The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-08-12
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (20,404 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 Arts and Economy Committee met on August 12, 2025, opening with roll call, a statement of conduct, and unanimous-consent approval of prior meeting minutes. The bulk of the session was devoted to a presentation on the state of Portland's music economy, featuring an artist introduction on music education and community, an economic-impact overview covering venues, recording studios, record labels, manufacturers, and retail, and a national independent-venue study noting profitability challenges since the pandemic. Panelists discussed UK "agent of change" policy as a model for protecting venues from nearby development, home rehearsal noise code issues, regulatory coordination across city bureaus, musician loading zones, and comparisons with Seattle/King County's music office and commission structures. A set of ten policy recommendations was presented, including venue protection measures, noise code adjustments, a small-venue roundtable, expanded loading zones, seasonal noise variances, improved inspection documentation, a creative economy director position, and a city music office. Committee members raised questions about sequencing, budget offsets, and jurisdictional limits on such recommendations. Public testimony followed from musicians, manufacturers, union representatives, and nonprofit organizers, addressing insurance costs, fair wages, all-ages venues, and manufacturing ties to the local music scene. Closing discussion touched on aligning economic priorities, public safety near entertainment districts, and plans for further data review at a future meeting, with the next session scheduled for September 9. No vote tallies were reported; any votes taken are recorded in the vote ledger.
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 Good morning. I call the meeting of the arts and economy committee to order. It is Tuesday, August 12th at 9:30 a.m. Diego, will you please call the roll?
1 Good morning. Clerk. Dunphy. Here. Here. Smith. Ryan. Here. Green.
2 Here. Craig, will you please read the statement of conduct?
3 Welcome to this meeting of the arts and economy committee. To testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at. Ed.gov. Agenda and economy committee. Or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In-person testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The chair preserves order. Disruptive conduct such as shouting. Refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, state your name for the record. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
4 Thanks so much for that reminder, craig. So, colleagues, members of the public, today's meeting, the arts and economy committee will first will do the very exciting work of approving our previous committee meeting minutes. But then after that, we're going to have, I think, what's going to be a great presentation on the state of portland's music economy and hear related public testimony. So with that data, will you please read, actually, before I go on, do you have a sense of how many people are signed up for public comment?
5 We have about nine individuals signed up.
6 Perfect. That'll help me moderate. Okay. So, diego, will you please read item number one?
7 Item one, June 3rd, 2025 to July 8th, 2025. Arts and economy committee minutes. Committee meeting minutes include the disposition agenda, which documents the actions committees take on each agenda item. The minutes also include the closed caption file, a speaker list, and audio files for each meeting. Minutes are presented for approval once a month for the previous months meetings. Minutes are approved by unanimous consent.
8 Thanks, diego. Looking at my colleagues here, does anyone object to adopting the minutes by unanimous consent? I'm seeing none. Okay, minutes are adopted. Before we move on to item two, I want to offer my co-chair an opportunity to say a couple things. You had something you wanted to bring.
9 Thank you so much, co-chair Green. Good morning. And it's exciting today that we will dive into something very important the music economy. I also want to make sure that we have about 15 minutes at the end to talk about more big picture economy. It can't be lost on us that our city is in really challenging times economically, and I wanted us to have some dialog at the end of this meeting so we can get, I don't know if it's about being aligned or at least being on the same page that this is urgent and that we kind of look at where we're going over the next three months. And I just think it's important in the committee structures that we have that transparency in meetings about the economy. Thank you.
10 I think we should have enough time to entertain that.
11 I think we should. When I was looking at the calendar, it looked like 15 minutes would be conservative. We could probably even maybe have more like 30 if it happens. So okay. All right. Thanks so much.
12 Okay with that. Diego, will you please, please read item number two.
13 Item two. The state of portland's music economy.
14 Okay, before I hand it over to councilor Dunphy, I just wanted to say a couple framing remarks. When I was a kid in this city. It was a really exciting place to enjoy local music. And that music seemed to sort of bubble up from the ground, up from just kind of scrappy artists who were, I think, painting this town with an identity that I found to be pretty magical. And I think when I think about the state of our music economy, I don't think about live nation. I think about our homegrown heroes in the music scene. So I'm excited and grateful that you've led this panel today, and I won't steal any more of your thunder. Why don't you kick us off here?
