The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-01-30
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (27,334 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Portland City Council held a work session on January 30, 2025, focused on a broad overview presentation from the Community and Economic Development service area. Bureau leadership introduced their divisions, covering the Portland Housing Bureau's "five P's" framework, the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability's land use, climate, technology, and waste programs, Portland Permitting and Development's structure and permit review process, Prosper Portland's economic development and TIF district work, and the Spectator Venues and Visitor Activities program's oversight of major event facilities. Figures on housing bond funding, unit production, and program budgets were presented, though some figures were stated inconsistently across speakers. Discussion topics included permit inspection consistency, timelines for permit review, Prosper Portland's legal structure under state statute, TIF district timelines and community engagement processes, office-to-residential conversion projects, tenant protections and tenants unions, enhanced services districts and their governance, the Portland Housing Bond and Metro Housing Bond, code streamlining efforts, the Portland Diamond Project's baseball stadium proposal, budget sources including PCEF and federal funding, and questions about housing production strategy amid market conditions. Councilors requested additional written follow-up on several topics, including federal funding breakdowns, tenants union policy, and a specific property dispute. No votes were referenced as occurring during this session.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
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1 Good morning. I am going to open our work session. It is January 30th at 931. This work session is a presentation from the community and economic development service area. This is either our last or our second to last of these service area. Broad overviews. So we have a number of things to go over today. Councilors I believe this is a work session where there will be some pauses throughout for questions, and we'll be able to ask questions about the specific piece of the service area that we just heard. Presentation on will hold questions about other parts of the service area until those pieces of the presentation. Donny, I will turn it over to you to get started and introduce us to your team.
2 Great. Thank you, council president. Good morning everyone. Donny oliveira for the record, I use he him pronouns and I am the deputy city administrator for the community and economic development service area. I'm really thrilled to finally get in front of you in this space, to kind of give you a broader overview of what the service area is solving for, how we'll support you on your policy journey as a as a collective body. And really, the goal of today's work session is to provide sort of a high level overview of the work. And I just want to just remind everybody that we've already started scheduling briefings for some of the deeper dive stuff that, you know, I no doubt you have questions about, like tiff and PCEF and permitting, we're going to cover those topics at a at a high level today, but and answer as many questions as we can, but we have a lot of content to get through. So I just want to acknowledge that at a high level. Our service area is really stewards of the long range planning and thinking about our city. We don't necessarily do it all ourselves. We work across the city with many external partners as well, but we're sort of stewards of how this city is developed and how we shape it and how we, you know, activate prosperity for our communities. Next slide please. And so we're going to cover four areas. First we're going to provide an overview sort of the 101 of our service area. The bureaus inside of it, how they do their business, what they're solving for. And we really want to focus on the collaboration that this service area depends on. Frankly, we're conveners in in a lot of spaces. We rely on our partners in other service areas to deliver some of these, these goals. And we work with our community partners to activate some of the resources that we have available. We're going to briefly talk about finances and just kind of give you all a background of how the bureaus are funded, the resources that we have to push out to our community partners. And then lastly, we'll kind of look ahead and kind of give you a snapshot of what's currently in work plans and areas that we likely will see collaboration with you all and committees and so forth. Next slide please. So today you're going to have the chance to meet, if you haven't yet the leadership of the service area. So we have we're not all seated in the. So I'm just going to read off the slide. We have Eric engstrom who's the director of planning sustainability, helming Eric, which is the director at the housing bureau, shay flattery who's the executive director at prosper, david kuhnhausen is heading up Portland permitting development. And carlisle, who will be joining us in a moment, is heading up the spectator venues and visitor programs together. They they work collaboratively around a lot of areas related to planning, development, prosperity. And it's a it's a really great group to work with because they're solutions oriented and we're always trying to refine what we're doing to provide better services and, and, and hope to deliver the goals of our city as we go through the service areas. You know, please ask questions for clarification and we'll do the best we can after each section, as council president mentioned, will have some time for broader q&a. So next slide please. It really sort of covered this already. The thing that I want to just offer is, along with the planning components of this, these all these bureaus are functioning as providing tools and services to actually deliver on our plans. So whether it be through tax increment financing or housing bond dollars or resources related to our venues, I mentioned already, we're also providing resources and tools to help deliver on those promises that our policy and our leaders set. So it's a really exciting group to work with because we get an opportunity to answer the question of what if? When it comes to meeting our goals. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to helmi to walk through the housing bureau.
3 Great. Good morning. Councilors I'm helmi, historic director of the Portland housing bureau. And before I begin, I just want to acknowledge the value I have as a manager meeting with this team, the team of bureau directors with whom we interact often and with the dca's office. It's incredibly helpful to me as a manager to have that opportunity to meet as a group. The Portland housing bureau is the city's lead agency on affordable housing policy and implementation. We've organized our work into something we call the five p's, or the five p's of housing. And so I'm going to walk briefly through each of those p's. The first is produce new housing. Portland housing bureau funds provides funding sources such as the Portland housing bond, the metro housing bond, tax increment financing revenue to affordable housing developers in order to produce affordable homes both to rent and to own. And these serve low income and moderate income portlanders. We then regulate the affordability of these developments, with recent projects carrying 99 year affordability terms. The bureau also uses programs such as inclusionary housing, which is inclusion inclusion of affordable units in market rate housing. Excuse me? Encouraging economically diverse neighborhoods. The next p is to preserve vulnerable housing. Portland housing bureau's asset management team supports nonprofit owner operators of affordable housing in our in our portfolio in repairing their property in order to extend the lifespan of affordable housing developments. The bureau also provides technical assistance to owners to maintain their properties, rather than selling or converting them to market rate units. In addition, fb's neighborhood housing program provides home repair funds, including lead abatement, radon mitigation, and other health and safety focused repairs for low income households living in single family homes and mobile homes. This ties into the next strategy, which we call preventing displacement. Under prevent displacement, fb provides funding to low income homeowners and renters, as I just mentioned, but also in historically gentrified regions of the city, as well as employing strategies such as down payment assistance for first time homeowners in order to help marginalized portlanders remain in their neighborhoods, have housing stability, and the opportunity to create wealth through homeownership. Simultaneously, Portland housing bureau works to stabilize the rental market, offering protections to at risk renters facing eviction, such as free legal services, landlord tenant mediation, and our rental services help desk, which can be reached through either 311 or by calling (500) 382-3130 three. This work is critical for combating homelessness, especially as eviction rates continue to rise. The next p in our housing framework is to promote equity in housing. Fb is committed to ensuring that all portlanders have access to safe and affordable housing regardless of race, income, disability, gender, gender identity or sexuality. A major component of our equity work is the north northeast neighborhood housing strategy, which aims to address the displacement of portlanders from historically black neighborhoods due to urban renewal, and has provided critical home repairs for 1000. More than 1000 households, assisted 129 families in becoming home owners, and provided 700 new affordable rental homes, prioritizing displaced households in the interstate corridor. These efforts are also central to our displacement prevention strategy. Fb sets a goal of 30% disadvantaged minority women and emerging small business contracting for projects receiving our funding, and it's a higher than the city's 20% goal. Our final p in our housing framework is a progress of environmental sustainability. Fb prioritizes housing design and construction that focus on focuses on holistically on design forward long term Green building strategies that positively impact the environment. Increase residents quality of life, and improve building operation efficiencies. Fb's Green building policy requires third party certification of a project strategy. In recent years, the city the years the bureau has deployed pcf Portland clean energy funds to help projects maximize energy efficiency, water saving, indoor air quality, and environmental measures. Thank you. Next slide. Okay. Just as an example of what we've been doing actively during the last five years, the Portland housing bureau has loaned $469 million in bond proceeds to create 4000 units of new affordable housing throughout the city. For every local dollar spent, Portland and metro housing bonds have leveraged $3 from outside sources, resulting in more than 1.4 billion in new construction activity in Portland. As you may know, Portland has passed two very significant housing bond measures in 2016 and 2018. The first was the Portland housing bond, which was passed by voters in 2016, totaling $261.1 million for affordable housing. Fb administered these funds, which have produced 1859 affordable homes in 15 affordable housing developments. The average loan per unit under the Portland housing bond was 140,000 per unit, and it produced 42% more housing than was initially projected. All funds from the Portland housing bond have been fully committed, and 13 of the 15 project bond projects are open, with the remaining two projects currently under construction. I would like to note the excellent work of the fb staff who administered these bond funds and actually danielle norby, who manages the program, is sitting behind me. The fb has dispersed this $261.1 billion of funds and been audited annually since its inception, and has had no audit exceptions. The second affordable housing bond was passed by the voters in 2018. The metro housing bond. Portland and portland's portion of the metro housing bond was $211 million. From this bond fd be produced over 2150 affordable homes, where what was promised initially was 1475, so exceeding those goals pretty substantially. The average funding commitment of the metro housing bond was just under $100,000 per unit. All funds are now allocated or earmarked for projects, with additional units to be announced in the coming months. At present, eight of the 26 metro bond projects are open, totaling 555 units, with nine in construction, one newly acquired and a recently constructed building which will reopen as permanent supportive housing in June. Both bonds are exceeding goals for the family sized units, with two or more bedrooms, deeply affordable units so exceeding goals for deeply affordable units restricted for households earning below 30% of the median area income, and exceeding goals for permanent supportive housing units with deep rent subsidies and wraparound services for portlanders exiting homelessness. So I'll now pass this over to Eric engstrom, director of the bureau of planning and sustainability.
4 Thanks, sam. For the record, my name is Eric engstrom. I'm the interim director at the bureau of planning and sustainability. Bts has been a national leader in land use planning and urban design, climate action and environmental stewardship for many years. We're organized around five major clusters of work. And the common thread there is all these programs are fairly oriented towards the future, policy oriented and very often political. First, the land use planning and urban design teams are stewards of the comprehensive plan, a 20 year plan guiding the physical development of the city, including policies, maps and infrastructure plans. We also manage the process to maintain and improve the zoning code and zoning maps. The planning team includes district planning, specialist economic planners, environmental planners and historic preservation folks. Second, our climate and energy teams manage work related to building energy, electrification, renewable fuels and clean energy. Historically, we've been keepers of the city's climate action plan with the elevation of chief sustainability officer vivian satterfield to the city administrator's office, bts is handing that baton to her, but we continue to play a role. Vivian and I work closely to maintain alignment. She's the lead for the city's overall enterprise on climate. While I provide technical support through bts and continue to manage a variety of climate programs that have a relationship to the sphere of community and economic development, for example, building energy and renewable fuels, as I mentioned. Third, the bureau oversees the Portland clean energy community benefits fund, pcf for short, an investment program with a goal of reducing carbon pollution while enhancing community resilience and prosperity. Prioritizing support for portlanders most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Pcf has awarded over $500 million in grants and allocated over $1 billion towards strategic programs in the last several years, all of those identified in the climate investment plan that council adopted in 2023. We're not going deep into that program today because they have a separate briefing set up. Fourth, Portland leads the country in its commitment to digital equity, open data and privacy. The former office of community technology was merged into bts in 2022. Staff in this division were instrumental in working with school districts and public agencies to equip us for remote work and education during the pandemic, and this team continues to work with bts to manage assessments of how the public adapts to new technology. With privacy and equity in mind in particular. Community technology also manages other private utility franchises held by the city, including telecommunications, cable and energy franchises. We staff the mount hood cable regulatory commission, which is a joint effort with the other cities of the county, and our smart city staff have been working on a new data governance model for the city. Finally, the bureau oversees world renowned waste and recycling system. This includes folks who oversee private waste haulers who deliver direct services to customers, both residential and commercial. The city manages its garbage service through contracts through a regulated, regulated franchise system. Our waste division also includes folks who provide technical assistance to small business towards, for example, implementing new composting standards. We manage the network of public trash cans throughout the city and work with Portland solutions to manage graffiti abatement, and that program moved to bts in 2022. It focuses on assistance to small businesses impacted impacted by graffiti. So that's what we do. Next slide please. I also want to briefly mention a few recent accomplishments. In 2024, the city council adopted the state required housing production strategy, which was a collaboration really, of all the agencies in our service area. And all of us are working together on implementation of that now. In 2024, pcf made major investments in a number of projects, including 82nd avenue public schools, city fleet electrification and clean industry, just to name a few. Bts also manages something called recap, a recurring program to bundle up improvements to our development codes. That acronym, by the way, stands for regulatory improvement code amendment package. I think you'll probably be hearing that quite a lot. Package number 11 was adopted by council last year, with an emphasis on streamlining codes related to housing production. It's not on this slide, but I also want to highlight the addition of batteries to our curbside recycling collection system. Last year, that was an important milestone. And in 2024, we completed a major overhaul of codes that govern utility franchising, moving us from a one at a time negotiation with the utilities to a more systematic, code based approach. Next slide. Now I'm going to pivot to talking more broadly about how all of us work together and what our policy framework looks like, and in particular, how Portland permitting and development and bts work together. We operate within a statewide and regional framework, implementing statewide and regional planning goals and plans. In general, the state sets broad goals through dlcd, the department of land conservation and development. Metro establishes a regional framework and cities are responsible for plans and implementing those plans. The city's comprehensive plan, which I mentioned already establishes the broad, broad, long range goals and strategy for the 20 year period, and the zoning code contains the rules that apply to development and land use. Today, pd makes decisions on a day to day implementation of this and is responsible for the code and the longer term policy and goal setting. Pd handles individual permitting and parcel specific decisions, and we handle longer range plans, policy code development, larger area plans, and citywide strategy. With the exception of the occasional legislative preemption or appeals, the state or metro don't generally directly apply their goals and plans to policy or to development in Portland. Instead, we do that, and we're responsible for periodically updating them with our compliance. We could do a whole work session on the land use system and our comprehensive plan, but that's probably for another day. At this point, I'm going to pass it over to david kuhnhausen in Portland, permitting and development.
