The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-02-10
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (18,422 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held its first meeting on February 10, 2025, opening with roll call, a statement of conduct for committee meetings, and introductory remarks noting this was also the first committee meeting under the city's new form of government. Committee members introduced themselves and described areas of interest, including funding mechanisms for infrastructure, sanitation services, high-crash corridor safety, pedestrian and bicycle safety, sidewalk gaps, asset management, workforce planning, rate-setting, and connections to other committees such as workforce development and climate/land-use resilience. A panel from the Public Works Service Area—including representatives from the Deputy City Administrator's office, the Portland Bureau of Transportation, the Bureau of Environmental Services, and the Water Bureau—presented on budget pressures, deferred maintenance, aging infrastructure, regulatory compliance, affordability programs, and workforce succession challenges; figures on budgets, backlogs, and rate increases were presented but stated inconsistently across speakers. A second panel from the Citywide Asset Management Group discussed asset management principles, the ISO 55,000 standard, funding and maturity assessments, and an ongoing audit of citywide asset management practices. Discussion also touched on federal, state, and local funding sources, including gas tax revenue, utility licensing fees, and grant opportunities. The meeting concluded with announcements about a deeper PBOT-focused session scheduled for February 24, followed by adjournment.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
0 Anything else? I forget?
1 Good morning everyone. We are having a little technical issues up here, but we can get going. I'm going to call the meeting to order the transportation infrastructure committee. It is Monday, February the 10th at approximately 930 and keelan. Can you call the roll?
2 Good morning Smith.
3 Hi,
4 Koyama Lane here. Morillo. Here. Breen.
5 Here.
6 Clark.
7 Here. Next. Claire, our committee administrator from council operations. Can you please read the statement of conduct for council meeting? Committee meetings?
8 Good morning. Welcome to the meeting of the transportation and infrastructure committee to testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at. Portland.gov/council agenda slash transportation and infrastructure committee. Or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at that link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one 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 disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, please state your name for the record. Your address is not necessary. If you are a lobbyist, please identify the organization you represent and virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
9 Thank you claire, to those of you in the room and those of you who are tuning in to the broadcast broadcast. Welcome to the very first committee meeting and the new form of government. We welcome you. This is the first meeting of the transportation and infrastructure committee. This committee is going to meet every other Monday from 930 to 1130 on the weeks that the council is not meeting. Typically, this will be on the second and the fourth Monday of each month. We're going to have plenty of opportunities to hear from the public in the future, but today is our first opportunity to talk amongst ourselves about our potential scope of work and focus areas, as well as to dive in to a more deeply into the work of the city that's going to manage our core assets. So what I'd like to do is to invite my colleagues at this first meeting to talk about their interests and topics we'd like to address as a committee. We're going to hear from our three primary infrastructure bureaus today, PBOT, the bts bureau of environmental services and water on their most pressing issues. And finally, we're going to hear about our current city assets, needs and the work of the cmg, the citywide asset management group. So with that, let me just say that the public works service area that we're going to talk about today. Is represents about 90% of our city's assets. That's pretty amazing, 50% of the city's budget and 33% of the city's workforce. I don't think there's any other city service area that touches the people of Portland as directly as public works every single day. It impacts all of us, our health and our safety. And I also want to note that while our committee is predominantly related to infrastructure service areas, there's also going to be times that we may need to expand our focus to issues within other service areas and bureaus as well. So now, committee members, I invite you to introduce yourself to talk about your areas of interest related to transportation and infrastructure, recognizing that these our interests may change as we go along and as we learn more, and we anticipate having plenty of time further for discussion of each of today's presentations. So with that, I'd like to start with my vice chair, Angelita Morillo, to ask her for her interests.
10 Thank you so much, councilor Clerk. Beautifully done for our first meeting. I think for all of us, obviously a focus for transportation and infrastructure is going to be finding new funds, funding mechanisms for all of this. It costs a lot of money, and it's no secret that we have a $100 million budget deficit to address with everything that we have to also do and to take care of our streets. For me, some of my top areas of concern, or things that I want to address in the committee will be no surprise because I talked about it a lot on the campaign trail. I'm really interested in addressing our sanitation system in the city of Portland. We're one of the last cities to not have a centralized sanitation bureau. I think that's part of why our sanitation can be so difficult. And I think by sanitation, I'm specifically talking about garbage collection and pickup and maintenance more than sewer, although I'm sure that we will hear that those have issues that need to be addressed as well. You know, in other in other cities they have the city, county and metro would all have a unified bureau that actually addresses sanitation to sort of streamline those services. So that's something I'm definitely interested in addressing. And I think for me as well, a top priority is addressing high crash corridors like cesar chavez boulevard, 82nd avenue. We've had a lot of pedestrian deaths because of these high crash corridors, and it is a top priority for me to address what is happening not just in district three, but across the city, to make sure that our infrastructure is physically changed, to make it safer to slow our streets down. I also think we have a lot of wonderful opportunities to think about closing more neighborhood streets, making them more pedestrian friendly. I know when I was a kid growing up in arizona, there were a lot of spaces that we could play outside and be safe, and I don't feel like kids have the opportunity to play outside safely like they used to, because we don't have any safe streets anymore as much as we used to. So those are some of my top areas of concerns. I also have, you know, my big dreams for sandy boulevard, making a rapid transit line or a bike Lane on sandy boulevard. Those are things that I would love to pursue and kind of connect those those parts of the city. And again, all of those things will be a pipe dream if we don't address our city's current funding needs. Thank you.
11 Thank you very much for that list. I took notes. Thank you, councilor Green.
12 Thank you chair. And you know, I'm really excited to work with everyone on this committee. And I'm excited for your leadership. You know, for me, I think about infrastructure as the kind of foundation of the value of the regional economy that we have. Like if you do not have good robust infrastructure, then some of the kind of higher order issues that you'd like to do as a city just aren't possible. So if we really want this to be a place that is conducive to growth, prosperous economic growth, equitable economic growth, we really need to get a handle on our infrastructure and sort of position ourselves such that we are not catching up, but we've invested in a really kind of stable and robust, you know, situation that that will yield benefits for years to come. And so, like, it's really, really important for me to get a handle on that. And, you know, financing and funding is the big linchpin here. I mean, we're kind of in a we're in a tough spot fiscally in the city. And so my frame of thinking will be, you know, and what I hope to bring to this committee work will be sort of thinking through interesting and creative financing strategies that we can use to prioritize, prioritize our most pressing asset management needs. You're going to get into asset management as a kind of an overarching theme for this committee. But, you know, if we can't do all of it simultaneously, what do we do first? And to me, that is critical that we use good kind of state of the art risk management frames for thinking through that. I will also say that in terms of prioritization, I hope that we can we can think about the parts of our city that were incorporated later on in the city's history that never got the infrastructure that they deserved. So, you know, I'm I'm representing district four. I think about southwest Portland as a as a sidewalk poor part of the city. And, you know, I live next to jackson middle school, and I see children walking on the side of the road on a shoulder in the road, frankly, and it's not safe. So I want to echo this idea that we've got we've got we've got streets that aren't safe. And so as we prioritize our infrastructure, I'd like to think about how do we think about bringing those marginal parts of the city into the fold in a more coherent way? In the past, we've we've used system development charges to finance these things. But I think that that has left us in a situation where we have never really completed the job. And I think if you're, you know, on the east side, if your district one, you can relate. I mean, there's also parts of district one that have the same that suffer the same cost. And so this is an opportunity for us to sort of think about the two west east parts of the city as having a common cause. And so we have this committee structure here to help guide us. So, you know, bottom line for me is that if we invest, I mean, I know there's a cost associated with, with with making infrastructure investments. And we've got a substantial, I think, annualized capital investment deficit in terms of the funding that we have. But if we do make the right prioritized investments, it will yield benefits for generations. And these are long lived assets. And so we have to think about not just ourselves, but also the generations that come after. I'm really excited to do that work here.
13 Thank you. That's terrific. Councilor Green, councilor Koyama Lane.
14 Thank you, chair Clark and vice chair Morillo. I'm so excited to be up here with all of you. I'm already just feeling like we have some great, like, femme energy and, like, pro femme energy. And I'm just excited to learn from all of you. And, chair, I know that you have just done so much work in this area and have so much to bring. I remember when this committee was first being discussed, it was described as the veins of the city, and so I was so excited that to be able to be on this committee to learn more about, I mean, what better committee to learn about the whole city? Folks will not be surprised to hear me talk about increased transportation safety, decreasing traffic violence. I hear from constituents almost every day reaching out about concerns about wanting more safety on cesar chavez. Southeast division 82nd powell. Sandy, this is something that that I'm hearing loud and clear and also something that feels very personal to me. Jean diaz, the youth librarian, is someone that I knew who checked out books and read books to my children, and that I feel that loss deeply and every, every loss that we have on our streets from traffic violence is, I view, a policy failure. So I know that that's something that we can be putting a finer point on and working on together. Specifically, I'm really interested in focusing on the idea of daylighting and increasing visibility and safety around intersections. I know that's something that PBOT cares about and is working on, and I specifically want to even focus that around schools, be able to see ways that we can engage students and caregiver communities in this work. Some of it is, I believe, educating. I think most folks don't realize that you're not technically supposed to be parking right up to the very edge. So I am excited about focusing on some of that and including, just in general, safe routes to schools, safe routes to schools that type when you focus on on that kind of safety, there's a universality that we know that comes with it, where everyone is safer when our children can get to school safely. I am proud to be part of the bike bus group, and my kids ride the bike bus with bike bus. I also remember when street trust came in and taught my fourth and fifth graders when I was teaching at fabian how to ride a bike. There were many fourth and fifth graders that didn't know how to do that, so instilling that safety and that confidence, my seven year old hates every Monday morning because he doesn't want to go to school. And I remember that happened this morning, too. And my husband biked with them, as he does every morning. And he came back and he said, oh, I think like biking for him in the morning is so important because he, like, gets confident on the bike. And then when he gets to school, he's a little bit more excited to get there. And so that was just a conversation I had this morning. That's in my mind. Something else I want to prioritize is advocating for district two, making sure that the voices of those councilors and those constituents come into this meeting. I have confidence that we're all going to be thinking about them and making sure that they are are feeling part of this conversation and emphasized just as much as the other districts. And I also know we have to kind of just keep reminding ourselves when there's not a literally a seat at the table for them right now, but we will. That's something that I want to prioritize infrastructure, infrastructure for aging with dignity, transportation for people of all ages. We there's that slogan, I think, from portlandia that was like, this is the place where young people go to retire. We also want Portland to be a place where people can stay and retire and can age here and can do that safely and with dignity. And then, of course, what is also been touched on already is stable funding for PBOT. Thank you.
