The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-10-23
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Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Climate Resilience and Land Use Committee met on Thursday, October 23, 2025. After roll call and a reading of the statement of conduct, the committee adopted minutes from August and September meetings by unanimous consent. The main item was a preview from Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund (PCEF) staff on the Climate Investment Plan (CIP), ahead of a full City Council work session scheduled for October 30. Staff described the CIP's structure, funding areas, strategic programs, and community grants process, noting that figures for allocations and program-level dollar amounts were presented but were not always fully consistent across the discussion. Staff also described the annual CIP review process, the current public comment period on proposed amendments, and the roles of the PCEF Committee and City Council in approving changes. Extended discussion followed on topics including nonprofit financial capacity and grant sizing, how funds are allocated between community grants and city bureaus, examples of programs administered by various bureaus, workforce development funding levels, organizational capacity building, district-level data tracking, the relationship between the CIP process and the citywide budget process, the origins and evolution of PCEF relative to the original ballot measure, and a suggestion to explore potential engagement with the cannabis industry regarding regenerative agriculture funding. The meeting concluded with an announcement that the next committee meeting is scheduled for Thursday, November 13.
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0 Is Thursday, October 23rd at 9:30 a.m. Diego, will you please call the call the roll?
1 Yes, I apologize, co-chair. I don't believe we've established quorum yet.
2 I think that we've got Sameer and councilor Morillo online.
3 Councilor.
4 Correct.
5 Apologies. Thank you. Avalos. Canal.
6 Here.
7 Ryan.
8 Here.
Procedural episode · turns 9–17
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9 Morillo here. Novick here.
10 Claire, could you please read the statement of conduct?
11 Thanks, Steve. Okay.
12 Good morning and welcome to the meeting of the climate resilience and land use committee. Sorry to testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at Portland gov. Council agenda slash climate resilience and land use committee. Or by calling 311. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In-person testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard if public testimony will be taken. Sorry if public testimony will be taken on an item. Individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise. Your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The chair preserves order disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, please state your name for the record. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. And finally, virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
13 Thank you claire. We have two items on our agenda today. The main event is a presentation from PCEF staff for the Portland clean energy community benefits fund climate investment plan. Before that, however, we need to adopt committee minutes for meetings that occurred in August and September. I would hope that we can approve the minutes by unanimous consent. Are there any objections? Without objection, the minutes are approved. Diego, you please read the next item.
14 Item two Portland clean energy community benefits fund climate investment plan preview.
15 So the full council is holding a work session next Thursday, October 30th on the PCEF climate investment plan. This is our opportunity as the climate committee, to get a preview from staff about the cip and how council will be engaged in this process, and perhaps give some feedback on this presentation as it gets adapted to next week. And I'll now hand hand it off to missus engstrom, barrasso and valdez.
16 Thank you, counselor, and good morning. My name for the record is Eric engstrom. I'm the director of the bureau of planning and sustainability. And with me here is the PCEF program manager, sam barrasso, and james valdez, who's strategic partnerships and policy manager for the clean energy fund. And I hope this preview is helpful for you all to formulate some of your questions for next week's session. The agenda today is we're going to give you a tiny bit of background. We know that you know most of this, but a little bit of background on the cip, the climate investment plan. Talk specifically about what's in the current 2024 to 2029 cip, including a reminder about what the strategic programs and community grants are within that. And then we will talk about the 2025 annual cip review process. That's before us. And then of course, questions and discussion. Next slide. A few key takeaways today that we hope you walk away from this with. One is that obviously PCEF is guided by the cip, the climate investment plan, which is a five year plan. And that's the umbrella document that governs how we administer the fund. 2024 and 25 was a year of standing up a lot of new programs that were initiated in the first year of the cip 2025, 26 will be a year of scaling up many of those programs. And then we will currently funds within the five year time frame are currently fully allocated through June 2029. But there is, we anticipate bringing annual fine tuning of that plan to you all each year to review. And so we'll talk a little bit about that. And with that I'm going to turn it over to sam.
17 Good morning. Co-chairs Novick co-chair Morillo councilors. For the record, my name is sam. I'm the program manager for the Portland clean energy community benefits fund. And so in this next two sections, first, I'm going to talk about and just give you again, background and context on the climate investment plan. And then we'll talk about the the contents within there. And then we'll turn it I'll turn it over to my colleague james valdez here to my right to talk about the current update process. So just first to state, this city has been a leader on climate since its very first climate plan, which was the first in the nation in 1991. Now we see as the latest innovation in addressing climate, designed to help portlanders deal with climate change. It does this by investing in projects that reduce emissions over time, while also addressing immediate needs of those living on the front lines of our changing climate. Now, this is just a reminder, but the program was approved by Portland voters in November 2018 and was enshrined by the city council into the city's code, which both set into structure its funding mechanism as well as its underlying structure, which has both the fund itself and then defines clear roles for the Portland clean energy community benefits fund committee, which is a clear an important body, which I'll discuss a little bit later. So here I'm really going to briefly just speak to sf's evolution. And it's why I remind folks often because we've been on quite a journey, first, as a program that started with the heart of our work, our community grants work. It was the community's design, and it's where we built the foundation of PCEF. We focused on community led climate action. We established trust, transparency and systems for equitable grantmaking. Now as we grew, we heard increased calls for more transparency, increased calls for accountability, ability to move faster. And so we adapted PCEF and created the climate investment plan as our vehicle for moving forward with it. And with that, our first strategic programs. This is where we began scaling sfs impact. This is where we introduce programmatic investments in partnership with government, nonprofits and private entities. We enabled coordination across these sectors better leveraging institutional capacity. And examples of this work include things like our transportation wallet for all that we support with PBOT, the Portland e-bike rebate program and our tree canopy program, and some of our earlier work such as cooling Portland and so many others that we'll chat about today. And our last iteration of change came with the collaborative for climate action funding opportunity that we awarded last December. And so even with this, we've been driving even larger collective impact. And this is where we brought forward more collaborative investments to advance greater equity, climate impact and long term resilience. Which brings us to our climate investment plan. Now, this is our five year roadmap for our community climate investments, our strategic program allocations, our outcomes, our goals that advance climate action, equity and resilience across the city. It is our document that we that is our agreement ultimately between the council and the public and our committee. It's the core guiding document. It establishes transparency, clarity and accountability for how funds are deployed, providing a structure for the piece of committee, council and the public. Now the plan is organized by funding areas, which I'll talk about in the next slide, as well as by its two main funding pathways strategic programs as well as community grants. Now, the cip is updated annually to ensure that investments remain responsive to community priorities, that it's aligned with program performance and ultimately accountable to results. Each update is developed by the pcf committee with support from staff, and ultimately recommended by the committee for council's review and consideration. Now these are our seven funding areas energy efficiency, renewable energy, Green infrastructure, transportation, decarbonization, regenerative agriculture, capacity building, climate, jobs, workforce and contractor development, and a catchall or other greenhouse gas emissions reducing projects. And so in each of these, we tie this back to ultimately, the focus of the work is ultimately about those that are most impacted by climate change and at the heart of our solutions. And so in the next slides here shortly, we'll talk about what some examples are of programs and projects that fall within these funding areas. But before that, I'm going to talk a little bit about the roles of the PCEF committee as well as the city council, and that's important. Just as we think about the action that we're going to bring before you all, ideally in January of next year. So the committee's responsibilities are ultimately to adopt the methodologies to measure, track and report the effectiveness of the program, adopt our workforce and contractor equity plan. They're also tasked with making recommendations to you all. So the recommendations on the climate investment plan, on amendments to the plan, as well as changes to the pcf code, it's important to note that as part of our overall our overhaul, the pcf committee does not recommend individual grant awards. They are focused on the climate investment plan that is their primary vehicle, and that their responsibility ultimately is to ensure community voice, equity and accountability are guiding the program's direction. Now for council, you all are key deciders in and of the climate investment plan. Amendments to the plan, any changes to the city code, as well as authorizing our annual budget and program actions consistent with the adopted climate investment plan. Okay, in this next set of slides, we'll talk about the contents of the climate investment plan. Before we talk about the review process itself. So here, I just want to give the broad timeline and overarching view of how we work with the climate investment plan. First, it lays out a five year implementation horizon, providing structure and predictability for the program and how we invest in climate and community outcomes. The plan was adopted by city council September 2023 and adopted in December 2024, and we update the plan annually to make sure funding levels and program design stay right sized are responsive to program performance, community needs, and available resources. Generally, we expect major new initiatives and program expansions in the next five year climate investment plan building ultimately on what we've learned in this cycle, our evaluations and lessons learned from current programs will directly inform how we design and prioritize future programing. And just to set your sights, planning for the next cip will begin in earnest in the next two years to ensure a smooth transition and continuity of investment between the current climate investment plan, which goes to June 2030, June 30th, 2029 and the next one. So we'll certainly begin a good bit earlier to make sure we've got that good runway. So programs know where we're going. All right. Now these are our various programs by funding. And this just gives you a real snapshot of what you can see. And what you see here is we, generally speaking, have community grant investments in every single one of our funding areas, as well as strategic programs across those funding areas. Of those strategic programs. Some of those are administered directly by the PCEF program, where we do so via contracts, where we do so maybe directly via our staff, and some are administered by city bureaus. And in the coming slides, I will provide examples of each. But just to highlight a couple, as you see, if you look at, for instance, transportation, decarbonization, we both have community grants allocations as well as strategic programs, two of which are administered by our staff directly, six of which are administered by city bureaus that we provide oversight to. Okay. And really importantly, and this is something that we've learned we need to do a better job of communicating, is that ultimately, our programs move through many different stages and timelines depending on the project type and level of complexity. Some of our capital projects, such as streetcar acquisitions or major facility upgrades, often span 2 to 5 years from conception to completion. Our program investments vary, some build on existing work and oftentimes have been able to scale quickly. That's where you'll see some of our early actions moving forward, while others represent entirely new initiatives that take time to design and stand up. So some of those new in times community service programs, at times they take 24 months going through the, you know, the design, the RFP contracting process, the program development, and ultimately the launch. Across all those efforts, we remain committed to intentional design, authentic community partnership, and ultimately long term impact to ensure our programs are built to last and deliver meaningful results. In this visual here, what you see is an overall breakdown of the flow of our funding across those funding areas. And so what you see is our renewable energy and energy efficiency portfolio is our largest, receiving roughly about 51% of the funding across this five year climate investment plan, followed by transportation, transportation, decarbonization and Green infrastructure and so forth for the others. Now, in the next slides, I'm going to go through each of our funding areas and give you all a sense for the programs themselves, as well as just the types of projects we see in there. So in our energy efficiency renewable energy portfolio, that's where we the examples of projects, you see us working on solar panels, upgrading, installation, whether in commercial buildings or homes, lighting, weatherizing