15 Thank you, chair Green. Co-chair. Green colleagues, many of you know me as the music counselor. This is a. You know, I spent my 20s in the back of a tour van playing music with my best friends. It's not about fun for me, though. This is something much bigger. Portland needs a unifying, inspiring vision for what the future of Portland is, one that brings economic development, public safety, community, and our identity into focus. For me, the obvious idea is the music industry. Portland's music industry punches well above its weight, and this morning we're going to hear directly from some major players in that industry. We made them get up early. That's pretty unfair. I apologize. You know, in addition to hearing about the state of the economy, we're going to have some specific recommendations on how we can fix regulation and permitting to create intentional paths for music and remove barriers that today marks the beginning of a policy conversation. We've spent months and years, in some cases, talking to people in the industry, to understand how the city of Portland intersects with the broad music economy. After today, I'll be leading a series of roundtables and listening sessions to with the intention of bringing a package of policies to the city council to officially recognize Portland as a major music city. With that, I will turn it over to my music and arts policy advisor, eben hoffer.
16 Well, hello, I am going to share the screen here. Well, that's not right. That's not right at all. Well, yes. Welcome, folks, and glad to be with you here. There we go. All right. Let's look at the agenda. So we've had our first introductions here. And then we're going to have an overview of the economic impact of the music industry in Portland, presented to us by mayor mclaughlin and jim brunberg. Then a comment, some discussions on how to protect the existing spaces that we have that are at risk as the city becomes more expensive and we build more densely in mixed use zones, a conversation about streamlining city regulation and enforcement as it relates to public assembly places, so that we can do a better job putting cultural events first, and then a conversation about music and nighttime economy development. Each of those sections are going to come with a few recommendations at the end for what we hope to bring forward later this year. And then we'll close and we'll all have cake and talk about the economy more generally. I want to start us off. We're so grateful to have a great Portland artist, esperanza spalding, here with us, to just give an introduction and talk a little bit about what coming up in Portland as an artist has been like.
17 Thank you so much. Good to be with you all this morning. Firstly, I just want to name that around the world right now there are like exponential. There's an exponential growth in the research and the findings that show music helps communities thrive. Be well, it helps children's brains develop. It helps us develop functional social skills, create webs of community, sense of connection, build our empathy. It helps with all the outcomes in the stem categories. And I want to name that. As cities around the world are trying to figure out how to really integrate this knowledge into curriculum and community practice and city practice, I have the memory from growing up in Portland of that already existing. So when I was a kiddo in the late 80s and early 90s, I, I got I thought it was normal that if you were a kiddo, you would get an instrument and you would be able to go to multiple community music programs and connect with people who were further along with you in their development as musicians, and you would have spaces to play with your elders and your mentors. You would have spaces to play with your youth ensembles. So all of that, I just, I thought was how things worked. If you're a person who is alive and I of course realize as life went on, that no, in fact, that wasn't somehow like a code written into the strategy of the city. That was from the hard, tireless work of grown up people, grown up professional musicians who recognize there was a gap, that there was a profound lack, actually, in the access to music education for youth. And so they use their own energy, time and money to create these programs and really cover the age demographics that I would have been included within. And so, yes, being in those music programs definitely set a foundation for me to then go on and become a thriving professional musician within Portland in my teenage years and obviously beyond out in the world. I am a full time professional musician now for the last 25 years, and what I want to really point to, which to me felt so integral to those times is the place and the community. The mentorship that was facilitated by these grown up professional musicians really doing what they shouldn't have had to be doing. But they did it. And I, I can testify to the impact that those pockets of community and connection, mentorship, education and then having the venues to go take what we were learning into the impact that that had on all of us who were in those programs, including the parents, including everybody who was in the audience in those venues. So I just I want to testify that we have already we have been living in at least when I was a child, we have been living in the embodiment of what so many cities around the world are trying to figure out how to make possible. And so I feel we're we're prime already to get behind the cultural practices that are already well established and alive in the city. But to what I heard, people pointing towards the economic shifts in the city are making it harder and harder and harder and harder for goodwilled musicians to keep these spaces and these programs alive. So I feel hopeful that through the work that we're all going to do here together, we can properly nourish and feed and keep alive this integral strand of the fabric of what makes our city great. And I will stop there. Thank you so much for listening.