15 Thank you, councilor, I thank you. And I discussed earlier that children and the elderly are the indicator species of our infrastructure, just like the salmon are for our rivers. Councilor Smith.
16 Thank you, madam chair. Thank you. It feels really good to sit on this dais with so many different voices, but we sound like we have some, some similarities in terms of what our priorities are. I do want to go into some of the deferred maintenance of the transportation system of the city, and to see what that looks like. I like that you added the asset management, so we can get a clear idea of what our assets are, since they are 90% of, of the city and workforce is a huge issue for me. I want to know what our workforce is going to look like over the next ten years and where we need to plug holes and what that looks like. And how do we get there. Of course, in district one we lack sidewalks. Some of our streets are not as safe as they should be, and bike policies, we need to have those. And I am totally with you. Councilor Tiffany. And I think that, you know, pedestrian safety is a huge issue in district one. And if you look at the news articles and you can look at where the majority of the pedestrian safety issues are, they're in district two and they're in district district one and district three. And so for sure I want to take a look at that. I think that making sure that our park system, that they're working well. And as I was looking at the, the fox news report yesterday on overtime in the city of Portland, I don't know if you all saw that yesterday, but $50 million is the number that they used that we have in overtime. And I want to I want to have a clear look at where those dollars are being housed. And they said it was in public safety. But I have to think that some of those dollars also are in transportation as well. And so we need to figure out our workforce. We need to identify ways in which we can get folks more folks working, which will lessen our our overtime costs and have a map. I want to have a map of the entire city that would indicate where we need, and we may already have this where we need sidewalk repair, where we need street lights, where we need potholes. Just so that I can get an idea of where the underserved areas are, so that those areas are those that we prioritize in our budget. When we're doing budget season. So I'm looking forward to today's presentations. And so thank you so much, madam chair.
17 Thank you, councilor Smith. Great to hear from everybody. Great issues. We have lots of work to do and I'm happy to hear that we have very similar issues for me personally. Also coming from district four, I know we have a dearth of sidewalks, particularly in southwest Portland, but the larger issues of traffic safety, kids financing of our infrastructure, our asset management. I'm glad that we all share those issues. And I think that what vice chair Morillo and I will do is take all of your input and then begin to put together a work plan for how we proceed with all of those issues. I can also foresee that we may have some work groups. We may have some overlap with your workforce committee. We may have overlap with the finance committee. And we would want you to work on a work group around those issues as we work through. And I personally share a lot of those. Obviously, the backlog of infrastructure needs really bothered me. So I wanted to start with with that and with asset management as well, the high crash corridors. I heard that that's really very important, primarily on the east side mostly. And these are all really big issues and big questions. But at the same time, we do have a pretty serious budget issue that will be beginning to deal with, I think the finance committee, which will follow this committee today, will begin to address the community engagement around budget issues. But for our committee, the budget issue budget problem is truly demonstrated by the PBOT PBOT budget. And we'll need to ask questions and identify future revenue sources for them. In any event, are there any other comments? Anybody want to add anything before we go to the first panel? Yeah, sure.
18 Councilor thank you. I just heard some great stuff as as we were talking, so I, I can't resist the urge to riff a little bit on that. Councilor Smith, you mentioned the connection to labor and workforce development. I think it's 100% right on spot on to be thinking about these cross committee connections of the work. Like I said, infrastructure investment is some of our largest spend and it affects our economy. And so if we're not thinking about its downstream impacts on on how we can, it's an opportunity for us to cultivate careers and workforce. And so I really support that, and I look forward to working with you on that, that work. I also want to say that there's a connection to the climate committee. I forget the longer name, but I think it's climate land use resilience. Probably some other words in there too. But I think the way, the way I see the connection is that if we do not make the infrastructure investments that allow for a 15 minute city, that allow for dense kind of mixed use, you know, you know, four floors in a corner store type of thing. In all of our high opportunity neighborhoods, then we're not really setting ourselves up for a more sustainable pattern of development, and that will yield benefits if we have that frame of mind. So I think about things like our influence with TriMet, to the extent that we have that through this committee, as well as sort of the prioritization scheme that we have. And so I think and that's not true, just downtown on the inner side, you know, close in neighborhoods. I think it's also true for thinking through transit oriented development out kind of in the more hinterland parts of our city. So it's again, it's this idea of thinking through holistically what our infrastructure investments and enable for broader development patterns. And we have a bigger opportunity and a challenge here. And then the other part I would say is that so much of our revenue in the city is actually encumbered by rates. And that's a big part of the service area. And so I'm going to be taking a very close look at how we set rates. And I mean everyone's doing a great job with that. But but you know our our ratepayers are really feeling the pinch. And so to the extent that our asset management lens can inform setting a sort of cost curve that's bended downwards a little bit on our rate schedules, that's a big opportunity and an obligation, I think, that we have to deliver to our our citizens here.
19 Thank you, councilor Green. And I want to encourage the people who are online, people who are in the audience, that if you have other issues that you think are important to please communicate with us. I think we have a pretty healthy list of to do list, but we're definitely open to other people's input as well. So thank you, colleagues. That was a good, good overview of our concerns. So I'm going to turn to our clerk and ask that you please read the next item.
20 This is item number two. Is that correct?
21 Mine are numbers so I believe it is okay.
22 Public works service area. Top issues and priorities.
23 Thank you keelan everyone. Remember that at our January 23rd full council meeting, we had a great overview from the public works area. The intent today is not to repeat all that information, but instead to zoom in on top priorities and issues that each of the bureaus here today face. So we have our first panel up. We have deputy city administrator priya, donna paul from the public works service area. Welcome, director millicent williams from PBOT. Welcome to you, director dawn uchiyama from bts. Welcome sherri peterson, revenue programs manager bts. Is she back there? No. Oh, okay. All right. Eric pacheco, the equity and policy manager for our water bureau and the quisha light customer service director, Portland water bureau. Is that right? Hi. Welcome. We look forward to hearing from all of you. And we will have time for questions from the committee members after the presentations. If you can hold them till then, I'd appreciate it. So, priya, we'll turn it over to you.
24 All right.
25 Good morning, madam chair, clerk, vice chair, Morillo and members of the transportation and infrastructure committee. I'm priya dhanapala, the deputy city administrator of public works. Today marks a historic moment in the city of Portland. It's not just our city's first committee meeting in the new form of government. It's our also our first, very first infrastructure and transportation committee meeting. It's an honor to be with you as we chart a path forward in ensuring the strength and sustainability of our city's core services. In my in my role, I oversee the three public works bureaus Portland bureau of transportation, the water bureau, and bureau of environmental services. And together, these bureaus are the foundational backbone of Portland, responsible for keeping our streets safe, our water clean and environmental protected. And if I were to answer the question, what keeps public works up at night? The you know the answer. If I have to summarize everything that all of you mentioned is very simple. It is the risk of failure. We worry about the risk of failure from deferred maintenance and funding crisis that have resulted in deteriorated conditions of many of our assets our roads, our bridges, the water and sewer pipes that are aging beneath our feet, and the stormwater systems that can no longer keep up with the realities of climate change. And today, you'll hear directly from our bureau leaders about the real, immediate and sometimes catastrophic challenges they face in managing portland's largest and most critical assets. Pbot will outline how many years of budget reductions have left our streets, bridges and sidewalks in increasingly poor condition and how the cost of deferred maintenance is growing. The water and water bureau and I will highlight the critical infrastructure that delivers safe drinking water and protects the environment and public health, but is aging beyond its intended lifespan and is in urgent need of investment. And each of our bureaus here will talk about what keeps the keeps them up at night as well and why. If we don't act now, the cost of inaction will far outweigh the cost of proactive investment. We all recognize that infrastructure is not just about roads, pipes and pump stations, but it's also it's about people. Our work is ensuring portlanders have safe, reliable infrastructure future not only for today but for decades to come. And I look forward to working with this committee to address these challenges and find long term solutions and deliver on the expectations of our community. Thank you for your leadership and prioritizing these conversations. And with that, I will turn it over to director melissa williams from Portland bureau of transportation.