5 Thank you Eric. For the record, my name is david keenan, and I'm the interim director of Portland permitting and development. I want to thank you, councilors, for this opportunity to talk about this today. The mission of Portland permitting and development is to promote safety, livability, and economic vitality through the efficient and collaborative application of land use, building public works and property maintenance regulations. The work done in this bureau is essential, and when appropriate, it enhances the safety of buildings and the livability of portland's neighborhoods. In July 2024, we undertook a significant transition that had been discussed for years but never implemented by creating Portland permitting and development. This brought together permitting functions. Focused on development of private property and the associated infrastructure requirements, many of which impact and improve the public right of way. The development review teams that make up p and d are from the bureaus of transportation, environmental services, water, the. The urban forestry team and the parks bureau, and the entirety of the former bureau of development services. We continue to integrate the work of all of these teams into the new bureau, and are focused on improving the functions of all these teams, with the goal to make our services more seamless, more efficient for staff to be more responsive, and to deliver equitable services to all of our customers in the city of Portland. All told, this bureau currently consists of approximately 350 fte across ten divisions and with several smaller groups reporting directly to the director's office. The bureau participates in the administration of 14 different city titles. Every single group in this bureau does really important and meaningful work, but some of the more external facing groups that you'll see here on this slide include the customer support and administrative duties, the administration of the zoning code, and the building code, which includes our inspections team, the public infrastructure reviews, which I mentioned, our property compliance division, and the empowered communities division, which is focused on assisting black, indigenous and people of color with the permitting process. Next slide please. The development review process really is a partnership between the applicant and their associated design team and the city, the project owner or the applicant, as well as all city reviewers. All play critical roles in this process, and they help shape the timing and the results of both the review and inspection phases of a development process or I'm sorry, development project Portland permitting and development continues to work on opportunities to provide education and resources to our customers, especially those who don't have experience in this field or are going through the permitting process for the first time, and in some cases, the only time we want to collaborate with them and answer questions as early in the process as possible, we want to avoid them running into issues that they were unaware of as early as possible. A few options that customers currently have at this time to seek that information are via our early assistance meetings, which do come with a cost but include a thorough evaluation of the project proposal by our staff from all the applicable applicable review teams, as well as recommendations to proceed and identification of associated land use or public works processes. We also offer free 15 minute appointments, which are available both in person and virtually. We offer key milestone meetings for customers looking for information specific to one review team that's offered at any point during the review process, and we're working with the permit improvement team to upgrade our web page that will allow customers to get responses to general questions 24 over seven, rather than just when staff are in the building. When a customer is ready to proceed beyond the design phase, they submit plans, drawings, reports, any supplemental information associated with that development that answers or that responds to relevant state and city codes. Projects that are reviewed by multiple review groups, depending on the scope of that work. And if a plan doesn't meet all code requirements, the applicant receives check sheets from the reviewers, noting missing or incorrect details that need to be clarified to meet all code requirements. Reviewers across the bureau are required to provide citation from the relevant code section, so that customers understand why those plans need to be altered, and where they can find additional information about those requirements. Efficient and timely review of permit applications requires communication and collaboration between the permit applicant and that design team, and all city reviewers. Outside of the technical reviewers, pad offers a single point of contact who assists customers with general questions about statuses, the next steps to take, how to make payments, or they can just act as a channel to technical reviewers or managers if there are issues preventing the project from moving along. A few examples of niche programs where this service is currently offered include our process management team. Our empowered communities team, which I previously mentioned, our customer success group, the field issuance remodel program, and the facilities permit program. Customers. Customer surveys have also identified this as a highly sought after service, and we've assigned a single point of contact to permits being processed via permitting services, which is where the bulk of our permits are processed. But it goes without saying that reductions to staff levels due to a downturn in construction mean that we've had to be creative about how to address this need while simultaneously maintaining service areas and or service levels in other areas. So once plans and drawings meet all code requirements, the permit is ready to be issued. Once issued, the applicant or the contractor can begin construction. Once all required inspections are complete, the final inspection is approved and the project is considered complete. You will hear a number of my colleagues up here talk about collaboration across the service area. I definitely agree with that. Just as Eric elaborated, we do meet with the bureau of planning and sustainability to talk about title 33 issues. We're meeting with prosper as they've stood up their small business program. We regularly meet with the construction coordinators in the housing bureau to help ensure that those housing related projects that the housing bureau is responsible for, move through the process as seamlessly as possible. And as donny noted, we're looking forward to providing more information via briefings with the district offices in the coming weeks. Thank you very much. And with that, I'll pass it off to shay.
6 Thank you, david and buenos dias. Good morning. Hi, everybody. Good morning counselors. For the record, my name is shay flaherty. I use pronouns like he, him and el, and I'm currently serving as the interim executive director of prosper Portland. Usually, I'm serving in the capacity as economic development director. So as the city's economic development agency, prosper Portland carries out programs that support small businesses and traded sector industries, improve access to workforce training, and create jobs. Prosper Portland is also the city's urban development agency. So that means that we are investing our resources again to advance small businesses, but also commercial infrastructure and mixed use projects within tax increment financing or tif districts. That's both in those districts and citywide. I will note that by charter and by city statute, prosper Portland is a separate legal entity from the city, headed by an executive director and governed by a five member volunteer board of commissioners that are appointed by the mayor and approved by you all or city council. If you go to the next slide, please, I'll get into more of what you just saw on the previous slide and what that looks like in action. So over the past year, our team at prosper Portland has had some very key initiatives. Good work come to fruition. First, building off the community work that was centered in the modeling for the cully tif district. And I want to thank councilor Avalos for your service and expertise on that work. The creation of the new tif districts in east Portland and the central city have the potential to dramatically transform our city and deliver on long standing community need. Late in 2024, council passed six new tif districts through the resources in those districts. And, you know, those resources really won't come into play for another five years at scale. But through those resources, we'll be advancing tailored development strategies and investments that reflect each of the district's unique strengths, their role and their priorities. That's through district action plans that will seek to address specific market gaps, from activations to increased mixed income housing to new entrepreneurial uses. A community centered approach to public and private partnerships should address the unique conditions of each neighborhood, with a particular focus on districts that are not experiencing that market resilience. And while we're leveraging also these catalytic opportunities, speaking of those catalytic opportunities, I'd like to note that we've made great progress on the central city master plan by approving a term sheet with amc and an iga with PBOT for a sizable tif contribution to build new water avenue in support of future development envisioned in that plan. That includes housing and the very exciting future center for tribal nations. These actions deliver on several of our advanced Portland priorities, as the city's growth strategy that centers equity and climate action, notably catalyzing public private partnerships to unlock infill development of large scale, mixed use, mixed income sites with high transit accessibility, as well as the other goal that's noted as addressing housing production across a continuum of affordability. An important thing I want to highlight for you all in an exciting development, has been both seeding and the impending it's happening very soon launch of our new office of small business. We've made great strides towards supporting and advancing the work of the new office. We've hired a manager, Mitch doherty, who many of you might recognize from his prior capacity as the founder of built Oregon. And I'm pleased to share, we've just made offers for new staff who are going to serve as small business liaisons under Mitch. We're hoping to shape this office with your help and the help of the small business community to better serve their needs and, importantly, break down barriers. Whether that barrier is communication, access to resources or grants, or navigating our many, many city programs, which we know can be a little bit difficult. Now, on the office to residential conversion front, we are investing in key projects in old town, piloting how the city can support converting vacant commercial buildings into housing. Last year, the prosper Portland board of commissioners approved terms of a construction loan for two buildings in old town. That's the falcon building and the casket building. Within these construction loans, profitable and supporting these two projects to transition from an office building into a 59 unit middle income residential apartment building. In the case of the falcon and 34, you know, live work studio apartments in the case of the casket building. Lastly, our office of events and film, which is also relatively new, has supported several events and other revitalization efforts during its seven weeks of operation. This past season, approximately 21,000 people visited our Portland winter ice rink. We sold over 17,000 tickets for that. More than half of all those skaters lived outside the city of Portland, which I think noted notably, is important just in terms of our reputation in getting our surrounding neighborhoods to come back into the central core. I'll also note that we championed and supported the new year's eve celebration in partnership with pioneer, courthouse square travel Portland and the city of Portland that featured a dance party and two drone shows. The event drew thousands of families to the square. There were over 5000 people in attendance around 9 p.m. I think 10,000 over the course of the night, which is a huge improvement from last new year's eve, where there was around 100 people in the square to ring in 2024. That's all according to data that we have access to through placer.ai. And I'll also note we hosted two. Yet another great is one of my favorite events, another two successful my people's markets this past year. To my knowledge, it's the largest bipoc market in the northwest. We had one in June and one in late November. Each market had over 150 vendors. Visitor attendance was on average around 4000 people a day. I think with that, I believe I'm passing the mic to karl.
7 Great.
8 Thank you. Good morning. My name is karl lyle. I manage the city's spectator venues and visitor activities program. A very small team, not in one of the bureaus, currently just reporting to donny. So the spectator venues and visitor activities program oversees the city of portland's interests in major city owned event facilities, including the veterans memorial coliseum, moda center, and providence park. Collectively, these venues attract millions of visitors every year and generate hundreds of millions of dollars of economic impact. It's over half $1 billion in real property assets. The team manages the relationships and contracts with venue operators, as well as engaging in long term capital planning and investment activities. The program is primarily funded with resources generated by events at the venues and some dedicated regional tourism funds. In addition, the program serves as the contract manager for the city's relationship with travel Portland and generally the sports, travel and tourism industry. This is a five plus billion dollar industry supporting close to 35,000 jobs locally, and the city's long standing partnership with travel Portland is a key component to sustaining and growing that activity. Also housed within the program currently is the city's enhanced services district coordinator, who manages the city's contracts and relationships with the enhanced service districts, or esd's, and works closely with the city's revenue division to collect and distribute license fees. These districts are commonly called business improvement districts or business improvement areas in other cities, and there are more than 2500 in communities across north America. Portland's three current enhanced services districts are central eastside, together, downtown Portland, clean and safe, and the lloyd esd enhanced services districts are established by local businesses and property owners who come together and ask the city to collect a property management license fee on properties within a certain boundary. These resources are then spent on additional services and programs within the district boundary. Typical enhanced services district activities include cleaning, public safety ambassadors, business attraction activities, marketing events, beautification, and similar programs. Next slide please. So just a few noteworthy highlights of recent spectator program efforts include successfully renegotiating and extending the Portland trail blazers lease agreement at moda center, and securing that the team remains at the rose quarter until at least 2030, helping to secure a commitment for a new wnba franchise that will begin play at moda center in 2026, successfully completing the first phase of construction on a major renovation. First in its history of the historic veterans memorial coliseum, the second phase, including finally replacing the original 1960s seats, is coming up this summer, helping to return summer concerts to providence park for the first time in over a decade. And I will end there.
9 Great. Thank you carl. Thank you team. So, counselors, we're going to take just a beat here to answer any questions you may have about just the general overview of the service area.
10 Counselors. There's upcoming sections about collaboration and budget. So if you have questions about those types of topics, let's hold those. But councilor Dunphy, go right ahead.
11 Thank you, madam president. I have a number of questions. Going back to director kuhnhausen, the permit inspection process. My understanding, the biggest complaint that I hear about the permit process is the steps between when a permit is issued and when it's finalized. Specifically, the. The complaint I hear is that an inspector comes gives a laundry list of things that need to be addressed. And then a different inspector shows up at a different time to check on that and has said, oh, that last guy was wrong. You actually have a different list of things to do. How are those how are how do we track what those inspectors are specifically asking from inspector to inspector? And how are we staffing those sort of things? Is it the same way it has been for a very long time, or how are you thinking about that?
12 Yeah, that's a great question. So they're staffed by district. There are obviously vacations to take into account. So sometimes there's not consistency between inspection from one inspection to the next. However they are documenting and providing reports to all of the customers. After an inspection is complete. That inspector who goes out the second time, if it's not the same as the first time, should be referencing the exact same details as the first inspector. There should not be additional information that's or additional requirements that are presented at that time.
13 Is there a recourse for a developer or a homeowner or somebody who I mean, I I've heard this exact complaint literally hundreds of times in my public service. Is there a recourse or is there a way for an individual to actually be able to know what they're being told is accurate?
14 Well, our all of our inspectors are certified through the state. They have the accreditations to perform the inspections that they do. They're professionals in this field, many of which are actual inspection division has many, many years of experience, many of which many of whom are at the point of retirement. They are professionals, and I believe that they're doing a good job of monitoring the work that they do, and have reasons to believe that they they're making sound judgment calls. They also have to cite the code when they provide that inspection report to customers.
15 Okay.
16 Councilor, if I may just offer this to you as well, because I think I've heard that as well, and especially for the larger projects, I think it's something we're working through with the creation of this new permitting development bureau, by bringing in the infrastructure bureaus, is this scenario that would often happen where a developer or a builder would think they had all the information they needed to go forth, and then a new requirement would come in from one of the infrastructure bureaus because of priorities of the bureaus regardless. So we're trying to streamline that. So to your point, when somebody comes in, they know exactly what the requirements are. And as they go through the process, that's what david picked up. There's consistency because I think a lot of what we're talking about is this way. Now, this is a new requirement. And it wasn't necessarily a now a pa thing, but a bds issue. It might have been a legitimate water issue or whatever. And that's not there's no criticism of the infrastructure bureaus. It's just how we were organized as a city. So we haven't solved for that yet. But it's on our radar, I think as something as we fix this new bureau. Okay.
17 Thank you again. Director kuhnhausen, the permit life cycle graphic. What is the I mean, I assume that that is sort of the life cycle for whether or not we are building a new apartment complex. Thank you. Or also a homeowner who wants to renovate their bathroom. Do we have expectations, expected timelines for what a full permit life cycle would be based off of the size and scope of a permit? Or how, yeah, do we what is the time frame for from submittal to final in the best situation?
18 As as I mentioned it is a partnership. So as we provide deficiencies via check sheet, it is the applicant's responsibility to provide responses, thorough and accurate responses to those check sheet items. If they do not do so, or do not do so in a timely manner that extends the permit cycle. As far as timelines for first reviews, depending on the scope of work we do. So I won't go through all of them, but it ranges in in depending on the scope from seven business days to 20 business days. There are also major projects groups which which has flexibility depending on the scope of the project. Because some of these larger scale projects, for instance, if we were to build a new baseball stadium at some point, it's unrealistic to go through the review process in 20 business days for a project of that magnitude. So there is the option or opportunity to come to an agreement with the developer to extend that review timeline.
