The record · Transcript

Council session — 2026-02-23

Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (17,377 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are AI-suggested and editor-reviewed (low confidence — auto-captions garble names); each color marks a speaker.

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How are we doing? Okay. All right. Good afternoon. I'm going to call the meeting of the finance committee to order. It's Monday, February 23rd at 12:01 p.m. Diana, can you please call the roll?

Good afternoon. Avalos. Pirtle-guiney here. Novick Green.

Here. Zimmerman here. Okay, christopher, if you could please read the statement of conduct.

Welcome to the meeting of the finance committee to testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance the committee agenda at. Agenda finance 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 testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.

All right. Now that we got that out of the way, colleagues, this meeting in the finance committee, we're going to first, I'll ask you to approve the committee. Minutes from January, we're going to consider an ordinance to amend the business license tax exemption. We're going to consider an ordinance to amend the city code to authorize payments of costs for city employees facing certain criminal or civil proceedings initiated by the federal government, and consider an ordinance to appropriate two grants from the Oregon transportation safety office and our four grants and four grants from Oregon impact. With that clerk, can you call item number one the minutes?

Item one January 5th, 2026 to January 12th, 2026. Finance committee minutes.

Colleagues, if there's no objection. All right, committee, the minutes are approved. With that, we can move on to item number two, please.

Item two amend business license law code to increase the business license tax. Gross receipts exemption.

Okay. With that, we have some invited speakers today. Colleagues, if you wouldn't mind, mayor wilson, thomas lannom and jonas biery, if you could come on up first and then we'll have some other invited testimony once those speakers are done. Before we kick it over to these folks. As most of us know, the business businesses inside of Portland pay an additional tax on their gross receipts revenue. And for many years now, this threshold has kicked in at $50,000 mark. Today's ordinance takes a two year phase in to double that exemption up to $100,000 beginning in 2027. For filers in Portland, that means their Multnomah county and Portland business license tax will begin at the same point of gross receipts. Revenue easing confusion for the simple small business operators. You'll see in the body of this document that upwards to 10,000 small businesses will be positively affected by this change, and 65% of the businesses getting relief are sole proprietors. This isn't about amazon. This is about our corner stores, our food carts, our contract graphic artists, our performers, our second job gig economy workers, and those that are taking a chance on the Portland market. I'm very pleased to introduce this legislation in partnership with mayor wilson, because Portland is in need of any and all economic engine fuel that we can provide. As has been widely reported since last week, Portland is in a hyper localized recession. We now compete with our closest regional cities. When our residents decide where to open up shop. The perks of the Portland story have waned for too long, and the attractiveness of nearby markets with lower tax burdens, less vandalism is attractive for operators and consumers alike. We must recognize that additional taxes at the lowest level of gross receipts is too low of a level to levy additional taxes, that we must create incentives to not only retain our smallest operators, but also to invite new taxes shouldn't be complicated. Aligning Multnomah county and the city of Portland makes it easier for all filers. And lastly, in terms of economic opportunity when facing a recession, reducing the tax burden is important, but it also helps us spur additional activity. And that's kind of the bigger point, creating new economic activity and breaking a stagnant or downward cycle is important. Blt exemptions alone are not going to accomplish that. But combined with our housing development initiatives, combined with our increased focus on safety and livability in our largest business district, but also in our small micro main street business districts across all neighborhoods, and combined with the reinvestment of our public in the parks levy, we can send an important signal not just in words, but also in actions. And so with that, mayor wilson, I am so happy to have you here at the finance committee. Please take it away.

All right. Chair Zimmerman, thank you. I appreciate your time. Committee members, thank you for this opportunity to speak before you today. I'm sponsoring this legislation with councilor Zimmerman that would take our business license tax exemption from 50,000 to 75,000 in this next fiscal year, and then the following or subsequent fiscal year, it will go from 75,000 to 100,000. So it's a stepped process that's responsible. It's a common sense, overdue step that sends a clear and important message to our small business community that we see you, we value you, and we are committed to your success in the city of Portland. The current $50,000 exemption threshold has not been updated since 2007, nearly 20 years ago. In that time, the cost of doing business has increased substantially. Rents have risen significantly, and I know this firsthand. As somebody who operated a business in Portland, the exemption that was meant to protect small businesses from an undue tax burden has quietly eroded in real value year after year, as inflation has outpaced it. I want to acknowledge that this is a modest adjustment, not a sweeping transformation. It does not solve every challenge facing small businesses in our city. But policy making is often about using tools available to us. And this exemption threshold is just one of those tools we're here to talk about today. The phase structure, 75,000 in 2026 and 120 27 is fiscally responsible. It allows the city to evaluate the impact incrementally, and it provides businesses with a predictable, forward looking signal that relief is coming in a deliberate and manageable way. Policy decisions like this one carry meaning beyond their direct financial impact. When this body votes to increase the exemption threshold, it is not just adjusting a number in a municipal code, it is making a statement. It is telling every small business owner who is working long hours, stretching resources and betting on the community that their city is paying attention and is willing to act and act fast. At a time when small businesses face intense competition, rising costs, and ongoing economic headwinds, that kind of signal matters. It builds confidence, it encourages investment, and it reinforces the kind of business friendly environment that attracts new entrepreneurs and supports existing ones. We have an opportunity today to do something meaningful, not just transformational, but meaningful for the small businesses that contribute to our economy. This excuse me, this proposed exemption increase is overdue. It is measured, it is responsible, and it is the right thing to do. I urge this body to vote in support of raising the business license tax exemption to $75,000 in 26 and 100,000 in 2027. Let's use every lever we have to support our small businesses and our city. Thank you.

Good morning, chair Zimmerman.

Thomas lannom from our revenue division. Please go ahead.

Jumped in on you there. And vice chair pirtle-guiney. My name is thomas lannom. I'm the revenue division director. Between the two of you, you actually covered anything that I was going to say. So I'm just going to be present for questions.

Okay, great. I will note we also have our chief financial officer jonas biery in the room colleagues, as if questions come up. But before we move into technical questions, we do have some invited testimony from the public. And so I'd like to invite duncan huang, steven Green, sierra pressler, and andrew hoehn forward to testify on this matter. And then we'll go into any technical questions and discussion together.

Thank you.

Okay. And I am seeing that duncan might be joining us online. So I don't know if between the four of you, if you have an order in which you'd like to go, but why don't we go with duncan first then? Because I'm getting nods.

Okay, great.

Well, thank you and good afternoon, chair Zimmerman and members of the council. For the record, my name is duncan huang. I'm the community development director at apano. First of all, I just want to wish everyone a happy lunar new year. Great to see you last night at the banquet. Councilor Zimmerman. It was great to have that in a small business out in the jade district. And yeah, I'm here on behalf of Elana. We're part of a inclusive business resource network at prosper Portland and also help manage the jade district. So we work a lot with immigrants and small businesses all across the city. We're really thankful for that. Investments in technical assistance and support and the responsiveness city the city has had to our business concerns. Just a couple from the last couple years during the pandemic, we reported one of our dim sum restaurants paying up to 30% of their revenues to postmates and grubhub for delivery services. 30% of that money should have been circulating in our neighborhood, but it was going to these these tech giants. So we worked this with the city council at the time to pass an ordinance to cap delivery fees at 10%, which was the strongest in the country at this time. And that was just an example of, you know, the city being super responsive and quick for small businesses. A couple years ago, two years ago, I think we had another vietnamese restaurant that was experiencing complaints about the smells from the neighborhood. And this council was also responsive in changing the rules. So that smell complaints were no longer subjective. We felt like that was being unfairly used against bipoc owned small businesses. So today I'm here to again ask for your support in supporting our immigrant business community. You know, a couple months ago, the mayor and director of wesley came to a town hall and mentioned that this was coming up and received spontaneous applause from all of us small business owners in attendance. As the mayor said, you know, our small business community is facing difficult times, especially on the 82nd, with all the construction going on and any sort of tax relief is, you know, much welcome and would really help them through some difficult times ahead. So just I'm really here to support this concept and any other ways that the city can continue to show its support for our small business community, you know, especially as we're competing with the suburbs and cities all across the northwest. So thank you so much and thanks for considering this and hopefully passing it.

Thank you counselor. Happy to have you and supporting today. Who wants to go next up on our panel.