26 Thank you. Paul. Good morning. Committee chair Clark and vice chair, Morillo and members of the transportation and infrastructure committee. My name is millicent williams, and I serve as the director of the Portland bureau of transportation. Thank you for prioritizing the conversation that we'll have today, and for providing the opportunity to share pbot's most pressing challenges with you today. You asked us, chair Clark, to come prepare to share insights about what keeps us up at night. Well, every day and night, as I look out of my window at the city below, as I traverse the streets and navigate our intricate networks, I'm reminded that the Portland bureau of transportation is unable to. As we face our seventh consecutive year of budget and programmatic reductions, meet the expectations of our of our residents. The basic expectations to comprehensively and effectively manage and maintain the right of way. And I know that that means a lot of things, and we won't get into details in this presentation, but we just can't do what portlanders are expecting us to do with the dollars that they believe they're investing in the system. While certainly not all, many of the challenges that we face as a city have a direct connection to historic dis or underinvestment in the city's infrastructure. If we are not able to stabilize funding and identify alternative revenue streams, we will never be able to return to intentionally and proactively maintaining roadways, bridges, signals, street lights and sidewalks, much less meet the policy goals that you, the council, set for us. I recognize that this isn't a budget work session, but it is very difficult to separate out fiscal impacts from bureau outcomes. Thinking about the very real consequences of that underinvestment is what keeps me up at night. Assets, failing, safety compromised, livability diminished, public trust destroyed. While we do have the largest budget as a service area in the city, I cannot fail to mention that our budget. We're not general fund bureaus. We raise the funds that we use to take care of the systems that we're responsible for. Our. My colleagues do so through rates. I do so or our bureau does so through the gas tax and parking revenues both diminishing in the current climate. And so it's really important that we focus on alternatives as we consider what our future looks like. A fiscal future looks like. So we are coming in at 2% of general fund dollars. And when we look at the pie charts, when we look at the images, it's a stark contrast regarding what we're able to do with what we have available to address our needs. I'm sorry. At the same time as our revenue has decreased, we've seen significant growth in fixed administrative costs citywide. General fund overhead costs, for example, have increased by 83%. That's almost four times as much as our inflationary increases since 2019. Can you go back to the last slide, please? Oh thank you. Yes. The next slide I'm sorry. Internal services and omf inter agencies have increased slightly less by 61%. We've only grown PBOT positions by 2.3% during this same time period. Given those obligations, funding for direct services continues to decrease. As you can see over the next six, over the same six year period, direct services have decreased by approximately 20%. We're not only seeing revenue pressures, pressures as described in the previous slide, but we're also seeing expense expense pressures. This graph highlights our largest pressures on the gtr budget. As you can see, the cost of centralized city administrative support such as human resources, finance, equity, city attorney's office and government relations have increased by 83% since 2019. These cost drivers have increased. Rates have increased at rates substantially above inflation, which has impacted our ability to provide direct services to the public. Next slide please. Heading into 2420. Excuse me, heading into fiscal year 2526, we are once again facing down the need to take massive reductions. Our current estimates are that we will need to cut about $38 million in general transportation revenue, plus cuts to some other programs with other funding sources. The reductions that we've taken over the last six years have had impacts that are seen and felt by all portlanders. We've had to eliminate residential street sweeping significantly, reduce our paving maintenance, as well as maintenance of other assets like signals and street lights, and cut back on our ability to respond to community requests for traffic calming and safety improvements, among many other reductions. Another $38 million in reductions is, frankly, hard to imagine. We will not be the same bureau, and we will fall even even further behind in taking care of transportation assets, making the transportation system safer, and contributing to the livability of Portland. Next slide please. Cuts at this scale are truly unprecedented for PBOT. If they go through, we are deeply concerned about our delivery, our ability to deliver even the most basic transportation services. Next slide. You've seen this image before, but I've brought it forward again to provide a visual reminder of what we're talking about. Pbot is responsible for $21 billion in assets. We face a $6 billion asset maintenance backlog, putting some of our city's most valuable assets at significant risk of falling into disrepair. What this slide doesn't capture is the facilities that house our work and the locations where we store our fleet and equipment, and where our team members work. Places like the kirby campus, which includes the main administrative facility, and stanton, albina and sunderland yards and the materials testing lab. Next slide. Already over 50, 56% of our busy streets are in poor or worse condition. As you can see in this chart, our local streets are in even worse shape. It should be noted that pavement close to 4800 miles of it, accounts for the city's largest asset of the 159 bridges, over 90% are seismically vulnerable, a third are past their useful life and 19% are currently weight restricted. One of the things that I'd like to mention, and the connection to the maintenance of our facilities, the maintenance of things like bridges and structures, is that over the course of the past several years especially, we've seen a deterioration at a greater rate than even time would allow for, because people are looking for places to find shelter. People are burrowing under our bridges. We've not been able to secure them in such a way that would keep people out without it looking uninviting as a city. And so that is a significant challenge. People setting fires under those bridges and even one of our newer bridges, the flanders overcrossing, was damaged because of that type of activity. The ornamental street lights found downtown in old town and in chinatown. Well, the entire inventory is past its useful life. The entire inventory is past its useful life, and at risk of widespread failure. Next slide. These cuts also mean less money to address the very real safety concerns of portlanders, and things that you've raised in your conversation already this morning. They will also make it harder to respond to the community traffic safety requests we get from public, from the public, and that we've been getting from you over the course of the past several weeks on behalf of them. Larger capital projects, like the work that we're doing on 82nd avenue or 122nd avenue, for instance, require many millions of dollars, and we typically need to find another funding source for these major improvement projects. However, with our discretionary funds, we can still do critical work to address high crash corridors and intersections. We can do things like make crosswalks safer and work on traffic signal timing to give pedestrian head starts. In 2024, the traffic safety team reviewed and responded to 589 safety requests from the community. The team also reduced posted speeds on 11 miles of streets. Completed intersection, daylighting on the high crash network, and designed 15 miles of speed bump projects. But at any given time, we already have hundreds of requests waiting to be reviewed, and I'd like to share that there was a time, 8 to 10 years ago that PBOT had five teams doing this important safety work, identifying gaps in the system all across the system. Now we have one. Next slide please. Finally, the cuts that we've already taken and those that we currently are facing mean that we're not going to be able to sweep street. Excuse me. We're not going to be able to sweep any streets for leaves or debris. Leaf day, for example, would be eliminated. We've been an integral, integral part of the city's rv removal program and will no longer be able to support that work. We will be challenged to deal with winter weather and address graffiti, both because of potential reductions in force and the reduction in available equipment without stable funding. We're also looking to cuts to programs that we know that portlanders enjoy and that are critical as we're all helping to work together to help Portland fully recover from the pandemic. Programs like the public space plaza program, Sunday parkways, all of those things that bring joy to our community would all but be eliminated. Next slide. Pbot is Portland. Our work is integral to the future of the city. We have the tools, but we cannot meet community expectations unless we solve our funding crisis. And I look forward to your partnership in that effort. Before I ask my colleague to share her thoughts, I'd just like to finally mention that you do see a lot of work happening around the city. There's a lot of construction that's going on, whether that's a road construction, ADA ramps or development. There is still a lot of construction that's happening, and I'd like to share that. That construction is largely funded by outside sources. They aren't funded by the general fund. They aren't funded even by the parking revenues or the gas taxes. Those things are funded by federal dollars. Several other sources the state, the county, other activities that help to make up that capital program, which we will be talking about more. But the local work, the basic maintenance is what we're talking about today. And I look forward to talking with you about more in the future. That's what we're not able to do. And so to the general public, it looks like we have a lot of money and we're making choices to do things that aren't basic and fundamental. We don't have the funding to do the basic and fundamental. We're fortunate that we do have investments to do other things, but we need to be able to work together to bridge that gap. So I share that to, to share that we see why people would be frustrated with the way that PBOT showing up, because it looks like the picture looks one way, but the reality is something that's very different. And I look forward to working with this council to make sure that people understand how we are working to solve problems large and small across the city. Thank you.
27 Thank you. Let me just turn to my fellow councilors. Are you okay with holding questions until we hear the rest of the presentations?
28 Is that.
29 I just have one.
30 Quick clarification, okay? And it's not a big question. So the slide.
31 The general fund overhead, 83.1% question. Can you remind me again which what cost allocation.
32 Sure. The general fund overhead costs that we are covering include. Centralized city administrative services, interagency. No. Interagency is something separate. So yes, that's human resources finance, the equity office, city attorney's office and government relations.
33 Thank you.
34 I think it must be similar to what we're paying out of our budgets for general services. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next.
