The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-05-27
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (20,524 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 Community and Public Safety Committee met on Tuesday, May 27, 2025, with roll call confirming member presence and the standard testimony/conduct statement read into the record. The session covered four agenda items: a presentation on the Park Rangers program, including its budget, staffing levels, dispatch functions, patrol districts, and coordination with police, fire, and 311; a presentation on Enterprise Services within the Public Safety Service Area, describing the history of centralization since 2021, the development of a service-area-wide strategic plan with four goals, and budget reductions and additions for the coming fiscal year; a presentation on the Vision Zero initiative, covering its history since 2015, rising traffic fatality figures, proposed reconvening of a Vision Zero Task Force, and discussion of data disaggregation, speed cameras, and community collaboration; and a resumed freewheeling discussion on the proposed 2025–2026 Public Safety Service Area budget, in which questions were raised about police recruitment and retention funding, precinct crime-reduction missions, BOEC telecommunicator staffing, ongoing funding for the CHAT program, PBEM planning positions, and Portland Street Response staffing expansion. Several potential budget amendments and budget notes were referenced for possible introduction at a future council session. No vote tallies or outcomes were stated; any votes referenced are recorded in the vote ledger. The meeting adjourned with the next session set for June 10.
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.
0 Thank you for. Good afternoon, and welcome to the community of safety committee to order.
1 It's Tuesday, may 27th at 2:30 p.m. Rebecca, could you please call the roll? Canal here.
2 Morillo here. Zimmerman.
3 Here.
4 Smith.
5 Here.
6 Novick here. Christopher, can you please read the statement of conduct?
7 Welcome to the meeting of the community and public safety committee to testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance the committee agenda at. Agenda. Community and public safety committee. Or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In person. Testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The chair preserves order disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, state your name for the record. If you're a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifier should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
8 Thank you. Christopher. Today, the committee will hear a presentation on park rangers with a focus on their budget and operational priorities. Next, we'll receive a presentation on enterprise services within the department of public safety, with particular attention to budget allocations and performance metrics. Then we'll hear from council vice president Koyama Lane, who will present on the vision zero initiative and its integration with public safety strategies. And finally, the committee will resume a free wheeling discussion on the proposed 2025 2026 budget as it pertains to the public safety service area. Rebecca, could you please read the first item?
9 Item one park rangers budget.
10 Come on down.
11 Good afternoon, chair Novick and co-chair cano and members of the committee. For the record, my name is adina long, and I'm the director of Portland parks and recreation. I'm pleased to share with you today a brief overview of our park ranger program and the program budget. I'm joined today by vicente harrison, our health, safety and emergency management manager for Portland parks and recreation. Also on the dais is victor sanders, who is a coordinator in our office and works very closely with the park ranger program.
12 Good afternoon, chair Novick and co-chair canal and members of the committee. I am vicente harrison is director. Long has mentioned v I c e n t e harrison with Portland parks and recreation. We can move ahead to the next slide to get started. The park ranger program's mission is to maintain safe and accessible spaces in our parks, community centers, and natural areas. We accomplish this through three core functions resource protection, community engagement, and today's focus park community safety. Our team undergoes a robust academy, and annual refresher trainings that emphasize dignity, respect, and equity in our work. Rangers are not law enforcement, but rather they seek voluntary compliance as a first step to address park rule violations when necessary. Our next step enforcement tools are civil and non-criminal like exclusions, citations and ejections. We also provide resource protection in nearly 12,000 acres of park property, 24 hours seven days a week, proactively patrolling parks, docks, trails, beaches and community centers. This can't be achieved alone. So we often involve our partners like Portland police, Portland street response and Portland fire and rescue when necessary. Finally, we engage the community with our leave no trace programing. Leave no trace works to engage visitors, especially youth, on the importance of valuing our collective parks together. This fiscal year, the bureau is funded for 29 full time rangers and up to 15 seasonals. Next slide please. In addition to proactive patrols, rangers also respond to requests for services. Community members can contact rangers through their dispatch line and 311 or through email with concerns in parks. Our top calls are shown here, with the primary concern from the public being dogs off leash in parks. Next slide please. In 2020, we partnered with the city's open data and gis teams to move the program to be fully digital. Every park patrol, every contact, every incident, every call for service, and each referral is logged in the rangers iphones. We use this data in real time to monitor ranger safety and response for weekly reporting to staff and senior leadership, as well as overall long term analysis utilizing existing city software contracts. We deployed an off the shelf solution to capture the immense work rangers do daily. Importantly, this was done at nearly zero cost to the city. It's an excellent example of partnership and flexibility of our program. Our outcomes have shown the rangers are making a difference in our parks. Sometimes to call attention to this on this slide is our extensive work connecting campers with shelter and services. Last year, park rangers made contact with over 5800 camps and made 1400 referrals to shelter or other social services. The rangers remain one of the top agencies making contact and referring houseless people to resources. We've seen so many amazing success stories over the years with campers who frequently are camping in parks, and we've been able to connect them with services. I want to take this opportunity to invite any of you here to come on a ride along to see the extraordinary work our rangers do in action, especially with the houseless community. About 7%, except referral services, and 20% of the time, there's no bed space available. As mentioned earlier, we could not do this work without our partners with other public safety and social service agencies as example. We as an example, we are currently scheduled to participate in partnership with Portland fire and rescue for the wildfire preparedness month event at Washington park on June 7th and eighth at the world forestry center. Last year, we participated in a forest park drill with station 27 our way and our team so that we could collaborate in response to forest park. We have conducted joint patrols during the wildfire season of our parks and natural areas for fire prevention strategies, and to address individuals living in our parks. We also work together during the 4th of July to install education, signage and patrol priority parks. We have collaborated with our neighborhood fire concerns from the community and support Portland fire and rescue's fire wise program and in chronic areas of concern such as forest park and mount tabor and throughout our wildfire hazard zones, solutions teams and participate in solutions teams and participate in weekly problem solver meetings. Coordinate with impact reduction program on camping issues and collaborate with 311 on call taking. Similar to the Portland police bureau, rangers are assigned to districts. These districts closely mirror council districts, but they are not exact. At any given time, we may have 1 to 2 rangers per patrol district with over 12,000 acres of park area citywide and increasing calls for service. We simply don't have enough staff to respond to all calls. We also strive to dedicate staff to hotspot locations, but have to make trade offs for these decisions. And what calls to respond, or what calls to patrol versus what not to patrol. So it's, you know, a decision making process, a priority process for our team. Finally, while we have good partnerships with our public safety partners, the rangers are not part of the large public safety structure, so we lose some level of coordination without that integration. Our next slide, we will also discuss the final point here, which is one time investments that ended recently. This slide shows our budget trajectory. Trajectory since 2021. I want to call attention to our one time investments that have allowed us to grow considerably since 2021. Starting in 2021, we received a 1.4 million from council for gun violence reduction programing. This allowed us to increase our seasonals, ramping up our support for programing and general safety patrols in parks. In 2022, we received a $755,000 ARPA grant. This allowed us to maintain our increased seasonal level while increasing our full time and dispatch and supervisory capacity. Now that these investments are ending, we're returning to a more typical summer seasonal coverage, which will which we will discuss in our next slide. Looking more closely at the budget here into next fiscal year, the adopted budget, it preserves 29 fte rangers and a supervisor to cover for all shifts. And remember, that's 24 hours, seven days a week. It brings us to 15 seasonals to support summer programs. The budget also eliminates our ranger dispatch program. It eliminates one coordinator and one vacant office support specialist position. The reduction of those one time investments I just spoke about, and some of the support functions we will have, and it will have an impact on our overall program and response times. So how do portlanders feel about these services? We're sharing some recent data over the last four years on park safety and responses that we've seen from the community, and now we're happy to take any questions that this committee has about the park ranger program.
13 Not seeing any hands wanted to ask, what are the consequences going to be of eliminating the ranger dispatchers and routing the calls instead to 311? Do you think?
14 I can speak to that. Victor sanders, program coordinator for the Portland parks and recreation. So that park ranger dispatch reduction was an efficiency savings reduction. As we joined the public works service area, we looked at what's currently happening with operational dispatch within the city of Portland bureau of transportation providing service dispatchers, Portland water bureau providing service dispatching citywide security operations, providing service dispatching. And then, of course, you have park rangers providing service dispatching. We believe there's an opportunity for some level of efficiency with our partners with 311 on that. I have michelle is here also from the 311 program as the program manager. So July 1st, the calls will still be answered by 311. They can take those calls. The dispatching piece is still something that we're working out of. What does that look like? Post July 1st as we join the public works service area? So we don't have a full picture of exactly how that's going to work. But we know that there's some level of coordination that should occur with that. And we are continuing to work with our sister bureaus on what that solution might be, as well as 311.
15 On the general topic of integration within the larger public safety structure. Do you have some thoughts about and how that might I mean, a way that might work if that became a priority?
16 Well, I would say that we are currently working very closely with pbb. We have regular calls and coordination. So I don't know if it would be a full on integration, just more of making sure that we're staying in contact with one another and that we're working with each other when we have issues in parks that we need to address. So just more collaboration. I don't know if any formal integration is necessary at this time.
17 Oh, I apologize if I don't know what I'm talking about. But somebody said that the dispatchers also dispatched like parking enforcement. Does that make any sense?
18 It does. We have a few, I think two parking enforcement officers that work in our parks. So do you want to speak to that victor?
19 That's right. So Portland parks and recreation manages a handful of pay to park programs throughout the city. And so we do have two of our own parking enforcement officers. And so there is a piece of, again, those calls come in post July 1st. They'll be answered by three one, one. And then like I mentioned, that dispatching piece is something that we're still working through of kind of what that will look like into the future with the public works service area.
20 Oh, councilor Kanal.
21 Thank you. Chair. Novick. And thank you for being here. Director north as well. I wanted to ask about, I guess just to follow up on the question around the parking enforcement. Is there anything else that the service dispatchers are currently dispatching besides rangers?
22 It's primarily focused on rangers. There is a component of that of kind of our after hours issues. Right. So something maybe there's a door broken in a park, right. Or something's not working that's urgent. And that, again, is wrapped up in kind of this larger conversation around who do people call after hours, right? When there's an issue in the city that's not non-emergency blocking out box number. And I see michelle has joined us up here. And that's probably part of a larger, even structural conversation around 311 probably becoming 24 over seven at some point in the future. Right. Beyond the scope of this conversation, but something that we're acutely aware of as we are part of that response structure for the city, but we're not part of boec, right? Similar to PBOT, they're not part of boec, but they are getting called in after hours to resolve certain issues. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, michelle, of kind of what your within your role.
