engage in a rapid spend down, I would I would question our ability to maintain this. The agency as a functioning, functioning agency. Period. Right. We've and I've heard other questions. Right. We've heard when you were referencing, you know, our peers at Portland permitting the call to have a more diversified fund source. I want to applaud our team because that's exactly what they've done. They've created a fund source that can serve community need, that contributes to our financial sustainability over time and makes us less reliant on the city's funds. So I would just caution against going against that great work the team has done.
425 Director flaherty, the only thing I'd love to offer is when director abeloff put together the plan alongside tony to develop the sif fund that was directly responsive to community, who wanted to have access to support citywide, and that wanted to be able to look at acquiring buildings and land. So it was meant to be more wide than what tif can do. And so it is absolutely responsive to years and years of community requests to look broader than what tif is really able to do. And so, sif, congratulations again to the team to really be able to think through and work with our legal team as well, to be able to develop that which was requested by community specifically, especially if you were just on the other side of a tif district, but you had similar needs. Sif is able to do that, and we're actually able to be really creative around how we think about supporting businesses, whether it be conversions or other. That's what sif has been able to do. And so a reduction of that also then further reduces our capacity to be responsive to community.
426 Thank you for that. That is a compelling argument that I'd like to look into more. I'm done.
427 Counselor Zimmerman and I should flag we have a stop time listed as 6 p.m. I think we can probably go a few minutes over, but I know folks who have other things this evening, including some of our guests. So I'm going to try to stop us as close to six as possible. Counselor Zimmerman.
428 Thanks to expand or reply to councilor Novick. I think with with regards to this amendment that's been made, I guess what I'm looking for is an impact statement and not one from a cold budgetary standpoint, but really an impact statement from our cfo and from our mayor about what this amendment would mean for me to give it good due diligence. And then and really, I think some understanding for if sif was used to backfill that general fund, what we would be giving up. I think I'm just I do want a deeper dive on that. Before I could weigh in on where I'm at on the amendment. So those would be very helpful. I want to shift back to the to the events piece. I appreciated where that last lines of questioning went, just because I think this presentation starts to bring together just how interrelated so much of the stuff that we do is, right. We had some conversations today about graffiti. We've had some conversations today about police or excuse me, this week about police. And I just want to go back. You know, andrew and I worked together in the mayor's office, and I remember coming out of the pandemic, and andrew was working to try and get more events to come to Portland. And he presented to me something that I had not really understood before, which was that the police. At the time, and I don't know where they're at now. At the time, they had to put a no more events standard on us. Meaning if you want to come into the city of Portland and have, I think we were dealing with erasing or some damn thing, but some, some sort of like track racing thing that's going to require us to close off roads, like doing a parade. Right? And the police at the time, given their staffing, said unless your event has already existed in Portland for a long time, we don't have the ability to staff up to cover that. And in a world where we're talking about number of officers, but then we're also talking about whether or not overtime should be something that we allow the police to tap into. It is related to this as well, because events continually do require a presence to close streets to make sure that we've got you know, I was at st. Johns parade in some of your districts and I unless you know what you're looking for, and I bet most of us don't. But I saw the bomb squad there. It was quiet. It was over in the corner. But this is the kind of footprint that we put on public events, because that's the reality we live in, right? We have a bomb squad at major events, and I think that's important. And I want us to get to the place, because I think that events are a way for us to brag about Portland, both externally getting the hotel. You know, I think the term is heads and beds, but also internally to our own region, because your question about our regional pieces to a smaller events, cultural events, going to pioneer courthouse square and using that as your hub. Here's the other thing. Those events now they cost us security, us being community members. And they never used to. And if they did, you kind of had like an alcohol monitor. Only now security is something that's got to be robust enough to deal with the 5 to 20 drug riddled people who are going to walk through the event and cause problems with the naked person, who won't realize that that's not an appropriate behavior in front of children, where security is not a presence anymore. Security is an intervention tool that is costing every event a lot more money, and that cost does not exist three miles away. It does not exist in that level anyway. In Beaverton and hillsboro, it does not exist in happy valley. And so they are very attractive. Other markets to take your cultural event for the region outside of Portland, because we have allowed this type of behavior to fester and go unchecked. And now to do an event, you have to be so big you can overcome the security costs and that you can overcome the new structural costs. Right. The events now plan how their structure is going to allow entrance and exits based a lot on what the feeling in Portland is. So I just I want to the reason I go on this, this piece right here is because it is interrelated. Everything we do today, graffiti discussions affect how events choose or don't choose to come to Portland security. Choose or don't choose to come to Portland police, etcetera. And I have, you know, and I have helped I have helped events kick off with either my own city, but my own council budget when I was in the mayor's office covering that last thousand bucks that a group didn't know they were going to have to do for either a certain type of security or a certain type of use permit. So I want us to remember that when we talk about prosper, because I've told prosper, I think it's great that you do some of the smaller community based stuff. But we also I want you talking about how do we get as many high paying jobs also moving here. Right? I think these are balances of this equation. We want prosper to be able to work on both. And I think that your footprint in the events world is important as well. So I offer just as a continued continued reminder that there are other places in this budget, not just in prosper's budget, that if we if we take a harsh tone, I think we'll have ripple second, third order effects into other areas that we really care about. And so there's a lot of neat stuff coming to Portland. There's a lot of neat, neat people who want to do neat things here that want to put their venue here, who want to bring their concert here and prosper is usually our into that. But there's other auxiliary services that directly affect how successful prosper can be when they do that, or how successful travel Portland and travel Oregon can be. And that's all I have no questions for you. You've got my brunt last time. So thank you everybody.