Well I'll go next. Go ahead. All right. Good afternoon I'm ciara pressler. I serve as the board president for better Portland. I also serve on the Oregon governor's racial justice economic opportunity committee, which works to create a more equitable environment for area businesses owned by people of color as well as workforce development. Additionally, I own a small business pregame which has provided strategic guidance and technical assistance to hundreds of micro businesses in Portland and throughout Oregon. I encourage your support of increasing portland's business license tax gross receipts exemption. There is an undue burden on small businesses in the city of Portland. While the entire tax structure needs to be reevaluated, this is an important first step. $100,000 may sound like a lot of money, but for a business owner, it's barely enough to survive. Our revenue goes toward the costs of doing business inventory, rent, employees, and at this micro size of business, any profit margin is typically reinvested into the business just to get it to a place where it can support the owner's livelihood. This week I'm doing my business taxes, and like every year, I will do the math on whether it makes sense to relocate my business to Washington county, Clackamas county, or gasp, Clark county, Washington. The sheer number of businesses that have already left or closed prove that I'm not the only one doing this calculation. As portlanders, we all celebrate and love small businesses and homegrown businesses that have the scale, that have the ability to scale are vital to portland's future. It's time for us to put integrity behind our celebration of small business by creating the conditions for them to thrive again. This is a sliver of a step to making Portland friendlier to small business, but it's an important step in the right direction.

Thanks for joining us.

On the next good afternoon chairs and members of the committee. My name is steven Green. I'm a local business owner. I own vanport studio and one of the co-founders of better Portland, a local chamber committed to supporting our city's economic and community resilience. I'm here today in support of proposed amendment to increase the business license tax gross receipts exemption. While this not be a grand solution for the headwinds our local businesses are facing, it is an important step for city hall and showing our community that you have their back. For nearly 20 years, the exemption threshold has remained unchanged. In that time. The cost of rent, payroll, insurance, avocados and simply doing business in Portland have increased dramatically, raising the exemption to raising the exemption to better reflect today's cost of doing business gives small firms an early stage startups, something they rarely have. Breathing room for many entrepreneurs, especially sole proprietors, the first 75,000 or $100,000 in revenue is not profit, it's survival. This amendment recognizes that reality. It reduces the administrative burden, aligns more closely with county thresholds, and allows emerging businesses to reinvest in growth, hire their first employee or upgrade critical systems. But more importantly, this is a signal. It signals that Portland understands small businesses are not just revenue sources, they are community builders. They activate our main streets, create jobs, sponsor neighborhood events, and shape the cultural identity of our city. By taking this step, you are saying that city hall is willing to craft policies that meet small businesses where they're at, and you are saying that you want founders and to see city hall as a potential partner, not as an obstacle. This amendment alone will not solve everything. Every challenge facing small businesses, but is a meaningful and practical step in the right direction. It creates momentum, it builds trust, and it lays the groundwork for a broader, long term commitment to local economic vitality. I urge you to vote yes and continue to building on this foundation. And one of the things I'll add that's not part of my notes is, you know, particularly putting your attention towards the needs of our immigrant owned businesses. Latino businesses have been devastated by the government presence here. Look at what's happened in chicago and Washington, d.c. Revenues for latino businesses are down upwards of 80%. We can't let that happen here in Portland. And so just like a government intervention has brought them into that situation in those other cities, we need government interventions to help turn it around. Thank you.

Thank you for adding that.

Good afternoon, chair and councilors andrew hoan, ceo and proud registered lobbyist of the Portland metro chamber. We are the regional chamber of commerce. We represent the largest and most diverse business network in the state of Oregon. We thank the chair, the committee and the mayor's office for bringing this economic policy change forward. And we strongly support increasing portland's business license tax gross receipts exemption. Our organization advocates on behalf of businesses at all levels of government. We represent more than 2300 members, and more than half of those are defined as extremely small or micro enterprises. 680 of them are small businesses with ten or less employees, 152 non-profits, 245 brick and mortar retailers and restaurants, and 95 solopreneurs. And lastly, our board chair is a storefront store operator from east 82nd street. We love our small businesses, and we have a long tradition of fiercely advocating for smaller employers. Today, we are proud to stand side by side with better Portland, as we did when we published our 2023 state of the economy small business edition. That helped lead to the creation of the office of small business. That was a major win for portland's economy, and that report points to the critical need to focus on this ecosystem, because Portland has a greater share of employees in small business relative to our peer regions, with more than 35% of our employees being employed in small businesses. Well, that's great news about the makeup of our Portland businesses. Unfortunately, right now, small businesses are struggling. They face enormous, enormous localized headwinds and economic challenges that they are less equipped to navigate than larger businesses. It is important to publicly state where our economy is. All of you would have just received our 2026 state of the economy report that details the challenges we face. We have been, as the chair stated, in a localized recession since 2023, the region's consumer sentiment has been the last of nearly every metro region in the nation. Our office vacancies are the highest in the modern history of our community. We are lagging nearly every other city in recovering our downtown foot traffic. For office workers, our region that depends on trade saw the largest drop in export value in the country. We are 80 out of 81 on real estate investability nationally, and we are the bottom of 50 American cities in terms of employment, public private partnerships have driven significant improvements in livability. And now, if we are collectively to turn our local economy around, it will again take public private partnerships, working together on economic policy improvements. Raising the gross receipts exemption is a modest, thoughtful update that hits that mark precisely, especially considering portland's businesses pay the highest business taxes in the nation. This proposal also improves fairness and simplicity. Aligning the city's threshold with the county reduces confusion, cuts down paperwork and headaches, and makes compliance easier for small business owners. Today, the city council can send a signal that you are supporting our neighbors who bet on Portland by opening businesses here, opening doors and easing costs is exactly the sort of support that our small business community needs at this particularly challenging moment. This is a good first step, but it should not be the last. Thank you for your time and your leadership. We are grateful and pleased to support this proposal.

Thank you. Thank you, councilor Miss pressler, mr. Green and mr. Horn. Appreciate you all putting some time forward this morning or this afternoon. Thank you. With that, colleagues, I want to give an opportunity, if there are any technical questions, as we check in to see if there's any public testimony as well.

Yes, we do have people signed up for testimony.

Okay. Let's do some technical questions first and then we'll go to that. Colleagues. Yeah. Councilor Green yeah.

Mitch Green: Thank you chair. Thanks for bringing this forward. On a technical basis. I see that in the in the ordinance language. It notes that that the the average impact is $207 for. Let's see here there are two on average impacts of the exemption change for each of the fiscal years. There's $310 on average, I think for the first year $207 on average for the second year. Can you give me a sense of the the men's and maxes so I can get a sense of range because I there's a there's a range of variability. There's there's some firms who are going to receive a more meaningful relief from this. If you could give us some flavor of that, that'd be helpful.

Yeah. Unfortunately, councilor I did not bring the min max or other descriptive, descriptive statistics with us today, but I can certainly provide that after this meeting.

I think that'll be helpful. Especially I expect this I'm going to support this today. But before when it goes to the full council, when we have this conversation, being able to show the range of, of impact and benefit because, I mean, I, I expect to keep some of our businesses in Portland that might otherwise think about moving to tiger. And so getting a sense of that range will be helpful. I think that's the only technical. Oh, I guess I should say, jonas, because you're up here. So the 1.3 and the 1.2 million is that is it fair to say that those would be the sort of budget impacts for each of those fiscal years?

Councilor for the record, jonas biery the city's chief financial officer and, yes, that's the case, that that would be revenue reduction in the forecast. So, ergo, a budget impact start beginning in fiscal 2627.

Thank you. It's probably outside the scope of the sort of analysis that happens in here. But but I imagine there's a dynamic response where this relief creates maybe a greater than the one impact. So there might actually be a smaller budget impact than than is modeled here.

Yes. Council. That's correct. So absolutely that to the extent there's that this action encourages strong, strong economy, we expect that that would increase business activity, would increase those revenues and offset some of that, some or all of that loss.

Thanks. Those are my technical questions.

Great. It sounds like we've got four signed up for public testimony. If we can go ahead and call all four up at once, that'd be great.

So we have andrea for stag, jose cienfuegos, karen curry and Loretta guzman.

Ladies first. Yes.

Buenos dias. My name is andrea, and I represent the hispanic metropolitan chamber. Our organization has served business in Portland for the past 32 years, and we currently support over 700 small businesses. I'm here to support for increasing the threshold of the business license tax exemption. A small businesses are the backbone of portland's economy and latino owned businesses. One of our fastest growing segments are facing extraordinary challenges rising costs, reduced customer activity, and uncertainty in the political and immigration climate are forcing some to slash prices just to survive. Many are struggling to stay open, putting jobs, families and the stability of our neighborhood commercial corridors at risk. Increasing the tax exemption threshold will make a real difference. It will allow small business owners across the city to retain employees, reinvest in their operations and continue serving their communities. This is not just about tax relief. It's about protecting livelihoods, supporting families, and preserving the character and vitality of our neighborhoods. Through our work with hundreds of businesses each year, the hispanic metropolitan chamber sees firsthand how critical this support is on behalf of the business owners and community we serve, we urge you to approve this ordinance. We must show the portland's stance with its small businesses, especially those owned by immigrant and minority entrepreneurs who play a vital role in shaping and strengthening our city. Thank you for your time.

Thank you so much. Who'd like to go next?

I'd be happy to.

Go ahead. Please introduce yourself.