homes. This really this includes about $156 million allocation for our community grants. That's something we administer annually. We'll talk a little bit about later, as well as several strategic programs, a handful of which I've listed here, the first of which is our clean energy and new multifamily affordable housing. This is about a $63 million program administered by the housing bureau. There's our energy friendly homes program. We're currently in the soft launch of that program. $140 million program administered by us directly through our contractor. We've got our b grant program. This is our building energy efficiency grant program. That's a $25 million program administered by prosper Portland. And they just initiated their full launch earlier this month and have about I want to say 86 applicants. That's 20 and that's administered by prosper Portland. And another example here is our energy friendly public schools program, which cumulative accounting for a couple of words, is about $120 million administered by us. Then you move into transportation decarbonization. A lot of this is focused on fuel switching, converting our fuel, our vehicle stock from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, as well as supporting e-bike programs and promoting active transportation. This includes a community grant allocation, which again we administer annually about $59 million and then about half a dozen or so programs. One of our programs, which just did its early launch with pcc students, a pilot. The pilot launch is our e-bike rebate program. That's a $20 million program. We got our $25 million equitable clean transportation access program. This is the transportation wallet for all administered by PBOT. We've got investments in our bureau of fleet and facilities at the city itself to support transitioning the city's vehicle stock into evs, as well as investing in active transportation capital projects that supporting PBOT and doing bicycle pedestrian improvements, and then several awards done through our collaborative for climate action program. One focused on 82nd avenue, another on sidewalks to schools, and an additional award to the bureau of fleet and facilities. So that's just a subset of some of the awards in that funding area. And then we've got Green infrastructure. We've got our $8 million community grant allocation. And here much of the substantive work is certainly happening with city bureaus, starting with Portland parks and recreation. Focus on equitable tree canopy, as well as some of our street tree protection and care programs, as well as the work with bureau of environmental services. Regenerative agriculture. The bulk of the work here happens in our community grant program. Again, this is focused on growing local food, helping build community relationships, and ultimately building that social fabric of community together over food and restoring soils and building soil carbon quality that way. So we've got a $24 million community grant allocation, and then a one strategic program focused on increasing access to urban urban farming opportunities. I've got a couple more slides here on these before I talk in aggregate about our community grant program. Now, the next here is our climate jobs workforce development funding area. This is focused on supporting pre-apprenticeship programs, providing training in things like solar installation, as well as training up our contractors so they can pivot and expand their scope of services to offer things related to climate action. We've got about 41 million that's here that's focused on delivering this work through our community grants program, and then about 7 million additional allocation for youth climate exposure work. So really upstream work to make sure youth are aware of these job opportunities. And then what we actually have sub allocations. So recognizing that workforce development is really integral to all of our programs. You have sub allocations as part of some of the other programs in the other funding areas. And then we have our capacity building work. Just recognizing that doing this work for the duration, the scale and the growth that we're going to need to accomplish that, it takes all of us and certainly means building the capacity of our organizations so they can show up and do this work effectively. We do our mini grants. Work happens within this. These are quarterly funding opportunities that are responsive to community needs, as well as strategic program ten, which is building community based organizations internal capacity. And that's administered directly by us. Which brings us to our community grants program. So what I just shared with you is an organization of our work across our different funding areas. And each of those funding areas have work that they fund annually through our community grants. So these are our annual funding cycles that we do on an annual basis. And to date, we've awarded about 220 million to over 180 projects. This also accounts for our grants program, which I spoke to briefly. And I want to acknowledge we are in our current cycle, which is planning to award up to 67 million in awards, and we should be getting there later this fall in our mini grant in our community grants program. We'll acknowledge each year we've got as part of this cip, three additional funding rounds going all the way through June 30th, 2029. Now, the overview and purpose of our community grants is to support community led projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and advance economic, social and climate justice. We support an eligible organizations that fit within that are federally designated nonprofit organizations. Projects must be within the city of Portland or support the the workforce that that live within the the metropolitan statistical area. And across that five year span, we're going to be funding about 300 million into community grants. And I gave you some of those values of how much within each of those different funding areas just earlier in the slides. Now, the current community grant cycle that we're in, which, as I noted earlier, is going to award about 67 million. We're right now doing the final portfolio balancing. But as you see here, it opened in March 20th of this year, closed at towards the end of may. And we've been going through the evaluation review of that process through that time with the expectation of getting awards this fall. And we will begin that clock, turn that right back around and begin that again in March, February and March of 2026. Same thing again February, March of 2027. Same thing again February, March of 2028. So just want to acknowledge that that is an annual cycle. And that's why these next slides are really important within those community grants. We support both planning grants. So to do assessments for folks to really tease out, evaluate, do energy audits of their of their projects, and then we support implementation grants to actually implement the projects themselves. Again, these fall across all of our funding areas for community grants. One important note is that community grants that we award today can go up to five years. And so that's just important in terms of really internalizing the timeline these projects take. And this is the last slide on community grants. It just gives you an overview since around the process itself. So really at a high level there's the you know, once we do a tremendous amount of work in that two month period where we open up our applications and providing technical assistance, doing a whole host of workshops, doing bringing folks together so they can collaborate on projects. And then once the application period closes, we begin the application review. That includes eligibility screening, technical review, financial review and application vetting. And then we move into the scoring. And that that's where we bring together our scoring panels. And ultimately we do that through a set of scoring criteria that are published for public comment before the grant cycle goes out. And it's based on a range of criteria that are that encompass all attributes of a project we want to see be successful. And then we we bring folks together to apply the scoring panel via scoring panels, scoring criteria via scoring panels, which represent diverse folks that are trained in our anti-bias training, that understand our work, understand our core portfolio work, and have have experience in the subject area that that they're going to be evaluating the image to the right of the screen shows just a little bit of the metrics that go into each of those phases. The eligibility screening. This year, we had about 216 applications in that initial phase. That involves about 650 hours of review, which included two staff members as well as subject matter experts per application. We moved into the financial review. That's where the folks that moved on from eligibility to the financial review. We had about 204 applications, three references per application, 300 hours of reviewing and vetting applicants and ultimately to the scoring panels, where we had about 189 applications that were scored across 19 panels, three members per panel, 20 external folks, 21 staff reviewers, and encompassing about a little over 1100 hours of review. And that is what goes into ultimately developing the portfolios that that we will bring to conclusion here later this fall. And so with that, I think the next set of slides really is to turn it over to my colleague james, to walk you all through. Now sort of you've got a sense of the baseline of what sits within climate investment plan, how we ultimately move that forward each year. And now we're going to talk about the annual review process, which important to note that this is our first time doing this annual review process. We've worked with the committee to acknowledge we're going to learn a lot, we're going to tweak a lot, we're going to adjust, but that we want to develop ultimately something that is iterable. Recognizing that this is something that we've got to figure out how to tighten up, because we do it every year until we get to really the redo of the climate investment plan wholesale. Okay, james. All right.
18 Thank you, sam. And co-chairs Novick and Morillo. Good to be with you today. And members of the committee. My name is james valdez and I work on this program as a strategic partnerships and policy manager. And yeah, sam mentioned I'm going to go through and talk about the review process and the framework that has been established to evaluate the climate investment plan and to make annual process of recommendations that then would come to you as council. Go ahead. Next slide. So this slide you've already seen, but just to reground us in the work ahead and where we are, we're really still in the beginning of the five year implementation of the climate investment plan. We've had one full fiscal year of of that implementation. And so the there has been a subcommittee that has met over the last few months to evaluate and bring forward this process for making amendments to the climate investment plan, consisting of three of the PCEF committee members. And over many meetings over the last few months, we are we've made progress now and are in the public comment phase, and we'll talk about where where we're at here. The intent of this presentation today is really to provide an overview of the process. And then next week there'll be more details about the actual content of the climate investment plan draft amendment that the committee has has proposed at this point. So go ahead and go next slide. So this is the overall framework that the subcommittee has implemented. And essentially the framework that that is expected moving forward. As we annually look at an amendment to the climate investment plan. So first, the the subcommittee started with looking at an assessment of the strategic programs in all of the work within PCEF, as sam mentioned, and as you've heard here, there's a lot of different elements and strategic programs in different phases of implementation. And so it was an opportunity to for them to review the status of those programs and to understand the implementation pathway of each one. Then the second step was their review of projected revenue in, in in the clean energy surcharge that funds Portland clean energy fund, as well as the budget and expenditures that have been made in the past fiscal year. Then the third step is the subcommittee evaluated a smaller subset of programs to evaluate the performance based on different metrics and goals within each strategic program, and really focusing on those where there was robust information available. Then the subcommittee develops a recommendation of the changes that are recommended in the cip to be able to optimize the impact and align resources and ensure that there's there's alignment between goals and the programs and the cip. And that brings us to where we are today. All that work of those first four steps have happened over the last few months, and the subcommittee put out for public comment on the 20th. Just on Monday, a draft of the the recommendation documents both a summary document providing an overview of the changes recommended as well as a red line. And so that is currently out for public comment right now. And the purpose of that is to really put that out to the public, get feedback and understand the impacts of the proposed changes as we move to the next phase, which would be then going back to the full committee for recommendation. Go ahead and go to the next slide. So the overall context here in where we're at in in the climate investment plan update, is that there really are many programs that are still ramping up, both within bureaus as well as the work in the strategic programs that are externally administered through rfps. The other reality and space we're working in is that the clean energy surcharge is not projecting any additional revenue over the five year period of the climate investment plan. In the review of different strategic programs, the subcommittee really focused their review of funding on programs or elements that were close to fulfilling their goals and their full allocation of funding, because that's where there was both the most amount of data and information, as well as potential needs. And so the next slide is just a very, very big picture overview of where where different programs are of the 37 strategic programs in the climate investment plan, and the majority are implemented, there's 22 active and implemented programs, both through city bureaus. Some of this work was already existing and was brought into PCEF. Some of it is new work that has been launched. We have three programs that are beginning implementation. Those include the e-bike rebate program that sam mentioned, as well as the energy friendly homes program, as well as the business energy efficiency program. Then there's nine programs that are in development and still kind of in development processes. There's two programs that are in early design that are are launching but not fully, fully launched yet. There's two programs that are not yet started, and then there's three programs that have effectively completed all of their goals and scope and are are effectively done. And so that's the big picture overview of where different programs are within the climate investment plan and where we really started our review with, with the with the subcommittee. Then I'll pass it back to sam to talk about the process of what's next.