23 Good afternoon. Council michelle koenig north manager of the city county 311 program. The only thing I might add is that 311 does currently have a team of service dispatchers who help intake, triage and dispatch for hazards in portland's rights of way. That is a 24 over seven seven days a week operation. Although our current role supporting the Portland parks and recreation ranger dispatch is limited to intake of calls as needed for coverage purposes.
24 Thank you. That team that you were just describing is that the team that was transferred in from another bureau. And can you speak to that for a minute?
25 Correct. That happened as part of our current year budget. They were moved last July from the Portland bureau of transportation into the 311 program.
26 Okay. So the work was moved, but the positions were also moved alongside that work.
27 Correct. The funding positions and roles and responsibilities.
28 And are any positions currently proposed to move over from parks as part of transferring this work over in this coming proposed budget?
29 No, not as as part of the currently approved budget.
30 Okay. And I guess, can you speak to the value of having people who were doing the work in another bureau, in this case, PBOT moving over along with that work and, and how that might have been impactful on their coworkers or on the overall quality of work.
31 Absolutely. And I would love for my colleagues in parks to speak to the same. What we have found with 311 customer service and dispatchers is that they are slightly different roles. Dispatchers are very much in tuned to the needs within bureaus to deal with urgent hazards. And in particularly in, in particular to support colleagues who are in the field who might find themselves in unsafe situations. So they're serving as kind of a critical point of contact and helping to make sure that those staff in the field have the resources that they need and can be be dispatched and attend to a variety of needs in the field, bringing that level of institutional knowledge and experience has been very beneficial to keeping the program running, and our both our infrastructure and people safe.
32 Thank you. I know there's others waiting in the queue, so I will wait and if there's more time, I'll ask more questions.
33 Councilor Zimmerman.
34 Thanks. This has been helpful. I want to just start with if the park rangers, in terms of classification authority, are they similar or even the same as the public safety support specialists that we have in the police bureau?
35 The park rangers are under a different classification. They're classified as park rangers in the. System, if you will. So I don't know exactly what the public works.
36 The ps, I think that the ps four, I think that's what they were for.
37 Ps support specialists who work for the Portland police bureau, they're members of the Portland police union, I think. Right. Yeah, yeah. So another non-sworn entity I think is the right term. Yes. Okay. And they seem very similar, right, to a layperson to me in terms of how they're used. I'm just trying to understand, because we've clearly set up some distinctions in how dispatch is happening. That's I'm I've got a few more questions related to that.
38 I'm not that familiar with the classification, so I couldn't really speak to it with any level of authority. I do know that our jurisdiction is different, right? So the park rangers have jurisdiction up to the curb line for parks properties and not beyond. So I think that would be a major distinction that I think about. And also what codes they're enforcing. So we're title 20 administrative codes are what the park rangers are are.
39 Okay I want to jump then. Thanks I appreciate that it actually gets me to a different question but kind of related to title 20. The last slide, you said 56% say an unarmed responder is appropriate for public drug use. That was part of the insights survey. And I am I am recalled back to a conversation that I had when I was a staffer in this building with park rangers, and it was over. We had a disappointing conversation about whether or not a park ranger would intervene if a person was smoking drugs in a park, and we were comparing and contrasting that to they would enforce or persuade, I think is maybe a better for a person with smoking a cigarette in a park, which I guess are both illegal by one, is illegal by title 20, and one is just illegal. And I'm curious if things have changed since then. I know at the time the parks commissioner was pretty abruptly upset with the idea that park rangers would not engage with a person who was doing drugs in a park at this time. This was a few years ago, but would engage on something else, and I, I want to give you an opportunity, like, have we evolved there or have your hands been tied? In a lot of ways when it comes to the public's expectations for what goes on in a park?
40 I mean, I can speak to the most recent update we did of title 20 we recently completed with the prior council that made some, I think, welcomed adjustments to the title 20 codes of what could and could be enforced. And so I think there is some changes that have occurred, one of which is that, yeah, if you're smoking in a park, that's an excludable offense. So that is something that I think to your prior question is distinguishing from a ps3 is that there is there actually might be more enforcement authority that a ranger has than a ps3 has to issue citations and exclusions in some circumstances, which of course they're civil, non-criminal, right? We can't detain anyone. No one's going to be going hands on. Right. But there is some level of enforcement that I think rangers can do more than a ps3 could.
41 Okay, thanks, I appreciate that and I'm glad for the changes. Thank you victor. The it seems a little odd though that so if I'm thinking through our structure and our system. Right. I'm trying to understand a little bit of what we're saying about what dispatch is role here is or soon to be three one one's role here, and what kind of thing would draw out a ranger versus dispatch for regular and regular maintenance issues that come up? Right. You think you mentioned like a broken door? I can imagine a tree falling in a park. These types of things. What is a ranger versus what is a hey, we have a maintenance problem. We have a we have a toilet that is just flowing, something like that. And what's what's the root here?
42 I mean, I think the ideal future is that you can call 311 for any of those issues, and it will be triaged and dispatched correctly. Our scope of influence and sphere is this big, and we're trying to kind of put our fingers in these other areas and kind of get to that future. But as you heard michelle mentioned earlier, you know, we're taking those baby steps as we get there. But ideally that is the future is that somebody can call 311 and triage it and it will get dispatched correctly. But of course, we want to make sure that program is fully supported to do that work for all of our bureaus. Yeah.
43 I won't call director cozzie up, but also I'm interested in a future that says, I mean, we all know that 911 gets a lot of calls that have nothing to do with being an emergency. But I, I would I'm wondering if now if vicente, if your team has the ability to field a call from a dispatcher. 911 dispatcher says, I got this call, but it's not emergency. Are they able to get in contact with you or do they have to like, start the whole loop again?
44 No, they we're in correspondence with boec and they have our call list for anything that's non-emergency. That is in a park. They they call us directly and we're able to deploy in those situations.
45 Got it. Okay. Last week. And I just want to say I appreciated the emphasis in couch park in northwest Portland. It's a park right next to a school that has just been a hellscape for a number of years. And so the focus by a few bureaus has been very helpful. And I've done a couple of walkthroughs now, and it's just a marked difference. And so I want to say thank you to that. But I want to use that experience just to help me out in trying to understand. So just like last week, for instance, we had a situation again going on. The surge had kind of slowed down. By the way, I met one of your rangers who was there with the kids during playground time. And honestly, it was one of the first times I've been in that park where the kids were using the playground and nothing bad was going on around them in many, many years. So his his presence was very appreciated. But we had a situation a couple days later where there was something bad going on, and it was just clearly using drug and dealing, but but rangers basically said, you need to call the cops. And I want to understand, like the right time to try and use rangers and the right time to try and use police. And where that distinction is, we ended up, you know, going through central precinct, but I want to meet the public's expectations. And that can be hard when I don't know exactly what what place to call. And I'm a city councilor. And so I'm trying to understand the best route. And what are the things when rangers might say, that's not us thing.
46 Yeah, I'll start and then my colleagues can jump in. Is those calls initially should go to a ranger to assess the situation on when to elevate to police. So rangers should be able to respond to that scenario, assess whether a crime is taking place, whether a title 20 code violation is taking place. Address the title 20 code. Call for additional backup if it's necessary. Our partners that we mentioned earlier, whether it's a referral is necessary in those situations, but then elevate to police if there's a crime in the park. So fortunately again last week we had a great collaboration with police that were doing work in the area, and we were able to facilitate some walkthroughs. And prior to that, we were able to joint patrol with some of their bike team to also again address crime that is taking place. But yeah, a ranger should be able to be deployed to those situations. And then based off of that analysis, make sure the right resources are brought in to resolve the matter.
47 Okay. Thanks. And I'm still kind of getting used to like the organizational setup between you and victor. And I appreciate all this. So last question, just in terms of your prioritization and how you all make decisions, you know what what constitutes a hot spot you use that term and how do you I know you said you have 2915 seasonal, which I just find very interesting, seasonal with a badge and a uniform. It seems strange to me, but that's what we've got. We probably would take those full time. But what constitutes a hot spot? How do you prioritize where you place people rotations, stationary placement versus petroleum placements? I'm just kind of curious about that part of the work.
48 Yeah, I can again start if my colleagues have anything to add. So we have internal assessments. We have maintenance staff in the field every day that is letting us know about situations that are happening, calls for service that are coming in in terms of what the public is seeing, but we're also internally doing our own assessment. So based off of crime that is taking place in parks and then our own data, part of the slide show, we talked about our robust data system in terms of the title 20 violations rangers are seeing in the parks. So we're we're making our own assessments per district. We've actually started that work per district on what areas are seeing the most activity that are crime violations and title 20 violations. So based upon those intakes, we can identify a park as being a hot spot area, so to speak. And then we can redeploy our resources to address some of those concerns. But again, we can't do it alone. It takes our partnerships with Portland police and other public safety entities in order to address those things properly.
49 But yeah, I would just add that stationary ranger would be a luxury. We just don't have enough staff, and we have too many parks that need to be patrolled regularly. But when we do identify parks that are have a systemic problem like couch park, we do have the ability to sort of blitz it and to put some extra resources towards it and work with partners. We did that at dawson park. We're doing that now at couch park. There's been other parks in the past, holiday park. So there there is a there is ability to focus, but having a stationary ranger except I believe Washington park. Yeah, we have in forest park that are funded through specifically for those parks. But yeah.
50 Thanks, councilor Morillo.
51 Thank you, chair Novick. Thank you all for this presentation. This is really helpful as we're able to make some changes to the budget with the last 10% that we have. I think some of my question may have been answered a little bit in what you were saying, because it sounds like when there's a call to 911, the park rangers can identify if a crime is happening, and then if a crime is happening that gets diverted to police. But I assume sometimes the reverse happens as well, where police show up, realize they don't need to be there, and then park rangers end up taking over. So I was just curious if you see redundancy or overlap in response between the park rangers and the Portland police, and if so, what are we doing to better utilize our resources? So far as the responses that happen within our parks?
52 There's very few instances where there's overlap because both resources are strained greatly in terms of some of the conditions that we're seeing around the city. So we work in partnership, as director long alluded to, we meet biweekly with Portland police command staff and other field sergeants to kind of talk about some of the areas that we're seeing and where there may be even a potential for overlap. And we will initiate our resources. And if it's beyond our scope, they'll let us know that they're addressing matters and will bring us along as necessary. So there's very few instances where there's a clash of resources in that way. But again, the communication, the transparency and the collaboration with Portland police has really helped us make sure that we can address issues in an efficient way.