19 I mean, respectfully, there is a reputation within the city broadly that the answer is no until you prove to me it's yes, and that the largest complaint I hear about a lot of these is that that reliance on the individual applicant coming forward and successfully meeting all of the requirements without any sort of additional assistance from staff, necessitates a professional developer, you know, it it increases cost because it requires someone who knows how to do permitting to be hired in order to do the permits, and it makes it very inaccessible for homeowners or people who are simply trying to renovate their bathroom. And the general attitude of it's no until we get to yes is one that I really hope until you prove to me that this is one that we can get to through enhanced customer service and more of the streamlining efforts.
20 Yeah, I mentioned that in the presentation that we really want to get to customers before they start planning a project, regardless of the project scope, we want to avoid them being hit with any sort of surprises, both in timelines or financial implications to the project. We have stood up a conditional logic survey for new single family residential projects that helps customers walk through what they absolutely need based on that scope of work, and we fully intend to use that same rationale across all permit scopes.
21 And councilor. One other thing. I'm sorry, I just want to offer this as well. We are currently in the middle of our permit improvement programing, and right now we're going through business systems analysis. Like what's working, what's not. Some of these things can be automated. We're a little bit behind the curve when it comes to taking advantage of technology. And so we have a team focused on that. But again I mean we have a new organization and we were updating our codes. But to your point, if we don't change the culture, none of those things matter. Actually, city administrator jordan often says, you know, culture eats everything for breakfast, right? So let's let's get back to you with when we do the briefing, and we'll be able to walk through some of those known challenges and some of the details of how we're trying to solve for them, including culture.
22 I have a couple more questions, if that's all right. Specific to prosper Portland. Shay. Is the legal arrangement where where prosper being a separate government entity is that the standard across Oregon or across other major cities or cities of our size with regard to our economic development agency?
23 That's a great question. It's as far as I'm aware, across the state, this is governed by a state statute. And so that's ors 457, which dictates that cities for economic development purposes, particularly around urban development and setting up tif districts, set up these separate commissions or bodies to do so.
24 But outside of Oregon, is that a you know, there are similar arrangements.
25 I would say, I think across the west coast, tiff is no longer used as a tool. I think california and Washington no longer have access to it. Other places I have just as anecdotally, chicago, for example, uses more plate like hyper place based tif for specific projects. I will admit, I have not seen tif plans from across the country that have the same kind of community centered model that we've developed here in Portland. Oh of course, yeah.
26 I can respond regarding california because I actually used to manage tif districts in california. It was structured exactly the same way. It's a state. It's a state allowed use of state funds locally. So it is a state agency, but it functions like a city agency does not no longer exist in california, but it did exist in the exact same form.
27 Why does it no longer exist in california?
28 Because there was a lawsuit in the state of california that essentially disbanded tax increment financing. I it's a complex situation.
29 Well, it is complex, but also I am I'm staring at the fact that the previous city council pushed through for all these these new tif districts with a with an expectation that we won't see any action for five years. I can't help but feel as though that was an intentional choice to be able to prevent this body from having actual, meaningful input on where those millions of dollars are being spent, or seeing the actual impact on it. It it it. So anyway, yeah.
30 I can't speak or assume the previous council's intentions. I will note that they had instructed us many years prior. I think it was two years prior. We were instructed to explore, not directed to establish these six new tif districts, but we were directed to explore with community the potential of these six districts. So I can't speak to the timing, but I will note that this was as part of the advanced Portland strategy, something that we were instructed to, you know, really explore the viability with community. And we knew from the onset that we weren't going to move forward with these districts unless we had community buy in.
31 And councilor as a as a reminder or actually for just a reminder as information, this body will actually contemplate and approve the work plans to spend those dollars. So the financing mechanism mechanism kicking in at five years is also a financial responsibility. We have to ensure there's actually resources of course, but you will actually contemplate and decide by the informed community plans what we invest in. So you will you will have influence, I guess is the direct answer.
32 Of course, we every single action plan for every single tif district has to come before council for approval.
33 Okay, my last question is actually specifically whether or not as part of the commercial to residential loan conversion program has prosper or or fb, though it sounds like fb has not a lot of resources on hand, but have a. Has there been a look at an investment strategy or a, you know, potentially even bidding on some of these buildings that are being going for foreclosure? I'm specifically thinking about how montgomery park sold for about 10% of what it sold five years ago. And so is there a conversation about acquisition of foreclosed properties in order to try and convert them?
34 I think that's.
35 Well, the there's two different things. The conversion of foreclosed properties, the conversion of historic properties in the central core has actually been something that prosper is looking at primarily for conversion to what what is often called workforce housing or mid-market housing that fb has not been looking at, fb has not looked at the conversion of existing properties, but we have actively worked on acquisition. We see there's an opportunity in the market right now to acquire properties that are already built for residential use at a lower than we can construct them, and so we've done a rapid acquisition, nofa and acquire and actually have currently got acquisitions in the pipeline. And we think that's a way to actually capture a downturn in the market and convert to affordable, which is very, you know, financially efficient.
36 And so I'll just add, I think an important philosophical approach here that's that's crucial to prosper Portland and our partnership with community is that, you know, those conversations certainly were contemplated by the committees that were evaluating tiff and its potential. But at the end of the day, the specific strategy of how we approach the use of tiff towards those types of acquisitions have to be governed by an action plan, right? So our next steps are to set up those community leadership committees that will set forth. You think of tiff as the tiff plans that council approved. Credit to shareef vickers for this amazing analogy. The previous council approved a menu right community still has to order from that menu every five years. And so we're not going to sit there. And I know that this is a popular sentiment in community, not about us without us. Right. Like we're not going to sit here and make plans that do things to folks. It's very much our intention to partner with communities so that those types of acquisition opportunities can be evaluated transparently.
37 I'd also like to respond. So there are six new tif districts, three in the central city, three in east Portland. 45% of those revenues are allocated to Portland housing bureau. So we see that as the prospective future funding for affordable housing. We've heard a lot of discussion around the conversion, particularly in the central city, but conversion of older properties into housing that has there, it may be a good strategy. There are times when it's an excellent strategy and has been done effectively in other places. There are times when it's actually a it's throwing good money after bad because it's a money pit. So I think you have to evaluate those things carefully going into it. I will say that with respect to the tax increment financing in the five years, what's driving the five years is the bond markets. You cannot issue a bond until you show the revenue for five years of what's coming in, because you have to actually show the cash flow that you can bond against. But the plan for those expenditures in year five, you can set up now so that you're ready to act in year five. So there's actually quite a lot of work that goes in during the next four years, five, 4 to 5 years, while you're getting ready to issue bonds where you can make those kinds of plans. And I think now is the time, particularly in the central city, to analyze the potential for conversion of buildings into residential uses. And I think it's a huge opportunity we shouldn't miss. But I don't think we should assume that it's cheaper than building new or that it always works. I think you need to go into it somewhat cautiously.
38 And councilor We can send information. We did some proformas on some example buildings in downtown, and the spoiler alert, there just wasn't a lot. I mean, there was a feasibility gap. However, prosper is working on a couple of column prototype projects, much smaller in scale, but that'll allow us to see what's what's feasible.
39 Thank you. My last question also to shay councilor.
40 I'm sorry to keep it quick.
41 I know we've.
42 Got a lot of other people waiting.
43 Sorry. Very quickly though. What does the office of small business do that the city doesn't currently do?
44 If one thing that we looked at in our analysis from advance Portland, we in essence as a city, if you compare us to peer cities across the region, we were doing a lot of the similar services. The difference is we did not have a central place called the office of small business that could provide wayfinding, navigation and support and really that customer service facing angle. Right? You think about all the different touch points that a small business has to have as they navigate both the city, the state, the county, as well as private sector resources. So our intention is to really have that wayfinding and the office of small business liaisons and manager are focusing primarily on that. Navigation.
45 Thank you for the concise answer, councilor Clark.
46 Thank you, madam president, and thank you so much for the presentation. This service area is so rich. I don't mean to money, but I mean in responsibility and impact. And actually, councilor Dunphy already asked some of my questions, so this will be pretty brief. I'm so excited to hear that, director hissrich, that you are getting into property acquisition and whether it's distressed properties, because my sense is that we have big hedge funds and others coming into our community buying up a lot of properties, and I think that we should be buying up properties and making them permanently affordable over time. So I hope that you expand that beyond just the what montgomery park area. Do you have a plan to acquire more distressed properties and make them affordable around the city?
47 We are actually at the tail end of our resources. That will make us able to do this. I think it will be a conversation about whether or not we want to try to find strategies not using bond funds, but using other mechanisms for acquisition. But it is as part of the housing production strategy. We do have a valuation of land banking, which this could be part of a land banking strategy where you acquire, hold and then eventually convert properties. But that doesn't exist today and will require us to take a deep dive into what? How can we do it? How can we put together the funds?
48 I'm really happy to hear that. I have a more specific question for director lyle.
49 Not not really a director, but yeah, okay.
50 Whatever.
51 Bring it.
52 Acting, whatever. I have a question on venues. I don't know if it's in your bailiwick, but could you give us or someone give us an update on the keller and PSU proposals?
53 Yeah. How do you want to handle that? So yeah. So the administration of the performing arts venues had previously been until last year within our portfolio and the spectator venues program. It's now transferred over to the newly formed office of arts and culture in the vibrant communities service area. So I didn't speak to that. I am pretty familiar with the efforts to advance, trying to figure out what to do about the keller auditorium. So if there's if there's a specific question there, we can revisit that. We're in terms of process, you know, we're operating under the really city council resolution that was passed, I think, in October. If I have that right, ish, that essentially directed staff in both sort of our program to help with the project development, but also primarily the office of arts and culture staff to work on advancing both the concepts of a new performing arts venue at Portland state university, as well as continuing to advance the renovation concepts for the current building.
54 And do we have advisory committees for those?
55 Yeah, there's a there's a new working group that's just been established by that office of arts and culture. And I started meeting, I think, within the last two weeks, and they're going to be really primarily looking initially at the question of what the management structure of those and the operations model should be for those venues, because the old model that's been in place for many, many years with metro running the city owned venues, it's it needs it's no longer really able to meet the long term capital needs of the of the facilities is the is the is the primary problem. So trying to look at how that model should be changed, maybe replaced. That's the kind of the first task of that committee that.
56 I can direct my questions to a different office. But thank thanks for that. Actually, I think my question is around the small business office have been answered. I think that's it. I think we've covered what I was curious about. Thank you so much.
57 Councilor Novick.
58 Hi. I'm going to ask a series of questions to which I do not expect answers here. Unless you feel compelled to give them. It's fine to give them in writing. The reason I'm not making asking the questions in writing is that, as you know, under the public meetings law, we're not allowed to communicate with each other except in public. So if I have a question which I'd like all my colleagues to hear, I have to do them, ask them in this form. One question is about permitting. We've heard this story, or at least I have from the Portland chamber, that the chamber or voucher developers or somebody came to the city and said we'd be willing to increase the fees we pay for permitting by 50% if the city would meet some targets in terms of timelines. And the city said no, that seems a little odd, but they were very insistent on it, so I'd be curious to know what actually happened, or if that on that topic. On the topic of housing, I mean, help me, and I'd like to know. What would it give? Assuming that the breakdown of federal and private share of the cost of housing remain the same, how much state and local funds would it take to build as much affordable housing as housing as we need to close our affordable housing gap? Like, is it 30 billion? Is it, you know, 10 billion, etc. On on waste and recycling? I've only in the past year or so become aware that virtually no plastic ever gets recycled, that the whole concept of plastics recycling is a fraud perpetrated by the petroleum industry. And I've wondered if either we or metro have thought of just telling people stop bothering throwing plastic into the recycling, just throw it all in the garbage because it will end up in the landfill anyway, and that will save the recycling facilities from having to deal with it. And then another random question I have, to which I'm sure the answer is yes, is this is kind of annoying thing councilors will say because they read something somewhere. I understand that calgary, canada is really invested in converting office to residential, and I was just wondering if you were tracking what's happening there, if they have any brilliant strategies. And finally, a question about Eric raised. One of the uses of pcf has been to electrify the city fleet, and that has struck me as one of the odder things that pcf has done, because pcf has two goals to reduce carbon emissions and to help, you know, address particular threats that climate change poses to vulnerable communities and to help those vulnerable communities transition to a clean energy economy. And it seems to me that as far as buying electric cars, I mean, it's a good thing to do, period. But it seemed like an obvious twofer would have been to buy a similar number of electric cars for low income people and people of color, and buy charging stations to go with them. So I'm wondering if people thought a trade off when we decided to electrify the city fleet. And I think that's I think I'm done. Thank you.
59 Questions received. Councilor. We'll get it back to you.
60 Perfect. Thank you, councilor Zimmerman.
61 Mine are intended for answers, so thanks, guys. I want to go back to. In terms of, I think director has said this would be in your in your area now, but given the changes with planning and bds and all that, I'm not sure. But the folks who are are code compliance, building safety, derelict building, that kind of enforcement. Is that in your wheelhouse now? That's correct. Okay. Thanks. So a couple of years ago, when we started looking at some really derelict buildings that had gone unaddressed, deliberately because orders had come through commissioners offices, that we were not going to enforce such things. And it took the mayor and commissioner Rubio signing a joint letter to basically turn that team back on, which had great impact. Do there exist or are there any current standing orders or practices preventing teams like that from enforcing current regulations, laws, anything like that in the city, or are we full gangbuster in terms of enforcement against derelict buildings? Now?
62 The latter we are. We have no restrictions to address those issues.
63 Great. I'm really happy to hear that. Mr. Bertini does the window replacement fund or whatever it was actually called. Does it still exist at prosper that we were using for the businesses, were victim of vandalism over the last few years.
64 Thank you, councilor, for that question. I'm sad to report that I believe either in the past few weeks or in the next few weeks, the repair and restore program funds have been all but extinguished. Okay. And we've been informed that we can't make asks for further replenishing of that fund.