35 All right. On behalf of the water bureau director, director campbell, I appreciate the opportunity to share the key priorities of the water bureau and highlight the critical investments we're making to ensure safe, reliable, affordable water service for portlanders. Next slide please. One of the most pressing issues for water bureau is the compliance with drinking water regulations. Since 2017, we have regularly detected cryptosporidium in the bull run watershed exceeding allowable levels, and as a result, we are required to treat our water and have the bull run filtration facility online by September 30th, 2027. Per our compliance agreement with Oregon health authority, the city council has selected filtration treatment because it provides multiple long term benefits, including enhanced climate and seismic resilience, and this project is a significant investment in the future of our water system. And we are also investing in automated meter meter infrastructure ami to improve how we track water usage, detect leaks and manage resources. Ami will provide real time, accurate water usage data, improving build transparency and allowing customers to receive monthly bills instead of quarterly bills. And when paired with our multilingual customer engagement portal, ami will transform how we interact with customers, giving them better access to data, improved leak detection tools, and more control over the water usage. And the last but not the least, the affordability is an important core value of the water bureau and bhs as well, and we remain committed to ensuring that all portlanders have access to clean, safe drinking water, regardless of income. And we continue to expand affordability programs based on data driven strategies to ensure our most vulnerable customers receive the support they need. And we're making strategic investments to keep rates as fair as possible, while maintaining the infrastructure needed to provide an uninterrupted service. Next slide please. The water bureau manages about $25 billion in infrastructure assets, and the approach to asset management is more than just condition assessments. It's about evaluating risk based on the consequence of failure. 95% of the bureau's assets are in very good, good or fair condition, meaning our proactive maintenance strategy has been effective. However, most of our capital improvement program, or cip, focuses on addressing assets that are in very poor condition and ensuring regulatory compliance. Over the last several years, we've had major infrastructure investments that have enhanced reliability, safety and resiliency across Portland, and some of the projects include improved corrosion control facility, which was a 24 point $4,000,000,000 million investment, and the Washington park reservoir, groundwater pump replacements, and so on. Next slide, please, to maintain our system and continue providing high quality service, we have ten year capital improvement plan that focuses on meeting regulatory regulatory compliance such as the bull run filtration project, maintaining service levels by proactively replacing aging infrastructure to prevent breaks and reducing the consequences of system failures, particularly for vulnerable communities. And we have we face significant funding challenges over the next over the ten year funding, our ten year funding gap is estimated at about $100 million for the water bureau, and in the next five years, we anticipate a shortfall of $82 million. The following five years will require an additional 18 million. These funding gaps put pressure on our ability to make critical investments, while keeping rates affordable for all portlanders. The water bureau is committed to delivering safe, deliverable, reliable and affordable water services, but maintaining a $25 billion infrastructure system requires strategic investments, proactive maintenance and sustainable funding. We will also continue to work on balancing affordability and infrastructure resilience while meeting the required regulatory requirements and community needs. And with that, I would like to pass it on to quisha light to talk about our affordability program for the utilities.
36 Good morning. Committee chair Clark, vice chair, Morillo and committee members. As stated, my name is quisha light and I use she her pronouns and I am the customer service group director at the Portland water bureau. I appreciate the opportunity to come and share how we're making water, sewer, and storm water services more affordable and accessible for portlanders. First, I want to make sure that everyone understands that customer service. We sit across both water and biz so we don't have a separate unit. We do that together as well as our joint affordability committee. We have representatives from both bureaus so that we can ensure that we are addressing the issues and taking a coordinated approach. I think we can all agree that water services are essential, but ensuring it remains affordable and reliable for generations to come requires smart, proactive investments in our infrastructure to keep water flowing, prevent costly failures and ensure we can continue supporting customers who need help the most. Next slide. I'm sorry. Move on. Mean balancing rates and affordability is about ensuring all portlanders can access our services today and for decades to come. A failing system doesn't serve anyone, especially our most vulnerable customers. That's why affordability and system investments must go hand in hand. If we don't invest in infrastructure, we end up paying more in emergency repairs, service disruptions and long term cost increases, which ultimately hit our low income portlanders the most and the hardest. On the other hand, if rates rise too quickly without support, we risk making essential services unaffordable for struggling households and small businesses. And I see this every day. So our strategy is pretty clear. We want to keep our rates predictable. We want to invest responsibly with those rates, and we want to invest in the long term system of the health and system health. And we want to offer targeted, data driven affordability programs that provide relief where it's needed most. Next slide. You will see that I'm really proud that Portland has been a leader in in water affordability, just in water services affordability for over 30 years. And many people don't know this. In the early 90s, we launched the first discount program of its kind in the nation. Since then, we've built one of the most comprehensive affordability programs in the country, investing over $20 million annually without receiving a single dollar of federal or state fund assistance. As our electric counterparts, they get that through the light heat program. If you're familiar with that, they get electric assistance dollars. We don't get any of that. But yet we've invested in our low income customers. We provide direct discounts and emergency relief for income. Eligible households help customers avoid unexpected high bills and shutoffs, support affordable housing providers so they can pass savings on to their tenants, and we encourage the creation of new affordable housing. These are just some of the things our affordability work supports. Bees and water have done this work on our own and we're committed to continuing it, but we will need your support. Next slide. As we move forward, balancing rates and affordability is more critical than ever. Our investments fund the infrastructure that delivers safe, reliable services. Our affordability programs ensure that no portlander has loses access to essential water services. But we also recognize that affordability isn't one size fits all, which this is why we're expanding our approach to build a truly comprehensive affordability strategy and program. We're evolving beyond traditional discounts to proactively support customers and in their various and different financial situations. These new programs aren't just add ons. They will prevent financial crisis, reduce system costs, and keep more customers connected to essential services. But to make them as effective as possible, again, we need your help securing funding, increasing awareness and ensuring policies to protect system sustainability while keeping services accessible. We have a long three decade history of providing good affordability services, and I believe we can continue to do that work. But we must balance rates and affordability as we do it. We can't artificially lower our rates and think that we're going to continue to be able to help our most, and our customers that are most in need. I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Eric, and he's going to talk to you a little bit more about the affordability work that we've been doing and the analysis and the data driven approach we're taking.
37 Hi. Good morning, chair clarke and vice chair Morillo and committee members. My name is Eric pacheco. I use he and l pronouns and I'm the Portland water bureau equity and policy manager. Next slide please. So as you've probably seen before, our Portland combined utility bills fall right in the middle of the pack when we're compared to peer cities that have similar water, sewer and stormwater infrastructure systems. And our combined rate increases are on par with nationwide averages over the past 20 years. And that is because affordability is really a nationwide challenge. We're not the only city facing these challenges. Most utilities, water and sewer utilities across the country are facing the same issues we're facing, like aging infrastructure, limited sources of funding for capital projects, rising operational costs, meeting regulatory compliance and also building resilience for our climate and seismic events. So in response to this challenge, we've built a robust we have a joint affordability steering committee, and also we have a robust affordability data analytics program that combines our community data with utility data and also utilizes industry and EPA recognized methodologies. Over the past year, we've been doing many analysis, and we find that our median monthly bill of $110 a month for last fiscal year takes about seven hours working at minimum wage to pay the bill, and three hours or less for people that are enrolled in our financial assistance programs. We do recognize that because most of our customers are getting a quarterly bill instead of a monthly bill, there is an impact in managing a large bill every three months in terms of our cash flows. And that is something that the advanced metering infrastructure project that dca and paul mentioned at the beginning is going to address, because it's going to allow us to switch to monthly billing and address in addition to another suite of benefits. And as she mentioned, that is one of our top priorities over the next five years. In our analysis, we also find that about 20% of our customers do need some form of financial assistance. And so our analytics, we are also leveraging them to develop a joint water and bs five year affordability strategy. Next slide please. We're also both bureaus are a member of the national us water alliance affordability task force. And so we're leveraging national best practices on affordability in addition to contributing to them. Because this is an emerging field. And our the premise of our affordability strategy really focuses on finding this balance. As I mentioned, between getting the rates that we need to fund and keep our systems sustainable and making sure our services are accessible to all portlanders. We've developed five different goals that we are going to be using over the next five years to achieve our affordability work, and the first one of them is exploring innovative rate structures that we can use to keep our systems sustainable and resilient, while also maintaining our services affordable at all income levels. We're also working on expanding flexible billing and customer support programs like payment arrangements, matching payment programs, and our crisis vouchers. We're leveraging a lot of data to continuously improve and adapt our financial assistance offerings, like our low income discount program, our multifamily discount program, and hopefully soon, our smart discount program. We're also optimizing our operations and our cost control methods through the adoption of emerging technologies like ami. But many others, like our ymca program, we're also continuously doing process improvements and really taking seriously this mainstreaming of data informed decision making. And lastly, we're expanding partnerships with community based organizations so that all of our programs are customer and community informed so that they're responding to the needs of the community. And they're also as transparent as possible. And so this strategy really stands to transform how our utilities operate. And it implies a lot of changes for us and its success. Also we need your support. Next slide please. As I mentioned for the past 30 years we've established and funded our affordability programs at a cost of over $20 million a year without any federal or state funding. And so to sustain this work into the future, we need your support for the rates that will maintain our critical services in place and also your endorsement of emerging funding opportunities. Things like the federal low income water assistance program, which was a temporary program that existed as part of the infrastructure act but has recently expired, or the Oregon low income rate assistance program that's being discussed in the Oregon legislature. And also, we need support, you know, brainstorming with us in creating policy options so that we can lower the customer the burden on our customers without sacrificing the reliability of our systems. And lastly, really leverage the new form of government through better engagement and outreach with your constituents and on all of the districts, so that all of our affordability programs are informed by and accessible to all the people that need them the most. Thank you.