18 Thank you so much. All right. Thanks, esperanza. And now we'd like to bring up mayor mclaughlin, the founder of music Portland, to give us a view of the music economy from the top. There is a lot here, from education to venues to manufacturers and everything in between. So she'll give us a sense of what's really here. Mirror.
19 Hello everyone. For the record, my name is marin mclaughlin. I'm founder of music Portland and music Oregon, and the former executive director. I live in northeast Portland. First to frame my data a little bit. This is this is an analysis of Portland and oregon's for profit music center sector, which some assume falls under arts and culture. But all the formal analysis of arts and culture, typically by design, excludes the for profit music sector. So the good news is, all the figures that I'm going to be presenting here are additive to any arts and culture data that you may already have seen and been exposed to. So that's the good news. Portland's independent music sector is an economic and cultural imperative in our city. It makes people want to live, work and visit here, and it's evolved organically, but it is losing ground for lack of strategic, public and private support. Oh, I'm not you're not showing my.
20 I'll follow you.
21 Well, they can't see it. I mean, I'm pretty, but there.
22 We go.
23 Okay. So the state legislature in mid 2023 recognized commercial for profit music as an emerging economic sector. And this was a groundbreaking recognition. They also funded a statewide census and a statewide economic impact study of this sector, to give the first numbers ever available to really talk about the economic impact, they presented the report with caveats, because music is extremely nonstandard in the way that it reports things, but even so, claiming that it's underreported by as much as 30% $3.8 billion statewide is the economic impact of for-profit music, with easily 80% of that falling within Portland. So one of the challenges with this data is that naics is not a sufficient industry standard code to track these things, so music doesn't fall within it. When I looked in 2019, 60% of 200 top music brands.
24 Briefly, can you just explain what naics is for the audience?
25 Sure. Yeah. The national it's the industry standard code that the government applies, that when you start a business you give yourself a code. Most people in music had never had it mean anything. They'd never been counted. It didn't seem to matter. So people like cdbaby were under other retail, excluding tobacco. Hundreds of millions of dollars in music economy, economic impact that wasn't ever counted. So that's the reason nobody ever really saw it before. This data. The blue data is from the 50 states of music. That was a state, a national study, but it exclusively used naics codes as their as their data source for economic impact. And the problem is that some cities are more mature. I think seattle is a more mature market. People understand they've been doing studies for longer, and they understand that having the naics codes makes a difference. But the red bar there is what we found when we looked deeper, even with the caveats of the economist gave. So I think it's important to understand there's a lot more study and research that's needed. Looking at the comparative economic impact. No other cities well, a few other cities have done economic analysis of this sector. But in many cases the devil's in the detail.
26 So yeah. Can I ask a question for clarification? If you go back to the other slide. So I see your slide, I see Oregon with the red much higher. If the other states did the same scrub as you did with theirs, have a red line that goes way up as well.
27 If they had one that matched. The thing about the blue is it was all measured on the same floor.
28 And that was all apples and apples.
29 Yeah, it was apples to apples I didn't want to presume to put in theirs. Other because some of the others, some of the other cities or states that did analysis would include the symphony in theirs. We wouldn't that would. We didn't want to double count nonprofit.
30 I thought you said that, but I wanted to hear it again.
31 Yeah, yeah.
32 And we really that's a question mark on the, the how much they dug into what you're saying. Yeah, but you weren't going to presume that you could look at their data for them.