53 And if I can just add really quickly, there's been quite a bit of work done over the last couple of years around call allocation, particularly to boec, and that work still is continuing to on, you know, it's continuing and ongoing, particularly around what three and one's role is. And I think there is something to that that needs to be continued to be examined so that we are tapped at the right time and that police are tapped at the right time or we're both tapped, you know, correctly when something like that happens. So it might be something to follow up on is just where that work is and how our services and other services integrate with that.
54 Gotcha. That's really helpful. I think anecdotally, when I had worked here a few years ago, I had heard the reverse. So it sounds like there's some movement on that and things have gotten better. So thanks. Appreciate you answering my question.
55 Councilor Kanal.
56 Thank you. Yeah, I only have one question. I think everything else got answered. And thank you, vicente, for being here as well. 29 along with the 15 seasonals you just mentioned is strained. Can you speak to what the ideal number would be if, you know, if resources were not not necessarily infinite but not strained.
57 You know, when you when you talk about 12,000 acres and over 250 parks, we work with other parks bureaus around the nation. A lot of experience from director long in new york city parks. I mean, a baseline number in terms of service in the city where we would be able to respond even with a greater efficiency, would be around 75 rangers minimum. That would give us sufficient coverage on every shift in order to address the conditions that we're seeing. But I'll lean to my colleagues if there's any.
58 I think I think your estimate is spot on. We do have some great connections with other municipalities who run park ranger programs. And so there's a lot of best practices and shared knowledge there. And I think that that breakdown sounds about right. I don't know if it would get us to the even a stationary ranger yet, but it would allow for much better coverage and response time.
59 Thank you. And I'll just remind colleagues, I have proposed an amendment. It was pre filed for last week's meeting as part of canal, for which I'll need to amend because some of the funding sources got used for other things that would restore those three service dispatchers and move them to 311, which would both bolster 311 towards an eventual expansion of service and save that expertise in those jobs for the city. It's about $350,000. Thanks.
60 Want to wrap up soon because we've got other things to address. But councilor Smith.
61 Yes, mr. Chairman, can you hear me?
62 Yes.
63 I wanted to clear up something in regards to the 311 dispatchers, so they know exactly where they're going to route the calls to and which department and, and do the people who who are in the, in the bureau right now, do they know who they.
64 Are? Councilor Smith, this is michelle north, currently our 311 customer service representatives do take calls for ranger dispatch as needed to ensure that they have somebody available. They're there during their operational hours. We are able to take many kinds of reports that people call the ranger line for things like campsite reports, and then make sure that those get routed to the appropriate staff in rangers or other programs. And then we are also able to intake other types of reports that go to ranger supervisors when a ranger dispatcher is not available, so that they can assess the situation and dispatch or assign their staff to respond as appropriate.
65 Thank you. And when you take those reports, are they via email or through a live person?
66 They are through a live person. And we then enter it into a form that that sends the information to supervisors automatically through a lot of the technology that vicente and victor showed earlier.
67 Excellent. Thank you.
68 Councilor Zimmerman.
69 Thanks. Just real quick. You you mentioned in the districts comparing it to PPB. I talked to commander hughes, the central precinct commander, sometimes on a daily basis, but generally about things or operations that are going on in my district. Is there a similar type of leadership model within the ranger program where there's a district lead, so to speak? That could be my person, my point of contact for here's a hotspot we're dealing with today, councilor That kind of communication.
70 So that would be in our setup would be our ranger supervisor. So there's a ranger supervisor on for each shift and that would be your contact. Now we have a security manager who the ranger supervisors report to who also is a intake. If the supervisors are actively engaging with their staff in the field. So there's two points where there's a connection for, you know, addressing situations or concerns.
71 I would say it's the communication up is welcomed in whatever model that works. Right. When Portland police commander of central precinct reaches out and says, you know, this is what's going on in your district, particularly if it's a tough situation or we're planning this upcoming thing. I've found that that communication ahead of time is great. Definitely the communication after the fact. And I say that as a person who is across all bureaus that work in the public realm, I think there's a model here about kind of district alignment, so that the communication to the councilors who represent that district is that much stronger, because we're then able to communicate with our constituents about about those things. So whatever that looks like, it's I think it's something we should all consider replicating in the future.
72 Thank you.
73 Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
74 Thank you.
75 Rebecca, could you read the next item?
76 Item to enter.
77 Enterprise services budget.
78 Welcome. Go ahead.
79 Good afternoon. Co-chairs and councilors I'm going to start talking while we pull up the slide deck so that we don't waste any time. So my name is elizabeth perez. I'm the enterprise services director for the public safety service area. So over the past about five months, this committee has heard from each of our bureaus and programs in the public safety service area. Today, we're going to pull everything together by presenting our unified strategic plan that lays out our shared goals and objectives for all of these programs. We're then going to highlight the work of our enterprise services team. The behind the scenes functions like finance, hr and communications, and explain how these back end services are helping to advance the service area goals. So a little background is relative to other city service areas. The public safety had a head start on consolidation and coordination under the new form of government in 2021, a year and a half before the charter reform was on the ballot, our service area began proactively unifying its operations. Under mike myers. He was the community safety transition director, and he kickstarted this effort. Under his guidance, we started consolidating core functions of our public safety bureaus and planning as a single cohesive unit. The previous council's direction to mike myers not only got the ball rolling on immediate changes, but also came with an expectation to develop long term vision for our public safety system. That early work set the stage for where we are today, with a clear structure and vision in place, and I'm going to pass it off to business services manager ken lee to talk about the history of the transition.
80 Yeah.
81 Good afternoon. Ken lee, business services manager for the public safety service area. So like director perez just mentioned, talk about the transition, a key milestone in our centralization journey was the creation of the community safety division. This new division was created and established to bring together key functions and staff from multiple public safety bureaus under one umbrella, by forming csd, which is the community safety division, we signaled the shift to a more unified approach for public safety services. This transition meant that functions like finance, administration and strategic planning for police, fire, emergency communications and emergency management could work in concert rather than in isolation. Essentially, csd enabled us to start operating as one well before the broader city reorganization took effect. This has improved coordination and laid the groundwork for the strategic plan we are about to discuss in practical terms, creating csd allowed us to centralize leadership and support for the bureaus. It broke down barriers between departments, ensuring that initiatives like budget development, policy making and support services are aligned across all public safety agencies. This transition phase has been fundamental. It gave us the structure needed to develop a comprehensive strategic plan for the whole service area, rather than separate plans for each bureau. Thus, slide that you see on the screen. One back please. Yeah. When we talk about enterprise services or business services, we mean the administrative backbone that supports all public safety bureaus. Over the last couple of years, we centralize these businesses, business services under the public safety service area. As you can see in the three boxes there, the initial objectives at the time were keep finance and strategic teams closer to public safety directors, improves efficiencies in day to day operations, and achieves near-term financial savings. Next slide please. So how did we get here? In November 2021, the business services centralization process commenced with the transition of three positions. Those came from police, fire and pbem respectively, to the newly formed community safety division under the leadership of director mike myers. In July of 2022, about 6 or 7 months later, the remaining business services staff from pbb and boec transitioned to csd to officially launch the business service operations, and then finally, in November of 2023, the fire bureau transferred their financial services team to complete the full centralization. Next slide please. So how did we get here? As far as the functions that we sorry, the functions that we currently serve as business services include procurement and accounting, payroll and organizational management, strategy, budget and performance. Even though centralized under the dca's office, one of the key things that we wanted to keep was our functions to remain embedded in the respective bureaus so that we could continue those relationships that we have built and be able to help, influence and inform decision making within the respective bureaus. Next slide please. Moving forward. So, you know, we're at this point in time with the organizational groundwork and support systems in place, we turn to planning. It's important to see how the plan builds on the foundation we just described and how it will drive our work and investment in the coming years. On the screen there, you can see some of the efforts that we are going to continue doing evolving standardized service area reporting, continued governance on hiring, spending and overtime, target setting, efficiency improvements in timekeeping and personnel management. And of course, we want feedback. And so we are going to be starting a annual survey to the service area for feedback on areas of improvement. With that, I'd like to now hand it over to nathan lim and chloe mazzarello for our public safety strategic plan.
82 I'm nathan lim. I manage the team that does our budgeting, strategic planning and performance management during budget season. We think it's important to highlight the structure that helped drive forward the service areas requested budget, and that will scaffold the work that is in the years ahead. Building off that initial guidance that the csd got when it was formed, the service area has developed a strategic plan that covers all of the bureaus and the programs within it. Srjc planning is a process, not a product. We intend this plan to be used regularly to drive decisions and evaluate our work, highlighting the importance of strategic planning, we converted an existing position we had from budget and finance to become a full time lead on strategy. Chloe here works on our team and has led the process. I'll hand it off to her to speak about the plan itself.
83 All right. My name is chloe mazzarello. I'm the strategic planning analyst for the public safety service area. Following a process of community and employee engagement and collaborative development, the service area now has a mission, vision and values to guide our work over the next five years. The service area's mission is to advance safety through collaborative prevention, response and recovery. This mission was developed in recognition of the importance not just of responding to an meaning and safety concerns and emergencies, but also of the critical role of upstream prevention work and support services to aid recovery for individuals and the community after something happens. The mission statement highlights that this is collaborative work and that we are dependent on each other and our partners and the community to achieve the service area's vision, which is a safe Portland for all. The service area upholds the city's core values, which guide how we do the work laid out in the strategic plan. Let's see next slide please. To make strides towards achieving the vision of a safe Portland for all, the service area has developed four overarching goals, each of which has multiple underlying objectives and actions that detail how we plan to reach those goals. The four goals are. Improve public safety response capabilities. Enhance collaboration internally with partner agencies and with the community. Increase the well-being of the public safety workforce and system, and strengthen prevention, recovery, and resilience capabilities.
84 These four goals are, by their very nature, broad. To operationalize them, we identified more specific objectives that are under each goal. For each objective, we then developed initiatives and finally we outlined concrete actions that we will take. Every action in this plan has an accountable program manager identified, that is, a person who is specifically responsible for making sure that action is carried out and reported on. Next slide. This accountability is crucial. It means that ownership of every item in the plan. We can track progress for each action item. Actions are grouped by common themes so that efforts can be coordinated and not duplicated. We'll regularly measure outcomes and outputs for each of these actions. In future months, our team will come back to this committee to report on the service area's progress. You can expect updates on metrics and milestones achieved for the actions we're about to discuss. In this way, the plan will serve as a living management tool and not a document that just sits on a shelf. For more detail about the goals, we will share.