Go ahead. Oh, jose cienfuegos, thanks for your time this morning. And I'm also a small business owner and a latino, so I would like to support what she just said as well. Chair Zimmerman and members of the finance committee. As I said, my name is jose cienfuegos. I serve as the president of revitalize Portland coalition. Revitalize Portland coalition is a commercial real estate collective working to make Portland a better city in which to live and work. We strongly support the ordinance before you today, and commend mayor wilson and chair Zimmerman for bringing it forward. As we are all too painfully aware, our city is facing strong economic headwinds, one of the strongest of which is one of the nation's highest level of taxation on business owners. Increasing the business income exemption has been, which has been unchanged for nearly 20 years since the right signal to the business community is consistent with last year's report from the governor's tax advisory group that is recommended increasing the blt exception. It is a very reasonable adjustment and improves tax clarity, and shows that Portland is serious about rebuilding a strong local economy. The blt gross receipts exemption has been at $50,000 since 2007. Nearly two decades of inflation has eroded its value, meaning very small businesses are paying taxes sooner than originally intended. The exemption is designed to help startups in very small businesses retain capital to grow, allowing small operators to keep a few hundred dollars more per year can mean reinvesting in inventory, marketing equipment and part time help. While we realize the council's facing very serious tax challenges and budget challenges, and increasing the exemption has increasing, the exemption has the potential to decrease tax revenues. We also believe strongly that the net result will be positive and contribute to a more favorable business environment that is desperately needed. We urge your yes vote to pass this ordinance on the full council. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Thanks for coming. Please introduce yourself.

Hi, my name is Loretta guzman. I was born and raised here in the city of Portland. I'm also a small business owner. I'm a native business owner. There's not many of us here that are native business owners. I am in support of this amendment to raise the business license tax gross. Right now, businesses are fleeing as our state is no longer a business friendly place to do business. We as business owners have many taxes from the city, the state and the county. Businesses need relief to help us stay in business, to help those fulfill our dreams of going from food carts to brick and mortar, or just being able to survive day to day and not rely upon the system for food stamps and unemployment. This will also allow more businesses to be able to take these tax benefits, to make life just a little less stressful. Many businesses are in serious life and death survival mode, as we are dealing with daily increases from gas increase permit increase over 30% at once. Products rising unexpectedly, vandalism and daily life challenges. I know not, I know not many businesses can take the time to come down here to testify as they are working to survive another day. I myself just was made aware of this and had to do a lot of juggling this morning just to just to get here today. So I am as I am dealing with business, kids and life itself. We are here to serve our communities and neighbor neighborhoods in a positive way. Please increase this gross receipts tax exemption I am here to support. I am here in support for all businesses who could benefit from this. We are important whether we are small or big. We do make a difference. Now it's up to you to help us. And since I have a little bit more time, I added a couple more things. Being a small business, we have high turnover rates, employee bonuses are important and end of the year bonuses make a difference in keeping employees stable and want to stay with us longer. Not everyone can just pick up and move. They and some will just close. So thank you for taking the time and considering this. Thanks.

Thank you for coming. Diana. Did we have karen aurora online or just not.

Karen I just got a message from her that she's stuck in traffic. Okay. She arrives later. We can at her. Oh. Oh, karen is running. That was perfect timing.

Thank you. All right, you're up.

You're up.

Nothing like making an entrance.

You're on the spot, karen.

All right, I'll give you a second to gather yourself. We. We just had our public testimony, and so far, so good. And you would be our fourth public testimony.

Well, hang on now. I can't see because I got water all over.

I do appreciate those of you who that juggle is understandable and real, that it takes a juggle with the small business to be able to get here and move shifts around. So thank you for taking that and making it work. Okay, whenever you're ready.

I'm ready. Thanks for waiting. Good afternoon. Members of the council. My name is karen ray. I own a convenience store in downtown Portland, and I'm speaking today not just for my business, but also for the resilient entrepreneurs who call the city home. As a small business owner, I face numerous challenges daily the weight of federal, city, state, and county taxes, along with various fees can be overwhelming. On top of that, we are constantly battling issues like theft and vandalism, which takes a toll on our resources and morale. These burdens make it increasingly difficult for us to thrive, let alone survive, in a four block radius alone within our store. For the last two years, we have witnessed over 33 businesses close or relocate. This statistic isn't just a number. It represents dreams, livelihoods, and the hard work of our community members. Each closure reverberates through our local economy, impacting not only our business owners, but also employees, families and the vibrant fabric of our neighborhood. I urge you to consider the importance of amending section 7.0 2.400 to increase the gross receipts tax tax exemption. Well, this amendment may not directly benefit my business. It is a crucial step toward offering relief to many small business owners who are struggling to make ends meet. By raising the exemption threshold, we can provide much needed support, allowing us to reinvest in our businesses, our employees and our community. Every small business contributes to the heartbeat of Portland. We're not just storefronts. We are neighbors, mentors, and community supporters. Together, we create jobs, foster growth, and enhance the character of our beloved city. Supporting this amendment is a way to strengthen that heartbeat and ensure our community remains vibrant and diverse. In closing, I implore you to consider, I implore you to consider the long lasting impact this amendment can have. Let us stand together in solidarity, supporting one another through these challenging times. Thank you for your time and for considering the needs of small businesses in our community.

Thank you. I think that concludes all of our testimony. All right, colleagues, we can go to any deliberation or discussion at this time. Councilor pirtle-guiney, your first up.

Thank you, chair, and I want to thank you and the mayor both for bringing this forward. We heard that the section of code hasn't been updated since 2007. That means it hasn't been updated since before the 2008 recession. And we can think about all of the economic changes we've had since then. And I think an average inflation rate of almost 2.5% a year. So clearly this is doing less for our businesses than it was meant to do. And what's more, I know firsthand from having been a sole proprietor for a little while, that the different cut offs between the county and the city are complicated, especially for those 65% of affected businesses who are solopreneurs and sole proprietors. I think this is an important tool for us to be working with the business community on, to make sure that that we're keeping up with the needs of our economy. It also acknowledges that we need to use different tools as we work with different parts of our economy moving forward. And one of the things that I think is important for us to continue to talk about is the fact that our small businesses that create the culture of our community often have different needs than our larger businesses, and we don't always do a good job of providing them with different tools. This is one where we do. I do want to follow the the line that councilor Green was going down just for a moment to understand the impact here, and I'm wondering if we could invite jonas biery back up. Thank you. So, mr. Berry, you had a conversation with councilor Green. The numbers posted are that the impact in the first year would be a decrease in revenue by $1.3 million, an additional $1.2 million a year. When this is fully implemented and in line with that county number at $100,000. This goes into effect this coming fiscal year. So the budget that the mayor is starting to develop right now, I would ask him this, but unfortunately I know he had to run quickly after testifying. Do you know if the mayor has a plan to fill that budget gap? For the first year? You had a conversation with councilor Green about the the ideal situation where this grows the economy, but that takes a few years. So what is the plan, as we're already looking at a budget deficit for this first year or two, how should we as councilors expect to see that reflected?

Yeah. Councilor good question. Thank you for that question. You know, I guess the short answer is we're still working, obviously, with the mayor on development of that full budget proposal. And so this will be part of that calculus. I don't think there's a one, you know, binary thing we can point to to say, you know, this 1.2 million offset by x other thing. But I know I have had conversations with the mayor as we're sort of responding to the financial crisis and thinking about stabilization, recognizing the importance of stabilizing that particular sector, small business sector, and investing in growing and what we have currently and creating an environment for that to flourish. So this is about that long term strategy and less about kind of a one year budgetary impact.

Thank you. And I appreciate that answer. I, I think this is a really important thing for us to do. I appreciate the look at the long term. That is how I hope we can start making all of our decisions at the city. I do think it's important, as we're looking toward a difficult budget year coming up, and those positive impacts will take a little longer, that we're honest with portlanders, that there will be a small challenge this year from taking this step. I think in the long run, it is so important for our city that we do it, that it is worth tackling that small challenge. But I do want to make sure that we're we're clear with portlanders about all of the impacts, positive and negative. And thank you. And thank you, chair, for giving us the opportunity to have the conversation.

Thank you, vice chair councilor Avalos, you are up right.

Thank you. And apologies folks, that I had to last minute be online today. But I am here colleagues. Yeah. Before I get into the substance I just wanted to first thank our invited speakers and the testifiers today. Thank you to stephen and ciara. They invited me to a thinking local event in district one on Friday, and I really appreciated the opportunity to sit down with some small business owners over some coffee and have some conversations. So thank you. I think what I heard there was definitely not abstract policy. It was about day to day survival. That's what we're hearing in the testifiers as well as businesses are navigating these rising costs and uncertain revenue and workforce challenges. And as we are hearing in some immigrant corridors, very real fear because of increased federal enforcement activities, a couple of the owners were mentioning that, you know, foot traffic has dropped simply because people are afraid to be out. So I definitely understand the intent behind this ordinance and updating a threshold that hasn't changed since 2007, and aligning with the county, I think, can provide some relief and some simplification. At the same time, we're in a structural general fund shortfall and once implemented, this represents a what appears to be a permanent revenue reduction. I have some questions. And so I think in this fiscal moment, as my two previous colleagues are already doing, we just owe it to both small businesses and the public to just be clear about what those trade offs are and the effectiveness. And so with that context, I have a couple of questions and apologies. I'm not sure who's at the dais. Like who's at the testimony table. It sounds like jonas is there. And then we've got tanya thomas lannom. Yes.