38 Great. Thank you Eric, I appreciate that and especially appreciate that we're partners in this work. So I won't speak to affordability since it was covered so well by my partners here. My name is dawn uchiyama. Good morning, chair Clark and vice chair Morillo Morillo and committee members. I'm really happy to be back here again and have this opportunity to describe what keeps me up at night. Many of the themes that I'm going to highlight, you've heard already, but I will give it the bs flavor and how this impacts stormwater and wastewater delivery. So my concerns next slide. Please fall into three categories aging infrastructure, regulatory requirements, and workforce impacts. All of these topics have been addressed this morning, but I would like to again put a bs flavor on these with aging infrastructure. Just last week I watched news reports out of japan after some very heavy rain. A gully basically was created underground and a entire semi was lost in a sinkhole and raw sewage was spilling into a river. And the efforts to go in to pull the truck out and to shore up the situation would make anyone stay up at night. And I don't know that Portland faces the scale of those exact circumstances, but we're very close to being exposed to some of those same risks. And I'll talk a little bit more about one project in particular that should keep us all up at night. The second issue with the regulatory, and I also want to acknowledge the climate will definitely amplify the situation we have with our aging infrastructure. The second topic, meeting regulatory requirements. It's really tied to, again, our lack of funding, which both bureaus have spoke to and a need to find stable funding. We understand that we need to find additional funding resources. We need to get creative about about other sources, and we need to be honest with ourselves about the impact of increased materials, the cost of labor, the competition to the workforce, our inability to strategically invest in technology. All of these things are are folded into my concern for our ability to meet our regulatory and operational requirements due to our funding situation. And then my last concern, which is really maybe the hardest and most personal, I've worked at bts for close to 25 years at the city, close to 30. And what I see, and it's not just within bts, but within all of the infrastructure bureaus, is the cumulative impact. This situation of being afraid of failure and not meeting our regulatory requirements, the effect that has on employee morale and on the overall workforce development that we issues that we face and our employees are our most important assets. So when we're talking about a asset management, I want to really highlight the fact that our employees are our most important asset. Next slide please. And my computer just went blank. And I'm going to have to pull my slideshow back up here. Sorry. Maybe I'll just go off script here. Okay. So this slide shows two things. To the left is the report from our citywide asset management report. And we shared this when we met last week that bts assets are worth 25 billion. And you can see over in the lower left hand corner the 172 for non-processed facilities. That's basically where we house our employees spaces where our employees work. And then 548 million for our pump stations, which is a large part of the work that needs to be done and where some of our biggest risks exist. So I just wanted to call that out. And then on the right hand side, you can see out of our all of our assets, our two, 2 to 8% are very poor to poor and 12 fair. But those those assets are some of our most expensive and make best the most vulnerable. So even though it's a smaller part of our portfolio, it is some of where our greatest risks is risks are. And this estimated backlog of deferred replacement and rehab work is worth approximately 6.7 billion. So we have a capital improvement plan that is looking at how to stage that work and how to address our greatest risks. I do want to mention that the inverness forcemain is one of the projects where, as I referred to the situation in japan that keeps my chief engineer up at night. You'll see some contracting coming through the city on this project. It's basically a 13 mile forcemain. We call it a force main. It's a pressurized force main. We have pressurized water coming through a 13 mile pipe that runs from the other side of 205, east of 205 to the treatment plant, which is just a little bit east of I-5. So it's a long pipe. And when water is pressurized, it makes the pipe more vulnerable to failure. And if this if this pipe fails, we would have 11,000 acres of sanitary waste from northeast Portland entering into the columbia slough. It would could impact I-5 205 and airport operations. So this is a highly specialized project. And I think I said 13 months, it's 40, 48 miles. We have a total of 48 miles of forest mains that are not currently funded. And it's reflected in this backlog of investment needs. So there's a lot more detail here that I am not going to necessarily get into in the interest of time. But again, we can come back and we can talk about our pump stations and our stormwater facilities. We I mentioned and highlighted quite strongly when we were here last time, the step project and how successful that's been. The flip side of that is that project consumed a lot of our our capital budget, and we had to defer a lot of other work that needed to be done. So again, just the overall theme of having a lot of responsibility, a lot of risk, and having very restricted funds to address that. I will also mention that as we upgrade our pump stations and plants our treatment plants, we have to meet a category four seismic requirement, which also increases costs and a forces us to really look hard at how we will stage our work. Next slide. And now I'm working with someone else's computer so I don't know how to advance their. I'm sorry.
39 How many people does it take to do this.
40 Okay I need I'm nice. Okay.
41 There we go. Okay. So to our regulatory requirements. Bts is responsible for permits that relate to the clean water act, the endangered species act, and the safe drinking water act. And these are both state and federal requirements, which again, we are tied to water in this space. We also have the Portland harbor, which I mentioned last time. But the reason why I really emphasize these regulatory requirements is because the cost of the utility and the work that we do is, is largely fixed and driven by the regulatory requirements and the asset management needs. Related to that, so much of our work that maybe that there was some interpretation around whether it was required or not has already been less prioritized. Deprioritized. And we are really focused on just making sure that we meet our basic regulatory requirements. And I know in today's age, in today's times, there are concerns about whether these federal requirements will stay in place. And I would argue that regardless of what happens with the federal and state requirements, this is our responsibility. These regulations have been in place for over 50 years and there to protect our communities. So we take this responsibility very seriously. Next slide. Again, the restrictions on our budget really kind of hamstring us in our ability to operate and maintain and invest in the multi-billion dollar projects that are needed. And we really need effective long term financial planning strategies. We can't be thinking about rates year to year. We have to be thinking about the overall trajectory. And as we often say in the 100 year business. So we need to be thinking on five, ten, 20 year time frames. And you it was mentioned earlier, the cost of contributing to the general fund and some of the city obligations. This is something that we also feel the pressure of and really look forward to diving into that detail and understanding the impacts those costs have on our overall ability to deliver on our mission. Next slide. I mentioned a step. So this is something that we met our budget and schedule for. And we spent approximately $650 million. This project is the real highlight of this is what we did with our community benefits agreement and with our contracting community. And again, I welcome the opportunity to come back and look more closely at those numbers and to really see the impact that that has made on our workforce. And next slide. The last point I mentioned about staffing and workforce needs, we have succession planning issues. We have a lot of baby boomers and a large percentage of people who are eligible for retiring in 1 to 3 years. A major portion of our workforce may be leaving, and we need more be able to transfer more institutional knowledge and be able to support double fills in order to facilitate training and the knowledge transfer that's necessary in those situations. We found that our recruitment and retention has also been a challenge. We're competing with private industries such as trade and engineering and engineering fields, where not everyone is interested in working in the wastewater industry. So we have to be really creative about providing benefits and values outside of just monetary award systems, and something we're really committed to as an organization is benchmarking against other utilities to stay current with those trends. So being really aware of the market forces that we're working, working within. And then last but not least, our training and development of our staff. This often gets shifted or cut in and with budget constraints. And we really need to be thinking about our technology and the training we give our our employees to really meet the needs of, of the future. So continuing to invest in our employees is something that is in our best interest and for the health of our organization. And all of this requires funding support. Last slide. So in closing, and I really appreciated this question. How can how can you help us be successful. And my biggest ask and I think I'm representing all of public works here, is to help us provide stable a stable and have a commitment for a long term financial support. This isn't a year to year conversation, so this is where we really need to roll up our sleeves and work together to meet the needs of the utilities and public works. The second is to support policy and funding mechanisms that ensure ongoing investment beyond capital costs. One of the things that we often struggle with and in the last few years has really hit our organization. Organization hard is it's a lot easier to get capital dollars than it is for the operating. And so we have to be very conscious of our capital investments. And then the operating needs. And that's really where we've underinvested. And I think when I look at PBOT situation again, that's where I really lose sleep, that we're not investing in the operating and that we can find ourselves in a situation like PBOT has. So it's in some ways like it's a look ahead. If we don't do something now for bts, we could be in very similar circumstances. And then the last, which I believe I have the support of this committee, is to really be thinking about workforce development and recruitment strategies to address the capacity gaps. We need our workforce to be fully functioning and present and not caught up in in the politics and the dramas of, of, of what's happening with our budget and know that they're supported and that we can help them succeed and deliver their best service within our organization. So with that, I will turn it back to priya.
42 Thank you. Don. You've just heard from my colleagues, the leaders across the three public works bureaus, who beautifully articulated the staggering challenges that they face. Big picture public works has about nearly has nearly $313 billion of total maintenance backlog. And this backlog isn't just a number. It represents the real risks we face today. The roads we don't repair today will cost 4 or 4 times, 4 or 5 times to rebuild in the future. The pipes we don't replace now could burst tomorrow, flooding homes and streets. The bridges we fail to reinforce could become impassable in an earthquake, cutting off communities from emergency services. So what is the path forward? We need your support and partnership in working with us to prioritize proactive asset management. Right now, too much of a budget stewards emergency fixes the daily fires instead of planned replacements. That must change. We must shift from being reactive to proactive in a management of these essential services. And how do we do that? We need to find stable, sustainable, long term funding, cutting budgets only delays repairs and drives up future costs and passes the cost to future generations. We're also advancing the implementation of a unified capital infrastructure program. Today, infrastructure projects across the three bureaus are often done in silos, with some collaboration. With an integrated cip approach, we can proactively assess when and where projects should be coordinated across the bureaus. We must take advantage of the opportunity to stretch taxpayer dollars further and extend asset life and minimize disruptions. And having an integrated cip is a step towards solving this. But we need support to make this a new standard for infrastructure planning in Portland. And I want to reiterate, the cost of inaction is failure. If we do not act now, the maintenance backlog will grow beyond what we can manage, and service levels will continue to decline, and the risks of catastrophic failure will increase. Portland cannot afford that. This committee has an opportunity to help set a new course for how we invest in the city's future. I look forward to working with you to develop solutions that stabilize the funding, modernize our infrastructure, and ensure that Portland remains a livable, sustainable city for generations to come. Thank you.