19 And this is our last slide. So as james said, we started we've got the committee process. So public comment is currently open. The PCEF committee will complete its review and make recommendations on the annual cip update in mid December, so that we're targeting coming before you all in January, ideally, council engagement. City council ideally is going to be you know, fingers crossed we're going to begin engaging with the update content from mid December through January. This engagement will focus on understanding the subcommittees, ultimately their recommended adjustments. And then we're acknowledging and we recognize that given our past experience, we are beginning the initial discussions on teeing up a council focused process, a secondary process that's structured to better capture council priorities and input ahead of the budget, recognizing that the process we are working on now originates with the PCEF committee. So that's that's really it here.
20 Sam, can I just build on one thing you just said, which is that because there's not new revenue projected and because so many programs are in that start up phase, this year's amendment process, we really have focused on what I would say is fairly technical things that are coming from bureaus, things that are coming from staff, things that are coming from the committee through that analysis that you walked us through. So there's not big moves being made in this first iteration of this amendment process. It's it's fairly small scale adjustments based on our experience so far, we're not yet in the place where we can say, well, this program is really spectacularly succeeding, and this one is failing, which, as we get further along in the five year time frame, I would imagine that the amendments can be larger in scale as we start to learn those lessons.
21 I think if I can even just add on director instruments, we know that by next, by next fall, when we've got two years of activity clearly under our belt, that where we've looked at two years of audited financials or not audited financials, but two years of financials, we will at that point have a better gauge of where the overspend, the underspend and where folks are and just their trajectory in terms of getting to year five and being able to make better judgments. But I think that's, that's that's the that's the primary sort of motivation here in keeping and keeping the focus that we have on the cip amendment process.
22 Having having said that, we know you all have ideas. And so the we want to do is start engaging with those ideas in this upcoming budget cycle, to start understanding that, start mapping out what that might look like, and then start figuring out what resources may be available by the time we get to next fall.
23 Any questions? Thoughts? Yeah.
24 That was a lot.
25 Thank you. That was a lot of information. I think we all have questions.
26 And next week there will be more.
27 Yeah I think you alluded to it. But next week we will have a few additional slides next week that have some more numbers in them that are a little thicker.
28 So I thank you, chair. I'll go ahead and get us started I guess. First of all, thank you for that report. I think a lot of us need to keep understanding the decisions that were made about locking up. Basically, we locked up majority of the funds for long term commitments. Now, I get to say, as a former head of a nonprofit, getting a large investment that goes beyond three years, up to five years with a high performing nonprofit that is that has the infrastructure to receive such a large investment can have a lot of impact. And so I did worry that we were giving some investments that were pretty large size to nonprofits that might not have the infrastructure capacity. And I get to say that story because I inherited a nonprofit that took a really large grant, and they weren't set up to manage that much money. And so I know this is hard for people to understand. It's not intuitive, but it put the organization into a really bad deficit. Does that make any sense to anyone? And if not, then we need to have a longer conversation. Sam, you understand that?
29 Councilor Novick. Absolutely. It's something we very well understand.
30 I guess we're being. Yeah. So anyway, you said Novick, but.
31 Okay.
32 I'll take that as a compliment.
33 For some reason, I spent years between 2013 and 2016 being mistaken for nick fish. So.
34 I apologize. I'm not touching that.
35 So I will go back to this statement. It's coming. I'm really just trying to wake up here. It's been a week already. My point is this when you are making those decisions, did you have a criteria that looked at that and what was that dialog like with those nonprofits and what maybe this is better? What percentage of the annual operating funds say an organization had an operation? Funds of a million. What percentage could we give annually to that organization? Because when I see gifts going to a tiny nonprofit that are much larger than their annual operations and they don't have financial infrastructure set up, I've seen the philanthropic community make this mistake. Like when gates was getting started, they learned from this. We were a guinea pig of that at the school's foundation. It's fun to tell them that they made their mistakes, too. And I just need to understand this better.
36 Thank you, councilor Ryan.
37 I can go.
38 Into the weeds on this one.
39 No, it's a it's a wonderful question. For that reason, I asked my colleague here, our interim deputy program manager, to just share on this because we have, as you know, over the years, revised our essentially our review process, our vetting process to really get in each year has been an evolution. And so I'd love to just turn it over to angela to speak a little bit about that.
40 Great. Good morning everybody. My name is angela. I she her pronouns. So a couple of things. Every single application goes through a pretty thorough financial assessment. So we have financial staff that are subject matter experts that look at the past three years of financial information for every single organization. And it's pretty thorough that you saw there was a slide there on 300 plus hours that went into that stage. So we look at the organizational financials. We come there's a set of criteria that we look at. We flag things that are of of concern. We use that information as part of that final selection process. If there is something that is majorly of concern, we will, you know, dig in and look into it. That information also goes into us being able to do what we call stage gating. So if an organization is getting a substantially larger fund funding amount than maybe they've handled in the past, we have mechanisms that we put into place inside of their scope to ensure that there are checkpoints, that that funding is going well and that things aren't really going off the rails. So that means that after, you know, six months of funding, there's a stage, a pause where we kind of do an assessment of how that project is going before we release additional funds. That's some of the mechanisms that we can put into place. If an award is made where there is some of those, you know, financial risks flagged. I also just want to bring up that the sb ten, the capacity building for. Community based organizations, that strategic program also looks to kind of get at some of those concerns that you have and be able to make some of the investments into the financial management and kind of that underlying foundation of some of the organizations that are doing climate work to make sure that they're set up for success when the funding does come. So we also have a lot of other resources. We have technical support that we are able to provide. We're bringing on additional contractors that are able to provide some of that support. So your concerns are very much known inside of our program, and we look at it pretty closely and try to make sure that not only are we set up for success as grant makers, but that the organizations are able, like you said, to handle it and aren't crushed under an award that's too big. The final point that I'll make is that some of our awards are for capital projects, and so it looks like a very large award, but it's going towards construction. So the organization, while they're programing budget might look different if we're if we're doing a major investment into construction, it'll look outsized on paper. But oftentimes it makes sense if they have a really robust team that they're bringing on to do that work.
41 So that was helpful. Thank you. So with the investments that go say to the city where we have infrastructure, that's never been a concern in some of the larger nonprofits that have that infrastructure where you have board members with that sophistication, I hope that they're at the table where they are audited by a professional, and they have these kind of conversations. That's not my concern, though. It's hard on them as well. It's it's when we do a larger gift to a growing organization. And so I want that to happen, but I don't want them to go into deficit like I experienced in my career when I was hired. And they didn't realize how big it was, and it was all connected to taking a really large grant and not having the chops to know how to manage that. And so, again, it's not intuitive to activists or nonprofits. It just sounds like, oh, money's great money, but it's not always great if you can't, if you can't implement it and actually get impact. So I think my question then that I didn't get answered, and I don't know if I asked the question specifically. So let me try again. Is there a formula for example, there's I know in PCEF or no, sorry. That's what this is in the children's levy, which you guys I know have been working together. And I appreciate that because I do think that's the best practice we have in our city. And you've caught up with it quickly. Thank you. Sam, is it can only be a certain percentage of the annual operations amount. Is that a criteria that we have in place?
42 It's it's a it's a screen.
43 So does that mean.
44 It's a screening criteria. So what it means is and a good example let's just say is and I don't know the exact threshold. So we might have to we might have to phone it in or follow back up on the actual threshold. We do have thresholds where if a grant request amount is over, let's say x amount of or is over some percentage of the annual budget, then we do do additional level of review. The example is it sends you on different paths. And this is where because all of our work isn't programing it's programing and capital. So if it's capital project.
45 Is that more of a pass through type.
46 Here's an example. For instance, you have a nonprofit right now that whose annual budget may be $3 million a year. However, they've got a capital project that is going to be about $5 million. So it well exceeds the threshold. It will it will trip our threshold up. But that capital project is because they're doing a once in a generation upgrade of their of their campus, of their building. And so in that case.
47 Sam, is that over three years is over five years.
48 The funding. Yeah. Because it's a capital project. Yes. It's going to be over multiple years, but it's generally.
49 Like a key point. That's why I.
50 Want to. Yeah. Right. Right, right. It generally it generally the the drawdown on those resources tends to happen in a finite period. There's oftentimes because there's early planning then there's a drawdown once the construction begins. And so our review in those instances is do they have the right contractors on the on board. Do they have the right folks on board that understand how to manage that project? So it's not a hard it's not a hard. No. It gets us into that evaluation of what is the project. And do they have the right mitigation measures in place to manage it. Because whereas if you have that kind of if you have that kind of funding coming in and it's an organization that's doing programing, that's a different concern because this may swamp the entire budget, because it's you. That distinction between programing and capital projects, you want to make sure that that's that's that's an important distinction in a differentiation between the way we work because we fund both of those, that that would be a major flag if it was programing. If it's a capital project, it can be managed well.