65 Okay. Got it. I'll just note for councilors, you know, a couple years ago that that fund was created and in the heat of things, we refilled that fund because it was being used so often. And so in a world where Oregon local governments are not spending their money quickly, that was one fund that sure was. So thanks for highlighting that. But if it was to be primed again, that pumps or that that gas tank still exists, right? We still it's just empty right now.
66 We still maintain all the capacity to deliver grants in an in an efficient way. And I will note those teams are stood up. They have other grants that they can manage, but we have the ability to rapidly scale up or down depending on available funding.
67 Councilor also just for added context for everybody that that grant program also was responsive for, you know, damages related to freezing. And so when the sidewalks were frozen and windows were breaking, that that grant program also solved for that. As your budget process develops, we will put an additional ask on the table to maybe not fully replenish the fund, but that is on the kind of wish list side of the ask. And obviously, given the budget constraints, that's just an added thing. Thanks.
68 That's helpful. Yeah, it's not just vandalism, it's all types of things that could prevent somebody from staying open, so to speak. Thanks. And then, carl, in terms of well, I think it's no, no hidden point that I think esd has played an important role. I understand some changes have happened just in terms of the way that rates are decided and things of that nature. I have this longer term goal that is all of our little micro downtowns that exist across the city, which I think are one of the greatest fabrics of the city. So I'm talking hollywood st. Johns Multnomah village you can go all these spots that they're primed for a business improvement district or in Portland terminology, and esd, but in their own light, right? In their own spirit. When I was at the county last year, we essentially started one without starting one over in gateway in a partnership between TriMet, the Portland and Multnomah county. What do you see as being helpful to make it easier for an esd to stand up in the those micro downtowns that exist across our city, if those businesses are interested in pursuing it, those neighbors are interested in pursuing it.
69 Yeah, I think that's a great question. Thank you for that. And, you know, I will just say most other cities of our size have many more business improvement areas than, than, than we do and many more very small kind of neighborhood commercial business district scaled ones. So for example, seattle has 11 current districts and some of them are very small. The really nice thing about the enhanced services district program is the rate structure, the boundary, the menu of services that the districts choose to deliver is completely established by them. Right? The city is not. We're a partner there because they need us to help collect those license fees, which they've asked us to do. And so that's kind of the relationship. We also have an oversight relationship where we can kind of, you know, make sure that things aren't happening that we're really uncomfortable with with the funds and that there's certain transparency requirements and various things like that. But it's really up to those districts to decide what they want to do. If they want to assess themselves, you know, a total of a few hundred thousand dollars and focus mostly on marketing, that's fine. And so what we're doing now, to answer the second part of your question about how do how do we make that happen? The enhanced services district coordinator position, which is a relatively new position, came on the heels of an audit in 2020 to sort of improve the way the city manages its enhanced services districts. We responded to most things in that audit now really tuned up the program, have new contracts now with the three existing districts that are more responsive to some of the concerns that were raised there. But we've also now, because that's kind of behind us, been able to turn towards outreach to some of those other districts who might want to consider this in the future. So one of devin reynolds, who's the city's enhanced services district coordinator, one of his jobs now, after going through a series of renewals over the last year, is to really start doing more outreach to those small business associations to sort of explain the tool, we have a new handbook that explains how it works. And so I think I think we're on a good path to making the information more easily accessible and available to those folks. And hopefully some of them will be ready to step up.
70 And that's great.
71 To hear. Bring you proposals.
72 Yeah. You look like you want to jump in.
73 I just want to add on I want to really appreciate the work that karl's team is doing around this, because I think when we're setting up the office of small business, one thing we're hearing is the relationship between small business support and business district support. I think there's a real opportunity to centralize and kind of think of it as a continuum, right? Whether we have the neighborhood prosperity initiative districts venture. Portland, I think, is currently supporting four districts. So I really I really appreciate karl and team because I think there's a potential if we look at seattle, the sheer number of esds that they operate is really exciting. So I want to just thank you. Karl.
74 Kind of looks like an extension of what a space that pmo has started to fill across our community with the problem solver networks where people are getting engaged, but it's all on the back of a napkin. And who can show up to a zoom call, right. So we're talking about structure and putting things in place that make us a big boy or a big girl city in the future. And I appreciate making it easier and not just a downtown thing. So thanks for that work and kind of forward thinking there as well. That's it for me, madam president. Thank you.
75 Thank you, councilor Zimmermann. Councilor Green, go right ahead.
76 Thank you, madam president.
77 And thanks for the presentation today. This is useful. My question is for director bertini. Also, congrats on the new job. And you know, wish you all the success.
78 Temporary.
79 Well temporary. Congratulations through the duration. So we.
80 Kind of fast.
81 So I'm very curious about the office residential conversions. I mean it's something that I think that we need to be looking at pretty holistically in our downtown core as part of our broader economic development strategy. But I am very curious about those specific projects that you mentioned. And if they came from, were those tif spend down projects.
82 That's partially tif and partially proceeds from tif revenue. And I'll note that I think PCEF also has been able to support some of them. So I will note they are not the most cost effective way to accomplish units. These are pilot projects. I think the gravity of the situation in old town demands that we take these kind of things seriously. It's not something that we fully have grasped how to do at scale yet.
83 Thank you for that. And it was about it was about $30 million total that came out of that spend down package.
84 I believe so, but we could we could get that information back to you.
85 Was there any other large investment that came out of that spend down package that were not office to residential conversions?
86 Can you remind me? What do you mean the.
87 So there's about so my understanding is the districts expired. You have to spend these funds down. There's about $30 million allocated. What's about 7 million for one project, 14 million for another of the conversions. But then there's another big chunk there. Yeah, I think it's made in old town I think is. That's right. Right. So I asked these questions because I. So how are those decisions made. Who's making those decisions.
88 That would be our board of commissioners. So for example, the remaining funds that you mentioned, the maiden old town loan that would happen, which would again create returns and come back, that would be, I believe is going to our board of commissioners, either February or March meeting.
89 Okay. And so when we I looked at the action plan because you mentioned that these decisions are governed by the action plan, right. And in the context of nothing about us without us, I think, I think is the governing principle in the, you know, advance Portland document as well. You know, who's the community, who, what's the community. When we think about community driving that.
90 That's a great question for old town specifically, we're partnering predominantly with the old town community association, although historically other investments in the area have have relied on the service providers in that area. But predominantly oatka, we actually have a partnership with them for their capacity in order to do some of that engagement and work as well.
91 Okay, great. Now what if there's other competing claims to that fund, like because the community is quite broad and the community also includes our culturally specific institutions down there, the lansing chinese garden, the japanese American museum. What if they wanted a big chunk of money to do an expansion on their on their institutions?
92 Well, I believe that they have been engaged, and we've also been able to partner with them and support a lot of their work over the years. I believe when they're contemplating is a potential expansion across the street for the vacant lot there, and that's something that our team is in active conversation for old town. I think now we're getting a little bit in the weeds, but I'll note the old town action plan is a combination of two legacy tif districts. Right. The river district. And I'm sorry, it's a little bit before my time, but for the other tif districts that we're starting up, the community leadership committees are really going to be tied to it. Our remaining kind of legacy commitments to old town are reflected in that action plan. But certainly we have staff that are boots on the ground that are connected to the community to engage with the lansing staff. We also were co-located with them for a minute. We supported funding going to the japanese American museum of Oregon. We helped the old town chinatown garden buy their building. So there's been quite a number of resources that have gone in that direction.
93 Okay. Thank you. And is there an oversight direction?
94 I meant the chinatown museum by their building.
95 Okay. Thank you. And, you know, is there an oversight and governance kind of structure inside prosper to sort of deal with sort of real or perceived conflicts of interest in the spending of those tif funds? Like, how would you deal with accountability in that kind of question if that question were to emerge?
96 It's a great question. I mean, we have all members of our committees declare conflict of interest file forms to that effect. We've often had, you know, in across both committees, our board, our finance committees, folks will recuse themselves and declare those those conflicts we have. Our one thing you'll note is we actually have in-house counsel at prosper Portland that's separate from the city that provide oversight and administer all of those forms and kind of keep us on track there.
97 All right. Great. I'll I'll come out of the weeds and let you go. Thank thanks so much for those answers.
98 Councilor Kanal.
99 Thank you for being here. Dc oliveira and team. I'm going to start with questions for housing. So I have two specifically. One is you talked about preventing displacement as a primary goal. And one of the causes of displacement is a systemic power imbalance between landlords and tenants in our city. And I understand there's no concept in our law for tenants unions. And I wanted to ask if you can give a little bit more information about what tenants unions do or should in terms of their existence as a legal concept here for and some idea if there have been proposals about formal recognition from fb in the past.
100 So I apologize, but I really cannot speak to the law regarding tenants unions. We'd have to. I can definitely speak to our city attorney and to our folks that are knowledgeable about that and come back with more details, but it's not not something that I have knowledge of with our rental services office, though we do have we do fund or tenant organize or tenant organizations, tenant rights organizations, including such organizations as the community of life, alliance of tenants, and others. So we provide funding to enable education on tenant rights and to provide a hotline for folks that are experiencing discrimination in housing or have concerns about their housing that we respond to. So we have a hotline. We provide we provide funding for tenant organizing and tenant rights organizations. We also provide funding for free legal aid. And we are essentially a provider of information to enable tenants who are feeling experiences of harassment, for example, to have access to tenant rights and tenant information.
101 Yeah, I think my question, I'm happy to take information on it later is speaking to the idea that there is a treatment of a symptom, but not necessarily the actual underlying issue. So the idea that there are contexts in which a labor union is required to be involved in conversations with an employer, or I should flip that sentence around, that is the sort of key difference in terms of tenants union versus tenants rights organization. So I just wanted to flag that. My other question for you is that I have constituents asking me about fb run or funded or managed housing units and underutilization of units, specifically calls to the effect of I'm applying for a unit in this building and not getting in, but I know from someone else who lives there that there have been this many units vacant for two years. How what is the goal around utilization and what's the plan to get to 100%?
102 The goal will be 100% utilization. We should have we have should have waitlist. We don't manage quite very much housing. Most of the housing is managed by others. We are a lender to nonprofits who own the housing, sometimes for profits that own the housing and that manage it. So we don't have as easy a time of tracking utilization rates to say, home forward, who owns their own housing and puts tenants in them. So we're not actually, for example, in the position of leasing up empty units. What one of the things that we are working on today is the creation of an online leasing system, so that we that all vacant units can be identified by anyone real time online and people can quickly access them. So we're working on a leasing system that will help us both track vacancies and enable faster leasing, and give us more tools to be able to kind of know what the status of empty units owned by third parties.
103 That that that sounds great. And I would posit for my colleagues that the idea that we are putting a penny of city money toward something, even if we're not directly managing it, should require us to seek out 100% utilization as a condition of that funding. Going forward. I'm going to switch over to asking for bts. You mentioned garbage pickup in areas. Why is our garbage service so infrequent in the city relative to our peers?
104 When we switched to the three bin system that we have now, there was a discussion around how to balance affordability with maximizing recycling and composting, and the every other week service was a solution largely driven by cost. There's a significant difference between the rates we would have to apply if we did weekly garbage and every other week. And to date, we the preponderance of customers are able to deal with the with the every other week service. There are provisions for bulky waste disposal and other things and larger bins. There's a two tiered bin size, which is partly how we handle that.
105 Yeah. So I would love to follow up with your office on two parts of that. One is what is the cost associated with every other week versus weekly. And also the second thing is who can request it because renters cannot currently get the larger bin without going through an incredibly arduous process to get the property owner to ask for it. So and that that's been, I'll speak personally, a giant pain.
106 We are working on a low income rate structure, and there are a number of different scenarios where the way we implement that structure, that's going to be coming to council probably next year. But part of that is I think, going to be making a better connection between the occupant of a unit and, and the and the recycling and garbage service.
107 And councilor. And I would posit this is not about income. This is about power.
108 So.
109 So councilor, I want to just flag the distinction. I don't know the size of building you're talking about, but we have a largely unregulated multifamily collection system. And that's a this is historic challenge. But staff are starting to through the process of having a more regulated system similar to our single family. So basically there's a system for four units or less which is called curbside. And then there's everything else. And the everything else is basically a black box of contracts between the building owner and the property management company, etc. So there's wild inequities in that, both in cost and service. And that is a huge challenge. So it's a it's a big lift. I don't want to underscore how I need to underscore how how complicated it's going to be, but it's something we absolutely need to address. Frankly, when I first got to Portland, I was I was sort of shocked that the city of Portland, the city of our size, had had no control over multifamily collections.
110 Yeah, addressing multifamily collections and figuring out a way to improve that is one of our top priorities in that program.
111 Thank you. This applies to single family homes, too. I just want to let you know that.
112 Yeah of course. Yeah. We have more control over the single family.
113 Just to make sure I'm moving quickly. My and I apologize for the musical chairs. My other questions are for karl lyle. Sorry. So first, while you're getting up here, congrats on the wnba return. I'll make a pitch for Portland fire and on the lease extension for the blazers. My questions are about enhanced services districts, specifically downtown, clean and safe. The previous council. This is sort of a riff off of what councilor Dunphy talked about. Snuck in a ten year extension to that in the period between the election and the change of terms and all that of ten years. I don't have a problem with the broad idea of esd's or the other two. And I also don't have a concern about the area expansion, but I do have a lot of concerns about the process by which this particular extension took place and the choice by the city, not necessarily council, to give six days notice on the petition. So I wanted to understand how that happened. I also wanted to understand what processes for accountability we have for renewing something in an area, which I think if you polled most portlanders is neither clean nor safe.