33 Fair.
34 Okay. Thank you.
35 So in terms of comparative economic impact, looking at different sectors within the Portland ecosystem, I think bears looking at the for profit music sector holds its own. Absolutely, as Jamie says, punches above its weight for being an organically evolved music sector of businesses, venues and musicians. You're looking with the conservative estimates, it nearly matches all revenue from Portland restaurants. It is 60% of all the revenue from all tourism activities. And, you know, cannabis is recognized as an emerging industry, but its impact is tiny, respectively. So talking about employment, the without sales tax, obviously it matters. It's notable that it we outstrip fishing cannabis and logging in the state. Looking at our one more looking at our data in context again with other Portland sectors, you know, outdoor apparel, Oregon tourism and Oregon tech are clearly, you know, celebrated as, as important sectors. But the employment you can look, we're right up with them. You know, we are we are a significant industry and we deserve to be recognized and supported and strategically considered that way. So this is a big ecosystem, and it is a complex set of interdependencies. Every single thing you see on this, on this graphic we have in Portland, I'm going to go through some of the key things because we rank well in the top end of in almost every single category. So musicians, we have over 10,000 unique recording acts with multiple people, multiple people per act, according to cd baby, in the last few years from Portland, zip codes representing diverse genres and many also working as educators, many of these were not counted in our economic impact study. Independent venues and festivals from dedicated ticketed venues to small bars, restaurants with frequent live music. Pdx has nearly double nashville's number of venues and 30% more than austin. We host more than 30 music festivals and many hotels, galleries and even retail stores present occasional music performances. Production. There are 93 recording studios in Portland. Many work with national and international artists. Production costs are half of la's and 30 to 40% less than seattle's. Positioning Portland as an active music production destination, but it needs promotion and amplification. Distribution and record labels. We have over 91 record labels like tender loving, empire, fluff and gravy, and kill rock stars. We have major single licensing brokers like marmoset and maximal, and music distribution platforms, including industry pioneers like cd baby. That was the first distribution service for independent artists. Now it's the third largest globally, but the largest globally. Distro kid has recently opened a satellite office in Portland. Discogs, another company is the largest globally, the largest online database and marketplace for physical music. These are businesses that actually grew during COVID, which is the one exception to our COVID suffering instrument gear. 67 manufacturers in Portland. The economic impact study confirmed that Oregon has two times as many employees in this manufacturing music manufacturing sector as the national level, internationally respected Portland brands like benson apps, barefoot audio, campfire audio, ear trumpet labs and many others. A number of Portland makers are also the uncredited manufacturing partners for some of the largest music brands in the world. Portland produces everything required for a complete backline everything you see on stage during a performance, every chord, every mic stand, every drum head, every cymbal, every guitar, every horn, every it's all made here. And that is unique in the country. This is a big opportunity to attract new traded sector makers, large and small, to Portland as a major industry. Finally, retail specifically records more independent record stores are here than in any other us city. There are nearly 40 of them in new york. Reports about 20, including music millennium. That's the oldest in the pacific northwest, hosting pop up shows with grammy winners and top acts. And the owner, terry currier, is credited with creating record store day that is said to have saved independent record stores worldwide. So next slide. So talking about induced economic impact, the arts and economic prosperity report and its sixth edition reported that people attending arts and culture, nonprofit arts and culture performance events in Portland spend an average of $36.45 per ticketholder, excluding the cost of the ticket on food and drink and incidentals. So if the economic impact, the induced economic impact that's credited against those performances is based on the number of bodies, then the idea of looking closely at how many people attend events. When you're looking at this, all of the methodology for these numbers and the sources and what I count and don't count are in the addendum at the end of the deck that I'll be sharing. But even conservatively and calculating at a fraction of what probably is happening, that's the way it looks. And so it's about acknowledging that music powers our larger economy, our restaurants or bars, our retail. Workforce. Where am I in time? I don't have the timer.