51 You're helping me split hairs here. So there's capital for your own organization like say place bound. And then there's your a player that impacts capital by distribution which is and I think pass through gets used as a loose term. It's very sophisticated and difficult to do pass through work. That's a different type of lens than if you're building. Because when you're building something in your place, yes, that also increases your operations. Yes, quite a bit. After the completion of the capital campaign, many nonprofits have gone under because of that as well. City knows about deferred maintenance now. And so these things are just so nuanced. And so this is such a large, sophisticated investment that as a city councilor, I think I have to wear this hat now and then and just grill in to the fidelity of how we're managing these dollars, because it's really big. And I don't think the city has ever taken on anything like this before. Sophisticated foundations. I hope you're having good conversations with them. They've made mistakes in this arena. And so we entered into being a philanthropic, sophisticated entity within the city of Portland. It's not really our culture. So I think it's important for us to continue to have this type of transparent dialog about how challenging this is to do. I think the other thing, and I realize as a part of the council that that helped make these decisions. I didn't realize when things were moving so fast that it locked up so much of the investment for such a long period of time. What percentage of the investments are locked in to these commitments and bearing they don't go south quickly for up to the next five up to 2029, is that correct?
52 So.
53 So so tell me more about when there will be another opportunity. Clearly, there's a lot of need in the enterprise. It's doing climate change work that has the infrastructure to actually have impact. Keyword I wasn't hearing enough about impact and metrics, but I'm sure there's more to hear about that. So how locked up is this? I think that you're going to have people wanting to know that increasingly, as we have challenges with balancing our budget.
54 I think there are different degrees. Right? I think what I want to acknowledge is that what we've committed to in this is there's programing that certainly all the way going all the way out to 2029, whether that's tree planting, whether that's purchasing electric vehicles for city fleet, that work is happening all the way through 2029 every year. It has to be budgeted now. So there's different levels. And then so there's sort of the annual budgeting process and commitments we've made. So what in a sense when you say locked up what this what the cip does more than anything, it gives clarity. It gives a trajectory for folks to take action, to make investments, to know that this is the general path I'm headed on. Yet you all, as council, still have to take those actions each year to budget those resources.
55 It's not technically locked up until you budgeted each year. And and of the 1.5 1.6 billion that is projected for the five year period, we we don't have all that money yet. That's future revenue, right? So all the cip is, is providing programmatic intent. And then which we hope to fine tune each year. But then once you get beyond that, there's these progressive stages of of more certainty. There's some programs, as sam said on the slide, maybe go back to the slide about where we are in the different stages of projects. The some projects are done, which means the money is spent. Some projects are have been contracted out so that money's essentially locked up. It's under contract with a private entity or a grant agreement. And then there's stuff that you've budgeted annually already to the bureaus. But there's there's that large chunk. That is all we use. The term allocated, it means that we're planning to put money there. But it's not it's not under contract yet.
56 Okay. And so there is opportunity to move dollars as needed in an annual review process.
57 Yeah. Once we understand the spending rate on these programs, I mean, because we've allocated everything, you know, moving money around involves unpromising it from someone and promising it to someone else. And, and but as we get into next year, we may have a better understanding of our certain programs under spending at a rate that is going to free up other money or are certain programs maybe not succeeding. So we should reduce their allocation or other programs are are spectacularly succeeding and we should increase their allocation. Those are the kind of decisions we're going to start to see. And so you will you will see. You will get to make decisions there. And then the the other important point sam mentioned already is that we've got chunks of money for the annual community grants, which are by no means locked up. There's three more cycles of those to happen.
58 I was looking at the large ones that you were talking about, and I'm, I'm, I'm asking questions and listening to understand. I don't have an agenda at this moment. I just know that I listen to people that I serve with. I listen to the community, and my job is to represent what I'm hearing. And so I think this type of clarity is going to be so important that we really understand as much as we can about the actual aggregate numbers that we're looking at. And I just wanted to give you that at this moment. I'll get out of the way. I'm sure I'll be back. This is really complicated and I'm glad. Thank you, chair, for lining this up. So we have a chance to digest it before it comes to the whole council.
59 Yeah. I can't resist the urge to jump in on this thing. And I appreciate councilor Ryan talking about how, as a councilor, the process moved so fast that he didn't feel like, you know, he was he didn't know how much he was locking up. I mean, would it be fair to say that? I mean, I mean, theoretically the council could jump in and demand a completely complete revision of the five year plan and say, we're going to spend it all on transportation and we're going to stop spending it on energy efficiency, right? I mean, theoretically, the council could do that.
60 We co-chair Novick. Yes. I mean, we would get into an exercise of communicating to you what has been already contracted, what has been in terms encumbered. So we'd parse that out and say, okay, now these are the resources that have not been contracted, not been encumbered. So and we're going to break that down more next week. But yes, we would be we'd have to get in that exercise. But yes, the simple answer to your question is yes. It's a question of how much of that. Yeah.
61 It's true. I, I was looking at the presentation last night and it actually, I think made a lot more sense when you were presenting it in person, but in I mean, what I think we can say is council adopted an investment plan which said the following things. It said, here's the categories of programs. Energy efficiency, workforce, transportation, etc. And it decided how much money to give to each of those programs. Is that right?
62 Correct.
63 Within those programs there were they decided to allocate money to itself, the city through various bureaus. And I do think it would be really useful to have one slide here that says, here's how much of the 900 million or whatever it is, is going to the city. You can sort of add it up, but I think that's an important thing. Another thing that we could say is, here's a chunk of here's chunks of money that we're committing to other governments, like the, the, the I mean, you've got it again in the specific but like schools 120 million TriMet 55 million.
64 I think I might have a slide that looks like that.
65 Oh, okay.
66 Is in the.
67 Back okay. Yeah. Sorry. Somehow I did not see that. But yeah. No, we.
68 Didn't show that. That was a back pocket slide.
69 Oh, really? Well, I think it's really useful. And so I think that one, one thing that we might want to say is if council wants to make changes then it either we're going to have to take money away from ourselves. From the city announced that we're not going to give the schools the money that we told them we'd give, and that's we're not going to give TriMet the amount of money that we give, we said we'd give and or reduce the amount of community grants that we're going to give. Is that correct? Okay. Do you mind if I just. I think I've got like ten minutes worth of things to spew on and then I'll defer to my colleagues. But one question, as you know, that comes up is why are we sitting at a bunch of money? And you've said that there's programs that are, you know, ramping up, and we wouldn't expect to spend 20% of the money in the first year. And you gave a couple of good examples of that, like the street streetcars. I think that would be useful to have, like several other examples of that. And I think, frankly, for council will be useful for people to know that it's not just the non-profits it's true of, it's the governments, like, you know, for the schools, maybe for the schools. We are spending $25 million a year immediately. But if we're not, I think it's useful to say even the schools, we're only spending x amount the first year, more the next year. By the way. Actually, I have a question to that with the schools. Are we in fact just giving them the money up front, or do they have to ramp up to.
70 There's a stage where we ask them to develop plans so they get a certain amount of resources for planning, for doing their energy audits, their assessments. They have to give us their scopes and then we can we're there's some fine tuning that's happening where we can advance them the resources for doing those improvements. And so but to answer your question, schools are not spending 20% of their resources in year one. As you know, they have a long lead time to build up and plan and then do their work in those summer periods.
71 I think that would be useful to say. And frankly, I'm thinking very specifically of councilor Zimmerman, who has made the statement that we should that we should spend money every year as it comes in and we do that in all the rest of government. Why aren't we doing it here? So, frankly, simply for the benefit of councilor Zimmerman? It's useful, I think, to have several examples, including government examples of why we're not we're not doing that. Another. Thing that I think might be useful is periodically to point out which chunks of money are tied back to language in the ballot measure, like when you say, you know, workforce development, maybe you have a reference to this is in the ballot measure. When you say regenerative agriculture, that's in the ballot measure too. So it's not things that we randomly decided to do. It's things that ballot measure told us to spend money on. Let's see. And then for the you had one line saying that for some of the community grants, it takes 24 months to ramp up. And there I think would be it would be helpful to have an example. I mean, just like we have an example for the schools, like here's a community grant, here's why, here's a specific community grant, and why we wouldn't expect them to spend 20% in the first year. So I'm just and I confess, I'm probably going to be emailing you guys over the next week about other, like, random suggestions as to what may to have in front of the full council, but those are the just the things that have occurred to me initially.
72 Co-chair Novick I think that's a wonderful idea, conceptualizing the scope and scale. And because our breadth is so wide, it's oftentimes challenging, but it's helpful, and I appreciate just hearing where you think it's valuable to really understand the examples, because as you know, doing something like streetcar, where we invest in it now but may not get those streetcars for three years because they've got to be made somewhere in europe and brought over here. It's a it's a really important thing. And yet we have to make the commitment and the deposit on those resources on that now. So that's, so that's so we can articulate those examples next week.
73 Oh I remember one other thing that I think is probably worth talking about next week is the mayor suddenly jumped up and said, I'm going to take $15 million out of PCEF to spend converting office buildings to residential. And so to me, I think a lot of people's reaction to that might be, hey, the mayor can do that. There must be lots of money around that we can randomly seize. So, I mean, I think it would be useful to like say, okay, that comes from a pot of money. That council decided how much money would be in that pot. And here's why. It hasn't all been allocated yet. What is the answer to that, by the way, why was there 15 million? Why does the mayor think there's $15 million just sitting there that hasn't been allocated yet?
74 It's a wonderful question. So I'll start just simply we have we have one of our strategic programs, and we've discussed this before in front of this body was focused on providing access to capital. It was arguably and admittedly, they're programs that we have that are very prescriptive within the climate investment plan. This was one of the programs that was not it was always intended to be complementary to the other funding areas. And so we had an earnest, already engaged in pilot discussions to understand the carbon benefits of office to residential with prosper Portland prior to the mayor's announcement. And so when when I know that desire came up, there was a natural place and that the rest of that funding hadn't automatically been spoken for. So that's, that's that's the natural progression of how we found ourselves in that place.
75 And is it accurate to say that access to capital is kind of unusual in how prescriptive it is?
76 That's that's if you look at the rest of the city compared to the rest of the climate investment plan. Correct? I would say yes.
77 I think that if that comes up, that might be important to say, like this is it's not like the the mayor could jump up and do that with as easily with the other categories because this is less prescriptive. Okay. Now I'll shut up and let my colleagues take over.
78 Correct me if I'm wrong, sam, but we are recommending some text changes to that program description for some of these reasons to clarify.