Yes, that's correct. And then if you wanted any of our invited testimony, we could bring them forward as well.

Okay. Sounds good. So then, building off of what I just heard. Jonas explain to councilor Pirtle-guiney questions. So it sounds like we don't have a clear plan yet on where the money will be offset. Is that. Can I just ask that one more time, just to be sure that you're going to be working with the mayor on creating where that offset will be?

Yes. Councilor. That's correct. So this will maybe just to add a little finer point on how this works. Right? So we have a forecast that includes an assumption of business license tax collection citywide for fiscal 2627, the upcoming budget. This will now reduce, you know, sort of in a, how can I say in isolation, just the impact of this increasing the exemption would have net effect of 1.2 billion, sorry, 1.2 million reduction in 2627. So in the budget conversation that becomes part of that math, by which I mean it isn't choosing, at least not in this moment where that 1.2 million gets filled for right now. Right. That will just be part of the comprehensive package that the mayor presents in his proposed budget in April, and then council ultimately adopts. It is also true that the reality is that it probably won't be a $1.2 million reduction, but our forecast policy practice doesn't allow us necessarily to make that kind of a guess. So what we hope is that that offset ends up being zero. That's additional resource that then we collect during the fiscal year and becomes available to redeploy in the budget, and hopefully has a positive impact on future forecasts. But we're kind of in this awkward moment of of, you know, we forecast conservatively. So we're going to forecast for that loss of revenue. And then that of course means we have to find an expenditure solution to to come up with a balanced budget. There's a long answer. Councilor. But but I want to be as clear as we can.

I appreciate the clarity. Thank you jonas. And so if this is this is an intended as a one time modernization. Right. So or are we anticipating indexing this exemption to inflation. So we're not doing this again in 15 years.

Councilor. This is thomas lannom revenue director. No. Right now we're not indexing. The county is not indexed either for the gross receipts exemption. That's certainly something the council could do. I would strongly advise if we were to go in that direction, we would contemplate getting the county on board as well, so that we could keep those numbers in conformity and keep things simple for taxpayers.

Wonderful. So the proposal increases this exemption by 200% in two years. And given our fiscal position, I'm curious why this is phased so quickly rather than gradually over a longer period to minimize budget shock. Maybe that's a question to the sponsors, but whoever wants to answer that philosophically.

Thank you. Councilor is one of the sponsors. I'll take that. I think that the first off, the conversation about indexing, so that this doesn't always have to be a a pole vault across the columbia every time we want to catch up with inflation. I think that's a really smart idea and something that could be explored in the future. I certainly when we were drafting this even was kind of thinking, is this the time to do it? I, I settled on it's not the time to do it. It's the time right now is to get up to a whole number that is easy to interpret, easy to administer, and with respect to the gradualness of it, I while the 50,000 to 75 and then to 100 seems like large jumps. I guess doing rough math the impact is so small in terms of our general fund. If we think of our general fund as about $800 million, this first year's impact of 1.3, if I've got this right is 0.0016 of the general fund that would be affected. And so while I guess the mindset there was that is such a small impact, general fund wise, and then an even smaller impact, if we apply it across the entire enterprise of 8.6 billion that I felt comfortable doing that large leap to 100,000 in 2 years. But I do recognize that that is not a system that will always catch up. It it means we always have to come back to it every now and then to raise it up. And that is where I would think it would be great to spend some time thinking together. Hopefully after this passes about what a proper indexing would be that is still easy to administer and is not just a brand new number every single year that business owners have to go. Do I pay it 100 or 103,217? Right. Because when we index, that's how it starts kicking in. I think those numbers are important. But that was the thought around it. You have hit all the points that I think we wrestled with, and we went with ease and minimal impact.

Thank you I appreciate that. Yeah. I think, you know, yes, it is a small amount by the large scale, but definitely still should give us all pause to reduce our revenue when we're in a crisis. So I appreciate the logic. I get the intent for sure. I think maybe 1 or 2 more questions. So for and I don't know, maybe some of your invited testimony will be able to answer this one. So for businesses under 100 000 in gross receipts, how much do we think that this change will save them annually? But more specifically, do they do they foresee that that amount will be large enough to influence things like hiring or expansion or stabilization? I just want to hear from the folks who are testifying, if they could share how they expect the impacts to land for them.

Sure. We've got stephen Green coming up to the table now.

Councilor. There's a couple different ways to answer that. It's it all depends on what the margins are for the business. And so for different businesses that have very different margins, because this tax is on gross receipts, it has a very different impact. So for instance grocery stores, they function on 1 to 2% margins. If everything is going great service providers may have 50, 60, 70% margins. And so, you know, depending on what this is could be a very different amount of money for them. But if you're functioning on 1 or 2% margins, being able to save 1% overall is, you know, a great win, but is not a tremendous amount of money. I believe the documents show that it was on par of 200 to $500 a year that folks were going to be able to save, so enough to reregister with the state of Oregon again when you need to do that.

Thank you. Stephen, I appreciate your candor. Okay. And then maybe my last thought is just something building off of what I think I heard councilor Green say, are there alternative tools that we might have considered that would more precisely target struggling small businesses, rather than broad tax relief that also benefits businesses maybe not experiencing hardship? I don't know who that should go to. Anyone have thoughts?

Thank you. This is thomas lannom again and the answer is this is the very best tool we have to target very specifically relief to small business. It's the gross receipts exemption. There are other tools that we have in the tax code. For example one that is inflation adjusted is the owner's compensation deduction, currently $156,000. That's the level right now. So they can deduct 75% of that from their tax liability should they have any. But if they're if they're between currently between 50 and 75 right now they could be paying taxes. And this would absolutely provide relief to whatever that amount was. And the same thing in the second step, 75 to 100. So there's a lot of different ways to define small business. But I think we could all agree that anything under $100,000 gross receipts, universal income from all sources, by definition, I think that's a small business.

I love that, thank you. I love that answer. I am grateful to have that information. So I'll just wrap up by saying I really appreciate this effort. I definitely want to us to work on supporting small businesses, and I plan on convening a specific small business table for small businesses in my district in the coming month, month or two. And so, yeah, we are obviously also stewards of general fund money during a really difficult fiscal moment. So I appreciate the space to ask these hard questions, but definitely intend to support this. Just want to make sure that we're confident it's going to meaningfully help the businesses who need it most. And I feel like those answers gave me a little more confidence. So thank you for the conversation, and I look forward to working more with our business community to find solutions for their prosperity. Thanks.

Thank you. Councilor councilor Green.