114 Well, so on the so similar to the you know, I can't really speak to, you know, exactly what city council was thinking when they made those choices. But what the process is that these urban enhanced services districts are to establish one is to make a code amendment because they are housed in city code. So it's a city council action, right? So in in code is the definition of the boundary and the definition of the rate structure. So those are kind of the two pieces that mean they have to come to city council. So there are, you know, best practices that I think we can observe. And we actually have described in our, in our handbook now for how a district should go about doing community outreach and sort of building support and developing the options, analyzing things and then coming to city council. But there is no currently no like firm requirement that those be followed. Right? Those are sort of guidelines. This is the best way to do this. If I'm talking to the folks in the Hawthorne business district, I'm like, okay, this is going to take, you know, a year or more to, for you to work with your businesses, your district, to build the support, to find that menu of, of options for services that you really want to provide and set that rate structure and then propose it to city council. Downtown, clean and safe did a shorter they still did a did a pretty significant outreach process to and worked with, had a series of open houses and various different things over at least a 6 to 9 month period to sort of figure out what kind of boundary expansion they felt like made sense for them. And with regards to sort of updating their rate structure, they actually did respond pretty directly to some things that we had recommended coming out of that audit in terms of a better way to set up rate structures. So, for example, for the first time now in downtown clean and safe rate structure, we have a residential rate cap. So a residential unit will only pay. I think it's I might have the numbers wrong. I don't have it in front of me. But I think it's $200 per unit. Right. Which is new. It used to just be the calculation based on a whole bunch of difficult to obtain and kind of obscure data, including elevator capacity, which you can only find in a state database that doesn't even it's not digitized. Right. And then tax data from the 90s and things like that. So now the rate structure with downtown clean and safe was much more responsive to those recommendations that there be a residential rate cap to sort of limit and control the costs on residential tenants within the district, and then also to use readily available and current data to be able to do the calculations and understand the rate calculations. So both of those things did happen with with the update. So I would say they responded to some of those recommendations in the audit and the consultant report that sort of looked at best practices in that process. So that's a positive. But in terms of the speed and sort of the process that they actually took to build the support and come to city council, you know, that was kind of their decisions and that's what they did.
115 So in terms of notice, I'm not going to make this a question because I want to move on. But I, I think underlying all of my questions here is a question of power and where the perception at least is around who specifically the service area serves in terms of people with power in Portland already versus not. And I remember with clean and safe was renewed in 2021. There was a conversation about whether or not to renew it for a single year or not, or for a longer period. It was renewed for five years, and then as soon as it was clear that the people of this city had spoken through an election, the next thing I know it was already in progress. I'm hearing what you're saying there. The next thing is we get a ten year renewal to take the power away from the 12 of us. And so I'd love to understand what what in the future, I'd love to understand what our options are. And that might be a city attorney question, because there are some accountability pieces of that contract that are problematic. And then the same thing applies with relation to both our sanitation concerns as well as the housing, because right now everything feels very tilted towards the landlords in this particular context. So I just want to say that in daylight it and say, I'd love to pursue that with my colleagues in the future, but I'm done.
116 Thank you.
117 I would just add one thing that might be helpful that there has always been a ten year renewal sort of authorization of these districts, and so that's always been a ten year cycle separately from that. But but paired with it every five years, the contracts between the city and the district management association get renewed. So there's a five year cycle for the contract renewal and a ten year cycle for the authorization of the district. So, you know.
118 Councilor Koyama Lane.
119 Thank you, madam president. My question is related also to the enhanced service district downtown known as clean and safe. I want to hear a bit about your responses to the concerns of the funds from clean and safe subsidizing Portland metro chambers executive salaries, including up to 45% of the president and ceo salary, which is in the 300,000. Can you speak to that? I have heard a lot of constituents concerned about the ties of this program to the Portland metro chamber, which is the Portland business alliance.
120 Yeah, I mean, I can speak a little bit to it. And I actually think that reaching out directly to the organizations and asking for that, that because the, the these enhanced services districts are governed by a board and then it's extremely common, almost always the, the board of the enhanced services district or the business improvement district or whatever you want to call it, will then contract with a district management association to provide those services. So, so in a at a smaller scale, you might have, you know, a neighborhood business district that sets up an enhanced services district, but then they they contract with their preexisting nonprofit business association to actually spend and provide some of those services. So that's the relationship that's very common. It is the typical model for these across the country in downtown clean and safe's case, that partnership organization is the Portland metro chamber. And so there's a long history sort of how how that that came along. The relationship I guess I'm saying is not uncommon. The need to have a bright line and a separation between how enhanced services district funds are getting spent and that and making sure that the enhanced services district board is governing that, not the partner organizations board is very important. And I think downtown clean and safe understands that. And, you know, I think we can we can request clarity on how those funds are being spent. But but you are correct that they there are staff, including the director of metro chamber who is working on both organizations and partially paid for by by different sources.
121 Are there specific things we can be doing to make sure there's more transparency and oversight?
122 We can we can provide budgets. We can. Yeah, absolutely.
123 And perhaps as you send follow up information that could be included. Councilor Ryan.
124 Yes.
125 Thank you, madam president. And thank you all for being here this morning. This is a big lift of your time and it's noticeable. I also want to say it's really easy to experience the collaboration that all of you are going through. And I know that's also been a new system to build. So it's great to see that. Congratulations, donny oliveira for your leadership. I think you mentioned a powerful word to drive culture for your area, and that's stewarding. And I think those who want to we really need to steward those who want to spend money here. We are not the darling of investors like we were the, you know, the 90s, the 90s, the aughts, and started to dissipate halfway through the what do we call those? The I call it ten spot because the station I listened to. But anyway, we know what we're talking about. We have national conditions that we can't control, and we have reputation that we have to rebuild. And reputation is easy to is slow to build and easy to have it go away. As I always say, it's easy to destruct. It's really hard to build. So thank you for all being to collaborating where I can see your rowing in the same direction. And I want to keep trying to find those moments, because that's when we get to efficiency. As you might know, councilor Green and I will be co-chairing the economic development committee, which has a different name, but it includes arts, arts and economy. But I'm going to go a little bit further, madam president, to say that it's also just about it really is about activation. So when we looked at arts, it's because of that. When we looked at parks, it's because of their programing. On the rec side, they are the largest program for arts in the city, and we all know that the parks have the big nature parks, and they have plazas and squares, and we've done a lot of work together to keep activating those. I just want to put a pin in that, not just in downtown, where we must continue to make that work, but in those pocket parks, those plazas throughout our neighborhoods as well. Just be shameless about district two at the moment. So dawson park is actually a good example of that. So I just wanted to make sure that we're constantly focused on that. I also, as you know, love community wide indicators, performance indicators, and I'll be working with you to what those look like with all of your team. So it will be a collaborative process, and I hope that we'll also include your partners, those that you're stewarding. When we create those, I think I just want to put it out there that the biggest one I want to see, it's all about activation. So we clearly those numbers that show activation in our streets, in our parks, joyful activation really does help change that reputation. I know you all agree with that, so I'm looking forward to how you track those numbers so we can trust those. And I think when we're looking at storefronts and office spaces downtown, please also let's start tracking those in the main streets that councilor Zimmerman mentioned earlier. The little downtowns, I think, was your language. Those little villages, those main streets throughout all of the city. We have to make sure we get that granular information as well. Okay, a couple questions. Are we seeing any early signs of improvement? Where would this go? A couple of you could answer this one. So I'll just put it out there. Are we seeing any early signs of improvement after the inclusionary zoning recalibration committee? That's a mouthful. Anyway, they came up with some recommendations. We had spirited dialog about bird gate glazing. You all remember that? It just happened not too long ago. I realized that. And again, I'm aware of the national conditions, but what are we seeing? Any early trends from investors appreciating that hard work that went in by that committee, by the planning commission, and then by the past council to pass that?
126 Well, I can respond. Unfortunately, I don't have the data in front of me. But I can tell you anecdotally and through my staff, the inclusionary recalibration has been successful. We've seen significantly more uptick in the inclusionary zoning. I mean, inclusionary housing production. And we have because the expanded area, we're seeing it broader areas as well. I know I'm getting a constant, constant inclusionary housing applications in I we can get you specific data. I just don't have it at my fingertips. But we can come back with specific data on the changes since the ordinance, since the recalibration.
127 Yeah, I just would love to keep tracking. I know you are too. So I'm just saying something that we're all thinking about.
128 Yeah, we are tracking it.
129 I just how we're disciplined and tracking tracking that and also what we learn as we're tracking that. So we can make those continuous improvements. Yeah. The transition from the peninsula crossing safe rest village is coming up this year. And I see leslie goodloe out there, and I recall when we were building the peninsula crossing safe rest village, we always had in mind that we were doing some infrastructure work for this transition to habitat for humanity. I was at a neighborhood association meeting on Monday. I'll just reflect on what it you know, how humbling this work is as a public servant. So some of the same faces I can picture all of them quite vividly that were very upset about that going in. Now they're at a meeting on Monday night being really concerned that that will be closing down and will be transitioning and, well, the good people at habitat for humanity, in collaboration with the city, provide the same type of stewardship that urban alchemy has provided for that neighborhood, a neighborhood that for over a decade couldn't use the peninsula crossing trail because it was unsafe and just didn't, you know, no one would allow their children to ride their bikes there. That's one way to put it. And so I just want to make sure that we're really cognizant of that transition. So I'm looking at the housing bureau. I know parks isn't here. I know you'll be collaborating with the rangers, but we've been really fortunate that urban alchemy is stretched really far to provide that type of stewardship to the neighborhood. And I want to make sure that we don't lose that. So it's good to see you, leslie, and I'm glad that that promise is now being delivered. And thank you for your hard work to keep us focused on that bureau planning, sustainability. I think I just want to end with this statement and question, and that is the customer cobid customer support. I think that what I experienced when we were trying to break the concrete up and actually get the soil going, so we could actually do this integration, it was a lot of hard soil work, if you will. But one thing that I hear a lot about is the process has actually I know has improved, and we've done bold work to bring people together. Hello, terry tyson, who's been the key cat herder out there and likes to stay behind the scenes. So she'll probably tell me. I wish she wishes I wouldn't have called her out. But the work of that team has been tremendous. But we're not going to solve it just by having the process improve. My experience, Eric, was the code clutter where council members constantly approve new codes and new zoning, and then we ask the customers to try to figure that out. I know that, Jamie, you started to poke at this a bit, but I just need to hear that in year 2025, we're going to make some headway and that you bring stuff to us if that's necessary to do that. Code clutter. Every gardener knows what I'm talking about. You can't keep throwing seeds in. You got to you got to weed it out. You got to make some space. It's not easy sometimes, but it's necessary. So I think that we have some old codes that just need to go away. So we don't confuse all of you who seem to have different interpretations of it. And you can only imagine what the customers go through. How's that coming?
130 Yeah, this is really another example of the collaboration across all the agencies here in particular. And we've been working to retool our regulatory improvement process to also not just address zoning, but other regulations. And with the process that you were involved in in the last couple of years to look at the process with and that's led to a reinvigoration of that work. You probably remember the regulatory improvement program was paused actually for a number of years due to budget, but that was restored with the last year's package. So it's definitely active work and a top priority for both bureaus.
131 And councilor. Terry's group will be coming to you all this summer with the first code improvement package that crosses all bureaus, all service areas. So. So terry and tyson, who's back there, is leading her and her team are leading this work. This was a work that councilor Ryan had seeded with his prior colleagues to really activate permit improvement. One of the results was the creation of p and d, but also this permit improvement task force that led to a team and their first major code improvement policy change will come to all this this year.
132 And really a focus of that work right now is the code version of the process improvements is looking at where the codes from the different bureaus intersect, not just within the zoning code, but how, you know, infrastructure codes may overlay with environmental codes or zoning. And that's been the.
133 You know, besides watching the 7 or 8 bureaus of permitting leaders get to know each other, I think sometimes for the first time a few years ago, that was a good start. But what was also exciting was to see your stewardship of the customers that were included in the task force. So will their voice be at the table as you do the code clutter work?
134 Absolutely. Yeah.
135 Okay. Thanks. I really want to talk about baseball because I know that's a big thing that everyone up here wants to talk about. That's a little bit of a joke. I might be the only one, but I do want to hear real briefly. Is that still live, or was that just a news flash last year?
136 Thank you for the question, councilor. For those who haven't been tracking, there's a group called the Portland diamond project who has been actively working for seven years now to bring major league baseball to the city of Portland. They are currently in negotiations with zidell yards, though the zidell family, about acquisition of that site to potentially be the home of a major league baseball stadium. Park, as you were, the answer is yes. We are still very much in communication. We've stood up a technical advisory committee that's led by prosper Portland, that's made up of all the bureaus that would be involved in that. But I will just say that's a very long road. If we're talking baseball metaphors, we're probably still in the first or second inning of this, of this game. So certainly more to come.
137 That was a great metaphor. And thank you. That's a longer conversation. I'll just say one reason I'm excited about it. I really am not the biggest baseball fan. It's like fourth in my order. But what I do know about it is the economic driver is that it attracts families to come spend a weekend, go to a lot of other amenities, whether it's the zoo or the museums. And I did see that when I lived in seattle. The difference between, say, the seahawks and the mariners, even though the nfl's a bigger brand in terms of local economic, hospitality drivers, baseball, because of the way the schedule is set up, really is quite a stimulation. And what a postcard picture that would be of having that balls go into the river. Yeah, caught by someone in a boat, of course. Thanks, councilor.
138 I believe that's what happens in san francisco.
139 Yes.
140 People go out in their.
141 Be prettier. They don't.
142 It will be prettier. It will be. I know there are a couple of councilors with repeat questions in the queue. I'm going to ask you to hold those questions so that we can actually hear the rest of the presentation as well. So, donnie, if you'd like your team to keep going, that'd be great.