79 Up. I'm sorry, I was councilor Avalos.
80 All right. Hello. Thank you for being here this morning. Thank you to the pcf team and the community members who continue to engage deeply in this work. You know, I think this annual review is not just about fine tuning these programs and adjusting outcomes, but it's also about just making sure that we're living up to the promise that voters that we made to voters when we implemented PCEF and when they passed it, I think ultimately climate action and community justice go hand in hand. And I think that's shown in the way that you've outlined your strategic priorities and how you've allocated the cip. I, as somebody who, you know, was part of that process with you all. I have a couple of thoughts, a couple of questions. But to respond to a couple of things that have happened so far in the discussion. One, I just feel like I really hope that between this conversation and the one that we have at council, we can finally get to a baseline of understanding, because I just feel like you guys come here and answer the same questions over and over again, and I don't know how else to get that baseline so that we're starting from a place of understanding the fundamentals of what the cip does. Why do we have contracts that are more than five years? Why do we have investments? What are these? How are these dollars allocated? I guess I'm just feeling a little bit like we continue to ask you all for questions that you've already answered. And that to me creates more confusion. And I'm going to ask my colleagues to lean in to let's figure out what our baseline is. And if we don't have a baseline, let's get to it. Because if we continue to enter these conversations in particular re asking these questions, I think we're going to open up this process in a way that I personally would not like to see. I think that the cip was designed in a way to create stability, not just for the city, but for the programs that are receiving these dollars. It's created to have a vision that we can enact on understanding that that vision takes time to implement nothing, especially in the realm of capital projects and these kinds of energy investments can be accomplished in short windows of time, certainly not within elected office windows of time. And I think that's the constant struggle that you guys face, that you have this big shiny pot of money that everybody seems to create different ideas of what it's been used for or why it's there. And I find that frustrating because I think for the community that has put a lot of time and heart and energy into creating these investments, being really strategic about them. You all as a program, being really intentional about how you're scaling up the dollars, how you're ensuring that especially the smaller nonprofits have access to these dollars, because that's the whole point, actually, of PCEF if we do not invest the time into the capacity building, into ensuring that groups have the infrastructure to implement this vision, then we're just going to continue to feed into the inequities that have are the reason that drove people to put this PCEF on the ballot in the first place, because investments were not coming to our communities, they weren't coming to the organizations that were on the ground that understood the needs more keenly. And those dollars have continued to be put into places that don't need them and aren't at high risk of climate disaster. As the communities that lead in this particular space. I think ultimately, as we approach this annual review, I think like anything else, just like we had conversations in the in our work session yesterday about the, the, the tao, right. Anything that is a plan that has already been decided, has been voted on, but requires some kind of adjustments or tweaks. We need to be super intentional about how we go about that so that we're not misaligning the vision at a time where, again, those programs depend on the stability and the promise that the cip delivers for them. So on that note, as the subcommittee and the staff are moving through this annual review, how are we ensuring that community members are have a clear and accessible way to see and understand the proposed adjustments before they reach us? As the council, I want to ensure that anything that comes to me has been fully vetted so that I'm not debating with my colleagues about investments, that, frankly, we don't have insights on the community members that are doing them do. So how are you going to ensure that we are prepared with all of that knowledge ahead of us, having to make our final decisions?
81 Thank you, councilor Avalos, for your reflections and and thoughts on that. And just wanted to note that the public comment period provides both a high level overview of the the changes that the subcommittee has proposed and that are in draft, as well as a survey that we're, you know, working with our outreach team and has gone out to all of our listserv. And we're also encouraging, you know, that distribution throughout the community, because we do want feedback. The committee does want feedback on whether the, again, mostly small, you know, technical changes and realignment. But even those we want feedback on whether they're meeting community priorities, whether they have additional whether community members have additional input, whether the content is understandable. And so, yeah, I'm happy to share that link and survey with with you all as council and also encourage the public to, to take that survey. So in addition to the summary, there are the detailed kind of proposed red line edits as well. So trying to make information accessible. And the committee definitely wants to get that public input.
82 I appreciate that. And I definitely as I've said before, when you've come before us, please lean on us as councilors that represent districts and can be really hyper local to make sure that we're recruiting voices for that feedback, as you are, you know, reviewing and updating your programs. You know, now we've got a couple years under your belt, you've clearly got the engine going. And I can and I appreciate and want to thank you for the hard work you've done to put the infrastructure in place for this program. What are the metrics or evaluation tools that are being used to track not only the carbon reduction outcomes, which we know is the main point, right, of PCEF, but also the equity impacts over time.
83 So for every program it is different. And it's always been the challenge of how do we ultimately roll up all of these metrics in a way that communicates and tells the story around those community impacts, those those equity related impacts. And so that's something we're happy to I mean, one, I would certainly point to our dashboard, but it's certainly something we're happy to follow up in. And kind of probably it would probably be best to pick a handful of programs and say, okay, here's the transportation wallet that we administered through PBOT. This is the data we get in terms of the locations, the general household income, and the beneficiaries there on our energy friendly homes program. Here's sort of the kind of data that we get there. We've been working to streamline and make sure our data ultimately rolls up in those ways that that can tell a story. But because we've run 37 programs and then community grants, it does, it does. There's a different shape for each of our programs. And so the dashboard is the nearest place. But I want to acknowledge it's an ongoing effort to figure out how do we capture that those metrics in a better way. So it's an ongoing product. We have our dashboard currently up that you can go to. We can follow up and send a link to that, but just want to also note that it's it's something we see as very much an ongoing product of ours and work effort of ours.
84 Thank you. I've noticed a trend amongst my colleagues in the last ten months that we really yearn for district specific information. How are you all responding to that? I don't know that that ask has been made directly to you all, but I suspect that could come. So how are you all looking at what it looks like to disaggregate all of this data and information, and give a district lens into the impacts of PCEF?
85 So you're it's a wonderful question, and it sort of speaks to the previous form of government and post. And so we're making changes as we go along. This most recent round of community grants that we opened up in March, everyone had to speak to whether their projects were district focused or just the geographic nature of their projects. Obviously, some folks put projects out there that are not. They're focused on a community serving a particular community, and they're not geographically focused. So we capture that information now in our community grant cycle, we're still we still do have data in our quarterly reporting that we get from our grantees on our prior projects around where those projects are. And so we are doing that analysis to figure out where those roll up to as we get completed projects and completed information. So there it's an ongoing work effort. Whereas now on all of our future grant requests, we have that information coming in at the front end for things that happen prior to this form of government. What we're doing is getting that in the reporting and disaggregating that and essentially rolling that up by districts. I expect probably our next iteration of our dashboard to speak to more district focused investments. But so I think that's really the answer, is that as we roll out program by program, we're making sure that any new program we roll out is is capturing that data at a district level. And for prior programs. We are doing some of that back end work to translate that as we get the data in, once the work gets completed.
86 I would also add councilor Avalos that some of the work with bureaus as well. We have the opportunity to bring in the geographic information of where improvements are being made. For instance, at community centers throughout the city or in construction of new sidewalks through the sidewalks to schools program. And those, even though they're kind of segments of of improvements, they might span multiple districts, especially for some of the sidewalk and PBOT related improvements. So we're developing the data tracking to be able to break that out. When a particular road, let's say, or sidewalk spans multiple districts.
87 I'd actually say 82nd, our investments in 82nd avenue are a good example, where those span multiple districts. That spans district one. District three and district two, and where I think our our folks are ascribing most of the benefits to district three. But we know that those touch all those districts. And so those are ways where we're developing those methodologies right now.
88 One thing that I'll also add is that now that we're building it into community grants, it will be also at the project type scale. So you'll be able to see not just a dollar amount next to the district, but see what kinds of investments are happening there. So you'll be able to break it down by, you know, Green infrastructure versus energy efficiency and see it a little bit broken out.
89 Thank you. I'm really excited to see that and appreciate your efforts. My last question is, you know, again, in this new form of government and also this being kind of a newer process for the city, right? I'm wondering what you see the relationship of this process to our budget tao processes. Because ultimately, you know what you're describing these adjustments, a lot of them are like technical. They're financial, like, you know, oh, this contract had to go over, right. Just the same conversations we're having at the larger city level. But this is like a micro version of that. And I guess I worry that if we treat them too much as separate entities, then we're making different calculations and decisions about what our ultimately budget questions. So do you have any insight into a way that maybe this process, if this is going to be an ongoing annual touchpoint, that it could be maybe a part of the tao process or just be more in cohesion, because I also want the discussions to be budget focused. And again, like we're having with the tao, some of them are technical, some of them are programmer. We need to make adjustments because things change or conditions change. What's your impression of that?
90 I think that's something that we're looking actively at right now as we try, we're trying to line up the this process with the rhythm of the annual budget and in part so that we can we're aiming to do this in the fall, in part so that we can get clarity on amendments we're making before we start making all the decisions on the annual budget. And we're doing it once a year. So we're trying to stay ahead of the annual budget, essentially, but we are essentially managing it in in parallel with the tao timeline.
91 Yeah, I think the the amendments, for instance, that are going to be coming in front of you all this January, any of those amendments, should they be adopted or however that lands, is going to be taking effect January or July 1st, 2026. So it's very much intentionally designed to to line up so that we're doing the work ahead of and that that feeds into ultimately your budget process.
92 Though at the same time, I'll just highlight or note that the recommended amendments to the cip also capture elements that were already made in your the past two budget cycles that weren't yet in the climate investment plan. And so that is one of the kind of technical elements of trying to make sure that the language in the cip reflects decisions that council has already made as well.
93 So and hopefully as we move forward, we get better at doing them ahead of the budget rather than clean up afterwards.
94 Thank you so much. That's all for now.
95 Councilor Kanal.
96 Thank you chair Novick. Thanks everyone for being here. I'm going to ask a couple questions that are more big picture and then I might have a couple specific follow ups. So I think we kind of there's a the part where you explain the percentages that go to each of the different funding areas, and we kind of jumped to that. But I wanted to understand how we got to those percentages and why they are the way they are. Specifically, I'm surprised that climate jobs are only 4%.