85 All right, let's jump to the next slide, please. Our first goal focuses on enhancing the efficiency, effectiveness, and appropriateness of our responses to various public safety incidents. Community feedback has highlighted concerns about response times, the appropriateness of responses to certain situations, and the need for better coordination during major events. In some cases, specialized responses can lead to better outcomes than traditional police or fire interventions. Additionally, portland's diverse population requires culturally relevant and accessible approaches to public safety. Next slide please. Our second goal is about fostering a culture of collaboration and partnership, and is crucial for creating more integrated, efficient and responsive public safety system that better serves the diverse needs of portlanders. This goal aligns with our mission of advancing safety through collaborative prevention, response, and recovery, and supports our vision of a safe Portland for all by ensuring that all stakeholders work together towards common objectives. Next slide please. Goal three includes five objectives to emphasize a comprehensive approach to supporting the people, tools and structures that drive public safety efforts in Portland. This includes fostering the physical, mental and professional health health of the workforce while modernizing technology, upgrading infrastructure and ensuring long term financial sustainability. Next slide please. Goal four broadens the scope of public safety to include the phases before and after emergencies and crises, not just the response phase. An effective public safety system must be proactive to prevent harm and restorative to help communities recover. Those are the four strategic goals of our plan. Each goal is critical and you can see how they complement one another. Goals one and two ensure we respond well and work together. Goal three ensures our foundation. People and systems are strong. Goal four ensures that we are forward looking and reducing future risks. Together, they cover the full spectrum of what it means to keep a community safe.
86 In the next slide, you'll show that to illustrate how the strategic plan translates into concrete action, we want to share an example of a strategic initiative under goal one. This slide in front of you shows data related to 911 call answering times, a very important performance measure in the response capabilities area of goal one. Under the strategic plan, each action has accountable leaders and defined metrics just like this one. For the 911 call answering initiatives, boec director and operations managers are accountable. They've identified key dependencies for success. For instance, continuing to hire and train new call takers to fill vacancies, certifying these trainees on schedule, and retaining our experienced staff. If those things happen, we expect to meet or exceed the national call answering standards. If not, the data will show shortfalls and we can adjust moving forward in the next slide. One of the most important aspects of the strategic plan is integrating it into our budgeting and operational decisions. We're not treating the plan as a separate or aspirational document. It's actively guiding what we do and what we'd like to fund. The plan is embedded in how we budget and operate, ensuring that it's not theoretical, but practical, and we're building in the accountability to make sure that we stay on track and deliver results. This should give the community confidence that the plan will lead to real action, and that you'll have oversight over our work. Next slide. As we move forward with implementing the strategic plan, the role of enterprise services becomes increasingly important. The success of many initiatives in the plan depend on effective support functions. Enterprise services ensures that all bureaus have what they need to carry out their actions, whether it's funding people, contracts, data analytics or communication strategies. We want to highlight how this back end work is directly contributing to our strategic goals. In the next section, we'll outline how some of the strategic goals we discussed are being advanced thanks to the efforts of our enterprise services team.
87 Next slide. Next slide. Thank you. So as we said this is the enterprise services team. The enterprise services team is 48 individuals. The greatest team or the biggest team is managed by canal which is business services. So I'm going to let him walk you through that.
88 All right.
89 Thank you.
90 Before that, I just have to say I apologize for letting the first segment run long, but we are kind of running out of time. So I want to have some time for committee questions. So if you I'm not sure we have time to get through all the slides to be honest.
91 Okay.
92 We might want to touch on the budget changes in particular.
93 We can.
94 Skip through that. Keep going, keep going. Oh it's buffering okay. Well I will just start talking about it. So the enterprise services team for the next fiscal year has an overall reduction of 1.2 million. Keep going. Sorry. It's still buffering. That's a reduction in three staff. Some support from other bureaus. And then future citywide enterprise efficiencies. We also received a couple additions, which include ongoing funding for a data analyst that support ovp and ceasefire, and one time funding for cog, and a contact survey that was recommended by pccep. So what's next? As I mentioned in the previous slide, an additional 706,000 in enterprise efficiencies is expected in the next few months. We're working closely with the city administrator's team to share our learnings from our first few years and help share the public safety specific needs for core realignment, so that is a little bit of where we are today, and then our strategic planning that will help us inform budgets and our programs in the future. And we can take questions now, but we're also around for the 50 minutes. So however you all would like to ask questions.
95 If you have another five ten minutes.
96 Council questions now. Councilor Kanal.
97 Yeah, I have two questions and I'll I'll just start with a disclosure. I worked with all four of these presenters until October 2024. Elizabeth was my supervisor. Ken, nathan and chloe were all coworkers I saw regularly, and I worked a little bit behind the scenes on the strategic planning process for a few months in 20. For my two questions. One is, are there any lessons that you could share? Director perez for other service areas that are looking to centralize enterprise services going forward? Does this actually save money and what would you do the same or differently if you were doing it all? Again.
98 Great question. So I'll I'll start. But I will also say that as you know, I wasn't there from the beginning. Ken was. So I'll talk a little bit about what we've been doing with the equity team. So in the spring technical adjustment ordinance, you all approved one position from PPB and one position from fire to move into the dca's office. And what we have been doing is we meet every other week as an equity team to start talking through what our plans, how do we coordinate, how do we make sure that we are still going in the same direction? And then really, I think it's talking to staff directly. What do you currently do? What is going to change? Talking to the bureaus about, you know, what are the specific needs of each bureau that may not be seen if we don't talk, if we don't talk to them? So specifically for PPB, there are background checks that have to get done for PPB employees that do not apply to other city bureaus. How do we make sure that we're incorporating all of that into whatever transition that we're going to do? So, ken, I will turn it over to you because I think you have more lessons learned than I do.
99 Yeah. Councilor canal, thanks for the question. I think the biggest lesson learned, I think since I was there from the start around this was really around the change management process before it was felt like a cliche, but it really it hit you really hard. And I think one of the things that I presented to the dca was, you know, you got to have a certain pace because if you go, if you get over your skis a little bit too far, you will definitely crash and burn and you'll have to pick yourself up. And it's a frustrating place to be, not only for our team, but also the bureaus that you're trying to serve. And so just understanding that this is not only a change for our team, but it's a change for everybody in that system. And so a lot of things we'd like to do differently, of course, but there's also a lot of things that we're proud of as well, especially to where we get where we got to today. And part of it is allowing yourself to fail in a sense, but being able to learn from that more importantly and be able to move forward and building the system. I also think this for me personally, and I think my colleagues would also agree, was that having a public safety lens is a lot different than having where I came out of from the police bureau, just a police bureau lens, and now I can see a whole system, and I see things that I didn't see before, just based on the work that we were fortunate to be able to do on behalf of the bureaus. So I think those are the kind of the main takeaways, the all the other work, you know, you'll find out that processes are processes, but every bureau had processes done a little bit differently for the exact same thing. And so standardizing those types of things, those are the things that we expected. Some of the things that we didn't expect, you know, potentially a little bit of when these when director myers at the time of csc, he was doing very well. When you're doing very well, you get more work and it's adjusting to that as well. And so that was a little bit unexpected.
100 Thanks. My other question, and this may be too detailed for the strategic plan conversation, but is there a goal around doing no harm as part of the strategic plan. And if so, or perhaps an objective or an initiative beneath that? Can you speak to that at all?
101 Yeah, that's a really great question. And I can say not framed in those terms. However, we are in the process of finalizing our performance metrics and the way that we're framing our actions and making sure that we are looking at those and the equity impacts of everything that we're including in the plan is a major consideration and a topic of focus right now. So we don't have an overarching goal, I would say, but we're trying to very much embed that lens throughout the nuts and bolts of the plan, if that makes sense.
102 Thank you.
103 Councilor Smith.
104 Thank you, mr. Chairman. Just curious, dr. Myers, when you were coming up with this strategic plan, were you also were you also thinking that this would be a plan, that that would get additional ongoing money or that would go away because it was actually. Taking on only new councilor?
105 We're having a hard time hearing you.
106 Can you.
107 You're still fading in and out.
108 Okay. Can you hear me now?
109 Yes.
110 Okay. What? I was asking my mister chairman. He planned for the public safety system to continue, especially when it was built on. At one time only framework.
111 So councilor Smith and council is mike myers and the deputy city administrator for public safety service area. Mr. Chairman, I think I understand what councilor Smith's asking. Does the strategic plan help kind of direct the limited term ongoing funding? Does it support future funding? I'm not sure if I'm capturing her question. That's kind of what I heard. Correct?
112 Correct.
113 Great. Good. So. In essence, yes, the whole idea behind and this is a you know, some of it's my personal opinion, I think the business services team, the executive team feels the same way, that in order to have really good, appropriate fundin, to have it sustainable, to stand by that funding and be able to deliberate about it, having a informed strategic plan from the community that really resonates with our goals as a as a city around public safety. Having that that strategic plan kind of signed off by our council and the executive team of the city allows us to kind of set our goals and get in a kind of an agreement, moving in the same direction around the strategic plan. And then that's how I think we should be funding the things that we do within public safety. And it should be directly related to the strategic plan. And I think it's critical that we, you know, we're going to start doing that as a public safety service area, hopefully setting some example for the city that we have a strong strategic plan and the funding is directly tied to it. I think that's important.
114 Thank you, colleagues. Thank you all. And I appreciate you saying that. You'll be available for the freewheeling discussion at the conclusion of this session.
115 Of course. Thank you.
116 Thank you. Next item.
117 Item three vision zero.
118 This is.
119 Welcome, counselor.
120 Hello. Hi, colleagues. For the record, my name is Tiffany Koyama Lane. Good afternoon, chair canal, chair Novick, and members of the community and public safety committee. I'm grateful for the opportunity to speak with you all about our city's commitment to vision zero. I have some slides that are that will be up soon. I think most of you all know, but I will reiterate that vision zero holds the basic goal to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries on our streets. No person should die or be injured from simply going about their day moving through our city. These are streets and we have the responsibility to make them safe for everyone, regardless of which district they live in, how much money they make, what mode of transportation they're using at any given time. And I know it's a priority for many of us to make sure that they're safe for all ages. Upholding Portland as both an age friendly city and a great place to raise a family. So I'd like to talk a little bit about portland's vision zero history. Portland first committed to being a vision zero city in June of 2015. So we are coming up on the ten year anniversary of portland's adoption of vision zero. In 2015, 37 people were killed in traffic crashes on Portland streets. And as we all know, we still do have a lot of work to do. As we approach this ten year anniversary next month, we're seeing a horrifying and unacceptable 57% increase in traffic deaths on our streets in the past decade. So looking at 2024, 58 people were killed in traffic crashes on Portland streets, and portland's high crash network represents 8% of our streets, but account for 62% of traffic fatalities. A recent deadly crash occurred in our district councilors and district three up on 80th and powell. This was just a few weeks ago, and according to the city, the city's vision zero dashboard, in the past ten years, there have been 23 reported crashes involving vulnerable road users. Within seven blocks of that fatal crash. When we talk about these numbers, we know they're not just numbers. They're neighbors, family members, coworkers, friends. And they're not accidents. 50% of deadly crashes occur on streets with four or more lanes, and over 40% of deadly crashes involve speed. So these crashes connect directly to choices made and to policies. The core action of the resolution that all five members of the transportation and infrastructure committee are bringing forward to full council is reconvening a vision zero task force to better collaborate on this work. Uplifting accountability, increasing the frequency of deliverables, and enhancing cross collaboration. I envision this task force to be a container to build a shared understanding of vision zero goals across bureaus, engaging community advisory groups and community experts to help inform the action plan that will hopefully save lives. Just acknowledging it really is just a first step. Part of this is this came out of ask from community members to recommit and seeing this as, as, as simply really just a first step. Yeah. So I'm grateful to be here with you all. I have handouts for you of the resolution. I know those on the transportation and infrastructure committee know it, seen it, are co-sponsoring it, but I'm happy to participate in any conversation or answer any questions that may be helpful.