Mitch Green: Thank you, chair Zimmerman, thanks for bringing this forward in partnership with the mayor. I've been hearing whispers around a desire to do this since I think, December, and I've been, frankly, quite excited about it. And I was really hoping that we would see this before the budget, and we're seeing it before the budget. And so now we can sort of separate a decision to do something that I think is overdue for the small business community on its own merits. And then once we know the impacts of that, once council adopts this, then, you know, consider how to pay for that in the budget. Just wanted to make a couple comments and actually do have some questions, I'm sure, but I kind of want to pick up on this indexing conversation. I think. I think we should have a conversation about indexing, but I think in the context of this, that kind of misses the point. I think the the real issue here is that a gross receipts tax. Penalizes or rewards a firm based upon their size and essentially based upon their ability to control their costs. So if you're a small business in general, you can't control your costs. The way this may be. An integrated multinational firm can do it. And so if your cost pressure goes up faster than the rate of inflation, faster than the cpi, you're you're going to get taxed at a higher share. If you were thinking about it in terms of net income okay. So you're going to continue to lose lose lose. So this helps us kind of catch up a little bit. But I think if we're going to have a more thoroughgoing discussion on how to reform our tax code in a way that, you know, doesn't put the smallest and maybe sort of least advantaged firms always, always in the back, then we might need to think about some sort of adjustment based upon costs. And, you know, all this stuff is all this stuff is a trade off between administrative complexity and what you get from it. And so I get it. There's some simplicity in this, but I just want to caution us from like jumping immediately to indexing is always the solution here. There might be a hybrid approach here. This you know, the cumulative case in point, you know, average on average, it was 2.5% per year of inflation over the last 20 years. That would be $80,000 in today's today's or I guess in appropriate level dollars. But a lot of firms haven't experienced 2.5% inflation. They've experienced 15% or 8% or 25 or 30, you know, especially in recent years, because there have been some very pointed sector by sector, rapid cost changes. And so this kind of I think it's reasonable to overshoot that 80 grand to go to 100, I would actually support something that just didn't step it out in two years, but went straight to the 100% in one year. I get that there's a desire to feather this in because we do know there will be a budget impact. But as you noted, you know, like the first year effect is like three fourths of 1% of the business license tax. So it's not much we do want to budget conservatively. And so there is that. But I think that we could probably accommodate doing it all in one year. But I'm not going to try to amend your thing. I try not to amend things with numbers on the fly, but just I'm just putting I'm just sending a signal right here in the public. I do think I'm going to support this. I'm very excited to support this. I think steven green's testimony really kind of nailed it for me, which is it may not be a huge dollar impact for a firm, but there's a lot of different reasons why firms are struggling and anything that we can do to show a consistent signal that we are interested in making easier to do business in the city of Portland has like some intangible benefits that are there are things you can't buy with money in some sense. And so reputation is is something that takes like action to change. And I think us taking action right now on this, even though it's maybe a small impact to the representative or the average firm, and even though we'll have to make some trade offs in the budget is very meaningful, and I do think we're going to see it pay for itself. If we can save some firms from folding. And then the last thing I'll note, and this is really maybe for the sponsor, you know, there's the requirement to get the. Impact statement. Resolution 37 664 requires an economic and real estate impact analysis by prosper Portland. For anything that has a meaningful economic change, this is certainly squarely in that zone. Some things are just not. And we get a lot of boilerplate responses. That's like. Prosper reviewed this and didn't see a reason to provide an analysis. I think I think I know why that response was there is because they don't have the capacity to do it, and that resolution is an unfunded liability that we placed on prosper Portland to say, do this economic analysis every time we have a council action. And so I just wanted to note that for the good of the order, that that is a requirement that's in our impact analysis, because we passed the resolution before, we never funded that. And I would actually I would have loved to see that analysis, because I think what it would have shown is some of these, like second or third order effects that speak to the the value of economic development that come out of something like this and not just like we didn't have time to do it, basically. So I don't think there's anyone from prosper here to defend themselves on that. And it's not it's not a slight at prosper. It's a slight of the city council for giving them an unfunded mandate to do this kind of work. So I'm really excited. I'll shut up so we can vote on it.

Chair Zimmerman, if I may, I just want to make sure we're clear on one thing. There is a terminology here. That's it is confusing. The gross receipts exemption is the exemption level at which the business is doesn't have to have doesn't have to pay any tax at all. And so anything above that level there then on the hook to calculate their tax owed the city. And when they do that it's based on net income. So I just want to be clear that the business license tax is a net income tax versus say for example, the the clean energy surcharge, truly a gross receipts tax with some exemptions deductions.

Thank you. Yeah. Why. Ours is the blt and the county's is the bit. Well we'll never know. But thank you for clarifying that. I just really appreciate everybody who came out. I appreciate my colleagues. All of your questions are so pertinent to this topic. I am reminded when we talk about the impact to the individual business. I'm reminded of a visit I did when I was the chief of staff with county commissioner Julia edwards, with the division midway alliance, and we stopped by an iraqi bakery. And if you know my work history, I certainly felt some connection and spent some time in there. And we had a great conversation. We went in the back and when I heard about the cost to repair the mixer, and the mixture was the lifeblood of the bakery, and that was the biggest concern that that owner was talking to us about, about a few hundred bucks goes a long way to keep that business alive. And so I keep that in the front of mind because it is a small cost that maybe allows those employees to stay on the clock instead of shut down operations. It's a small cost. That maybe means that you can expand to a second mixer, but when you face an $800 charge for a repair or close the doors, these little things do go a long way. And sometimes, if you're not in the in the heat of that moment, I think it can be easy to not understand those numbers. So your questions to all my colleagues. I am so grateful for them because I think it sends a signal of being in tune more than maybe we have always shown. And so I think it is best for us to be in tune with that bakery who is trying to do the thing with that consultant, with that artist, with that performer who's trying to do the thing. So appreciate that, colleagues. I would certainly and gratefully appreciate a motion to vote and pass this to the full council.

So moved second.

Okay. Moved by councilor Green and seconded by vice chair pirtle-guiney to move document number 2026 079 with to the full council with a due pass recommendation. If we could call the roll.

Avalos aye, Morillo.

Pirtle-guiney I Green. I Zimmerman. I with four eyes and one absent the motion to refer the ordinance document number 2026 077 to city council with a recommendation to be passed has passed.

I'm going to do a correction just because I read the wrong number on something on that I said 079 for the document number. Colleagues, if we can all do a head nod that you agree that that was a misstep on my part. And we were actually talking about documents 077. We'll just move on like nothing ever happened. All right. Thank you. Thanks for everybody came out to support that. If we go to the next item, please.

Item number three, amend office of the city attorney code to authorize payment of costs for city employees facing certain criminal or civil proceedings.

Thank you. I think jonas biery was going to stay, but he may have just stepped out. Colleagues, I'm introducing what may be one of the more strange and uncomfortable ordinances that I didn't ever think I would write. And I don't often write down my remarks, but I'm going. I have written them down because I think it's important to hit some main points because of what I'm asking you to dig into today. It's got a long and very technical name to this ordinance, but I'm calling it the official duties. Legal defense colleagues were living in uncertain times when it comes to the rule of law and the interactions between different levels of government, we have all felt on some level the pressure and the rhetoric coming from the federal administration with respect to local and state leaders complying with federal demands, sometimes at odds with state or local law. It is not unusual for different governments to have competing laws, and in large part, those points of friction have a long history of being worked out in our courts at exactly as they should be. In those instances, we see the respect for the system, respect for the different appointed or elected officials or elected offices that are held, and a reliance and a deference to the system of laws, debate and a system of legal proceedings. What that system is aimed to protect for 250 years is that we do not have a system, that we do have a system of multiple governments. We are not one government centralized at the federal level with a supreme leader. We are not subservient, we are independent, and we are accountable to the laws and the regulations, not just at the federal level, but also within our own state and local jurisdictions. Last summer, we began to hear rhetoric from the president and his advisers about charging local officials who they deemed to be preventing federal government from doing their job, that by simply not helping them with their immigration enforcement, one was actually hindering or preventing them from doing their job, irrespective of local laws preventing local officials from certain actions. This is a wild escalation, but much more but much but more much. Excuse me, but much of the summer and last fall it seemed to be threats of rhetoric words. And that changed in January of this year, when the federal department of justice convened a grand jury to look at the governor and attorney general of minnesota and the mayor of minneapolis. The prospect of using federal charges as an intimidation tactic against local officials has real weight to it, and real consequences, while exceedingly inappropriate, at the end of the day, it is perhaps not on the first page, but certainly within the first chapter of the authoritarian takeover handbook. So why are we here currently? And appropriately, if a city official, from elected leader to front line worker is charged with a crime, the city does not defend that employee or that official. This is an this is important, and it ensures that city employees and officials know that if they choose to break the law and they are charged, their defense against those charges is personal. Just using some examples, if a PBOT employee is working and is told to drive a large piece of equipment down the road, but they do so while intoxicated, there is no place where the city of Portland should defend that person against their dui charge. Similarly, if a if an inspector takes a bribe while inspecting a recently completed project, the city is not defending such criminal acts. But earlier this year, we had a substantial debate about what documents the city administrator or the mayor could or should sign and whether or not being the signatory opened them up to personal liability for criminal charges. We as a council have enshrined our sanctuary laws, and we have done and we have bestowed and we have, excuse me. And we have, by that action, bestowed certain restrictions on our employees. If a parks employee refused to provide a participation name. List of recreation of a recreation league, for instance, to an ice officer, they would be following our local laws and could potentially face federal charges. A police chief who does not authorize their officers to conduct missions with ice could face federal charges. And this is not just a what if thought bubble. We are seeing this move from words and threats to action with what is happening in minnesota. I'm introducing this legislation that enables the city of Portland to defend in actual or by paying for the defense of city employees and city officials if they face what the city administrator, the mayor, or the majority of council deem to be criminal or civil federal charges for simply conducting their official duties and for the purpose of intimidation. I don't think any of us on this dais, and certainly not most of our employees, can afford to spend a year or more of our lives defending against frivolous, trumped up charges for intimidation alone. Going up against the feds would bankrupt just about anyone I know in public service. And that is that is why this type of intimidation is in that first chapter of authoritarian reading. It is designed to silence, it is designed to distract, and it is designed to prevent local and state officials from doing their duties as bestowed upon them by their local leaders and by the local electorate. And so I offer this up in finance, because largely, I believe it to be that the city will recognize official duties where appropriate. And if we were to see such threats and intimidation come to our government, that we are signaling to our officials, our leaders, our line employees, that official duties following state and local law is the right thing and that intimidation will not mean you go it alone. And so with that, I would open it up to colleagues for questions, consideration, debate, etc. And I want to just nod to my to the clerk if we have any public testimony that's signed up.

No one signed up.