97 Yeah, it's it's a wonderful question and it's a bit of an art. Councilor. Canal. So the there's the original ballot measure, which the original ballot measure and I've got to go back to it, but if I'm not mistaken, the original ballot measure stated 40 to 60% of the investments would go towards energy efficiency, renewable energy. It stated that 10 to 15% would go towards Green infrastructure and regenerative agriculture. It had stated sort of. The other catchall was about 5% and it actually had nothing for transportation, decarbonization. And and it actually had about 20 to 25% for workforce development. And so as we implemented the program and got underway, what we quickly realized is when a program would function at a scale of $40 million a year, and it was a grant program, 20 to 25% is going to be in the realm of 6 to $8 million a year, that for the workforce development ecosystem, you say that's that's that's that's fair. That's that's appropriate. When you when we got substantially larger that just it both not only overwhelmed the workforce and contractor development ecosystem landscape. The entities that could do the work itself, but it also just didn't line up with ultimately. And we're still doing that work and refining that in terms of how many folks we would realistically need to train both the ecosystem wide like to enter apprenticeships and apprenticeships, as well as more some of the more training that would help upskill workers getting into some of this work. And so it simply was a function of we don't want to spend so much funding that we're training people into opportunities that don't exist. And so it's a bit of striking that balance. I think there's going to be continued work to figure out, do we have that balance right now with this? But as we I would say so that's where I get to the art. There's sort of the original ballot measure where we start with, and then there's the experience and the learnings and figuring out have we, have we struck that balance. And so I think that's the question certainly will be asking as we get into the next sip, based on a lot of these lessons learned is where are we relative to that balance. But but that was and not to not to undercount like a lot of community engagement, a lot of showing people where are we going touching base, showing that over multiple iterations for folks to chime in. And there is robust feedback. I mean, I would say there's certainly certain sectors in there that feel like they should have more resources in there. And I think that's an ongoing, broader conversation that we should have. And we hope to have with you all in community as we get to the next cip.
98 So you're saying that the dollar amount, the sort of numerator of the fraction stayed the same, but it went down as a percentage because the pool of aggregate money, that sort of denominator, the fraction. Yeah. Got it. And and as someone who graduated from college in 2008, I'm very sympathetic to not training people for jobs that don't exist. So can I also ask and I want to hear your response to but I think this is related how the exact definition you're using for regenerative agriculture, because there's a lot of sort of example based definition in here, but not does that make sense? Yeah.
99 I would have to call in a favor with my colleagues to get the exact definition. I mean, I think there's a slew of practices that we identify with, regenerative agriculture. At the core of it, it is about building soil carbon. And so it is about that work that happens there. I mean, I think we've certainly had a lot of healthy debates with community members, others around things like, oh, geez. Aquaculture and other things. And so there's there's there's been a healthy debate. There's been healthy research around really to what extent that does or doesn't reduce emissions. But regenerative agriculture at its core, is about implementing a certain set of best practices. As we're farming the soil, the land, to ensure that we're building soil carbon, obviously growing healthy foods and creating healthy, healthy communities. Healthy, healthy, healthy, biodiverse environment.
100 Thanks. You look like you had something. I don't know if it was.
101 On this or. Yeah, thank you. Councilor Kanal I did want to add just one additional piece that maybe is a nuance on this chart. This really should say summary of cip investments by primary funding area because that climate jobs, workforce contract development, 4% is really the funding that is is in community grants. And that is specifically for those elements. But then there are in various strategic programs. And this was kind of on a slide further up sub allocations, where for instance, in the energy friendly homes program, there's a $3.5 million allocation for workforce and contractor development. Knowing that there's specific opportunities in those strategic programs to build jobs and to do some targeted training. And so I'd read this chart as kind of like the generalized allocations for workforce and contractor development. But then there's also specific targeted ones as well that are within the other funding areas.
102 Thanks. The other one I wanted to talk about was the organizational capacity briefing, which is that sort of right most dark purple area there. It's 1%. And one of the things that we talked about when in our briefing was that there's a less capacity in geographic areas of the city in terms of where the organizations might be based or the communities that they are primarily drawing volunteer hours from, as well as, I imagine, where they serve, I also imagine there's a need for organizations led by the communities most impacted to be supported by this work, and yet it's only 1% of the investments. So I'm curious as to how that plays out. And I understand that for the individual group, as, as councilor Ryan was putting, you know, was expressing earlier, you can't throw millions of dollars at an organization with a $10,000 budget a year and expect it to work, but in the pool, you know, across the entire city, it seemed like it might be on the lower side. So where was the 1%?
103 Yeah.
104 I'll start and I'll turn it to my colleague angela to speak more on that if she's got more to add. But the, you know, organizational capacity building is something at its core that we've always seen as central to the work that we do. And obviously that shows up in different ways. Some of it just shows up in the workshops that we do the grant writing, grant writing, training seminars that we do the, the, the whole host of engagement we do to ultimately help folks understand what is climate action projects, what does that look like, and what does it look like when communities innovate around that? So folks understand that. So I just want to acknowledge capacity building shows up in many ways. And I would say it's a core part of every one of our jobs in some form. And it originally did not exist. We did capacity building, it did not exist as a specific funding area. And that was a core point of critique. With the the audit received in early 2022. And so we carved it out when we overhauled the program in late 2022, we carved it out as an explicit funding area and defined that as a funding area so that we could say, okay, let's let's be clear about how we do it. And so we developed it. And so I would say in large part, it's new. We're figuring out how we're going to be doing it. You know, we have we have an RFP out right now to bring in consultants to support us in doing that work. And so that's there's a lot of excitement in the community. I know councilor Avalos was part of that, one of those roundtables that focused on organizational capacity building, and it's one of the areas where we expect to learn exactly how to do it, how to build these cohorts, where we help nonprofits that are, frankly, founded by really passionate, committed folks that don't necessarily understand what it means to run an organization or have that backbone. So it's it's in many ways, it's I think it's a small and large part because we want to get it right and then figure out where do we go from there? And I'll turn it to angela to see if I missed anything else on that.
105 No. That's great. I think that what, you know, looking at a slide like this, what gets missed is all of the opportunities inside of all of our investments where that capacity building is happening. So when you see organizational capacity building at that 1% allocation, that's the very specific organizational capacity building cohort program sp10 strategic program ten and our mini grants program. However, there's opportunities in all of ours and we always have that lens. I think. Councilor Avalos, you did a great job of talking about how those opportunities hadn't previously been available to those organizations. So inside of community grants, when we do fund organizations that are scaling up, we're able to provide a lot of that capacity within a community grant award that isn't necessarily representative of that 1% organizational capacity building, you know, set aside. So I think it's it's happening in a lot of different levels and a lot of different scales and actually connects back to that workforce development piece, because we see that as another element of, again, being able to bring capacity inside of all of our work.
106 Last question, and then I'll let colleagues go on this. I might have more later is where do building decarbonization efforts, where does the the $15 million that that councilor Novick mentioned? Which of these areas have they fallen under historically or currently build.
107 So office residential, we're going to have to tease that out. And that's part of I will acknowledge that's part of the studies that we're paying for to do that, because there's components of that work that focus on literally like the things you think about the operational carbon. And what I mean by that is like the energy it takes to heat the building, to cool the building. So that is a part of the investment we're making. But then there's the savings in carbon that that materialize because we're not demolishing an entire building and building up new. So we're going to figure out what that partitioning is. It's likely some combination of renewable energy and energy efficiency and other greenhouse gas reducing projects. But when we talk more traditionally, a good example is when we talk about our affordable housing projects and we do electrification that falls squarely in our renewable energy and energy efficiency portfolio. Just what you're touching on here is why. Because you mentioned the example. When we do an office residential that's a conversion. And there's multiple types of carbon savings that are at play there.
108 Sure.
109 But but if pure, when you say building decarbonization, it would fall within renewable energy and energy efficiency. Okay. Yeah.
110 For that part that makes sense.
111 For the conversion of now there's an entire thread that I think because that that does I think go back to the idea that the mayor can just do that. So can I go make a press conference and say, we're going to do like I'm trying to understand, you know, I understand he's a mayor. I'm not trying to imply anything there. But my my point is, it seems like we should know what pot of money that was supposed to be coming from.
112 But wasn't allocated like before. This mayor.
113 Let me let me let me try to. It's it it it came out of strategic. It would come out of strategic program 14. And I want to acknowledge there's work that's happening right now. And there's refinement that's going to come before you all as part of this amendment process. To clarify the language there. We've discussed that in a previous council session, but it is coming out of strategic program 14. I want to acknowledge what councilor Co-chair Novick said earlier. That was and is our most flexible sort of strategic program. It was intentionally, by design, intended to be flexible, to complement the others, because nearly everything else you see within the climate investment plan is fairly prescriptive. Or like, this is what we're going to do, these are the outcomes we're going to get. This is, you know, these are the number of homes, buildings, cars, widgets and so forth. That program was actually the one program out of the entire $1.6 billion program that was fairly flexible by design. And so that was the that was the program, ultimately, that the mayor would have leveraged to do that.
114 Thank you. Yep.
115 Thank you. That was fun. And I do think when you come to the full council, having clarity on what is flexible and what is available is going to be important. I want to finish my through line on building true capacity for nonprofits. Again, I care about this because my lived experience and I've seen multiple examples where large gifts have screwed things up. When. What's the matching request we have of them? Is there one like when a large philanthropic organization, which you are, you're in the stratosphere of like the gates foundation locally, you don't want them to become dependent on one gift that just comes from this all the time. So do you have guidelines that seek them to build other revenue streams? Why? We're also an investor.
116 It is one of our criteria that we prioritize, that they are coming in with some leverage and some match. And that is certainly the work that we do as part of our capacity building to help them diversify the income streams. It is not a strict requirement, and part of that comes really ultimately down to just there are some projects where match is entirely appropriate, expected, and there's some projects where we we may be the entirety of the. And when I say it's not for the organization, but for the project, when we are paying for an organization to do workforce development, on average, we invest anywhere from 8 to $20,000 per person that comes to workforce development program. And if that is something that is, if that trainee, for instance, is going through and doing other things that are not climate related, maybe we may expect some sort of leverage or match, but in some of those instances, we may pay for the entirety of that. That isn't to say that that organization isn't getting their other funding from work systems, from the state, from other sources, through other workforce development. But we will own the entire piece that's focused on our work.