36 You've you've got a few more minutes. Okay. Five more minutes.
37 Okay. Oh I'm slamming okay, okay. Workforce development retention. I have confirmed with some major employers in the city and also had staff confirmation of the general consensus that seems to be held by the business community, that the top influences, sort of external influences that help them to attract and retain young, college educated, highly employable talent in a creative market is our popular music sector, our natural environment and our celebrated food culture. And that's a trifecta of competitive advantage. Imagine what would happen if we actually promoted or if travel Portland, or if gpi actually promoted our music sector as a self-serving value for them, not as philanthropy or anything else. So there's a huge opportunity here. Greater Portland and Portland, metro chamber and better business have all confirmed this reality. Again. So talking about music tourism, it's the fastest growing travel trend in the world right now. And it it's understood by local hotels that business travel is in decline because we can zoom, we can do whatever we need. So there isn't as much demand there. They are absolutely looking and all the travel conferences that they attend say it's experience based travel, specifically music. That is the place they should be focusing their energy travel. Portland despite many years of trying to convince them of this, still sort of buries our music culture under the culturist identity. They've got the shopper, the adventurist, the there's one other, and then the culturist and oh, the eater and but but I've tried to get them to understand that we are different from just the larger culture and their systems to promote. It's not their fault, but the system is to promote. Events are focused on large, singular events. They cannot possibly represent the 1200 promoted music shows, and that's only a part of them that happen in Portland every single month. So we need to find a new way to work with them and to engage them in the idea that this is a major travel asset, a tourist lure, that they are not leveraging. There needs to be investment to quantify the scope and inform music tourism strategy. One thing that I did was worked with six of the top of the largest music venues in the city, and one promoter looking at about 2 million purchased tickets and with zip code data analysis confirmed that 23% of those 2 million tickets were sold to people for more than 50 miles outside of Portland. That kind of analysis should continue and should be something that we're using to leverage it. You give me the eyeball. So music tourism, just to give a context, we need to create a strategy citywide that promotes not just large events, but also persistent music activity across the city. So this one waterfront blues festival, you know, they're an amazing asset. We want to keep them going. But Portland music month, it's a month long celebration of music in January to get people out. Had 23 venues participate in 2023, 2024. Had a terrible ice storm, but 2023 we sold 91% as many tickets in that month. At just 23 of our 300 venues. 91% as many tickets as the waterfront blues festival did. This is a potential year round driver for economy, for induced income and for tourism. So the takeaways I think I'm okay in five minutes. For 15 years, as our city prospered, Portland was consistently ranked in the top five music cities in the us. We were alongside nashville, austin and seattle, which are the other three cities that were credited in 2019, as have the fastest growing job markets in the country. Three of those are recognized music cities. One got there by the efforts of other people like esmeralda, said esperanza. So the rank was ours to lose. And we did. Over the past six years, dozens of other cities have actively invested in assessing and promoting their local music cultures, fueling economic growth and tourism. And despite our dominance in nearly every part of the ecosystem, Portland has fallen off most of these lists. Our professional music ecosystem needs to mature. To do so, it needs strategic policy support, public private investment, intentional promotion to cultivate engagement from residents, tourists, existing employers and businesses. Considering a move here, investment does not need to cannibalize other arts funding specifically because, rather than philanthropic motivations, it support can be done for measurable economic development and return on investment strategy needs to consider the ecosystem holistically, not just the artists or the venues or events. And one final word is beyond qualitative or quantitative factors. I urge you to avoid supporting music solely as a means to other ends. Keep Portland music at the heart of any strategic plan. While music does enrich young minds and it boosts tourism and attracts a young workforce and influences new businesses to come here, portland's music's true value lies in its distinct local reputation. Well earned as an innovative incubator, tastemaker and authentic creative hub, many cities have a large corporate owned venue, but. But it's crucial to understand what makes our music scene unique and what defines its value. Otherwise, we'll lose it and our competitive advantage. Thank you.
38 Thank you mara. Thank you.
39 So much. So much.
40 Now next up we have jim brunberg from mississippi studios, revolution hall and the vice president of the national independent venue association, to give a closer look at the role of independent venues in our city. Jim.