Thank you. Thank you for letting me get through that. It's an important enough topic. I actually wrote it down, so I appreciate that it's not my norm. Councilor pirtle-guiney.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney: Thank you chair, and thank you for laying out all of the reasoning there. You and I have had conversations about this, and so I knew where you were headed. And I think it's really important to have all of that on the record. This is a weighty topic. It's one that. I hope no one in the future on a city council like ours ever has to grapple with, and one that I think is incredibly important for us to grapple with in 2026. I am wondering if you have had conversations because this is the finance committee with either the cfo or the attorney's office about what fund would be drawn on in a case like this and how well resourced that fund is. I would like to understand whether we need to think about a budgetary action in the next budget to go along with this policy, or whether we already have the resources set aside in some of our legal reserve funds to cover what I hope never comes to be, but what we could see in the future.

Yeah, I'm going to invite the cfo to come up if he has any any insight on this, but I'm going to share with you my perspective and how we wrote it, and why I didn't attach a funding stream to this or an accompanying resolution, so to speak, was that I believe that the mere threat of trying to defend yourself against a federal charge, federal d.o.j. Which I think is probably the largest law law firm on the face of the earth, is intimidating. And and it is in and of itself somewhat crippling to, to anybody's work. That being said, if we are able to pass an ordinance that that indicates we will take on such a responsibility for our employees, I think at that point, then we of course, have to figure out where we would find our funds to defend. But to that end, I did not carve out a specific. We would take it from a risk fund or a legal defense fund, etc. And I think it's a worthwhile conversation to have. I will say I had no intention in this upcoming budget to. Put a line item for this type of service. I think it is probably more appropriate in a reserve fund to be used more broadly or contingency more broadly, and not as a line item reserve just for this. But with that, I want to give mr. Berry any and this is unrehearsed. If there's any opening thoughts on that at all.

Mr. Berry, before you start, I just want to clarify with the chair, if that's okay. I think what I'm hearing is that your intent is to get the policy on the books, and we will all hope that we don't have to use it. And if we do, we will consider that an emergent situation where we look at our reserves, look at what we have in various funds, and potentially make budget adjustments as needed to cover the situation at hand. Okay. Thank you, mr. Berry. Anything specific we should know about some of those funds and what we would be looking at if we ever have to have to resort to using this new councilor.

Thank you. I think the statement you just made is literally about what would come out of my mouth unrehearsed, which is we'll hopefully not need to use that and make that assessment if it does materialize into something that has meaningful cost.

Thank you. I know that we have a variety of reserves that we could use in an emergency. I'm comfortable moving forward with without specifying anything, but I did want to make sure that if there were future asks coming, we understood that.

I have none planned.

Okay. Thank you chair, and truly thank you for bringing this forward. It is unfortunate and necessary.

Thank you, vice chair councilor Green. Your next.

Thank you, chair Zimmerman. You know, I'll note that you do hardly ever read off of a script. So that tells me you wanted to make sure you you recognize the gravity of the moment. So I really appreciate this piece of legislation. I think I have been personally uncomfortable, but also not just for my own self, but also for all the reasons you laid out. Like we're taking actions to respond to an unacceptable situation at the city level. And we're asking our our staff to execute those actions without any sort of course, of protection. And that's that's been a tough thing to sit with. So this is a this is a very specific and narrow, you know, one sentence at. Yeah. One sentence addition to the code on this. And I don't think it opens up any other sort of unintended consequences that I would be worried about, which is why we don't, you know, it doesn't doesn't just give a blanket protection to staff to get defended by the city attorney. So I'm going to support this. I think that I think the line of questioning from councilor, pirtle-guiney pirtle-guiney is important, that when we pass things that we we do need to think about how we resource those, those things. But I think in the case of liability, it's difficult. Like I don't want to be a position where I say, you know what, we can't afford to take care of our employees. We can't afford to do the right thing in the face of a historical moment. We just got it. We've got to do that, and we've got to figure out how to pay for it on the back end. And so there's a time and place to sort of forward budget in that sense. But this isn't it. So this is this is urgent. I'm going to support this today.

Thank you councilor. Thank you councilor Green. Councilor Avalos you're next.

Candace Avalos: Thank you. Couple of things. So yeah first of all definitely supportive of this amendment. These are not normal times as you have stated chair. And seeing kind of this increased federal scrutiny of local governments, particularly around policies that reflect our values, are really disruptive to how we run our city. And I think that if our city employees are being asked to carry out laws and policies that this council adopts, adopts, then they should not have to fear personal financial ruin for doing that work in good faith. So and as you laid out, you know that this ordinance is not shielding people from misconduct or protecting people from wrongdoing, just making sure that people within their legally, you know, required scope of duties are not being left to shoulder costs. And I just have a couple of questions about just some guardrails and understanding. You know, my colleagues have already started to talk about the fiscal exposure. I feel good about the concept of it being out of like a, a fund, not necessarily a line item. So I do agree with that. What you stated, chair. But let me first start by asking, I guess I don't know if it's you chair or if it's staff who could walk us through how we will be determining whether a federal proceeding is sufficiently connected to an employee's official duties. And it sounds like maybe that's what the direction that you're giving to the city administrator is to do. Or is that what you're expecting out of that point, chair, that they will create this process, or am I missing something?

Thank you counselor. Yeah. So it there are three areas where the authority would rest to make that determination. And it's the city administrator, the mayor or the city council. City council. Excuse me. And so I think that those three options offer good cross checks or good coverages based on at what level the question exists. But yes, those those two administrative executive roles and then the city council, as a final could by resolution say that we determine, you know, x, y, z proceedings are in line with this ordinance under j. Therefore, we're taking on the defense of that employee.

And then I'm curious in that note, where does the city attorney fall? Like why would they not be one of those reviewers. Just want to understand your logic.

Well, I think that city attorneys are always reviewers on everything. I just think it's important to remember that there's two groups of people in most organizations who don't really have an executive decision making authority. Those are your attorneys and your hr folks, right? They advise us on best practice. They advise us on where risk exists. They advise us on perhaps path forward, but they are not in themselves determining authorities. And so if the city attorney works for the city, and through that determination, I, I would expect that any mayor or any city administrator and certainly councilors, would. Get advice, legal advice from the city attorney's office about the practicability, the reasonableness. And but I do not think it would be appropriate to have the city attorney get carved out a specific level of authority on this, because they are an actor toward an actor on our decision making, ours being the three levels of authority that are in this ordinance.

Okay, that makes sense. And then my next two questions, I don't know if they are if they're not questions we can answer now, maybe they are just things that I would signal for the city administrator to take into account when writing the policy. I'm curious if we will be reviewing and, if necessary, updating job descriptions and position authority to ensure that there's clarity about what constitutes official duties. I feel like there's some like hr job description work that might need to happen here to be more clear on who like is it just any employee just automatically is taking on this risk, right? Or are we going to like say, you know, these employees should not take on this level of risk for these reasons. So therefore those things will explicitly not be in their job description descriptions or explicitly in theirs. Do you see what I'm asking? Like, I don't know if any of that discussion has come up, but that's a flag I have.

Yeah, thanks. I, I envision it being that I think this is such an important question. So given the time that we're in and what we've seen happen in minnesota, it's my it's my reading that simply by not doing what the federal government asked them to do now, the federal government is is convening grand juries against a mayor, against attorney general, a governor. The reason I think it's important to say this broadly and then also have that determination for was this or was this not within the scope of, of official duties, is that I use the parks employee example, who just won't give a list of the people who participated in a recreation league, because I can very reasonably expect that a uniformed person could walk in to a recreation site and ask for a list of names to a parks employee, and they could say no, because that person is clearly an ice official and face backlash for that. And yet that is incredibly detailed. So I don't know that it is feasible, but I'm certainly open to if the hr department were to come back, the city administrator were to come back and say, we'd like to put some parameters on this, etc. That would be okay. But I don't think it's feasible to try and outline every position. Out of the 8300 positions about who or who does not have something that intersects here, and that's why I think the umbrella coverage is important and why the authority question is important, so that a couple things come to play here. This is written specifically. With respect to intimidation and retaliation. And not for, you know, if you if you break a federal law and you weren't supposed to break that federal law and you face federal charges, this is not covering you, just indemnifying you for for law breaking. This is very different. And so that's why I think being broad councilor is helpful. But I will say as the sponsor of this, if when this matures and we see some nuance that has to be addressed in policy, I would be all ears. And I think it's good that ordinance be broad policy, be more specific. And how we would achieve that is is very I'm very comfortable with that. And I hope that satisfies at least some of your question there.

I hear you I get what you're saying. I definitely think, yeah, let's have the city administrator weigh in when he writes the policy, and we'll just keep that in mind. And then another thing to keep in mind, I wonder if there is a mechanism by which we could withdraw coverage if misconduct is later substantiated. Because you talked about how like, no, this is not for like if there's actual misconduct and all that, but then is there a lever to say, oh, we were, we were representing this person because they, we thought it was unlawful. But then it turns out they did something wrong. And then can we walk it back? So there's just like a is there a out lever is something I'd want the policy to address.