143 Thank you. Council president. Next slide please. All right. So those are great questions. And actually a lot of the conversation we're going to have going forward is about this collaboration. Some of the questions that you are all framing really talks about. How do we do our work. Where does councilor Kanal where does power lie and who do we interact with. So next slide please. And so really very broadly speaking again the service area in many spaces are conveners. We're bringing both internally with other bureaus regional partners, but also community partners to contemplate how we're going to advance our economic development strategies, our housing production, climate, climate action and urban development, and the general like overall urban form of our city. A lot of this work is done both across the service area internally. But frankly, we rely on a lot of community partnerships to make this real. So there's a robust number of committees and stakeholder groups that the directors here rely on to provide feedback. And that's that's equally important to how we develop policies and programs. So just a little bit, just thinking about some of these things when it comes to economic development, we're really talking about the interconnected components of how we're both retaining our, our current business community, providing new opportunities, generating wealth not just across the board, but specifically to communities that we're trying to prioritize. And this is not just about like ongoing business, but, you know, councilor Ryan mentioned activation, like, what are things that are not going to be good buildouts, but really going to perpetuate good growth. And that's really important. So it's not just money. It's really about the community connectivity. It's about infrastructure investments. It's about the longevity of good, Green, well-paying jobs. And it's about that social fabric that we need in our communities to thrive as we're as we're seeing things like the fires and, and los angeles, for example, how people respond to that is directly tied to the, the health of their of their community districts, their business districts. There's a direct tie to that. And I just want to offer that there's a lot of work to be done here. We have had neighborhoods in our city that have been underserved, under resourced, not had power and influence. And I think I want to just give a lot of credit to the team up here who have really leaned in to try to unpack that and change that culture for the for the city of Portland. And there's much work to be done. I don't there's we're still refining, of course, on housing. The great success of the bond spin downs is can't be understated. The housing bureau over delivered on those promises. But now we're at the point now in this in-between time, no bonds. Tiff is still a few years out. What do we do? So what are the policy levers? What are the strategic partnerships that we're going to have to activate to continue that housing production that's so needed, even with the transition of our city government, climate is still a priority for the whole service area. So whether it be the housing bureau, looking at Green building prosper, looking at clean industry strategies that the clean energy sector, obviously at bts, we have a sustainability work. It's like, how do we ensure that's embedded in all of our all of our work? And then, of course, with planning in the urban form and urban development, it's really thinking about how we activate our zoning. You all over your time here have to make decisions about how we're going to grow our city, what are the areas we're going to focus resources, energy, how we're going to leverage the tools in our tool kit, whether it be zoning or code to really push the development, the type of development we want to we want to see through development agreements and community benefit agreements. I'm going really fast. I want to get to the part where you get to ask us more questions. Next slide please. But I alluded to this earlier. While you all will work with you all to craft new policies and refine the existing policies, this group isn't just sitting in the back rooms thinking about what we're doing next. We're guided by existing plans and policies, some that have been around for many years, some that are more new. But everything from our comprehensive plan that bts stewards to our climate emergency work plan, the economic opportunity analysis pcf's climate investment plan, our housing production strategy, even the homelessness responsive action plan, and of course, advanced Portland, which is the city's economic development strategy. Those are all guiding. Those are our north stars. That's what we're working towards constantly refining, looking to elected leadership to provide a finer point on where we should be going. But these are your tools as well. We're stewards of them, but you really are the agents of change that can help us improve and be responsive to what you're all hearing, what we're hearing from community about how to be better, how to do the work a little bit more thoughtfully, maybe with a little bit more kindness. And, I know commissioner Ryan is extremely councilor Ryan, we've talked about this before with a little bit more joy. I think part of a part of this work has to be about community development, economic development, actually bringing a little bit of fun and happiness. I don't want to be all about it, but I mean that sincerely. This is an opportunity for us to remind portlanders and the world, frankly, that that portland's a really great place. And I think the tools and the toolkit of this service area, these policies, as wonky as they are, help deliver that promise if done well. So I just want to flag that. That's something I'm really looking forward to working with you all on, is how do we deliver the goals in these in these guiding documents? And with that, I'm going to pass it over to shay to kind of talk about the ways that collaboration works in real time. We picked a few examples. There's so many more, but this is just kind of a taste taste test of what it looks like when this service area works within our, you know, within our colleagues here, but also with the other service areas to deliver some pretty cool projects. So appreciate.
144 Thank you danny. Thank you senor. Okay I love broadway corridor as an example of collaboration, not just among bureaus but among this all star crew here. As you may know, we're talking about the 34 acre site that's located in the central city. It's a previous facility for the post office. The bureau of planning and sustainability completed initially the years of outreach and planning work on an updated central city plan that was done in 2018. The updated plan called for a master plan process for large central city development sites, and that included the broadway corridor. At the same time that was happening, prosper Portland worked to advance the vision for the post office site, and that was a long standing priority for growth in our central city. We negotiated the acquisition of the property from the us postal service in 2016. We undertook significant community engagement. We completed the central city master plan as a requirement by the city, and we negotiated project agreements, including terms for community benefits with the healthy communities coalition and a funding and finance plan with bureau partners, both of which were approved by city council. Subsequently, prosper helped relocate the usps retail facility to an interim location. We led the demolition and the soil remediation to ready the site for development, and I'm proud to say that 93% of those costs were all spent on cobid certified firms, and nearly 36 million was spent with minority owned firms. Prosper has an exclusive negotiated agreement with related northwest and melvin mark, and we partnered with them and constructing hope and Oregon tradeswomen to apply for, receive and now implement a pcf grant that's going to ensure net zero middle income housing development and advance on site Green building and pre-apprenticeship trainings. Pad also reviewed and approved a master plan for the area, as well as permits that were necessary for the relocation of the usps retail site to its current location and the demolition of the former facilities. We are now closely working with bts water and PBOT, and anticipating the construction of northwest, johnson and kearny streets that are going to start later this year. We're also engaging in early consultations with home forward for the forthcoming affordable housing development, and anticipate working with related on their proposed development as well. And tell me you want to chime in here too.
145 Yes. So just fbs role in the broadway corridor development was after a competitive solicitation, which we issued, we awarded $37.5 million in metro affordable housing bond funds and 4.5 million in river district tax increment funding to a joint venture between home forward and the urban league of Portland to develop 230 affordable rental homes in the broadway corridor. Last year, we awarded those funds. The 14 story mixed use development will be the anchor site for a new neighborhood, providing for over homes for over 200 portlanders in need, alongside services accessible to both residents and the local community. As a co-owner of the site, we look forward to supporting prosper and related northwest on the development of parcel six in order to house over 400 portlanders in a mixed income development. In the first phase of the development and help activate the neighborhood. And we'll go to the next slide. I'll show you a few more examples around the city of partnership. Let's go to the next slide. So tax increment financing has been an important financial tool for the city to deliver to deliver on inclusive residential, commercial, employment growth and to support critical infrastructure investments and deploy innovative Green technology within our central cities, such as in the broadway corridor and other corridors throughout the city. Commercial corridors. So a few examples of this collaboration I'll just share with you. One is albina one, which is being developed by the albina vision trust and land company. They're developing 94 units of family focused affordable housing in the interstate corridor tif district under the city's north northeast preference policy. Rental priority in those units will be given to displaced or longtime residents of the north northeast Portland area. Albina one will be completed in the second half of 2025 and complements other Portland housing bureau and prosper investments in the interstate corridor, including the future williams and russell project, which brings 85 affordable rental units, 20 affordable home ownership units, and a black business hub to the district. A multi-partner collaboration between prosper Portland, Portland housing bureau, human solutions and girdling eden. The nick fish, which is on the picture, is a mixed use mixed income catalytic project in gateway regional center tif district, adjacent to the gateway discovery park at northeast halsey street and northeast 106th avenue. The ground floor is owned and leased by prosper Portland, with happy go lucky as an anchor tenant offering childcare services in east Portland. 75 rental units funded by prosper and fb serve a mix of low income, workforce and market rate tenants. The asian health services center within the lens town center tif district is headquarters for the asian health and services center, or ahsc at southeast, foster and southeast 91st avenue. Prosper funded the project include. Includes approximately 30,000ft■!s housi, the asian health and services center, offices, community and clinic services, and event space. The project includes a rooftop garden, on site and on site parking, and this builds on other prosper and fb investments along the foster avenue and 92nd avenue corridors, including projects like the mercado commons and the phoenix pharmacy. Waterleaf, which is formerly called river place. Parcel three. Phase two is a second building and a recently completed development by bridge housing, a national nonprofit affordable housing developer bringing 176 new affordable housing units to the south waterfront area in north macadam macadam tif district. Phase one. The vre created 203,000 affordable units through collaboration between fb prosper and our partners in public works service area for transportation and infrastructure improvements. The city catalyzed the district's significant transformation from an industrial area to a now thriving commercial and urban residential district, anchored by major employers and educational institutions. Fb investments in water, leaf and vre was key to achieving a balanced mix of housing incomes within the south waterfront area. Handing it over to.
146 Eric.
147 Eric. The next example of collaboration is the clean industry initiative. This initiative works with public and private nonprofit partners to help Portland industries thrive while supporting the environment and community wealth. It's shaped by input from industrial businesses, climate and environmental justice organizations, labor representatives, researchers, government and other key partners. The initiative uses a collaborative and data driven approach to help us understand the current landscape of portland's industrial sector, identify opportunities for clean, decarbonized and inclusive practices, and define a roadmap of next steps. The future of job growth in Portland will center on businesses that work towards climate goals, and the industrial sector in Portland provides about 22% of the jobs in our city. Many of these are middle wage jobs that don't require a bachelor's degree. This can help reduce wage and racial wealth gap in our region and benefit the entire community. The initiative connects portland's climate emergency work plan, which describes the actions we can take to eliminate carbon emissions by 2050. These actions make portlanders more resilient, especially communities of color, and who are at most at risk of the impacts from climate change. And this initiative has been successful in late 2024 and leveraging federal resources alongside a recent grant of $20 million from PCEF from the collaborative for climate action funding opportunity.
148 Next slide please.
149 All right. I think this is me. So as we look at this slide, I do want to acknowledge how hard it has been historically for small businesses to navigate both city services and the public and private sectors of our city. So on screen, sorry if it's a little convoluted. What you're seeing is an ideal client journey, though. In practice, I want to acknowledge that businesses could enter into this continuum from any point, right. There's not one universal experience that businesses have here. But as an example, you know, a home based food entrepreneur that's facing barriers to success might plug into our work through prosper's inclusive business resource network. That's the ibn. And those are, you know, culturally specific and industry specific service providers like apano naya. In this example, it's the northwest native chamber, where a culturally specific business advisor builds an initial relationship. And that's crucial, right? Building trust helps them with things like entity formation or a business plan. And then it will refer them in this model to the new office of small business once they're ready. And they need to engage with government services as a central point of access for information and assistance, the office of small business liaisons used their knowledge of the city's many bureau rules and regulations to make sure that businesses are prepared and able to access the right city staff and programs. Such a great example is pads small business empowerment program, which supports small businesses. With permitting, we've had some great success in partnership with that. For some businesses like ice queen, they also may recognize that the business needs further technical assistance around stability and growth, so that they might enroll in a three year program with an ibm provider like miso microenterprise services of Oregon. I want to note through the ibr, which can't serve everybody we serve, you know, on average, around 1000 entrepreneurs a year focused on entrepreneurs of color and women. They are concurrently provided with culturally specific advising, and they're referred to other providers for intensive services that could be things like legal support or accounting, but also things like recipe development with the cdc. Despite the Portland being in its state, they still have pretty robust business advising services. Eventually, once this entrepreneur has a product they might sell for the first time in my people's market and meet a buyer from new seasons. Once they're ready to sell beyond the region, they may get referred to one of our more intensive growth programs for businesses making 100 k in gross sales or more through an organization like livelihood northwest and their increase project. I just want to note this is a long term. This is a long term journey, right? When we partner with these organizations, the RFP for the ibn is around five years, and we do that intentionally so that these relationships can be long term and we can in a client relationship management system, we can really keep tabs on the entrepreneurs. And I'm really excited by the new office of small business, which now provides a nexus to the wider, you know, city infrastructure at large. So thank you for allowing me and indulging me to walk through that.
150 All right. Great. And so that was largely about our service areas collaboration. But I really want to stress that the work continues across the city. So whether it be PCEF working across the city to invest in climate justice, programing in the bureau's prosper, working with PBOT and parks on the winter lights festival, there's just so many examples where we are working with our partners in the city to deliver quality service, new programing, infrastructure, investments. Et cetera. Because I think the city works better when people just work with the city and not a particular service area or a bureau. That's that's our stuff. Less important to our communities. One thing I just want to offer as well is and actually go to the next slide, please. Some of the reason why our service area convenes frequently and coordinates is because some of the larger key metrics and indicators of our city are we're stewards of. I keep using the stewards because, yes, we have a responsibility for cost burdened households as a data point that we track. But the influence of that is obviously bigger than just our service area. And if you look at just some of the examples of these key metrics, these are big things. These are, you know, reduction in carbon emissions, workforce with quality jobs, the economic vitality of our city, you know, measured in gdp. Those are big, big indicators. And we're doing better as a city and for our part of our service area and providing more regular reports and dashboards to show real time to you all and our communities how we're doing. And I will tell you, there's in some of these things, we can be better and we're working on it, but at least we can have that real time information to pivot off what's working and what's not. So over the course of the coming months, you'll you'll hear more about some of these dashboards and be able to poke out, like, why are the why are we not hitting our targets on some of these things? And how can we improve that? Right. So we're going to I think the next slide please is more questions. So that was really just about collaboration. If there's any questions about projects we can keep moving. Council president the floor is yours. Of course.
151 I want to make sure we get to the budget portion of your presentation. Counselors who are in the queue are any of your questions specific to the collaboration examples that we were given? Okay. Let's very quickly go to councilor Green and then councilor Dunphy, and then we'll keep going.
152 Thank you. And I promise to be very brief on the collaboration. Collaboration question with the Portland housing bureau. And specifically, like in summer of 2023, there was a street roots article about the inclusionary zoning program and the sort of like a lack of you guys know what I'm talking about, a lack of sort of visibility into the costs, the long run costs, the total cost of that program. Are you guys taking any steps to sort of figure out how to see who owns that data and how to kind of be more responsive to the public for those kind of questions? Is that part of the key metrics piece?
153 Yeah. So I think specific to that was the recalibration study of the inclusionary housing, which actually took a look at the costs that were being imposed on new developers as a requirement of putting affordable housing in their in their projects, and then looking at what are the tax abatements that are being offered by the city to offset those costs. Also looked at whether or not we were achieving the deep affordability we were seeking. Most of the affordability was coming in at the 80% of ami, which is actually closer to a moderate target. So we made adjustments both in the area that was contained. That is has the inclusionary housing as well as in increasing the ability, increasing the tax benefits to the providers of inclusionary housing to offset costs. What we're seeing out of that recalibration study is not only an expansion of inclusionary housing, a deepening of the affordability, and frankly, fewer complaints are coming in as we do the agreements, the inclusionary housing agreements. But I think we can provide more specific reports on what's happened since the calibration.