43 And thank you, administrator dana paul and the entire panel. It's been enlightening. Some of us knew pieces of this, but not the full story of what keeps you up at night. And I appreciate your answering that question. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm feeling the weight of this responsibility right now and working with you and looking forward to working with you to address the issues that you've lined out for us. I feel that wait, I'm anxious to sink my teeth into. I know some pavement or some pipes, but I'm ready. I'm really anxious to get going on this. I think we have a responsibility to, as a as councilors in our outreach to the public to take some of the information that you've provided us and educate the public about what the risks are. And I particularly appreciate the example from japan. I know we have our own just waiting to happen, so I appreciate it. I just want to say one other thing that may be a little controversial, but I think it would be irresponsible, if not even criminal, of us to not address these issues because they concern our health and safety every single day of every person who lives in Portland. So I feel the weight of this responsibility, and I look forward to working with you. Now we've got questions and comments coming from the other councilors. My colleagues, and I think councilor Smith had her hand up first.
44 Thank you, madam president. Thank you, priya, for the presentations. So I want to go back. I heard a lot of stuff. You all gave me some stuff to be up at night, and so I'm not happy about that because there's so much. I want to know. And I think don said something. I want to know when was there a time in the city of Portland that we were adequately paying for this infrastructure? You've been with the with the city for 30 years. 25 with bts. So when was there a time that we were adequately putting stuff in, or have we always been behind the eight ball and not able to service everything in the way that we would like to?
45 Well, thank you for that question. I think this will have to be a ground truth to some degree. This is my memory, my recollection. But, you know, asset management is a topic that we probably started in earnest around the 2000, maybe 2005, somewhere around there. And prior to that, I think for us, we were really focused on some very innovative work with with Green infrastructure and our stormwater work, and we were not as aware of the impacts that were or the risks that we face with our sanitary system. So the sanitary system was built out and running and doing what it was supposed to do. And then we turned our attention to our stormwater, the stormwater side of our portfolio, and really lost sight of what was happening with wastewater. And by the time, you know, by 2020, when 2020 rolled around, we had an assessment report that revealed some very dramatic risks and shortcomings of our sanitary system. So bs has had we've been very fortunate. The community has funded our work. They support us. They believe in what we do. They they supported us through kind of the expansion of our stormwater programs. There's still a lot of support for that. But what I've had to do in my directorship is bring it back to the interest in the sanitary system. So we still, I think, you know, our funding, we still have steady streams of funding. And we have community support. It's just now that the risks that we face outweigh that. So it isn't that we don't have funding. We do. But we now the risk that we face this deferred work that we've done, that we weren't paying enough attention to, it's big.
46 Okay.
47 So this is specific to bts, not PBOT in water.
48 So I'm trying to go back to a time and go back in history to a time to see when we were doing the best practices to, to be able to, to maintain all of our infrastructure. I have a lot of things on my mind. So the $20 million that you talked about for services for low income folks and underserved folks, do you spin down that $20 million every year?
49 I'd say in the last three years, we definitely have been spending it down. Okay. I will be honest, when I came in, that was one of the things I did notice we were leaving dollars on the table. So we have really enhanced our efforts. We've lowered the barrier in a lot of ways to our programs, increase awareness. We're out in the public more, so those dollars are definitely being spent.
50 So when they were not being spent, what did council do? Do they give you that money back in addition to another $20 million? Okay, no. So it is to your benefit to be out in the community and trying to spend all this money down because you're not going to be able to keep it going.
51 So the bureaus contribute, each of the bureaus contribute a certain percentage each year. And as you know, if rates go up, then we get a slight increase in what the money is. Also, it's so you know, that's we've reached a point of about 20 million now. But we do essentially spend all of that down every crisis voucher. The amount of money, the challenge that we have with the 20 million, honestly, for me is this I think we could be serving more people with those dollars than what we are right now. And that's what we're working on, this data driven approach, trying to be more targeted. You know, we and there may be some customers that can benefit from having no bill at all, but we need to decrease the amount of customers that are getting a $2 bill, a $5 bill, you know, for a quarter. That's pretty that's a pretty substantial subsidy. And so what we're doing now is really looking at how can we be more targeted in those dollars, because I have a lot of people that get priced out of our financial assistance programs because they make $2 too much or $100 too much or something, and we're trying to redistribute those funds in a better way now.
52 Okay.
53 So just an additional comment that about a quarter of our financial assistance is waivers of system development charges is not direct benefits to customers. It is supporting affordable housing initiatives.
54 So about 15 million of it or so is actually going directly to residential or multifamily types of customers.
55 So the individual residential folks, they're only getting $5 million of this.
56 Money, 15.
57 15.
58 15 million.
59 Okay. So I do want to. Your offer, I want to take you up on your offer because we will be having town hall meetings, and it would be great to have your people in those in those meetings to be able to sign folks up. That is so important to me. And. Joel is here from my office. He's sitting in the back. Talk with joel about that. He has a beautiful purple shirt on today, so I like that. Okay. The other piece is the federal government, millicent. They have a they have a bridge list of the worst bridges in the united states. And that's how they determine who gets the funding. First, of the 159 bridges that we have here in the city of Portland, do we have anything that is similar to that so that we know which things need do we have like the worst bridge list or something like that?
60 Yes. I have a series of documents that I'll share with you when we have our future sessions that demonstrate the quality or the vulnerability of our structures. So yes, we do have a prioritized list, or at least a list that identifies all of the challenges we, as I shared in the presentation, we know that the majority of our bridges are at a point where if we don't do something, they are at risk of failure. So I can make sure that we have that ready for you to review. It is something that is very concerning based on the level of investment that's required to maintain a bridge or a retaining wall or other structure, and the imbalance in terms of an investment in being able to maintain that work.
61 And so you brought up the fact that government relations and some other places, they increase the general fund money by 83%.
62 80%, 83%.
63 So it is my thought that if that is the case, if we have more government relations people, I believe that we need to have folks trying to get some of those tiger dollars if they're still there. And on the federal side, and to identify our bridges as a appropriation. I know that's what we did at Multnomah county even before I was at Multnomah county, I was the appropriation person for senator whitten. And that Sellwood bridge was was being talked about for many years before we actually did something about it. And it was actually number one on the list. And so, for me, I believe that our federal government relations folks need to be identifying our bridges and some additional money, because I don't know where else we get money for bridges. And that's why I'm trying to figure out if you all have gave some some great presentations. But I felt a bit of nuance in it, as if there was a time that we were adequately doing this, that we were, you know, the cip. I guess we get 50% of that after we identify the one time only money, and 50% of that money goes into that pot. But I'm feeling like there was a time somewhere that we were we were going, you know, we were doing great in terms of how we were spending our taxpayer dollars on infrastructure. And I'm just trying to figure out when was that time that we were actually doing this, and where were we getting the funds from? Were we always getting the funds from from the general fund? And now you're the 98% because you only get 2% of general fund money?
64 We were PBOT was never getting significant funding from the general fund. Okay. So I want to make sure that I'm stating that as clearly as I can. We have historically only gotten a small portion of our overall 600, roughly $600 million budget comes from general fund. So the rest of that is either from grants and other programs, which the office of government relations does assist us with. We meet with them regularly. We are in lockstep with them in understanding what the opportunities are, what the asks are, and really have a very strong partnership. When we talk about that 83% overhead cost that we're supporting government relations is a very small portion of that. There are there are certainly others that are larger. And we can talk about that when we have the budget discussion. But what I'll share is that there is intentionality about finding resources that are available, and figuring out the strategies for going after those resources. We work to ensure that the grants that we write are very specific and focused. We have gotten some funding for some of the bridges, beauregard bridges, one that I can name off the top of my head that will be funded through some federal appropriation, but that is.
65 A county bridge. Though. The bridge. Did you say did you?
66 Berger?
67 Oh, I thought you said Burnside. Okay.
68 Beauregard. Bridges hours.
69 I got to learn our city bridges.
70 Well, there's 159 of them. I know.
71 Only had 26 at the county.
72 Yeah. So? So we do work with work with them very closely. And in fact, probably in daily conversations with the office of government relations. It's interesting that you would bring that up, though, and I meant to mention it in my talking points as we talk about the restricted funding that we have available. So again, the $600 million budget of that 425 million is restricted. And by restricted I mean it's some of that is grant funds. Some of those funds are roughly $115 million are right now in suspense as we continue to understand what will be happening at the federal level, based on some of the executive orders and other things that have been happening.
73 And so that I have this right now, I have so many questions. I need to follow up with you afterwards, and I'll go on. But so let's be clear, our gas tax money has decreased, which has decreased your budget. That's what has decreased your budget because you know we're going to alternative energy sources. And you know with the electricity you know people are buying more electric cars. And so they're not on the roads as much. So that's that part right. There is a.
74 That is true. Gas taxes and parking revenues have both decreased for the past seven years. That is part of why we're having to make some of the cuts that we're making. But there are also other expenses that have been requested that we meet, right? To ensure that that city operation continues.
75 I just want to remind everybody we have a hard stop at 1130 and we have another presentation.
76 Okay, perfect. I have to have another conversation with with you all because I want to understand how, you know, these new forms of multimodal, you know, forms of transportation has impacted us because I feel like, you know, if someone was listening to this, to this presentation, if they listened to it, it would appear as if we have not been on our job in terms of. You know, dedicating resources to infrastructure. But there are some outside forces that have put us in this position. And it doesn't mean necessarily that that position has been from the city.