121 Councilor zimmermann.
122 I've got a in the chat with our councilor Smith, if you don't mind, if I convey so we can hear her a little bit better. So councilor Smith says, I'm concerned about vision zero and the effectiveness we've only seen. Excuse me, we have only increased traffic deaths in east Portland since they've been in operation. I support vision zero. I want to identify strategies that vision zero can use to help decrease. I think it says lives lost and I would echo similarly like what are the strategies that vision zero helps us with? Thank you.
123 I think that's an excellent question. And. And is one that we need to continue to keep asking over and over again until we actually get to zero deaths on our streets. Part of the goal of this resolution is to put more attention on vision zero, raise the profile of this work, and remind bureau and service area leaders that this needs to be shared. Work with shared accountability. Right now, we only have two people who work full time on working on the work of vision zero. So part of part of the goal is to make sure that vision zero has more of a profile, is getting more attention, and also, I think I've spoken with most of you, you've seen the budget amendment that I'm bringing forward to pull out the vision zero lead and put them in the dca's office in order to give them. More, more profile, more attention, to be closer to the dcr of public works, to make sure that that work is elevated. The vision zero action plan is something that's available online, and part of it is looking closely at reporting, looking at relevant progress milestones. I believe that those need to be more frequent. And so that is something that I am also asking for. Yeah.
124 Councilor Morillo thank you, chair. And thank you, councilor Koyama Lane for being here presenting. I was wondering if you were feeling nervous being up there on the other side.
125 I haven't sat here before. Yeah it's fine.
126 Well, I appreciate you bringing this and this lens as far as how a vision zero relates to public safety, because I think that it absolutely does. And I think we heard from advocates during the transportation committee that they're really excited about this and that this isn't the end all be all. We need to put our money where our mouth is, literally, I think, during this council budget session that we're still going through and make sure that we're appropriately funding it and giving PBOT the tools to actually make the changes that we're pushing for here. So I appreciate you elevating this at this time. I think it's really critical. And you have led the charge on this and done a fantastic job. So I will be happily supporting any amendments that we bring forward to boost this work over the next few years. Thanks.
127 And councilor and councilor Zimmerman and councilor Smith. I'm happy to send the entire action plan. And also kind of there's a one pager also that summarizes a bit of vision zero's work, which includes reducing speed limits, installing more safety cameras at high crash spots, designing and installing new street lighting where we need it. So there are a few different main things that you can look at that are key to vision. The vision zero programing some low cost safety treatments near shelter sites, and a few other things.
128 Councilor Zimmerman, is that a legacy hand or is that a new question?
129 That's actually.
130 Me now. Okay. Oh that's right. That you, councilor Smith. Right.
131 Thank you. I'm I'm approaching this conversation from my experience with a lot of years working at the county where the public health aspect is here, and traffic safety is something that I consider part of the public health conversation. And those numbers since 2015 are a stark increase. And in a community where we have taken a number of four Lane roads down to two lanes with a middle, and we've added a lot of sidewalks, better intersections, better bike lanes, a lot of lighting. As you've mentioned, it is very concerning. Does vision zero do any work to help us better understand the victims of these crashes, these these interactions? Because I want to be I want to be clear in understanding who it is that we're talking about that is falling victim to dangerous road situations, because the strategy that I would take to prevent two cars from having a deadly head-on crash are very different strategies that I would take to prevent a pedestrian crossing where there's no crosswalk in the middle of the night in October when it's raining on division, right? And those are really different types of tragedies. But one of the things I've found difficult is that with this increase in fatalities, I've never seen a breakdown of the type or the, the situation of the victim in terms of their own, their own situation. What choices were all those types of things? Is there a way that we can get better public health data about this group of people, so that we can better put strategies together?
132 I really appreciate that question, councilor Zimmerman. And I think that's absolutely necessary. And that is part of one of one of my budget notes. Most of the things I'm bringing forward are related to vision zero is around not only getting the data, but making sure that we're disaggregating it better. So making sure that we can look at race, ethnicity, ethnicity, different parts of the equity matrix zones. And so we're not looking just at an overall level, but at specific data points tracked and reported. And I have heard that I have heard that exact question, actually, as I've been door knocking and talked to my neighbors about vision zero, wondering about what are some of the things that people are going through in their lives, you know, where is it children walking to school? I think as much information as we can get, I think would be helpful. What I have found is that folks at PBOT that the dcr, donna, are all very open to figuring out how we can collaborate and work on this. And there are also are as you you likely know, many pedestrian and bike community groups that are really interested in how can how can we support, what can we give, what how can we try out different pilots? I would absolutely support as much data as we can and disaggregating it.
133 Councilor. I just want to note that one tool that we know does work. I mean, one thing we know kills is speed, as you mentioned, and one tool we have that we know does work to reduce speed are the speed cameras. We at this point only have, I think, 30 speed and red light cameras operating. There's a hope that we can get it up to 60. Unfortunately, right now there's a cap on the number that we can have because the courts say they're only prepared to handle 60 of them. But I just wanted to note that new york city has 3000 of speed and red light cameras. And I looked it up and we have one third of the road miles new york city does. So my personal goal is to get to 1000 as quickly as possible. Councilor. Oh, sorry.
134 The only thing I was going to say is I hear that. I see that as something listed as part of vision zero's work and something that does show to reduce traffic deaths. Deadly, deadly and serious injury. Total crashes by up to 44% and 49%. And I also have had a lot of conversations about this because I have heard people from the community worry about if there are certain groups that are more targeted by these safety cameras. And what I have heard in my conversations, especially with director williams, is that there are ways to do do these cameras in ways that are keeping that in mind and making sure that the focus is that they're not targeting any specific groups.
135 Councilor Kanal thank you.
136 First, thank you for being here and doing this. We're not voting on this resolution as a committee. And so we're grateful for just this sort of extra briefing and time to talk about it. I think this, plus the park ranger conversation earlier is, you know, indicative of the breadth of the public safety work that goes on in the city beyond just the service area alone. I really want to just stress I'm appreciative of the last two and the third, fourth and fifth resolves because they they take this beyond simply a reaffirmation of values and talk about what we're actually going to do about it. And I just wanted to sort of start with saying that. And I think, you know, councilor Novick kind of stole my thunder a little bit with talking about the cameras, but I appreciate that. I also wanted to just build off of councilor Zimmerman's question in terms of we have seen where road dieting has worked. We've also seen a couple places where it maybe has moved a problem. I know in north Portland, there's been a stretch of Willamette that has gotten much busier as traffic has sort of been rerouted, including by mapping apps off of lombard as lombard got reduced. That's not a criticism of road dieting or that one in particular, but it's just sort of one of the unintended consequences that we haven't then also addressed. So my question for you is that's something that I hear about when I knock on doors or when I talk to my neighbors. How do you anticipate us as council being involved with this on an ongoing basis, to be able to communicate feedback like that to this task force?
137 That's a great question. So you're wanting to know specifics about how to inform the community about progress made and.
138 More, how council will interact with the task force that you're proposing through this resolution. I must take this.
139 We added specifically connection with city bureaus and their specifics in here around working with ODOT, metro TriMet Multnomah county. I could see it making a lot of sense for this task force to report back to a policy related committee. I can also see it being great for councilors to come to some of these meetings to join some of the related community advisory bodies that are going to be working with this task force. I think that that's something that I'm I'm open to. And specifically, yeah, we have increasing reporting to quarterly, quarterly as something that instead of annually.
140 Yeah, that that would cover it. Thank you.
141 Councilor is everyone.
142 Thanks. I'm re jogging my memory here for a second. Sorry. Yeah. I think I want to make sure that what we'll end up supporting this forward that we don't overemphasize. Councilor Novick thousand camera plan. But at least in due time, I hope I'm long gone by the time we get to that point in Portland. But I understand the sentiment. So thank you. In terms of I mean, I just continually go back to how will how will positioning this work at the dca level or we had an interesting meeting earlier about a plan of many, many plans. Right. Collating all the plans. And I just continue to. Try to understand what isn't occurring today and what this action to eventually, if you're successful, to bring it up to the dca level. What a portlander might expect. And I say a little bit tongue in cheek of am I going to see an advocate in the dca's office who says southwest Portland and east Portland need more sidewalks? Right? That kind of am I going to see that explicit of a of an advocacy, or is it a position who says, boy, we sure do have a lot of problems. We should think about that more. I just, I, I don't know a lot about how that conversation happens. I'm looking for more plans and more action steps and less plans. But I'm curious on your thoughts.
143 I yeah, I appreciate that question because I don't think we know exactly what how it will go and if it will help. But the question that I asked of dca, donna paul and the director of PBOT and folks doing this vision zero work is what do you need? Because what I'm hearing from many community groups is that, you know, the folks who work in vision zero are great. They need to be empowered, and then they need the money to do some of the things they need to do. And so I see this as trying something out, seeing if it it does help, having a little bit more visibility, maybe having a little more informal power just because you're you have the ear of the dca, it's possible that it's something that doesn't end up panning out great, but it seems like it's worth a shot and it's something that is net zero. It doesn't change the budget. It's really just pulling that position out. And when I heard that idea, it reminded me of some other positions that we have in our our city that kind of like float. And people can they come and, and have a say and can come talk to us about a certain specific topic, especially one like this that really connects to so many different areas and is one that that we want to pull in different service areas into where it's not just PBOT leading this or vision zero, but that there is buy in from multiple service areas. And so that's a piece that I'm excited about too, is that it pushes three different service areas to really work closely together. But I'm also open to if it's not working, then we can change that to.