154 Thank you.
155 Councilor Dunphy. Briefly, briefly.
156 Shay. Specific to the broadway corridor. It's an example of collaboration within internally. But can you tell me about the external component of it? I know that there was some change in the master developer and also the community benefit agreement. I've lost track of the ball. I know that there was a lot of conversation about what is the status of all of that.
157 Yeah, I think thank you for that question, councilor Dunphy. Yeah. I mean, the pandemic did have a tremendous impact on the office market and on the overall initial plans of the site. Right. And I think we're very fortunate to still have a great private sector partner like related northwest and melbourne market at the table. So they're still actively engaged. They're still pursuing an initial project. I think we're very close to announcements or completion there. I'll also note there's been existing and continued collaboration around, you know, looking knowing the office market is where it's at. We understand and acknowledge that in order to have kind of the catalytic investment you have on site, it will probably have to attract a large corporate headquarters. And so we're working with gpi, melvin, mark and others around some of that. I'm pleased to note we recently welcomed a number of site selectors who, if you all know that world that is generally who kind of sets the tone and reception around our city, and they were blown away by the potential of the site. So I think that and, you know, the continued positive momentum that Portland is experiencing right now makes us pretty bullish and happy around the future for broadway corridor.
158 Thank you.
159 Let's move on to budget.
160 All right. Next slide please. Thank you. All right. So actually let's go to the next slide. We'll just dive right in. So really this is a just a high level breakdown of the service area. And as you can see the funding sources for community economic development is wide ranging. It's very fluid. In many cases. We're relying on on taxes and fees in a lot of ways. You know, obviously bonds previously and going forward we'll see more tax increment financing. A couple of things I want to I want to just flag in particular is in particular Portland development and permitted development is fully at the mercy of the boom and bust cycle of development. And this should surprise nobody here. But we are in a downturn right now. And so we are admittedly looking at different mechanisms to keep the bureau afloat. As we prepare for the we expect to be an uptick in development and permitting soon. But the point being is we don't have a lot of flexibility to pick up the slack elsewhere within our service area. A couple of just anecdotal notes are the 70,000,000in general fund discretionary, only about 45 million of that is ongoing. The remainder is one time. That's going somewhat to pad as a one time someone to housing in different different programs. And of course, the thing that you should be given all the federal concerns a large portion of our resources has federal implications. So we'll obviously keep tracking that with our colleagues at government relations and the mayor's office about the, you know, the potential impact. But really, this is just a moment to kind of daylight that this is a diverse portfolio of funding, and we try to be as nimble as possible with a lot of these dollars going out the door for programs. To that end. Next slide please. Help me.
161 Okay. I'm going to just briefly discuss some of the major sources of funding for the Portland housing bureau. So specifically multifamily development capital. Last year, our fiscal year 2324, we spent $91 million. We make up Portland multifamily development capital, available through notice of funding availability or nofa. A team of internal and external housing professionals will review project proposals for financial feasibility based on affordability, design, service partnerships, ability to manage the property over time. And this year, we spent the majority of our housing capital funds on new development of affordable housing. However, this we also as, as I mentioned earlier, use multifamily development capital for a rapid acquisition nofa which enabled mission driven affordable housing providers to acquire market rate apartments for conversion to affordable housing. A recent example of this is the December 2024 acquisition of the cesar apartments by our partners at home forward, who are converting it to a market rate property to permanent supportive housing. Fb provided $9 million of metro housing bonds pass through Multnomah county general fund in order to take advantage of the current market conditions, creating affordable housing more cheaply and more quickly than new construction. We've also used multifamily development capital for preservation. An example of this is that we recently provided $6 million loan to preserve and extend the affordability of the belmont dairy apartments. It's a historic, mixed use, mixed income project in an amenity rich neighborhood. This previously regulated property so it had been regulated, the regulations expired. The property was being marketed for conversion to market rate. We offered a loan to the to the new buyer during the. During that process, and our loan of $89,000 per unit is preserving 67 units of the 85 units in the building as affordable for households, earning 60% of the area median for 99 years. So it's a really good way to stabilize affordability in the community. We have other funds, primarily federal and sometimes state funds that we use for homeownership that we call homeownership access funds for things like downpayment assistance, homebuyer education and readiness program programing to help low income portlanders become homeowners and build generational wealth. We also anticipate tiff. We have used and anticipate using tif district for that work as well. We spent 4.1 million in homeowner owned homeownership retention funding from federal state resources for things like home repair grants and loans, lead paint remediation, and grants that address safety concerns so that vulnerable homeowners and renters can remain in their homes, as well as estate planning. Education for lower income households. We anticipate using tif funding, along with federal and state funds for future homeownership program activity. Our renter services funds, which comes from our rental registration fee of we put $4.8 million into programs such as eviction, legal defense, landlord tenant mediation, emergency relocation for victims of fire, and other severe habitability issues. We offered free trainings for landlords on Portland city code and fair housing laws. We staffed the renter's rights hotline at community alliance for tenants, offered letter writing clinics for tenants at Portland community college, and legal services for fair housing complaints. Our healthy homes, which comes also from state and federal grants, offers lead screening. Particularly, we're looking for households where children with elevated blood lead levels are presenting and we offer in the remediation of lead for those health conditions. And so that really gives a very quick overview of our main sources of funding, as well as a lot of our activities.
162 All right. I think this is me. So here's a sample of some of our most impactful programs. You'll note this reflects over $33 million that went out the door. But I'll also note that that number goes up and down depending on availability of resources like cares or American rescue plan act. But the examples of the types of grants you see on screen could be from everything from construction industry training programs, helping entrepreneurs do tenant improvements, installing a new commercial kitchen in their space. It might be ibr grants for technical assistance. We administer that program through five year grants in the next year or so, we do expect to be releasing roughly 150 million. That number is higher, mind you, because we have a number of sunsetting tif districts over the next few years, and so we have to deploy those funds. It also includes new partnerships with the Portland clean energy fund. And so we have new grants coming that will be provided to small businesses around energy efficiency and improvements. So there's a number there. That's the reason that number is higher. Also note that that includes some loans that we intend on making with the strategic investment fund and a handful of other resources. But in general, many of these are property improvement grants for small businesses like hot mama salsa or accardi or bumblebee restaurant. I also want to call out one there that's that's pretty sizable. It's the reimagined Oregon. Those are grants that are funded by our tax cannabis or our cannabis tax dollars. And it represents really our grants that are reflecting our commitment to portland's black and brown communities, stemming from the 2020 protests. And I think it's particularly just given that those communities were the ones most adversely impacted by the war on drugs and no shade to the city this was we're proud to partner with community to get these dollars out. Many of you recall these sat in a fund for the city for a number of years after 2020. And so really appreciate shabrie vickers and the team at prosper for getting these out to the tune of $7.1 million. I'll also note that tiff can. In general, most of our funding is to support small businesses. We have very limited funds for supporting nonprofits outside of grants, for performing duties and delivering on contracts for services to the community. But one such example are our community livability grants, which are supporting nonprofits that are inside of tif districts for their build out costs and tenant improvements there. So don't want to dwell on this too much? Make sure we have time for y'all's questions, but you can get a little snapshot of what we're up to on the screen.
163 All right, my turn. Bts has about five major sources of revenue. We obviously the largest source currently is the Portland clean energy fund. We also have a substantial revenue from the solid waste management fund. Through those activities we have general fund resources, we have grant revenue. And then we also get revenue from cable franchise fees through the mount hood cable regulatory commission. The general fund is about less than a third of our revenue at the moment. Our operating budget is around 40 million. If you exclude the outgoing resources through PCEF and other other investments. This slide shows that we pushed last year about $23 million out to community organization partners in direct support. The lion's share of that was through PCEF community grants. I want to just note that that number will will go up substantially in the coming years. The 2024 number is a reflection of grant decisions we made in 2022, while PCEF was still emerging, and that number will be well over 100,000,000 in 2025, potentially closing in on 200 million. We have several other outgoing grant programs, though, beyond PCEF, particularly our community technology division. In that group, we manage $250,000 annual digital inclusion grant program in 2024. Our focus in that program was on technology assistance to small business. As part of our role staffing the mount hood cable regulatory commission, we also disburse 1 to $2 million annually to facilitate creation of content for community cable television, and these grants go to small nonprofit organizations, filmmakers and schools. We are also the primary funding source through that program for our community media centers, including metro east and opensignal, to the level of several million dollars annually through the cable commission budget. And as I mentioned, this is an increasing part of our work is the outgoing grant programs.
164 All right. Yeah. So are there any questions? I know we covered really high level, a lot of information, but I'm happy to dive in deeper if.
165 You have questions coming in. And a note to counselors that our rules do direct me to prioritize counselors who haven't spoken yet in the questions. So we will start with counselor Morillo.
166 Thank you, council president, I just have a very quick question. I saw that you said that over $159 million for funding comes from federal, state and local. And I was just curious if there was a breakdown of how much comes from federal, just given everything that's happening at that level.
167 Great question. We can we can grab that number for you shortly, counselor.
168 Thank you so much.
169 Counselor Zimmerman.
170 Thank you. Director engstrom, in terms of I'm kind of going for the whole presentation at this point. I know you have a what's next page, but we're at the end, so you noted a lot of the plans that guide the work. But I didn't see the Portland plan alluded to, and I know that it was passed unanimously in 2012. It was adjusted in 2017, but I'm not seeing it now. And I'm kind of curious, given that we just went through a whole hell of a lot over the last few years, a lot of things have changed. We're not as cool as we were in 12 and 17. So what's changed or what's guiding that work now, and how are we bringing the Portland plan to 2025?
171 Yeah, just refresher for those of you listening, the Portland plan was a multi-agency effort, which we adopted in 2012, led by then mayor adams, but it included work with many government partners, the county, the school districts, the port. It was seen at that time as a strategic plan to help align us on some of our big picture goals. It was. It was also important to note that it was not the comprehensive plan. It was broader than that intended to guide sort of all government operations, not just land use. And bts led the creation of that plan. It's been important to the city in terms of holding us in alignment over the last decade and a half. We're in conversations now and have been leading up to this government transition with the understanding that it may be time for the city to embark on another stage of strategic planning. And it's something that city administrator jordan and I have talked about a number of times, really, the next step is to engage in a conversation with you all about what that might look like. We've put together some preliminary work plans, not necessarily on the scale of the Portland plan because of budgets and timelines, but it is on our radar and something we want to continue talking about because.
172 It was a 30 year horizon, I think. Is that right?
173 Or 2035 was the horizon for the Portland plan, as well as the.
174 Health equity education planning, like it was a whole package deal, right?
175 Yeah. And we the comp plan really embodied that same spirit. But for land use and there are many I will say there are many city agencies with agency strategic plans that mirror those, those themes even today. But I think we've stopped putting it on the slide, mostly because it's been 15 years, and it may be time to start thinking again at refreshing.
176 Great, thanks. Next question for director Eric. Did I say that right? Yep. Okay. I'm curious in terms of and actually it's probably also director engstrom in terms of we've long ago declared this wonderful housing emergency. There used to be a time when declaring an emergency meant something really specific in in our context of government. I'm very curious what what have you, I guess, removed, if you will, from the operating procedures or the standards for how we develop housing in order to use that emergency to get more units up more quickly, more aggressively. It doesn't feel from a consumer standpoint that the declaration really changed anything other than just underlining the fact that we didn't have enough. But I guess I would expect that some level of standards would have been removed from the development expectations. And I say to both of you, because I'm not exactly sure where we'll go. And then I do have a follow up for the type we're doing. So either.
177 Way, maybe I'll start on that. We have definitely over the years that we've had that emergency gone through several waves of code reform related to, you know, facilitating housing, including redoing our design overlay system, several packages of just more mundane code streamlining so that that's on the housing side. That's been the primary activity as well as of course, the, the, the permitting mechanics that david shop and the permitting groups have been engaged in. One of the things very specifically that the emergency has been used for is more on the homelessness side, where we have been, as you all know, adapting our strategy in terms and working with the county on on how to deal with that. And over the years, strategies have changed with the creation of the safe rest villages and some of the other alternative shelter systems going into the current mayor with with an additional set of ideas. So we've been responding with code updates to try and address some of those barriers permanently in the zoning code. A substantial rewrite of the way the zoning code handles homeless shelters, for example, happened in 2020. And then we did some follow up in 2022. But we continue to rely on that for streamlining, in particular shelter opening, because not every site we select comports with the zoning. And it continues to be a tool that we're using to move fast. And then again, because the strategy has been changing over time, we occasionally have to learn from our work and then go back and adjust the zoning code.
178 So I'm getting a lot of shelter. And I've certainly been part of teams who have benefited from that. But I'm not getting a whole lot of we changed how you develop housing in Portland.
179 The well, the code changes we have made have been significant in terms of removing requirements for discretionary review from a lot of projects. We have substantially increased compared to where we were in 2012, substantially increased floor area ratios and heights in many parts of the city. So yeah, there have been a lot of changes in zoning. The middle housing is another example of that. Over the years that we've had this emergency.