117 Sam, I think I'm getting that. Thank you. And I think it's important for the organizations to build a base. I'm not talking about the largesse of the total aggregate. I'm talking about increasing those active donors to their organization so that they build dependency, even if it's, you know, grassroots gifts. But I find it to be a real disservice when there aren't those type of guidelines, because I've seen those organizations come and go, because I don't think those guidelines are in place. Does that make sense? Very much. Director. That's one reason that I have these perspectives.
118 Yeah. And I'll say I've been in grantmaking for, you know, over a decade now. And it's a perennial problem, right? That funding dependency that happens. So I know it's really core inside of our grantmaking. Just to give you an idea of some of the things that we're balancing. Councilor Avalos mentioned this before, there has been historical disinvestment in certain organizations, and so we are really careful to not put in place barriers that would prevent organizations that may be new and emerging from being able to access some of our funding in the right way, in the right scale, with the right, you know, scopes in place. So within our application, we do ask about leverage, and we do document that, and we do analyze that as part of the award cycle. But it isn't a hard determinant of of exclusion.
119 I'm not going into the barrier space at all. I'm going into an empowerment space. Yeah. So I just wanted to get that record because I found you going down a barrier.
120 Sorry. Yeah, that was.
121 Just not what I was asking. I was asking for why it's in place. Are we helping empower them to build a bigger base?
122 Certainly. So the the balance with that is with once folks are funded, how we are able to give them access to additional resources. And that comes back to some of that capacity building conversation that we were having and how we're able to encourage diversification, encourage understanding of what robust portfolio development looks like for an organization. Those are all of the things that we're bringing into play. So we know that we don't we don't want to bring the barriers, but by reducing the barriers, we increase risk of that happening. And so how do we address that risk is with some of that technical assistance and some of the capacity building that we're doing in the conversations. But I'll acknowledge that that is a perennial, you know, risk that that will occur. We're really trying to be mindful of it. It it will always be a competitive community. Grants will always be a competitive grant process. So there is always the possibility that someone that had been previously funded is not funded to.
123 Portland has the highest percentage of nonprofits per capita, with the lowest number of philanthropic donors. I speak truth here, so it's important for us to work with them to help build that capacity. Couldn't agree more. Had to make that point. That was not, again coming from a deficit place. It was coming from an asset building place. Thanks. I think there's confusion by many voters on this one. So I speak for them, not people that have been in the weeds. The ballot language. I don't recall all the details. I haven't brought it up in a little bit. What was in the detailed language in the ballot, like give me the details that got us to this place.
124 Not much.
125 And I don't think there was much. So I, I sometimes feel not feel I experience I remember calling really smart people saying, I don't understand what this is. And I kept drilling into it. What is this? Do I want fresh air? Do I want Green initiatives? Yes. Do I want capacity building for Portland to not just say they're the Green capital of the world, but we actually have jobs that that indicate that we actually become number one at that someday. Like give me something that could get me excited. So I just went on faith that it was a good thing, but I, I was frustrated when I voted on this. I've talked to many people that experienced that because they did not see the details, which we now hear about today. And so I need the details about why we made these decisions in the flexibility of funding decisions. It seems like a lot of people are concerned that they didn't really understand what they were. There's some buyers remorse, mostly because of this confusion. I don't think people are upset about the results yet because we're trying to build those results. But there is some strict details now about what the ballot said that I couldn't, for the life of me, ever get to those same details. What am I missing and what are many voters missing when they talk to me about this?
126 Councilor Ryan, I think this may be a bigger question of how the voter pamphlet is developed and the backing language. For the longest time we have, for the longest time our our code was almost identical to the ballot measure language that was that was ultimately put before the voters. Obviously, in the voter pamphlet, there's a slightly shorter version of it, but it was focused on providing funding to to nonprofit organizations to implement climate projects with with percentages ascribed for renewable energy and energy efficiency, for Green infrastructure, regenerative agriculture, for climate jobs, workforce and contractor development, and other greenhouse gas reducing projects. The notable exceptions were capacity building and transportation decarbonization here. So and there were definitions of what those things were, just not definitions, but descriptors of what fell within those. That isn't to say that, you know, I wouldn't acknowledge that, that the program is at a very is at a different scale. Our ability to make impact is substantially larger. Now, the ballot measure, by and large, I would say this program was designed very much similar to the children's levy. And we very much are not the children's levy. While we share, we share.
127 The largesse became a shock.
128 We so that's that's that's correct. So there's a different scale I think that's right. That's that's right. And so and so we've certainly adjusted in order to one acknowledge that being able to do climate at the scale that we the scale of one, the resources we have required, changing and making adjustments, meaning being able to do stuff with for profit partners, with government, with others. And so those are sort of the adjustments we've made. But by and large, the the core attributes of what we fund has remained the same. I think if you ask anyone working in the climate space, the fact that transportation was not included was a large miss from the very outset. And so that's I think that's I appreciate the question. I don't know that I can fully answer that with a question for you, councilor Ryan, but I can acknowledge the changes at least.
129 Sam, I just think it's the question that we have to keep trying to answer, because increasingly people are asking because they're seeing the budget challenges of the city. They want to see impact. And so when we went through so many debates, if it could land in urban forestry, if it could land in transportation to electrify, electrify our fleet. A lot of people I talked to said, now that makes sense because it's impacting many, many people and you have the capacity to deliver results and impact. And yet there was this debate that it couldn't go there because it had to be at the nonprofit sector. And I would say, there's so much money. We can't build the capacity of this sector up to get the impact that people want. Why can't we both get along here? And I think you threaded that needle. I can only imagine how many intense meetings that you had around this topic. Just know it's not done. People are still talking about it. And so I think people are looking for more flexibility in funding allocations so we can meet the moment.
130 And councilor. Yes, I think the and you were on the council when this happened, the the council made an important decision to change the language in the 2022 code change we made, which we did answer the question of is the best.
131 We could.
132 Is it appropriate for government entities and other partners like that to be able to spend the money? And that that question was answered with that 2022 code change. And so we're operating with that instruction.
133 But I and I think we did and I think we got some heat over that. And I from activist I, I think most people thought that was a lot of sensibility implied. But I do think that's going to continue to be the tension. And I don't think we have it like done. I'm going to pivot to one last question. I've been going to connecting with the cannabis industry quite a bit lately because because quite frankly, the great state, it's our number one cash crop before it was all legalized. And we've done a really miserable job making it. So we're not at the top of the charts. I don't know how we've managed to do that. Well, one is that they feel like they're the most tax burden. Micro industry with cash strapped because of the fdic allegations. And then when I hear councilor Kanal talking about agriculture and what is our opportunity, how are we leaning into the cannabis industry? Do they feel like they could apply to be part of this infrastructure, since we have such a potential there to actually do something that would. I graduated in 1984. You're talking about a painful time. That's when the timber industry collapsed and there were zero jobs in Portland. So people from the wrong side of the tracks, that would be me had to move because there were no jobs here. So when I think of cannabis industry, I'm like, oh, good, that's an opportunity for agriculture to be celebrated in really fascinating ways. Yeah, kind of like our wine industry has taken off. So are you partnering with the cannabis industry currently?
134 I would have to circle back and check in with our team. I don't believe so. I think we've had early conversations with the groups, such as resource innovations that has done work in terms of helping make cannabis operations more efficient. That's really on the processing side of things. That's on the energy efficiency side on the indoor grow side. A lot of them, they are energy intensive operations that want to name when, particularly when they're happening within city boundaries. There's just been tremendous amount of change and shifts in the industry that I think it's certainly worthwhile. And if you've got individuals and folks, we should reach out to try.
135 To set up a meeting with some people that could meet with you. Sam, that would be great. I think we're just really leaving a lot of money on the table. And again, they are tax burdened like no other industry. The city taxes them in addition to the state, and they keep asking me, we don't get anything from that. Like where's the, where's the, where's the roi on that. So we do have to lean into this micro industry which has a lot of potential. Thanks.
136 Thank. Councilor Kanal.
137 Thank you. I, I think as we have seen with several other ballot measures proposed by the community, when ballot measures are drafted entirely outside of city government, they often have limitations to the policy analysis, to the fiscal analysis that are found out later. And that is not necessarily a criticism of PCEF. In fact, it's not a criticism of any of them, because the reason that they all happen is fundamentally because the people who sit up at this side of the dais historically don't listen and don't do the things that people ask them to do. So as a result, people take it into their own hands, and we have a significant quantity of ballot measures, and we govern often by ballot measures in the state, city and all that. So as a result, I think there's there's that's the necessary cost of doing things that way. And the way to fix that is by having a more responsive government on this side of the dais. I just want to note, I reject out of hand the idea that that voters don't know what they're doing when they approve ballot measures. We've had this debate at this side of the dais many, many times, and I can do it again for years. I'm sure we'll be doing it. And I respect the the my colleague who has a different viewpoint on that. But I am very, very strongly of the opinion that voters knew what they were doing. And I want to just take a moment and say that, yes, measure 110 is a is a part of that as well. I think that the concern was not so much from my perspective, what voters thought as they approved these things, but the fact that they were not necessarily well crafted from the beginning. I. Just want to read something really quick here. The the ballot measure summary is all available online. I'm not going to read the whole thing or anything, but you can find it if you just search for the Multnomah county. November 2018 voters pamphlets on page 49. I wanted to build up on a different point councilor Ryan made about locking up money. It might sound like I'm arguing one direction. I'm not. I am concerned about when there are plans that exist for longer than four years at the city. And I recognize what councilor Avalos said about creating stability. But I also understand the democratic accountability trade offs here. And this is based off of two factors that I think the second one actually alleviates a lot of the concern. The first is the example of the last council extending the clean and safe contract by ten years, to prevent future councils from being able to weigh in. If I serve two terms, I will not have a regularly scheduled opportunity to revisit that contract. And that's ridiculous. I recognize that this does not apply here because it's a five year program. I also recognize that it's not related to the community grants, which is, you know, annualized. But I, I do think that the response to that question is a little bit misleading because, as I think councilor Novick pointed out, if there's a long term commitment we make through this plan, even if we haven't received the money or disbursed it yet, there's a community expectation that the money is going to go where we said it's going to go. And then when council tries to adjust that through the tool that was mentioned, which is the budget, that's us taking heat for a promise that we're breaking that we never made in the first place. And I that is concerning to me. So I think the way out of that, and I think you have done a lot of it, is the degree to which the annual review process has the ability to make those small adjustments is the degree to which my concern on this is alleviated. It sounds like that is something we're putting into place that that will have it. But I just wanted to because this is the first one to raise the the stakes on it a little bit. Sorry, but and I also want to note that even if the adjustments were every two years at a more significant pace, that would still help, because every two years half the council is changing over. Two questions are any of the community grant criteria based off of the level of pay of the nonprofit executives involved?