144 Thank you, councilor Really appreciate your commitment to traffic safety. Appreciate your spending time with us here today. Even though we're not voting anything.
145 Can I talk about one more piece that is not necessarily in the resolution, but is just something that I'm thinking a lot about and am and have been having a lot of conversations about. And I see it. I see this coming up in a few different places in our city, but just where there's like this clear line where it's like, oh, PBOT like bureaucrats over here, and then like advocates and then like it just feels a little bit like the public is just really frustrated and that there's like this clear line. And I know and I think many of many advocates know too like that a lot of these folks doing the work really do care. But there's this frustration because it feels like like bureaucrats and then non bureaucrats. And so just part of this resolution too, was also bringing in Oregon walks and trying to bring in community groups, along with consulting PBOT to show that we can work together. We can. We have to work together. We have to be in line with each other. And where are some ways where we can at times try different pilot projects or loosen restrictions so we can bring in volunteers. That's a conversation that I've had with councilor Clark a lot. How are we utilizing our volunteers? We have people that are so excited, like running these bike busses and bike happy hours. How can we harness some of that energy and use it to say around schools, let let students do some daylighting, do some like painting the curbs red. And so just having some of these conversations around where can we try some some pilot projects out and maybe just build some goodwill and some trust to for our constituents to see that we're we're trying things we're trying to move forward. We're wanting to include community members. So that's the only piece that isn't quite reflected in this resolution, but is connected to conversations I've been having.
146 Thank you, councilor.
147 Thank you.
148 Rebecca, could you read the next item?
149 Item for continued discussion on the public safety service area budget?
150 So, colleagues, what I wanted to do with this last part of the session is to give each of us what now, I think would be about eight minutes apiece to discuss amendments or budget notes that any of us are planning to bring forward on June 11th, or to ask staff questions about amendments or budget notes we ourselves might bring forward, or others that we're interested in. So I invite I've got a few that I'm going to save myself for last, but I invite everybody to kick off with questions or proposals that expect to bring forward. Councilor Morillo.
151 I don't have another amendment, but I have budget notes that I'll be bringing forward that would impact the public safety area. And I've discussed this before, so it shouldn't be new. But I am going to bring forward an amendment to talk about the police forfeiture fund, which are the funds that police get when they seize assets, whether after a crime, whether that be property, vehicles, etc. We spoke with the attorneys and it sounds like the police have around $6 million in that fund. That fund can't be touched or go back to any other resources. It can only go back to police. But it might be something that we can tap into to ensure that they have the resources necessary for hiring or filling those 91 vacant positions that haven't been filled for five years. So that is something that I intend to bring forward soon, and it basically will direct them to create a policy by December explaining how they plan to access those funds and use them.
152 Thank you. Councilor colleagues. Getting ready. Oh my notes. All right, well, councilor Kanal gets ready. I just want to bring up. Some items of my own. I am not going to be proposing, as previously suggested, a set aside of $3 million that the police would only access once they made progress towards shifting welfare checks to unarmed folks. Because the city attorney told me that it was illegal. However, I am going to be proposing a budget note asking that the bureau give us periodic reports on progress towards moving welfare checks to unarmed responders, and I'm also planning to do an amendment to increase the bureau's authorization to hire more ps3's in case that that's something that they're able able to do. So just that, for the record, councilor Kanal.
153 Yeah, I'll.
154 Say the part that I can remember that's that's still coming up. So the first thing is there's a there's a set of cuts that I'd like to reverse in parks, specifically around recreation that relate to community safety. And also one piece that is very specific, which is the alternative community service program. This is $30,000 that parks spends to have folks who are convicted of misdemeanors do community service, doing parks maintenance. 660, I believe, was the number of people that go through this a year. This also would prevent the reduction to community center, aquatic center and tennis center hours in particular in the evening, which is afternoon and evening, which is a time that we want to make sure that there's something cheap or free for kids and young adults to have something to do, and that contributes to the sort of preventative side of it. And then I previously mentioned the park service, parks, ranger service service dispatchers, which I believe the 380,000 was the correct number. I misspoke earlier, and then I'll finally mention and I have some budget notes, which is what I'm looking up the conversation around ensuring that there's ongoing funding for chat for a portion of that, that's about half of it. And we can get into that of their their funding, ongoing funding for eight limited term dispatchers or telecommunicators at 911 and then a portion, I think it's about 10%. Nope. Sorry, about 25% of the grant funds for the office of violence prevention and ceasefire. This would not be any change to the dollar amounts, but it would make it ongoing. That would give some certainty to all those programs, in particular chat. I want to just state that not only would it give certainty there, but it would help us talk to our partners and our potential partners about chipping in more, because one of the things that I have found, and we can speak to this as well, is that as we ask for partnership and support, one of the things that prospective partners say back is, is the city committing, are you putting skin in the game as well? And so having a portion of that funding be ongoing, I think would help send the right message there as well. I'll come back when I can find everything else, but and I welcome any questions if anyone has on those.
155 Actually, there's a question that I wanted to ask chief de, which is we voted to cut back the $2 million additional money that the mayor allocated in his budget last week. But obviously that's not the final budget. And one question that I was a little fuzzy on was how the bureau is going to use that additional 2 million. So in case somebody any of us finds $2 million now in June 11th, I just wanted to ask the chief to hold forth a. Bit in a few minutes, because we don't have that much time on what the plans would be for that $2 million.
156 Thank you counselor. So earlier, bob day, chief of police, city of Portland, earlier today provided some recommendations to the mayor's office. Should be coming to you folks at some point here soon regarding our strategy around recruitment, hiring, training and retention. And as I've stated throughout the conversation, that's our priority. So those are going to continue. Was directed last week after the vote that I had to find. I was planning on using that 1.9 million towards those issues, about a million of it. And I was told last week after the amendment that I needed to make adjustments going into the next budget cycle. So in consultation with my team and with the business services, we're going to see a reduction in traffic, priority projects, human trafficking missions, precinct crime reduction, street racing and gun violence reduction, investigative overtime, stolen vehicle operations, retail theft and precinct patrol backfill. We're going to break it down because at 1.9 million equates to about 21,000 hours of overtime. So the overall goal around recruitment, hiring, training and retention is going to continue. I just have to find the money somewhere else to pay for that.
157 My question actually was, how do you spend $1.9 million on recruitment and retention? Like I've heard that the bureau for a while has not had like a permanent dedicated person as a recruitment coordinator. Is that one of the things that you might address with that 1.9 million?
158 Correct. So in 2020, due to budget cuts, we eliminated the recruit manager recruitment, which was a civilian position. And we also assigned at that point two sworn officers that were recruiters back to patrol as a result of the budget cuts. And so there was no applications or hiring in that time period. And then sorry, we got to slide. You pulling up there for me, nathan or Ryan. So the in 2022 we reassigned one officer. And in 24 we had another officer assigned to the recruitment team. Both of those officers would normally be in patrol, but they're not because they're doing recruiting. So we have to backfill for those positions, which is when you see some of the comments there about backfill overtime travels and materials, we spend about, you know, 125 grand on going to universities, job fairs. We were at comic-con this year. We try to stay within a three hour plane ride of the city of Portland. We want people to they want to come from out of state to be able to be connected. We're very intentional on looking for the right people. This isn't just about hiring, but we do try and get out and visit, whether it be military bases, universities, job fairs, the auto show this year, etc. Really getting a wide representation is important to us. You know, city of seattle this past year implemented a $7,500 signing bonus for new officers and a $50,000 bonus for lateral officers. And they've hired 60 people in the first three months of this year, according to the article I read, they only hired ten similarly last year at this time. So clearly those incentives are matter, are making a difference. I don't know if that means they're getting the highest or the best, and we're committed on still continuing to get the very best. So we're making every effort in that regard around travel. Another cost that's not outlined on there, but we've really increased our efforts around marketing, and we're realizing that today, more and more people are relying upon social media for their job postings and for recruitment. So we do a heavy emphasis on marketing, digital marketing primarily, and we spend about $400,000 a year on that. And we're looking at ways to increase. We feel like we're in most of the prominent spaces, but we believe there's more. And the feedback we're getting is that we're getting a lot of good information on that. So between the personnel costs and the marketing costs alone around recruitment, and then that doesn't take into account the training and the retention strategies.
159 Councilor someone.
160 Thanks. This slide is great. And that explanation is also very helpful. I know that it can sound right when somebody says, you know, the chief's got a thousand applications in the queue, that the quick jump is well, darn, he should be able to hire 90 people, no problem. And I just want to I appreciate that it is hard to become a Portland police officer. I have worked in and lived in, and certainly traveled and visited in some places that have a much lower standard, and I think that has suited us well here. I think we can always be aggressive, right. But it has suited us well not to have mentally compromised, ethically compromised, legally compromised people representing the city. So. I, I am appreciating that. I'm also I'm just noting I never thought of the recruiting as one of the many broadening assignments that exist for an officer in Portland police bureau, but I'm going to just kind of go back to one of the things that I think makes a large agency attractive is and also effective in the long run on an individual employee basis, is something that we call a broadening assignment. And the idea behind a broadening assignment for colleagues and others is that officers who have had a variety of assignments, whether it's a school resource, it's a recruiting, it's a time on swat, it's a time on TriMet. It's a time on patrol in various districts. They are more well rounded for us in the long run. And this is something that I'm I've always thought Portland was very good at. And it's become harder and harder to do that as we constrain. And we have to take people off these special assignments just to fill patrol. So I appreciate kind of hearing this. And I had not considered kind of these changes of uniform personnel in the recruitment side, and that I just want to make sure I understand a little bit about how operations work. This last week in central precinct, we had quite the surge of effort by that team, by the neighborhood team, by the mobile command, both at couch park, which I mentioned earlier in this committee, but also in the central east side industrial district in other parts of downtown. And I am betting that a good portion of that was done on having to use overtime. Right. These were people who came out of a they were already had worked patrol they were on or they on in a day that they would have normally been off. But that was an overtime function, I think. I think, and the reason I'm asking that, chief, is that was well received by my constituents, by the parents at the school, by the businesses. But I'm estimating that that kind of operation will be less moving forward if these direct dollars are reduced. Or have I got my calculations wrong?