77 There's a lot of opportunity to understand all of the factors.
78 Go ahead.
79 Madam chair. Thank you. From the, the in in about about 30 years ago, this council or the previous council did establish the utility licensing fee, which was designed with the goal of at least 28% of that funding coming to infrastructure, specifically to transportation. Okay, over the course of the past 30 years, that funding source, which would account for about $30 million a year, has decreased to zero. All of that funding goes directly to the general fund for other uses.
80 Well, that's what I was talking. I wanted to that's what I wanted to know. Thank you.
81 You're welcome. Let me just remind the committee that at our next meeting on February the 24th, we're going to do a much deeper dive into PBOT. And we can get some of these more of these questions answered and maybe offline as well. But I appreciate appreciate that. In the interest of time, let's see.
82 Let me lower my hand.
83 Sure, sure. Okay. Councilor Green, do you have a quick question?
84 I don't.
85 Know if it's quick, but I'll try to be. Thank you, madam chair. So I think when we think about grants and external funding, you know, because I share your concerns, like, I don't know where this money is going to come from, but it needs to come from somewhere. And as you lay it out, like if you do not raise rates, you will not fund the things that we need to fund. And so it'll be a vicious cycle. So I get that. But I also want to say that, you know, 8.2% per year is it may be in the middle of the benchmark range, but it's really not it's not great. And so I want to offer a potential way to think about this. And you know, if we have to change a policy, you let me know. Or if we have to lobby you, let me know. But when we get one time money, when we get grants for infrastructure, is there a world in which we can think about, rather than use that for new infrastructure, let's use that grant to offset the cost of existing infrastructure that is driving our rate base. And I think about the water filtration plant as a prime example. Okay. That's a regulatory liability that we have no control over really. And it starts at $500 million. Now it's $2 billion. And that drives rates. And so if we if we have an opportunity to get some significant funding from the feds or the state, that would typically would earmark that for new infrastructure, let's have a conversation about saying, let's just write down our regulatory liabilities with that so we can put our rates on a sustainable pace that is closer with the rate of inflation, because 8.2% is almost twice what the current rate of inflation is. And then I think that we get back some goodwill from our community. Okay. So that's just something I would like to offer. And I'll do some thinking on that. So I'll yield.
86 Thank you councilor Green. I'm going to I'm not going to ask you to respond to that, but I'm going to as I said earlier, I think that we are probably going to bring this issue back and also develop work groups that may be cross committee work groups involving the finance committee in the future, in the not too distant future, so that we can address these issues in greater detail with your help, obviously, and your involvement. So I'm going to unless you have something you absolutely have to say.
87 I just want to clarify that our combined rate increase is about 5.5% for both utilities.
88 Thank you. Thank you for that. And thank you so much for being here today. It's been an incredible hour I think hour and a half. So much learning, so many more questions. But I think you have if I can speak for my colleagues, you have our commitment that we're going to work through these issues with you. So thank you so much. Thank you.
89 Thank you.
90 And as we are transitioning, I will turn to, I think, the clerk to read the next item. Please.
91 City asset management.
92 So our second panel today, following up on what we just heard, is going to brief us on our current asset management needs, the work of the committee. I think it's the city asset management group is what kcmg stands for. You all have been meeting and we had access to your report, your 2023 report. Hopefully we've had a chance to look at it, but we're asking you for a pretty high level discussion of this since we have very limited time and we at the dais, we have someone we all know, director maddie from the bureau of fleets, who helped rehabilitate this building or redesign this building, many of whom we met you when we first got a look at the new building. Chris silk is the chair of the committee, I believe, and your manager of parks and rec. That's correct. And then our friend tate white, who many of us spent time during the transition, and who with who is a senior strategic projects manager in city operations. So thank you and take it away.
93 Great. Thank you. Good morning. Committee. For the record my name is if there's a record I'm not sure for committee meetings. My name is maddie sauter. I'm the director of the bureau of fleet and facilities. And I'm here today to represent or on behalf of city administrator mike jordan, to talk about citywide asset management practices. He asked me to come today to both introduce the field of asset management to the committee to introduce the citywide asset managers group and to talk about how citywide asset management practices may be able to be better imbued within the bureaus, which actually is beyond just public works. It also includes parks bts my bureau, every bureau that owns infrastructure moving forward. So chris and tate, if you would like to take a minute to introduce yourselves, go for it.
94 Hi. Good morning. Excuse me. Chair. Clark. Vice chair. Morillo. My name is chris silky. I use he him pronouns. I'm the program manager for asset management for parks and rec. But I'm actually here in my collateral duty position as the chair of the citywide asset management group.
95 Good morning. Councilors. My name is tate white. I use the pronouns. It's so great to see you. Back in 2022, I led a citywide asset management maturity assessment as well as an infrastructure funding assessment. And so I'll be shifting back to thinking about asset management citywide. Happy to be here.
96 Great. So we have a quick presentation to discuss what asset management is. And I think that that's valuable because I think some folks think of asset management as just an entity that manages long lists of to do to do items that are never going to get done because there's never any funding for it. But in reality, asset management is a management practice. It has an international standard that it's guided by called iso 55,000. And it's a management practice that is really intended to identify how to direct very limited funding in the most optimal way for the entities that that that infrastructure serves. And it's used by everything from municipalities to regulated utilities to private companies like railroads and oil and gas companies. Asset management or compliance with iso 55,000, is actually required by some countries for their infrastructure. Organizations. Within the united states, it's utilized by some, mostly as an aspirational best practice. And that's probably the case here as well. But it is one I think, that really can help get to. In particular, some of the questions that councilor Green brought up, which is how do we think about risk in an apples to apples way? How do we take $1 and know that where we put it is the right and best place to put it? And so we thought it would be helpful to speak a little bit to that and then to move on to big questions about how do you handle a 12 to $13 billion backlog? I would also just say for reference, there's a pretty deep bench of asset management expertise at the city. The water bureau in particular has a really excellent asset management practice. Water was one of the first fields to embrace asset management about 25 years ago. Bs is also pretty advanced in its practices across the city, though there really is varying maturity in both the use of the tools as well as the outputs of the tools. And so that is an area that I think charter reform can really help us talk about, which is how do we make sure that every bureau has this as a goal, and how do we help support them from a funding standpoint to get to that goal? So what is asset management again? It's a it's a management practice. It's intended to look at large portfolios of infrastructure to attain essentially the best return on investment for that infrastructure for what we're spending. And that's often really hard to do because there's a lot of competing needs for funding, and there's a lot of risks that are always evolving as folks are trying to tackle really complicated long term problems. At a technical level, asset management is intended to basically balance. If you can think of a kind of a stool that has three legs, one of those stools is performance. So what are our systems supposed to be accomplishing from, you know, allowing freight to travel or making sure we have clean water. So that's service level performance. It's looking at risks which are what is our risk risk thresholds and what are we willing to let fail and not let fail and then cross? What are our life cycle costs for advancing work? And actually, to councilor Smith's questions earlier, I think part of the reason that asset management as a field became popular is because for many, many decades, people were building these huge asset bases that were very durable and assets tend to have very long failure curves. They tend to be hard to see, and they tend to be very easy to ignore. And I think as the field started maturing, that happened because we were still growing our capacity and our systems at the same time that systems that we had earlier built started to fail. And so suddenly you end up with these competing priorities. Am I trying to expand capacity or am I trying to reinvest in that which I already own? And really, what is the best way to do this? Sometimes it might be capital, other times it might be actually better preventive maintenance. And you can think of your car in that way. So this is a field that really emerged as people tried to balance a lot of different competing priorities that suddenly had a lot of pressure on them. I will also note that costs have really gone up over the last half century. That's not just inflation. It's also because we we've started expecting things that we didn't expect before. And the most simple example is safety. So if you look at pictures of skyscrapers being constructed in new york or even go to bpa and look at, I think they have a picture of a giant turbine, you know, people are just hanging out. We don't do that anymore. So as you start instilling things like osha or you start having assessments of how you should be doing, work, costs go up and so suddenly you have a lot more to do, and you have a lot fewer resources to do it with. And so I don't know that there was ever an optimal time in terms of what we had, other than maybe 1950s. But certainly over the last several decades, we've started to just have more to do than what I think we could reasonably keep up with. And so in line with that, infrastructure, asset management is really about having a comprehensive, systematic way to look at things and to think about things and to have visibility into your system so that you can be very strategic about what it is that you choose to do. And I think that's really important for the city. We have $75 billion in assets. They were built over the course of 130 years to all different standards and all different eras. They're spread throughout the region, and for a long time. I think it's also important to acknowledge the institutional element of this. There are also managed by basically five separate ceos, some of whom really didn't maybe have a background in infrastructure before they were making decisions about what to do with their funding. And so I think there's a sense on on the part of city administrator jordan, that charter reform is the moment. Right? This is the time when we can start thinking about how we do things comprehensively. How do we look at risk comprehensively? How do we have common capital planning processes, which we don't necessarily have, or common sips? And within that, how do we become much more strategic about what we look at and what we choose to do? Acknowledging, of course, that we have very different sources of funding. And I think that that's incredibly important to emphasize. The public works bureau is truly our kind of financially demarcated off. But then that also means that other organizations have very little money available to them, not because of that demarcation, but they have very little available to them. So we really aren't an $8.2 billion city. We're kind of two cities financially. But but even within that, we should be able to speak to what's happening in an apples to apples way. This is a little example, and I do want to say that the kmg could give a masterclass in in this. And we did actually do that in 2020, 2021, 2022. The citywide asset managers group met with every elected official at