Yeah. And and I would I would read that as, as it lists because the authority rests and the mayor, the city administrator or the council that any one of the three could, could say actually, because of new information, we are revoking that. That seems very reasonable to me. And certainly in the policy development that that could be even further hashed out. But I would see no issue as the code is written now, nothing would prevent those three authorities from revoking that. That coverage.

Sounds good. Well, I'm definitely interested in this topic. I agree with its premise and have lots of little tiny, detailed hr type questions. And I think my broader last question is just like in these situations, right? What is the way I can be involved? Because I would love to help inform what some of these little questions that I have. So you don't have to answer that now. But I guess flagging for you, chair. As the sponsor, I would like to be helpful in the policy development because I've got a bunch of other little questions that we don't need to talk through today.

Okay. Thank you. Councilor appreciate it. And councilor Pirtle-guiney your hands up.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney: Thank you. Chair. I, I think legislative intent matters and therefore I just want to put on the record that I actually hope that the city administrator does not significantly narrow this. We don't know what's coming. And in too many historical instances, just doing your job has been an excuse for not standing up for things that really matter. And what I believe we are doing today is telling city employees that if they feel caught between what we as the city are asking them to do and what somebody from the federal government may come and ask them to do, and if they feel like just doing their job is caught in the middle, we want them to stand with our city's values. We want them to stand with our city's laws. And we, in fact, want that so much that where pen meets paper, where money meets legal defense, we will stand up for them in doing that. And I don't want to limit that just to our management level, just to our leadership level, just to our elected ndca level employees. I think any employee in our city who is standing up for portlanders, for our values and for our laws, ought to have the same protections in doing so. And I hope that the city administrator take that seriously and actually allow this to be applied as broadly as necessary to respond to our federal government's actions. Thank you. Chair.

Thank you. Vice chair. Councilor Avalos.

Candace Avalos: Yeah, thank you for raising those points. And I just want to further emphasize that I agree that it should be coverage as much as possible. I think where my questions are coming from though, and is the discussion I think we need to have is what if some employees don't want to put themselves in risk way? What if they want to assure that they don't have to make decisions that would possibly put them? I know we can't make we're not going to be able to predict every single scenario, of course, and we want it to be broad for that sake. But I also think that there should be like we I would not want to assume that, like every single city employee is at risk and they have no way of not of not being at risk, if that makes sense, especially when we talk about employees that are immigrants or have immigrant families, or have other barriers that they are trying to avoid putting themselves in the crossfire with the federal government. So I just want to make sure that we are talking through that so that we can avoid unintentionally putting some in harm's way if possible. Again, I don't know what the exact policy solution is. I'm just talking through some scenarios that I think we need to just work through when it comes to the policy development. So that's why I'm raising those points.

Thank you. Councilor, I want to just comment a little bit. To be very clear that this ordinance, if it were to pass, is not. Directing any new duties, any new work. It's not giving any missions to any employees. And so I take very seriously that that point and that question you raised councilor That it it isn't about mobilizing the city of portland's workforce. It is about making sure that the city of portland's workforce and its appointed and elected leaders, everybody under the sun that in the regular scope of their duties. And I think that that's important because you raise a point that I think could easily be. Could, could cause some consternation, if you will. And so thank you for that question, and thank you for raising it. And it allows me to clarify that. I think back to our conversation that we had about whether or not when the city of Portland submitted a grant application, if by submitting that grant application for the types of programs we had, did or did not put one of our senior officials in a precarious position. So that's, I guess, what I'm talking about in this sense. But I can see it to councilor Pirtle-guiney point. I can see it being extended, because one thing I have learned in this last 13 months in office and living under this current federal administration, is that the norms that I thought existed are shattering. Every time they grab a microphone, every time they write an order, every time they think about where to send a new group of federal employees, whatever they are, the norms, the norms that I grew up thinking existed in our legal system and our checks and balances system are feeling very strained right now. And so that's where the the broadness is important to me. And, and to assure you and to assure everybody who might be paying attention that this is not about new duties for Portland employees at all. And and I want to protect against that. If there's any assumptions there or misgivings about it, it's certainly not. It is about the duties that you thought you came to the city of Portland to do, the duties you are doing, and or the things you've been appointed to do. But I as we go through the development of this, I do want you involved. And so let's do that together. Let's make sure that we've got all the cross checks that are available. Because while the federal government's norms are breaking down, our norms should be reinforced. I don't see any other hands in the queue. I want to do one last check for any public comment that may exist.

No one signed up.

Thank you colleagues. With that, I would certainly entertain a motion. And this time I will say the number correctly. I would entertain a motion for document 2027078.

I would move document 207078 to full council with a due pass recommendation. Chair.

Second, but I but I think you misspoke again 20272026.

And then I repeated it because I repeated the.

You're correct councilor I read it correctly, it's written correctly incorrectly. You know what I mean? Let's move this ordinance if we will.

Thank you for three on the agenda. Thank you.

My mistake. And thank you for catching me and in such a public manner. All right. We've been called. Let's call the roll, then.

We're good. Avalos.

Aye, Morillo.

Pirtle-guiney aye, Morillo Green.

Hi, Zimmerman.

I with four eyes and one absent the motion to refer the ordinance document number 2026. Sorry, 2020 2026 078. It is contagious to city council with a recommendation it be passed has passed.

Thank you colleagues I appreciate your support on that. And with that, we can go to our last item of the day that I will just say next item instead of next number.

Item number four, appropriate grants from the state of Oregon transportation safety office and from Oregon impact for a total of 322,555 to increase traffic safety.

Welcome. You don't look like sheila. I have a sheila down, but go ahead and introduce yourself and take it away.

So my name is ben smuin. For the record, I am a grants analyst with the grants management division. I work for sheila and thank you councilors chair, vice chair for having us, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, that this is the first time we've brought grant appropriation ordinance before this committee. And so we have a short presentation that I'd like to do. And so I'll share that with you. And. Okay. Let me. Sorry. It's been a whole minute since I've actually presented. So in terms of what of who we are, what we do, the grants management division, we have three essential functions. One is the coordination of all of the outgoing grant applications. The second and probably largest is the management of all incoming awards. That is what I do. And we have another team that manages the city's outgoing grants. And so the the reason we're here is incoming grants. And so we handle compliance award management, monitoring, reporting, federal audits. If we have federally reimbursed disaster recovery, we handle that. And we are a part of the emergency operations center finance team. And the reason that we are here to appropriate a budget or these items is that we get incoming grants throughout the fiscal year that we don't aren't necessarily able to either anticipate or account for in the regular budgeting process. Other things these grants often cross fiscal years. We deal with state, federal, city, fiscal year. So you'll see if you looked at the awards, the amounts were appropriated for this fiscal year are different. The award amount the remainder will be budgeted in the 26, 27. And this particular ordinance is a good one, because all of the grants that we are appropriating are related to the police bureau's traffic division. And so, since we're not here at the public safety committee, they're responsible for traffic enforcement, serious injury collision investigations, fatal collision investigations, dui enforcement, traffic complaints, and any major traffic crime investigations. They will also provide traffic control for community events, parades, demonstrations, Portland marathon, rose parade. They do a lot of street racing enforcement. We've had past grants specifically tied to street racing and street takeovers, and they respond to events that we know about and sort of ad hoc, impromptu spread on social media. And another major component is the traffic investigation unit. Again, this is part of the investigating prosecutable fatal accident accidents. And a lot of the data that they compile in these investigations is used to help identify traffic engineering problems. And so the the first and the two larger grants are from ODOT, from the Oregon department of transportation and specifically their transportation safety office. And they are responsible for implementing oregon's highway safety plan related safety programs. And they award grants to local governments, law enforcement agencies, schools, tribes, and nonprofit organizations for any number of things. We have the two that we are appropriating today are a driver education program and training for traffic officers. We've had past grants from them for street racing. We have potentially some in the works for street racing. And so the state receives these funds from the national highway transportation safety administration to the tune of up to $10 million at the beginning of the calendar year. Actually, right now, they put out a call and then we or through PPB respond and say we would, you know, we'd like to fund these programs. And so the two that we have, the first is $50,000 for traffic officer training, specifically in some of the specific programs that we've identified, or PPB has identified, that they'd like to participate in, is a somewhat new vehicle system, forensic investigation, training that they'll look through the infotainment systems in major crashes. Those are fatal or life altering crashes to sort of, as I understand it, which I'm not. I'm in grants management division, but it's looking at distractions. What was being used at the time, any sort of information they can glean from that. An additional one on pedestrian and bicycle crash investigations, which. Is a sort of an increasing problem, I think, across the city, from what I've heard, dui and drug recognition, expert trainings, the north American motor officers association, which is for motorcycle officers, they'll do they attend trainings and then often will host a regional training at Portland international raceway, where officers learn to operate motorcycles at speed and additional accreditation for traffic accident reconstruction, which deals with that earlier point of developing data sets that can help identify traffic infrastructure problems. And there is also a second grant for a driver education course that is offered to anyone. There's no restrictions of who can attend, but it's largely aimed to work with folks who are who with whose first language is not english. There's a significant number of accidents that that take place, and then there's a fear of interaction with law enforcement, whether it's language barriers. And so these courses are designed for that. And this grant funds, those drivers ed courses. And then there's also line items for translation and childcare services and personnel costs. And the second funding partner in question here is Oregon impact, which offers has offered grants to law enforcement agencies for probably two decades at this point. The focus primarily on impaired and distracted driving. They work with middle schools, high schools and colleges across the state. The city has received these high visibility enforcement grants on an annual basis for decades, and in the past five years. There's just amounts here. So speed, high visibility, almost $200,000, you know, across these four programs, just shy of a million over the last five years. And this largely funds PPB overtime costs and associated benefits. And one of the things that they ask us to do is, in addition to these high visibility enforcements, is to engage in public outreach education. So they in the grant agreements, it includes participation in things like a national speed enforcement campaign. In July, they ask us to for the driving under the influence awards focus on large events like new year's, labor day. There is a distracted driving awareness month and things like the national click it or ticket in may and then child passenger safety week in September. And so in terms of what this ordinance is specifically doing, is it will amend the fiscal year 2526 budget to increase pbs's grant fund by $322,555. These grants do require local match to the tune. As of right now, 71,952 and $0.23. And these these matching funds are met by already budgeted for this fiscal year. In some cases, it's budgeted ot. In other cases, it's straight time. We're in the process of one amendment with ODOT to add my time as a grant administrator to, I mean, to spend a lot of time with meetings preparing these reimbursement requests. And then, as mentioned before, anything that's not appropriate in this fiscal year is currently being appropriated for the following fiscal year because they do not end until September 30th. And so that is that basic introduction. If you have questions, I know we'd be interested in hearing how you would like these to go going forward, because this one was lucky because the six we had were all in my portfolio. They were from one division, but we have I think if you look at the most recent city administrator report, something like $40 million of pending grant awards, and so we're all those to come in at the same time across six different bureaus. Having all of us up here might get a bit unwieldy for a two hour committee meeting.