161 No. The actions last week were what we would call precinct related crime reduction missions, right? We have our more commonly known, you know, retail theft, stolen vehicles, human trafficking. Some of those are more larger, bureau wide. But then each of the precincts have really taken ownership in their particular areas of the city, and they can have the latitude within their budget to make those decisions. So last week, commander hughes, to his credit, saw that he had some available overtime funding, but it was about 30 to 40 hours a day. Several of the officers agreed to adjust their shift. They wanted to be a part of this. And then we were augmented by osp and Friday, which made a significant difference. And that's one of the reasons why you saw almost a doubling of people to deflections and activity and so forth. And I want to thank the governor and superintendent cotton for their support, which also allowed us to, you know, keep officers in, in patrol cars and not bring them on to the mission. But, yes, this will, as this slide indicates, in that part where it says precinct crime reduction missions, we will be eliminating those in the future so that we can focus on, you know, singular larger missions. But the autonomy that the commanders are using right now will be greatly restrained.
162 One more chairman, I, I hope, chief, that if there is an incentive package that your team thinks is viable and reasonable, that you'd like to explore, that you could bring that forward, I know. In this era. The reasons a young person chooses to go into a public service, particularly a sworn public service job, are different than we did. And I am noticing that incentives are becoming higher dollar and more specific for different types of roles in other venues that I sit, and I could only imagine that they would be pertinent here. And I'm unaware of our current level of incentives for hiring here, but I'm certainly from a am I open to incentives? The answer is absolutely yes. And I would look to the bureau leadership and hr for what is the right package of incentives for particularly recruiting portlanders. That's great that somebody wants to move here to be a cop. I'm really also interested in the portlander who wants to step up, and that has always been an age old debate, but my ears are open. If there's an incentive package that you'd like to explore.
163 Thank you. And I do want to add that we are still hiring far greater number of portlanders than we are from outside the community, which is really encouraging. And so that's that continues to be a point of emphasis. I believe that recruiting the right person for this job, and I think if you view our recruitment material, you'll see a different approach. It's not about, you know, going through doors and driving fast and all those. It's really about the humanity and the opportunity and the unique experiences you can have. As a Portland police officer in the city of Portland, highlighting both, you know, the job itself, but really the environment, because we are learning with and I don't think it's just young people, but certainly people younger than me that are looking for law enforcement experience. As you said earlier, councilor Are looking at it from a different lens than I did 35 years ago. And we're I think if you're able to get to a hiring ceremony or two, which I know you have, you'll hear in the bios a really diverse representation of people that are coming on. It's exciting. It really is exciting.
164 Chief. It's one in terms of marketing you and I have talked about, there's like national research that says that there's a fair amount of self-selection, obviously, in people that want to be police officers and quite often the people that want to be police officers are, unfortunately, people with authoritarian personalities who like the idea of carrying a gun. I'm not saying that ends up being the majority of people that mean, but that's a certain segment of people that like the idea of being police officers. New zealand eight years ago decided that they wanted to expand the pool of people who would think about being police officers who otherwise might not think of it at all. And they had a really interesting advertising campaign that was playful and intriguing and actually in drastically increased the number and the diversity of people who applied. And I was wondering if, in terms of marketing, you've given some thought to how you do marketing that expands the dramatically expands the kind of people that might even think of the job.
165 Yeah, I mean that new zealand advertisement was, you know, seen worldwide literally. It was very innovative. I get a kick out of it every time when I, you know, think about it. I mean, it was very, you know, just very intentional. Well done. I have a responsibility as chief of police to make sure that we are bringing people into this organization that represent the values of portlanders, and it would be remiss for me to for both the people that are coming in, as well as for the community they serve, to not be conveying the right message of who we're looking for. One of our recent videos from just a couple of years ago talks about that just, you know, come join us in a way that I think does similarly reach out in a different perspective, you know, talks about the roles of these officers before they were police officers, why they're here, what's important to them. We also have done advertising around, just as I said, the beauty of, you know, mount hood, the Oregon coast, Multnomah falls, being in the being able to be in the city of roses. So really trying to set the tone early that this is our expectation of who is applying and what we're looking for versus, you know, just sort of, as you said, sort of self-selecting. But and one of the things we're hearing in our outreach is people are responding to that. They're seeing that they're talking to us about, hey, I saw your post on whatever spotify. I recently did a message, whatever we call it, a public service announcement, and they put it out on social media that I'll never see or use. But people are saying, hey, we saw the chief on blah blah, blah. So I do think that that's really important and I think it's being modeled. I'm very interested. And this is not something that that was something I would consider funding wise, is we have some great creative minds in this city, great ad agencies. I was recently in louisville, kentucky, where louisville pd is actually working with a ad agency company, a marketing company, and they're going to have a hiring class of 48, I believe, this month or last month. I was there last month, which is one of their largest in many years. And we certainly know the challenges louisville has faced. So they have really embraced the help of this local marketing firm. And I think that's something that I would like to consider as well here.
166 Councilor Kanal.
167 Thank you, chief. I will have a question for you, but I'll just give a heads up. I have questions for boec and for fire as well. So if you could please come up as well. And first off, thank you for being here, chief. Thank you also to dc jovic and robert king. I see in the back as well. I just wanted to with a comment. You mentioned seattle and I'm glad that you did, having lived there for eight years, would definitely not trade departments with them. So I do encourage you to, to look at what we can learn from them. But but I am greatly happy that we have this bureau here and not that one in Portland. There are. The question I had is, is for you as chief is, is that when there was the memo that dc myers sent about what the 8% hypothetical reductions were in January at that time, the bureau said, the police bureau said that that the human trafficking unit and the crime reduction plan missions, many of you which were mentioned, would be reduced. Then when the city which is what, similar to what you said. Now, there are a few other things in the memo as well. Then when the city administrators budget came out, which is very similar in aggregate dollar amount to where we're currently at with the amended mayor's proposed, that was not a concern that was raised at that time. And given that the mayor effectively proposed 2 million additional dollars, the council effectively amended that out. I'm curious as to why that is now a concern when it wasn't a concern at the same dollar amount of the city administrator's recommendations for specifically the human trafficking unit and the crime reduction missions that you mentioned.
168 Well, in the putting together the proposed budget for 2526 with the mayor, which is what you know, you have in front of you and what we've been voting on and amending, it was our recommendation and our belief that this is the proper funding that we need to be able to accelerate around hiring, recruitment, retention and training and seeing that as a priority. I know the mayor has made a priority for us to be able to be able to rightsize the organization. So we put a budget, we put a budget forward. We believe that does that and still allows for that. So this is a cut. And where we anticipated being able to move forward, and we're going to go ahead and make the adjustments accordingly.
169 Yeah.
170 And I'll just remind everyone that 316 million to 316 million is not a cut. It's just not an increase. But my question is, did the did the city administrator's recommendations would that had we just done that, had the mayor proposed that and council approved it, would that have caused the same cuts to service that you're talking about?
171 I don't have that in front of me to speak to that. So my memory fails me on that. I'll be happy to take a look and get back to you, but I don't. I'm only speaking to the mayor's proposed at this point.
172 Thank you. And I'd love to chat with you more about that. My other question, and I don't mind what order director cozzie or chief jackson, you go in. Thank you both for being here. There is a proposed amendment that I would be bringing forward that would convert eight limited duration telecommunicators at boec to ongoing permanent positions, and would convert one of the $2 million currently allocated to chat from limited from one time to ongoing funding. Could you speak to what the impacts on service and any other impacts you'd like to talk about? If we were to do that would be.
173 I'm happy to, yeah, happy to dive in first. Bob cozzie for the record, director of bureau of emergency communications. First of all, councilor, I appreciate the support that you're wanting to show boec in particular, we currently have a plan in place as we look at improving our call answering times. Overtime has gone down quite a bit, and because of that, the plan that I certainly have in my mind and we've gone over that with our our budget team is transitioning our eight existing limited term positions over the course of time into permanent positions, primarily using overtime savings. So, you know, using additional funds from another, you know, another bureau or another program in place isn't really necessary for boec. And that's exactly why in this budget, I didn't even consider asking for additional funds, because we are seeing success and I can't straight face ask for additional dollars when other other folks are having to take serious cuts. So really, the plan this next fiscal year is to transition at least four positions from from limited term to permanently funded, because we're saving money and overtime. And we've been able to budget that over time and then look at for the following fiscal year, whether or not maybe we do need to ask for some additional funding, permanent funding for the other four positions. And at that point, we should have a very clear vision of what our staffing needs to be based on call answering times, call volume, if that makes sense.
174 Yeah. Can you speak to.
175 Why the 141 number like you arrived at a number specifically that includes the eight?
176 Yeah. So currently we have permanent funding for 128 positions. We have limited term funding for eight positions. So that's kind of one time funding every year that that we have to ask for. And because I said 140, I believe was the kind of the magic number, that's because right now, in the winter time, we're averaging the need for about 130 certified call takers. In the summertime, we need about 150 certified call takers. So, you know, splitting, splitting that up, looking at being able to meet the national standard, most of the time, it wouldn't be all of the time it would be most of the time, certainly winter, fall, spring. And then as summer hits where we really need 150, we wouldn't be able to meet the nina standard or national emergency number association standard. Does that make sense?
177 Yes.
178 Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.
179 And, chief jackson, if you could speak to the chat.
180 Chair canal, would it be okay if would you permit me to intercede before chief jackson?
181 Yeah.
182 So one of the things, first of all, councilor, I really appreciate and I think we all do and I don't I'm not going to speak for the fire chief, but I will speak for the service area. On how much we value your interest in in ongoing funding for chat. You're absolutely right. And your comments earlier, I think you and I have talked a lot about the office of violence prevention and the need for ongoing funding. I know the community very much desires it. And of course, bob cozzie just commented one of our concerns and we've talked about this in the service area with the chief's, is we want to make sure as we talk about our interest in supporting ongoing funding within the bureau, that we don't advocate for the reduction of other parts of the bureau in programs or operations, in taking cuts to be able to or transfer money and able to do that, moving ongoing from 1 to 1 time in order to do move one time to ongoing in another. So I just want to be careful and speak just for the service area that we do not want to bring our bureaus or our teams or programs into opposition with each other. So I just wanted to state that for the record, to be clear, kind of where we stand, very much support the need for the ongoing. We support and appreciate your interest in seeking opportunities to do that. Thank you for letting me intercede, I appreciate it.
183 Yeah, I would echo some oh, a.j. Jackson, interim fire chief for Portland fire and rescue. I would agree with my colleagues here in the statements that have been made. I support chat as a program. It's been in existence since 2021, and we know we have some end goal objectives that we'd like to reach over time. To director cozzie point, understanding the financial environment and the challenges that we're facing, gauging those wants versus needs. And so we have had great partnership in the past. And I think as we move and we can work towards those long term goals with ongoing funding, I think our partners will appreciate that. I think they are appreciative of the city, and especially in this climate, finding a way to continue to support this program for another year. But I do. I agree with director or dca, myers director cozzie and of course chief de, in that we are very much a collective effort that rely on each other. We're all connected. When one is cut, the ramifications hit all of us. And so there is kind of a unity and a sense and trying to keep that perspective of where we are and just knowing that that might have to be gauged, you know, as we you know, hopefully next fiscal year is more positive, but if not, how do we meet all of the needs across the public safety service area?