429 Thank you councilor. Thank you.
430 Councilor Morillo.
431 Thank you council president. I realize that because I'm online and my cameras off, so you guys don't all see how gross I look right now. You can't see what I'm indicating by nodding. And that seems to be the approach that the finance committee is taking. So I just wanted to say that I'm definitely in favor of exploring big picture proposals like councilor Green and dunphy's prosper amendment, and especially during a tough, tough budget season. I had a question for councilor Green, and I was wondering if you could clarify the particular point that this effort would adversely impact bipoc businesses. Can you speak to how this wouldn't do that? And I also just want to indicate that I'm generally in favor of discussing it more on the 21st.
432 Yeah. Thank you. Councilor. So my intention with the amendment with councilor Dunphy is to restore funding to. The other elements of economic development that we had received briefings on that are going to suffer based upon the general fund reduction in the context of the various fund balances that we have between prosper Portland, the city of Portland, and the trade offs we make, the intention was to move cip funds over to make those programs whole relative to their fy 2425 levels. Now, understanding we need to have a rich discussion on what those trade offs look like and the different forms of economic development. I've heard very clearly that sif is a part of that strategy, but that is my intention there. The idea is I, after the testimony that we got last week, it just reinforced my commitment to make sure that we are signaling that these communities have borne the brunt of development in this city for a very long period of time, and they should not bear the brunt of these cuts at this time.
433 Councilor if I could just add, one thing is, is I know we're going back and forth on this proposal because we are a separate legal entity. Any direction about funds other than general fund to our board would be advisory. And so you would be putting our board in a very hard place to determine whether or not we fund the community commitments and capacity that we've built up over decades, or the financial viability of the agency as a whole. So I just want to put that on the table. That's that's what your advice to our board would make them contemplate.
434 I don't want to get into a back and forth here. I'll just say that I, I don't share that interpretation. I think the city council, as the budget committee, has the authority to set the budget as a whole. Thanks.
435 We can get a legal opinion on this to make sure that we're all on the same page. I do want to make sure that if councilor Morillo has other comments and questions, she has the opportunity to continue.
436 No, I don't I think that's something important that we need to explore, and I'm generally in favor of exploring it.
437 Thank you, councilors, in the name of time, I'm just going to list a few things that I'll be following up with prosper to get more information about, rather than asking my questions and looking for answers. Today, I do want to understand if you maintain cif at the level that allows for the investment return that your board has directed, how much would be available to backfill in the way that my fellow councilors have requested? I understand that taking the amount they've requested would create problems with that policy, but I'd like to understand at what level there wouldn't be. I would like to know more about the policy decisions that were made in what programs are funded, and not because when I look at your proposed non tif budget in the presentation that you gave to us last week on page 41, the bar graph with the nice lines to help us compare, which by the way, I love and which I wish that other service areas would do something like this. I see a number of programs that are funded at a higher rate than last year, and so I'd like to understand those policy decisions. I'd like to understand the use of cannabis funds in the inclusive business resource network because like councilor Smith, I have heard from cannabis businesses, those run by communities who have been affected in the past by cannabis policy, that they can't receive, that they're they're not able to receive funds from you all. And I want to understand where the funds are going to understand if this is an issue for a single business or if this is a categorical lack of availability to resources, I think that's somewhat problematic. I also would like to ask some questions about coep and the set aside coming out of contracting that was agreed to in the regional workforce equity programs, I am hearing that there are folks who are on projects and need support that are not able to get the support that those funds were originally negotiated to provide, and I'd like to better understand that and understand how we in the budget might be able to make sure that they can be supported. Like my colleagues, I was planning to bring an amendment on the broken windows fund, though it seems that perhaps I don't need to do that. And I also have some questions. Actually, you know what? I think that's my list for today. That's my list for today. Colleagues, I know a few people have additional questions, but we are coming up on 6:00 and I'd like us to end on time. So I am going to close us out with the knowledge that we can always send additional questions to prosper Portland and share amendments based on those answers at our work sessions tomorrow. So I will close our work session for today. Counselors will be back here tomorrow to hear from the public works service area.