that time separately, and we walked through an intensive two hour overview of how one could do asset management. And there's a little wheel on the next slide, but the long and the short of it is that all of us have to have a good inventory of what we even own. And that gets back to our data systems. Some of us have point based assets, some of us have vertical assets, some of us have linear assets. There's polygon assets. Some of us, like parks, have all of those in one system. So getting information about our assets is really vital in order to be able to look comprehensively at, at systems and even neighborhoods, we think about how to assess the likelihood and consequence of asset failures. So that's from an engineering standpoint. What are our failure modes and probabilities from a consequence standpoint? What happens if something fails? If sometimes if you have an individual asset fail, you have that cascade through your entire system and you think you can think of a process system like pipes in that way, sometimes there are concentrations of risk in a neighborhood. And if we are modeling risk and then apples to apples way, we could start seeing and visualizing those concentrations. And I think I'm hearing a lot of that in your safety corridors for example. So really thinking about where do we have concentrations of risk, where should we be looking to take action is an idealistic endeavor, but it's one that takes a lot of maturity and development on the bureau's parts to be able to get there and to speak equally to things. Modeling risk can be done in all kinds of different ways. I built the asset management program for the grid when I was at pge. We built massive economic life models here that may not be possible. Maybe we do something more simplistic like a matrix, but doing it consistently, I think, is key to ending up with that comprehensive vision of what we want to do. And then overall, we need to be thinking about how to ensure that the solutions that we pick are really optimal. And that's a lot of business case analysis. Again, sometimes it's not just capital investment. Sometimes it's better actually, and cheaper to maintain something a little bit better than it is to wait until it fails and then to fix it, in fact, most times. And lastly, then we have to take action. And I think I would be remiss if I didn't take off my hat and put on my city operations hat for a second. Taking action to get to workforce development in particular. To take action, you have to be ready to do that. You have to have contracts in place. You have to have staff that can deliver. You have to have technology resources available to manage and monitor the effort, like capital planning and capital controls. You have to have fleet vehicles available. So I know I saw a chart with the general fund overhead and the interagency dollars going way up. I would love to see that chart in dollars. It is really, really hard to have workforce development if you don't spend money on air. So a more comprehensive discussion about those charts, I do think is in order. This is the wheel that the kmg has really kind of advertised in terms of the competencies that organizations need to have to be able to do their work. They need information systems, they need risk assessment methodologies that are comparable. Everybody should be engaging in long range planning. That's really looking at things collectively. I think rate planning is an example of that. We should have an established business case methodology, where we're looking at trade off decisions and trying to figure out what's the most optimal way to perform. We should be able to deliver capital controls, I think are a rich area for discussion in terms of where can we get more out of what we are already spending, and then maintenance is a huge part of the asset life cycle. It's the most expensive part of an asset's life. And so making sure that we have adequate funding for maintenance and support maintenance is critical. And again, all of our bureaus vary in their maturity in this space. So to get to the citywide asset managers group, what is it? I think as don mentioned, it's been around in some form for the last 25 years, but really it was an affinity group for a long time. Now it is becoming more formalized in the way that it is interacting with the city. And at present, I know that the organizational chart for the new form of government actually had a citywide asset management office that would work on promoting a lot of this systematized systemization of asset management practices. That office hasn't been set up yet, but I believe it was originally envisioned maybe in budget and finance or maybe in the city operations group or maybe public works. I don't think that's been determined yet, but I do feel like there's a strong interest in having that organization. This is a list of everybody who is on the kmg. It's predominantly infrastructure owners, but it's also stakeholders. And the recent deliverables that the kanji has produced are to the left. So there's an asset management policy now for the city to lead the maturity and funding assessment in 2022. Those were released in 2023. I think what kmt is best known for is that citywide assets report, which is that laundry list of everything that's that's troubling. And there actually is also an audit going on right now, led by the auditor's office of citywide asset management practices. So the kmt is participating in that. As, you know, kind of an informant, I guess I would say into that, that that sounded horrible, but an informant into that process, these are some just high level bits of the asset management maturity assessment and funding assessment findings. For the most part, they focus on the fact that not every infrastructure owning bureau has had the same access to resources to develop their competencies, whether it's data systems or risk management practices. And so funding is needed for capital, but it is also needed for organizational development. If you don't have data to bring to the table, then you don't get to be in that conversation about what to fund. A lot of this is really a lot of there are a lot of findings in this about the challenges of the commission form of government, and what better governance could create and provide for asset management. And so great job we did that one check, but we still have more to do, I think, as you can see. But hopefully bringing up the organizational aspects of these bureaus and getting more governance and more processes in place will allow us to then see the picture holistically and just to close out and open it for q&a. There are some things I think that will be very interesting in this conversation because of course we now also have districts. So, you know, we'll it will be interesting to see how the conversation goes between district level investments and central plants. You know, we need a treatment plant. We need a filtration plant. We need a bigger 911 center. Those are assets that aren't unique to any one district. They're citywide assets, and they need to be funded. Likewise, we need support for public investments that are, frankly, invisible. Bts is a big asset owner. They own the entire radio network for the emergency system. No one would ever know that there's assets underground that nobody thinks about. There's assets hidden in corners that no one thinks about, but they have to be supported. Even if there's not the political will there to clamor for them, or the whole system starts to fall apart. And then lastly, there's new and emerging risks. So we have seen that with everything from climate coming in and creating new pressure all the way to something happening, you know, probably about 3500 miles to the east. Right. Is the funding even going to be there? And so keeping those risks in mind as we make big long term decisions, I think is vital. So I think I'm at my 15 minutes. So I'll close it out and open it up for discussion.
97 Thank you maddie. That's a terrific I think our heads are probably throbbing right now with the complexity and that you've done such a great job of laying out for us. I'm going to just take the privilege of asking you a question and knowing that we really only have ten minutes, and we do have a hard stop, and we have a couple of announcements we have to make. But I'm just curious, what do you think the auditor's report will say?
98 Two years?
99 I don't I don't know that they're in the in the drafting process. I think the first step was scoping. Exactly what are we talking about for citywide asset management? I, I think the history of the kmg. You know, we said it's been around for 20 or more years. This volunteer group, you know, we meet once a month and we throw together a report. You know who's going to edit it. Oh I'm going to edit it, you know, so it's kind of ad hoc, somewhat thrown together over the course of 20 years. Even that policy is actually pointed to by many other cities in the country right now is, oh, look at portland's policy. It's a great policy. Not a lot of other larger cities have anything like that. So I think there's going to be some great things to point to. And when you heard the previous presentations and learn about this massive backlog, where is that disconnect? And so and so how can how can the city turn that corner around the actual investments and infrastructure? So my hope is that it'll get into some specific recommendations for that.
100 And I would just briefly add, I think the city has a lot of great practices, but our capital planning and financial planning have have gotten off track a little bit just because of the commission form of government. There's a real opportunity for us to be more coordinated and have more strategic prioritization process. And we really have that with the mayor council form of government. We have that opportunity to move that forward.
101 Thank you. And I think I think that we can see that now and we appreciate that collaboration and potentially consolidation. Do you think that the auditor's report will recommend the need for an asset management office?
102 I don't know that I would ever want to speculate what an auditor report will say, but possibly I yeah, I would imagine so. I think it's I think it's a useful I mean, it's either an office or it's a directive perhaps that the bureaus be funded to all have equal maturity and then to collaborate to do it in a more methodical way. One of the two has to happen. And however however that manifests, I think is really up to the city. But I would say moving out of the commission form of government and moving into a place where we have governance that can create some sort of systematic view and some sort of systematic way to do things is critical. And then, you know, historically, also there's been this giant divide between policy and what is actually happening at the city. And so that is maybe one caution also for the council is to say, as we adjudicate these roles between policy and operations, let's make sure that we stay connected. Right. This is a collaborative endeavor, and you don't want policy out promising things that it can't. You can't deliver on, and you don't want operations doing things that you know aren't at all in alignment where we want to see things go. So it's as much an emotional and organizational time, I would say right now as it is a technical time. And so probably making sure we have those roles and responsibilities and that that workflow clear is, is vital as we move into the new form of government. And then because we have trust and we collaborate, then we can think about, you know, how do we want to do this? Where should it be? What's the best manifestation? Is it this committee or is it a citywide office. So I think that there's a lot up in the air right now, and I think it's just authentic and important to acknowledge that.
103 I appreciate your very clear eyed analysis and laying that out for us. I think some of us see that and we're all hoping for the best, but I hope that we can check in with you as we go along together in this process and that we keep our powder dry for a while on any kind of policy as we continue to learn and work through issues. Thank you so much for coming today, all three of you. It's great to see you and I appreciate all the work that you've done on kmg and your willingness to meet with us and line this out for us today. Thank you so much.
104 You're welcome. Thank you, thank you.
105 So I'm going to make a couple of announcements before we adjourn. As I mentioned earlier, we're going to have a deeper dive into PBOT on our Monday, February the 24th meeting. And we're also going to be setting aside considerable time for public input at that. At that meeting, the second half of that meeting. And if there's any individuals or organizations that you want to invite, would you please let the vice chair and I know and we'll process that. And if there aren't any other questions, I think I'm going to bring us in on time for the next committee that's coming in in the next half hour. So with that, I will adjourn.
106 The.
107 First meeting of the transportation and infrastructure committee. Thank you everyone.