180 Okay. Thanks. That frames it up a little bit. Help. It will help us in committee. So I appreciate that. And then.
181 You probably have time for about one more I'm sorry.
182 I've got some questions regarding. You know, you highlighted a south waterfront building. I continually am concerned about why we stop at five and six levels instead of when the neighbors are 30 levels high. But my last comment will actually be back to some, I think, disappointing comments that were made regarding the isds, particularly the one that represents my districts. And so, mr. Lyle, this is kind of more in your side of things. I think that it's true that the esd that is on the east side in district three also has a partnership with its business district in that area, and I'm pretty sure it's also run by an oversight board who makes those choices about how they fund their staff, their programs, cleaning security, and that those are all elected by the members of those individual localized groups. I also know that that since the expansion of clean and safe in my district where I represent, and I know that that one has a history of folks being somewhat brought to activism around around what they do in downtown. But I'll say my residents reach out every day that they're not in the new inclusion because they want the border to go even further. Because if you live at 13th now, you're covered. And if you live at 16th, you're not. And you're seeing the differences between what a service district can deliver on behalf. And so I would. Caution folks to give too much credit to an outside state, outside city organization who is dedicated across this country to taking down business improvement districts and business and enhanced service districts, particularly because they don't like that it's related to some historic bias to a business organization. And so my residents are benefiting greatly from the isds. And I think it's important that that be noted. And my residents are asking for how more can get in there. And I will also say, since I have so many neighborhoods now who have bought private security, that me as an elected official in the district, I have no oversight in how they conduct themselves with my residents, renters, landlords, visitors. But the esd, I do, right. It's not a private security force. It is. It is a recognized and regulated security force and cleaning force that is governed by city rules and governed by a community board. But not all areas in our city have that. The pearl district, for instance, has security that is not regulated by the city. And so I would just offer that up for those who come to an immediate problem with a one esd out of the three we have, that it may be rooted in some misnomers, maybe rooted in some 1980s assumptions, and is not very much related to the experience that my residents are having. So, mr. Lyle, I appreciate the ease in which you've improved this system so that residential buildings are more appropriately brought in now, and so that we have a chance to enhance the district so that we have a chance to go to the stadium center eventually, where we've got great, great problems every single day, three blocks from a high school. So I appreciate that. And that's it.
183 Councilor Green.
184 Thank you. These are budget questions probably for dca. Olvera because you've been around, I think, a little longer in the role than than prosper Portland. Ed. So I'm just curious to understand the share of our general fund. You know, we I think we put about was it last year, $22 million from our general fund to prosper's general fund? More or less. But there was a big jump from fy 2122 to fy 2223. That was about a 75% increase. So I'm curious if you can shed some light on like why that jump happened and what those what those funds are used for.
185 Thank you for the question, counselor. Very, very briefly. Some of that was one time funding just for context. But there's also a general fund is playing sort of a bridge currently in between the tiff, you know, downturn. So there's just it's a, it's a temporary but it's, it's, it's called a boomerang. We're basically just using general fund to keep the programing afloat until, until tiff is reactivated in 29. Is that right?
186 Donna? I can provide some extra context here. So one of the reasons that the previous council decided to allocate a percentage of the returning tiff funds, right? A lot of tif districts closed, and that came with a large influx of new resources to the returning taxing jurisdictions, including us, the county and the schools. One thing to note is, is previously in previous iterations of this council and prosper Portland, we were flush with tiff districts. Right. We're at 100 people. At prosper Portland. We used to have hundreds of people back in the day. Our general fund, compared to what other bureaus were administering, was significantly lower because the higher tiff revenues and the tiff administration was essentially subsidizing council's general fund funded priorities that lived inside prosper Portland. So things like small business administration, things like workforce development, all of those were being subsidized by tiff administration, right. The previous council recognized that fact. And so when we saw returning tiff funds, they said, all right, we're going to lose these programs. We're going to lose that capacity at prosper Portland. If we don't allocate a percentage of this returning funds, acknowledging that one, we probably shouldn't have allowed tiff to subsidize these programs in the same way historically, and that moving forward, our our general fund allocation is more comparable and in line with what other bureaus receive.
187 Now, that's a great answer, I appreciate that. So that's 7.6 million was the tiff return fund. So that jump is about seven. So I'm just trying to do the math here. That's right. It makes sense to keep administrative capacity I mean you don't want to like spin down your capability to do things just because you've got a couple year gap. So my question is when what's the ramp rate? When do we start to see new tiff money flowing into prosper's coffers.
188 So the rate at which tax increment finance will accumulate is slower than our ability to bond against it, right? So starting around year five, we start seeing in the tens of millions those numbers start creeping up. And that's probably the soonest we should probably revisit the conversation. That being said, we could start for more catalytic projects that are identified in those action plans. We could start depending on the performance, right? We still have to see how these districts property values, the assessed property values. If they increase, as we expect them to modestly, we'll be able to revisit that in five years. I will note, though, in general, the returning boomerang tiff funds brings us to a more of a level of parity, I would suggest, with how other bureaus are charging administratively, and we're not over relying on tiff, which is a hyper localized resource, and we're not relying on that admin to backfill existing citywide programs.
189 Councilor one other element of that, just for added context for the for the for you all and the public, if you think about tiff as being you know, you know tiff district specific funding general fund allows prosper to be more agile across the city in non tiff districts for things like the repair grant program and other services that we'd want to see, you know, equitably distributed. So there's just it's a calculation about how much does this council want to continue to see those programs rolled out citywide?
190 No, I appreciate that. And as we go into the budget cycle, I'm going to be interested in us, you know, using those scarce resources to really for the grant funds and less for administrative overhead. Thanks.
191 Thank you.
192 Councilor Kanal.
193 Thank you. I think there's a broader conversation that's not really related to this service area alone, but about the level to which our funding is restricted. I don't know, obviously, some of our funding should have particular purposes. Is 90% the right amount. I think that's the conversation to have, and that's an estimate, of course. But I did want to note before anything else, I appreciate getting the slides a couple days in advance. So thank you for that. That's been a particular point here. Two questions. One, we have the first statewide housing needs analysis report that came out saying that we need 29,000 new homes per year or new units. And we've seen declines from 2022 to 2023. And the data we have shows it will be a pretty an even sharper decline to 2024 when we go to seattle, when we go to a lot of other places around the country, you see cranes everywhere. And I'm curious why, in your opinion, what is the problem that is causing that and how can we be a part of fixing it? And I understand, I've heard a lot of community input on this. Some of us obviously have opinions on it, but I'm curious what your perspective is on that.
194 Councilor we can spend a few hours on that question. Sincerely. I'll obviously defer to the directors to answer that, but I do believe we have some time teed up with you to dive into that a little bit more soon. But please, directors.
195 I'll just add that we did provide a response to some questions councilor Novick asked in our in our recent work session on homelessness that that get at that a little bit as well. I think you were all copied on that response.
196 But.
197 Well, I will provide my opinion on on the answering this question regarding production, and I think it's important to separate out affordable housing or housing that is serving households that are lower income versus market rate housing production. Most market rate housing production serves higher income households. The challenge when you don't see a lot of new production is because investors are not investing in housing in in the city of Portland, my sense is that the rents in Portland are quite soft, and there is not a high enough rate of return in Portland from an investor's perspective, and that's slowing down investment in portland's residential, new market rate residential. So I think the constant focus on reducing cost of construction, which has been an ongoing conversation that we're trying to address, is important, I think trying to figure out how to do that, while at the same time, I think the conversation around economic development and wage increase is very important. That's the market rate conversation there. I will also always share, share, say publicly that all housing is workforce housing, including what we call affordable housing. There is a huge need in Portland for housing that is not so expensive. There is a high. It's the proportional share of people that are rent burdened, is close to 40% in the city of Portland, which means that number of households are spending more than 30% of their income on housing. And figuring out how to provide affordable housing is the challenge because the market doesn't deliver it often that well. And that's the conversation that I spend most of my time focused on. The good news is, is that the voters of Portland put a substantial amount of funding into affordable housing and have produced a rapid percentage, a rapid new supply of affordable housing through the bond funds that have been excellently spent and delivered. In addition to which Portland has a higher share of affordable housing in the city than every other city on the west coast. 8% of the housing in Portland is restricted. Affordable 24,000 units, which is really higher. Most cities have below 6% affordable. So I would say Portland is actually got a good track record. The question is, is how do we how do we keep it going? Where do we go? What's the next step for affordable housing? And I do think it's going to be a conversation of both. How do we drive down costs? In fact, councilor Novick asked the exact right question, which is if we do things exactly the way we do them now, how much money would we need? That's a good starting question. And then the other question is, what can we change to improve or make it less expensive? Because the cost of building right now we can it will be very hard to fund it and subsidize it. So I think it's a conversation of both driving down costs while increasing figuring out how we continue to increase the good work that's happened through the bonds. You know, we've got a good track record and we can point to really substantial housing models. So I think there's a good news, bad news scenario. At the end of the day, I will just say one last thing on this topic, which is many of the existing affordable housing developers and owners in Portland are struggling right now with their older buildings. There's a huge preservation problem. And I think, you know, our focus step one is to make Portland lendable from an affordable housing perspective, and we think there's a lot of conversation we need to have with you about what it's going to take to stabilize the existing affordable housing portfolio, because that will unleash the funding for more affordable housing.
198 Councilor. Thank you. Yeah, I shared with councilor Novick a deck from about a year and a half ago that we presented at a work session. It's public record, but I'll send it to you all. There's still some real time salient information in there about sort of the feasibility gap for doing any sort of development in Portland right now, but it was touched on. I mean, the costs of building are just outpacing willingness to finance in Portland and frankly, you know, rent or rent rates, which is a tension because of we don't have as many high income earners right now. But again, I'll share the deck for more context. But again, these are things we can dive deeper, deeper with you on over time.
199 The one of the things we talked about in our response to councilor Novick questions earlier, and it is super important to focus on continued work on code simplification and permitting improvement. That's that's the thing we have control over, and it's our number one priority. That said, large institutional investors did leave Portland in droves in 2020, driven by reputational issues driven by other factors. Part of our job is to figure out how to get them back, and some of that has to do with our work on large strategic sites. If we can get some some of these projects that that prosper and all of us are collaborating on out of the ground where there's examples of, of housing that that that has revenue coming back, then investors come back.
200 Right?
201 That's part of the path.
202 Could not agree more. I just want to build on that from the sense that all these issues are interconnected, interrelated, and reputation has such an enormous role to play here. And so the more that we continue to think about councilor Ryan, I appreciated your comments earlier, the more we think about activation, one thing we do at all of our activations is we pull people that are coming from outside the city and we say, what's your perception around Portland? All in all, overwhelmingly anybody who actually comes back to Portland or to the downtown core from our surrounding areas has a better perception of what they had previously over the past few years. And that's a great thing that we have to work with as a starting point. But it's going to take continued work because that's a word of mouth issue. The more our neighbors are saying it, the more business, the more business is saying it, the more site location consultants are saying it, and the more that that'll change the narrative nationally.
203 So we are going to start losing a couple of people. We have, I think, two more quick questions, and then we'll give you just a minute to wrap up. Councilor Ryan.
204 Thank you, madam president. I was told quick. So here we go. As you know, we're in budget season. We're all out in our neighborhood districts this week listening to our constituents. And it's really clear that where we're at, we really have to focus like never before on our primary purpose of all of our work areas and the collaborative spirit that I'm listening to right now gives us an opportunity to really get creative and streamline. So my experience when I've been in executive is your only real time to do some, let's see, creative innovations is when you're in a period of time like this. So that's my way of saying when I'm looking at your numbers, I want to be able to track what your primary purpose is. I want to see what your top three goals are and how they leverage with one another to get impact, because there's going to be cuts. So we need to use this opportunity to be able to see that innovative, creative spirit that is streamlining that you're all talking about today. So it's the year to really get bold and put that in action. So I'm hoping to see that and I hope to see more clarity early on in the budget process. About the PCEF investments and where they currently are. We've had some discussion about that, where they're going. So it's not last minute like a backfill. It's like this is part of this. As mike jordan says, the enterprise. So let us really understand that early on. And then in the spirit of it's dangerous when elected officials read articles and on a Sunday night and do a little bit of a I can't say that anyway, they're they're shocked at what they're reading. So the gordons fireplace, that lovely eyesore on I-84 banfield freeway for those that are older is something that everyone was excited, was finally labeled a derelict building. It was coming down. And so I don't, for the life of me, understand how you can get sued. With a minimum bid of 1.5 million in a in the free economy. So you don't have to answer that. There's probably legal reasons why I should not go any deeper right now, but could someone please explain that to me? Because I've been stopped about that several times this week. That's it. Was that pretty quick.
205 That was very quick. And it might be helpful to get that explanation, at least to the three district two councilors. If it's something that you can legally share with all of us, that would be fantastic.
206 Absolutely. Thank you for the question and the comments. Councilor.
207 Councilor Clark.
208 Just very quick. Thank you. And thank you, councilor Ryan, for the question about priorities. That'll be really helpful. Just a quick question about alternative construction methods. Are we looking at manufactured housing as an option? I know some proposals have come to the city and they haven't really gone anywhere. I'm just wondering where we are with that as a way to reduce costs.
209 From from Portland housing bureau. We have a strong interest in that in manufactured housing, both in mobile mobile homes, which exist largely in east Portland and north Portland, but also in the emergence of particularly locally produced modular housing. We think there's opportunities there for streamlining. It's something that we're taking a close look at. We hope that there's an opportunity moving forward, probably related to tif districts, to expand the use of modular housing.
210 And I'll add from a attainability perspective, there's interest in connecting the dots between modular building components and mass timber construction methods. And looking at that. And that's something that pcf has invested in.
211 All right.
212 Turn it back to you to talk about how many committees you get to.
213 See us. So this is really this is just an the invitation. And we're looking forward to working with all of you and all these committees. And it didn't take us a long time to see how quickly we're going to be interacting with all the committees. I won't go through each list, but there are substantial systems within the service area that will will be collaborating on. We'll be looking to your guidance for policy development, everything related to transit oriented development and waste rates, technology and the infrastructure section. Obviously, housing and permitting and the housing section, there's a lot going on in climate and land use that this service area will be working with you on and supporting your policy development and so on and so forth. You can obviously read the screen there largely to say that we're really excited about these committee structures and the chance to unpack opportunities. I don't I don't think there's I can I can say that on behalf of the group, there's so much to be done. We have ideas. We want to hear from you too. So let's collaborate. And yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Thank you.
214 Thank you all for being here today. I know that was a lot. I know we have some follow up conversations, and I think a lot of information was asked for follow up. So if you can make sure to get that to us in the next couple of days, that would be great. And I think we'll probably help inform many of our committee chairs as they start to think about what their work plans are over the next month.
215 I appreciate that, thank you.
216 With that, we will close the work session. Thank you all for being here today.