184 Yeah, thanks. And I would love to know at some point if anyone can reference you can follow up later any pre-filed amendments that would have any cuts. I'm not aware of any others that are pre-filed at this moment, but can you speak to what it would mean for the chat employees to know that they had ongoing funding?
185 Absolutely. I mean, it has been a challenge since inception when this budget process, you know, starts and when it ends. And each year jobs are in question and we get down and, you know, in a challenging environment that we are in this fiscal year, we are kind of getting down to the very end and in some cases, some employee employees feel great uncertainty about their job and whether they will have a paycheck. And we understand that, and it's incredibly challenging for them to wait and have faith in trust in the process that you know, their jobs, the service that they provide are valued. And so obviously, that long term goal of getting to ongoing funding and expansion of the program and what it can do and the calls that they can go on and how they are able to affect the system on the front end, I think, is something to take into account because it's been difficult. And I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that. I think most of our employees coming in, we try to explain kind of like that financing structure. And of course, as folks come into the city getting exposure to the city budget process, and of course, this year being a new form of government and slightly different than what we've done in the past, we've all tried to pivot and be flexible in what's being asked and information that needs to be shared, education that needs to happen. So folks have a true understanding.
186 Thank you.
187 Councilor zimmermann.
188 I'm interested in your your potential amendment chair regarding ps3's. And it's got me thinking, just in terms of we talked a little bit about the standards in which it takes to recruit a Portland police officer. Assuming and knowing that the standards for ps3 are lower. In terms of creating a pipeline, which would allow our teams to evaluate a person and using ps3, not certainly there are people that are going to stay in that career field, and that's what they intend to do, that that is what they want. But there are others who I'm sure use that as a potential training ground or an introduction to potentially a sworn position. So I am interested in that, that over authorization. And I would just at the same time, I'll be curious in your thoughts if that is in fact the case, chief. But also, you know, former police chief and former sheriff mike reese assumed the reserve program at the sheriff's office when it left PPB. And in my understanding, that was not something that was certainly preferred, but it was something that needed to happen. Given the tumultuous time that the bureau was in. But in a similar fashion, I've known a lot of reserve officers who become permanent sworn officers, and a potential return of that in coupling with this ps3 idea is something I'm just curious about. Thoughts there, chief.
189 Yeah, the reserve program would way several years ago for a variety of reasons, and my dad was actually important. Reserve in the early 60s. Did not go into law enforcement, but talks about, you know, walking around the zoo and stories like that. We hired a number of officers in that program. We are seeing officers come out of the ps3 program. We just hired two or excuse me. Yeah, just hired two officers that were formerly ps3's. It was really encouraging. And several of them came to the hiring ceremony to support their peers. And you're right, you know, we're seeing some that are assuming this role and this is where they want to be. It's a good job. It's a public service job. And one of the proposals that we'll be looking at, and I appreciate councilor Novick challenging us in this is looking at well as maybe some supervisory opportunities or some opportunities within the psc program. Second of all, we do see some officers that retire. They want to continue to serve, but they don't want to do so in some capacity. And then third, we see those that do see it as a pathway towards a future law enforcement position. And if we can get them in the ps3 door, it just makes the pathway so much clearer for all of us to be able to see them perform and hold them accountable and see what we're going to get ahead of time. So I definitely would love to continue to have it be a viable recruitment tool.
190 Yeah, I think about so many of our interactions that I think sometimes people think about nostalgically is like, oh, I my kid got to talk to a police officer at the rose parade, or the person who was kind of, you know, cordoning off an area while there was a public event going. And I think we forget that a whole lot of those that we all interacted with when we were younger were actually Portland reserve officers who were filling those roles. I think about, you know, retired commander bob ball and other team members who I know from that team. And the pictures of these guys are everything we interact with when we see police out on the street, out of their cars. And a lot of times they have that role. And it's sad that we don't have it anymore and certainly open to doing what it takes to wrestle that thing back from from the sheriff's side. Or maybe we can duplicate, because I think they play an important role in part of the community policing connection. Yeah.
191 Thank you.
192 So I actually have a pbem question. As some of you know, I was proposing to add $3 million to the pbem budget to address some priority needs that they had identified, and I was proposing to do that with overhead funds, because you can only you can only use let's if you're using, for example, if we were going to cut city council budgets and use that for operating bureau, we could only use 44% of the money. Whereas if we were going to give that money to pbem, we'd use 100%, because pbem is also an overhead bureau. And as of midnight may 21st, we have about 689,000, I think, dollars in overhead money, as opposed to only about 300 something in non overhead money. So I wanted to ask pbem if they could identify some things that we could pay for if we decided to do the right thing and spend the whole $689,000 on pbem.
193 Thank you for that question. For the record, I'm bridget norvell, chief chief resilience officer at Portland bureau for emergency management. So thank you for the opportunity to talk about a potential funding opportunity for our bureau. The. So while working on this, we have done a prioritization of where would our bureau need to dedicate our resources first if we get them. Planning is definitely high up on the list. If we get it, if we get this funding, we could start with two planners. These planners would be responsible for coordinating and developing both strategic and operational emergency plans. This includes hazards like earthquake. I know c.e.hubb has been discussed in this in this forum before. This also includes other severe weather plans that other jurisdictions are working on right now. Continuity of operations plan and continuity of government plan. Now, while these planners may may be able to assist, if we get these two positions, we may be able to assist with emergency response planning for the critical energy hub. However, I do want to highlight that the scope and complexity and the interjurisdictional coordination required for a for a facility the size of cei hub that requires a dedicated resources for that dedicated resource. For that, however, we can start with that. We can prioritize. When we hire, we hire a planner, and what plans they work on can be decided after after they get hired. I'd also add there are other priorities that beers have identified. I think this one another one is an all hazard watch desk manager. This position will oversee the development, enhancement and operations of city's all hazard watch desk to support situational awareness and information sharing for emergency and routine monitoring across the city, and also doing while doing so, refining protocols and tools for city's duty officer program, thereby contributing to improved data collection and reporting processes processes. So that's how we could we could use that funding.
194 Thank you. Councilor Kanal.
195 Just a quick follow.
196 Up on that and thank you for being here. The cei there's a there's a question around cei. Can you speak to the would that be a sorry. There's a separate amendment about the cei planning component. Would this be something that a full time fte would, would effectively cover for the city, or is this something that would require more on the on the outside of pbem side? Like I'm trying to understand what whether these things are mutually exclusive or would need to be done in parallel, if that makes sense.
197 So I'm going to speak technically any product that comes out, like for example, if we create a plan for an earthquake that would have a cei component, cei hub component to it. If we make a plan for a hazmat, a significant hazmat event in collaboration with Portland fire that would have an emergency management component to it. The amendment if the amendment when I read it it it includes two positions for cei hub dedicated that's under the I believe. The other service area. What this position can start on the cei hub. However I would recommend that city would require emergency management, would require at least one dedicated resource for cei hub because just it's not even planning as much. It's just like bringing people, everyone to the table and kind of starting that planning process. Just there are too many stakeholders involved. It's different counties, different states. It's a if I have to write a work plan for an employee that's going to work on that, I don't think I would assign them anything else. Just this would be a lot.
198 Thank you.
199 Zimmerman.
200 Thanks. This question is regarding Portland street response and the increase of fte. I see stephanie's in here, but if others are willing to answer. So I think that the proposed budget has 14 new fte coming on board for Portland street response. And I do not have in memory what that dollar figure is. But I'm just curious. What is the expected hiring time frame? When can we expect to see all 14 up running, taking calls? And what the 14 are expected to achieve for psr, whether it's shift coverage, 24 over seven, whatever that is. What does 14 get us? Because I know it was proposed by the mayor in a collection of all the things. And since we've taken on this budget, some things in the public safety realm have changed. So I'm just curious. Thanks.
201 Yeah. Thank you. Stephanie howard for the record, director of community safety for the public safety service area. So the 14 positions that are included in the mayor's proposed would be phased in over a year. And likely, I think, our goal, according to current, the current staffing plan that our program manager has would be within two years getting to 24 hour, seven day a week coverage for the whole city. But that is between the hiring, the recruiting, the hiring and the training that's necessary for those. It would need to be phased in, you know, over the next year. And then I think a little extra into the following.
202 So if that is really helpful, does that mean that so at two years. So if we're sitting here next year, would I expect to see another increase of fte to get past what is now the 14 new positions or just acknowledging that there probably won't be an ask next year to grow it even more? We're seeing 14 is kind of the number, 14 more is the number we're trying to get to.
203 I would say 14 is the bare minimum number to get to that over two years. So I wouldn't necessarily say we wouldn't make another request depending on the budget conditions next year. But I think at this time next year, what you can expect is that there is, you know, again, a transitional phasing in of staff. And I think we're looking at trying to create a third shift so that we can expand hours in the meantime. And that would be happening in this first year as well. So by the time we're here next year, I would expect that you would see us being pretty close and pretty dialed in to, what, 24 over seven coverage looks like.
204 I'll take that as it'd be great if we could have seven up and running by the end of the next fiscal year. Anything above that is you've exceeded your goals, and anything below that is, we're going to try really hard to get to 14 up and running by the end of a two year cycle. It's kind of how I'm taking that.
205 I think. No, actually, I think what what I'm saying is, is that it's going to take time to hire 14 certainly over the next year, year and a half. But I think what I'm saying is that at the to get us to 24 over seven coverage, 14 total over that, you know, whether that's all in one year or two, 14 total is the absolute minimum number of staff that we would need to reach those hours.
206 And was the mayor's decision made from a perspective that we need to go to 24 over seven? I'm trying to understand, yes, that was his intent when he put the proposed budget together.
207 That's that is my understanding. And that's that's our goal with that.
208 And that's about two years away until we think we could minimum we could get to that point. Correct. And do you remember the dollar figure, miss howard, in terms of what it was to hire up those 14 permanent?
209 I believe the difference is about $2.5 million, maybe a little less than that.
210 Okay, I appreciate that. Thank you.
211 Seeing no one else in the queue, I want to thank profusely all the staff who stayed here for two hours and ten minutes, knowing that you might be asked to say something during our freewheeling period and you might not. So thank you very much. Our next meeting is Tuesday, June 10th, and the meeting of the community and public safety committee is adjourned.