138 Not explicitly. We evaluate that as a as a function of just gut checking is there because we don't pay consulting rates. We when we compensate folks that are working on our projects, we pay them the rate that they get. And so we evaluate that more as a means to ensure that we don't see anything just out of the norm. And what we use is we use guidestar. We have essentially their publication on nonprofits of various sizes and general expectations per sector of what the executive directors should make. And if someone's well out of bounds of that, we flag it to say, that's not going to fly. So it's it's more of a screening tool to make sure that we're not we're not we're not paying some obscene. Rate.
139 Fair. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily have to be scoring if it's in a different stage in the process. Thank you for that. And then slide 35. You have the the graph that we were talking about with relation to councilor Novick's question around where the money is going. This is the one that was back pocket slide. I understand that the pool of money has increased. And so as a result of that, plus existing financial pressures on the rest of the city in 2022, there was a change made. And now we put $740 million a year into city bureaus. What's the long term plan to reduce that amount and get more money back into the community.
140 So this is an important question. And this is one that I expect year to year. This first year, we've got a good sense of information about the work and the progress that our bureau colleagues are doing. Next year. We expect to have a lot more and subsequent year more, and it will be in that last year that we begin the it will be in early 2027 that we begin developing the next climate investment plan. We expect it to take 15 months. In that 15 month span of time, we expect to have pretty honest conversations based on the preceding three years of experience of where is this program going? What are its outcomes? We made some big, we made some bets. We got into partnerships on programs, and we're going to have to see how are they actually producing in terms of their emissions reductions and their community benefits, and using that as the basis. And at that same time, I can promise you community capacity will continue to grow, and the demand for more investment in community will grow. And I think that is that point in time where we're going to have to have that real conversation of what is the what is the directionality? I think when we made those adjustments and recognition of the additional resources, the opportunities that presented to our to our city, now we recognize that community capacity would only continue to grow, and that that balance would have to shift and would expect to shift. And so we expect to be in that conversation over those 15 months of the next climate investment plan.
141 I think there's also not all those bureau investments are similar. Some of them are programmatic, and they may have an expectation or a hope that they continue, like ongoing management of the urban forest is a good example of that. Others are more one time things like a streetcar purchase or 82nd avenue. So the the not all of them are ongoing.
142 Yeah.
143 I want to be clear. I do not have a problem with the idea that some of the money should go to the bureaus. I have two, three concerns. I think one's been raised before by a colleague in a previous meeting about, you know, what was the expectation of the voter, but that that's I think the other two are more important here. One is the idea that the the amount, the ratio is maybe out of, I think what, what we would like and we're maybe using it to paper over the fact that we had a budget issue like that is coming to us now effectively, but really exist in a couple of years ago that we were able to paper over slightly with PCEF funds. The other issue, though, is the idea of the switching around of the pots of money I would want. My goal is to know that if there is $10 million from PCEF, let's say going to a bureau for the last couple of years, that their budget is $10 million as a whole, higher than what it would have been as the inflation cal grows over two years, because otherwise what we're doing is we're freeing up general fund dollars or whatever other source of whatever other fund dollars there are for another bureau that pretty much by logically could not have received PCEF funding this way. In other words, we would be using PCEF money to backfill non-climate related investments in other parts of the city. And that's a concern to me, and I don't know that anybody has done that analysis. I also don't think it's your responsibility as PCEF. I think there's there's that's more on the, you know, cfo and that side of things. But that's what I'm trying to avoid is the idea that we'd be using PCEF dollars and it looks like what we're putting it in parks, we're doing it for urban forestry. But if we then take $10 million of general fund away from parks and give it somewhere else, what we're really doing is just moving money around. Does that make sense? I think you've probably already thought of this quite a bit, based on the facial expressions and just logic, so I'll leave it there. But I wanted to daylight that point for oh, one other thing, councilor Ryan, I think is correct about the. We are in a position where we do have a lack of philanthropic dollars relative to the number of nonprofits in the city, and that has created, I think, a little bit more demand on government for funding nonprofits that are filling in gaps for things that probably government should be doing anyway. But it's not. Yes. It's not sustainable in the long run. So I am concerned about that. And we do need to figure that out. But and I think, frankly, your work is the only thing that's been sustaining it, or one of the few things that's been sustaining it this whole time. So thank you.
144 Thank you. I want to actually to take the opportunity to respond to councilor Ryan's question of how did we get here? By simply reciting something that I heard from one of the former co-chairs of the PCEF committee, and the way he described how we got here is, well, we started off thinking that we were a community grants organization. And so we were reactive. We spent money in reaction to community grants or requests that we got. And he said, then after a couple of years, we had a lot of money, and suddenly the city council realized we had a lot of money. And the city council started asking for lots of it. So we reacted to that. And there were some things we thought were so absurd that we pushed back. But most of them were like, well, we better agree to that, or else we will take all the money and give it, give it to the police. And so we wound up, you know, carmen rubio was head of the housing bureau and, you know, cleaned the having housing, be more energy efficient, has something to do with with climate. So she took a bunch of money for the housing bureau, and I don't know who it was that decided, well, the schools could use money to revamp all their hvac systems. So I don't know if that's really the highest goal of the clean energy fund, but sure, that's cool. Let's do that. And we just and people are like, well, you know, it's not fair that it's a it's a continual problem that homeowners have to maintain their street fees and trees are like kind of calamity. Right. So let's take the money and spend it on that. So my impression is that the we've got here in largely a random way with a city, a cash strapped city, demanding money for a whole bunch of stuff, and what we have not had is what I hope we have for the next tip is sort of more of a strategic question of, okay, what are the investments that we can make that do the most to reduce carbon emissions and help frontline communities? And let's build our investments around that. But that is not the process that we have followed that that's happened to date. So that's my screed. And by the way, councilor Ryan, I have to say, I'm really disturbed when I hear you talking about giving money to the cannabis industry, because the idea of regenerative agriculture is to invest in agricultural practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And if you had a specific proposal saying, here's what, here's ways in which the the cannabis industry can be less energy intensive, that'll be one thing, but I would be violently against simply randomly giving money to the cannabis industry, because that's something to do with agriculture. Unless there's some actual tie to climate.
145 I agree with that. Councilor Novick. But I think we could partner with them and let them in to help us see what that pathway might look like.
146 I'd ask that panel, is there anything that's prevented the cannabis industry from coming forward with a community grant for regenerative agriculture?
147 No. You have to have a nonprofit. But. You have to be an.
148 It has to be a nonprofit.
149 Correct.
150 So that's one of the clear rules that it can't be for anyone in the private sector.
151 For community grants, specifically.
152 In the community grants. Right?
153 Yes.
154 Okay. I just have to retort a little bit. I mean, I think what you said was entertaining and you summarized well, councilor Novick, but there was a lot of thoughtful dialog that went into all those decisions. So it was and I know I got involved in the schools one, because I was concerned that there wasn't enough action going on east east of bts, where the district struggled to have a tax base that can say yes to bonds and such, I had more I had more concerns about bts because at that time we were being asked to support a pretty large bond. So just know that there were a lot of thoughtful dialog that went in each decision. And it was it was under one commissioner's office for the most part.
155 Yeah.
156 We'll continue that conversation offline.
157 It wasn't fun, but it was.
158 I, I we have seven minutes left, but I don't see any other. Hands up. Anybody else have some final questions or thoughts? Thank you very very much. Really appreciate this. I appreciate the fact that although I think we were scheduled for an hour, I thought we'd use most of the two hours. And we have and I hope you won't mind if my colleagues and I, at some point over the next few days, you know, engage in some back and forth over what might be helpful for the whole council. I think a couple of us have now said that this summary of cip investments by implementer is really helpful and should probably be fairly upfront. And one thing that I think that might come up is what was the what were the original expectations for the revenue that we would get was like $40 million a year.
159 It was, oh, councilor Co-chair Novick, you're bringing me into a different state. I'm like that, that that that's caused trauma in its own right. Those numbers change as frequently as they have. The original numbers was originally 50 to 70, then it was dropped to 40 to 60, and then as and then as you know, the number is increased from there. And those are very early projections we got from our revenue department as the as this program became a reality and as folks started to really understand the extent of it.
160 And one thing the point I think is might be worth making about that at some point is that although I actually tend to fall more on the councilor Ryan line of what the voters thought about a ballot measure, I think voters thought we should do something about climate change. Cool. And I don't think people thought all of the money has to go to community nonprofits. But there was certainly an expectation among the people who put the measure on the ballot that the money would go to community nonprofits. And I think it's worth noting that the community nonprofits are now getting a bit over $60 million a year, which isn't orders of magnitude above the amount that was originally expected to come from the measure. So one way of looking at it is the community. Nonprofits have gotten the amount that we originally expected, plus maybe a little bit more. And governments have taken and taken the rest of it. So that might not be something for you to say, but I might. I might find a reason to say it myself next week. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
161 Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. That's that, that's it. Oh, sorry.
162 I forgot to actually gavel us out the. This concludes the meeting of the climate resilience and land use committee. Our next meeting is Thursday, November 13th. At that meeting, we'll be having an update from the city attorney on zenith, an opportunity for public comment. We'll also be hearing a design review resolution from councilor. Zimmerman and I now adjourn the meeting to the climate resiliency land use committee.