So thanks. You know, this has been part of the conversation that the cfo and I have had, the budget officer and I have had. And I will say it's an interesting time. The first one is coming, as this committee was going to dissolve and move into a different situation. But councilor Smith and I were noting just how often when we worked at at Multnomah county, how often we would get grant award budget modifications, because it's just the nature of recognizing revenue as it comes in, especially for our federal grants who work on a different fiscal year. They are just the timing will always feel different than our budget. So I think if you if you wouldn't mind, as you ask your as you ask your questions or as you think about it, share some of your thoughts on how you might want to receive these moving forward. I think it's important. Some of the things that I think are important is if a grant requires us to match money, that's always good because we love other people's money. But we definitely want to know if we've got to have money in the pot as well. The other part that I learned to be at least critical to at Multnomah county was the types of grant who require a significant fte increase to in order to be implemented, because the nature of those is that sometimes they put us in a particularly difficult position when the grant runs out of having a host of staff who we are going to make a choice. Are we now in this line of business when it's our fund that keeps them afloat, or do they expire that line of business and those fte when when the grant runs out? So those are the types of things that counselor Smith, the cfo, the budget officer, and I have talked about in terms of how we might give this information to counselors so that they get some insight. And the other part that I always love about it is that grants offer us an insight into some of the folds of the of the bureaus that never get talked about in the big budget presentations, because they talk big stuff. And grants are always a little bit about how do we do a dui mission, how do we go talk to a school about about drunk driving for for the record, I think my very first paid pr kind of job was riding an Oregon impact and advertising campaign. Like as a kid who could barely function on a computer some 20 odd years ago. But it's kind of fun to come all the way full circle. But I would just, as you answer, question or ask questions, think about that, colleagues, because we do want to get into this regular practice. To ben's point here. Thanks, councilor Green.

Mitch Green: Yeah, thanks, ben, for the for the update. From as far as I can tell, this is budget neutral from the standpoint of there are already resources in play to match these grants. Is that right?

Yes. If if the and these grants do require match but they that those funds are already in the budget. One of the things that we do is at least with public safety grants, because a lot of times it involves overtime, as we will work with our budget analysts and the bureau when we're putting these applications in and say this will require match, we need to make sure that we've accounted for that so that when we get this award in six, seven, 12 months, we're not scrambling to figure out where that match is going to come from.

Thank you. That's helpful. I mean, there's a lot of information in these slides that span a lot of different policy areas, mostly transportation infrastructure. I'm not going to get into that because this is really about the financial impacts. And so I think I've got my questions answered. And so I think to to the sort of charge that you're, you know, tasking to us is how do we want to receive this. Like being able to parse and separate the, the financial machinations from some of the broader policy discussions that will happen through other, other committees is what I'm trying to keep in mind. So that's why I'm not as verbose today. But but thanks for bringing this forward. I'm going to be happy to accept a proposal to take money from the federal government or state governments. Thanks.

Thank you. Chair. You know, I want to thank you for the level of information you brought to us, seeing how the funds are going to be spent. We don't need every single line item, but understanding the programs that we're spending these funds on is really important. And that's something that, as council, we get into the details a lot in setting policy with our general fund, but we don't always get to see that decision making on grant funds. So having the opportunity to review that in committee, when you accept the grants and appropriate them is really helpful for me. I think my colleague made a an important point, which is that we need to be able to think about policy pieces and those fiscal impacts a little bit separately sometimes. And I think as these come forward, where finance will go to the full council, it will be important for the the new chairs of our committees to think about whether they want reports like this to the relevant policy committees, or whether we should do it all in that broader finance work that we're doing altogether. Certainly, we need to do it in that broader finance space. Is that the only space or is there another? I think between those spaces, it's really important to me that we can see what we're giving up. If anything, if there's a match, are we matching with work that we're already doing, resources that have already been allocated for that type of work? Are we matching by cutting something somewhere else? Are we matching because we actually set funds aside that are not currently working for us, that are just waiting to have the match money? Are we buying something new? Staff as our chair brought up or a policy change? Because often through grants we buy up new program. That is really a policy decision that council hasn't had the opportunity to weigh in on. And if we are buying something new, whether new staff or a policy change, making sure that council knows that so that we understand what we might have to change or what we might not have funds for later. And then, like I said, just on that level of detail of what the grant dollars are going for, I think that you hit that really well today in your presentation. I appreciate that. That's what I'll be looking for as we move forward as well. Happy to support today.

All right. Thank you. Colleagues. Not seeing anybody else for further discussion. If I could have a motion for item four to be pushed to the full council with a due pass recommendation.

So moved.

Second.

Okay. Moved by councilor Pirtle-guiney, seconded by councilor Green. We can take the roll.

Avalos. Aye, Morillo pirtle-guiney.

Aye, Morillo.

Green. Zimmerman.

Hi.

The motion to refer the ordinance document number 2026 079 to city council with the recommendation it be passed, has passed.

Great. I know our colleagues will appreciate an extra $320,000 in traffic safety, so appreciate the work. Ben. Thank you for coming. More to come on. How we do this moving forward. Okay, colleagues, this is likely our last finance committee. So before I gavel us out for the I think what would be the final time? I just want to share a couple of notes here. You know, this has been an honor for me to be the chair of this committee and and to work with the four of you. You know, we had it looks like 25 finance committee meetings. We passed 72 pieces of legislation, maybe 75 after today, through this committee, we the work included administrative items, just moving through a timely manner, legislation to improve the business climate for businesses of all sizes, funding projects that I think really affect portlanders daily lives. And now making sure that our employees can do their jobs less impeded by the federal government. I just want to give a deep appreciation to our council clerk, diana, almost always, I think, was our council or our clerk on these meetings christhopher herr our our council ops person who provided with provided me with tons of background support and very little direction from my part. But I was always prepared because of him, to adam and aaron and bts who kept us alive opensignal and certainly security. While we're not the kind of committee that has to have security interrupt us much or intervene is a better word, we do appreciate your time here. And then from the administrative side, you know, in my role, you know, councilor, vice chair pirtle-guiney and I met constantly with our cfo, with our budget director, and with their management assistant, hailey. So to jonas, to ruth, and to hailey, I deeply appreciate our work this last year. Thank you for always coming in, having a fun time, laughing through the serious items, and making sure that this was the committee who produced more legislation than any other in this last year. I've appreciated the work. I know that the council is going to take a different direction in terms of how they address finances, but I think we had a good start to a very interesting experiment. So thank you, colleagues. It's been a pleasure to be your chair. And with that, we are adjourned at 148.

Way to leave us.

Pretty quickly. That's right.