41 Good morning. Is it still morning? For the record, my name is jim brunberg. I own mississippi studios. I'm a musician, a traveler, a composer, and I wanted to start a place to record music and play music. So I started and built mississippi studios from the ground up and then with partners, built some other venues like revolution hall, and now we have 240 employees, and we consider ourselves to be sort of in the right, in the crux of what meera so eloquently talked about. I'm going to try to be super brief. I don't have the experience in advocacy that meera has, but I'm always so inspired to hear about all the different aspects. I'm going to speak about one little chapter. It was in the upper left corner of that diagram and that's venues, independent venues. Before I get to the study though, I just want to set it up by saying that people don't drive to Portland and spend a weekend here to get a really great sandwich, or to experience chip manufacturing at its finest. They come to be in the presence of somebody like esperanza spalding, to be in the presence of, of musicians and to share an experience that that is a unifying experience. And I think that venues I have I have some notes here that I want to say before we I'll just breeze through the neva study, but I'm going to leave it with you. We regardless of how good the stake is or how great the brunch is at mother's, people really come here to share in-person experiences, and that's where venues come in handy. And that's why I think venues can save cities. And I've said this in every forum that I've possibly been in, but for every buck a person spends on a show, they spend 12 more dollars. Everywhere else they go. It's rhymes. Even I almost sang it to you, but it's too early in the morning. That means they're going to go out and get brunch at mother's the next day. They're going to stay in a hotel, they're going to use public transportation. They're going to use cabs. They're going to go out for dinner. They're going to get drinks, they're going to go shopping downtown. And I think that venues in this way can save cities. And I don't say that to over to drum up some sort of sense of importance for what me and my incredible team do. I've just seen it happen in neighborhoods. I've seen it happen in cities. I've seen you, some of you at shows, and I see you having the time of your lives. So the let me make sure there's nothing else. So. So I formed an organization called independent venue coalition that is 55 nonprofit venues and theaters. So this counts all all types of live in-person performance, 55 nonprofit venues, and 35 for profit venues in the state of Oregon. That's called independent venue coalition. And then simultaneous to that, and this all happened when the COVID hit the fan. Simultaneous to that, venue, owners around the country were getting together for the first time. Like mia said, we're an unusual industry. We don't share information in the same way through trade organizations until recently, but now we have niva and that's the national version and that represents the same thing. It's tax blind, tax status blind. So there's nonprofits and there's for profits and it's about 5050 nationally. We wanted to know more about the state of our industry and the state of the impact of what we do as independent music venues and theaters. So we did a hot off the presses. I haven't really had a chance to go through it in depth, but this is I'll tell you just a few things about the national study. In my remaining minute and a half or so here, we'll just kind of breeze through this, but also know that coming in the next 60 days or so is a city version of this. So the office of arts and culture has agreed to participate and partner with niva in putting together the Portland report. Some of these numbers will seem sort of general, but I think that they apply pretty well to the Portland and regional market. So about niva, it's about several thousand venues. I think about 1500 of them participated in this. There's a lot of lot about the study. You can skip this slide because I only have a few minutes, and I don't want to drown you in details here. There's great pictures. Key results of this study show that despite what you're hearing about the strength of the music industry nationally from the big corporate entities who are telling us that music is huge and is having a boom, and taylor swift is bolstering things, and we're seeing tickets sell for $2,000 and blah, blah, blah. Despite what you hear, independent venues are having a hard time making things work. So you can see on the right side of that 64, nearly two thirds of independent venues are reporting that they have not been profitable since COVID. There are some pretty serious reasons for that. Some of it has to do with the economy. Some of it has to do with just changed behaviors. People have become habituated from coming and making a whole evening of what you grew up doing when you were a kid, going to shows, but they're getting back into it, and every time I see them get back into it, it brings tears to my eyes. When I see people who tell me they haven't come to a show in five years because they didn't feel safe because of COVID, or because things had changed, and they just got really into streaming netflix or whatever. I'm so happy and they are coming back. But in order to really reestablish its footing and to further affect the economy, we need the recognition that councilor Dunphy is talking about as an economic force. Some of the challenges that we're facing are the influx of monopolies into new markets. Some of it has to do with the insurance companies and their I won't say greed because I have an insurance company that insures me. I'm certainly not talking about them, but the rates have skyrocketed. And it's not because anything bad happens in the symphony hall or in the wow hall in eugene, or in revolution hall. It's because people seize an opportunity and a narrowing scope of available entities who are willing to insure music venues rents up. People don't drink as much as they used to, and that can be a good thing. So we're trying to diversify our revenue streams and recognize that when people come out to see a show, it's not about just spilling beer all over the floor and getting as rowdy as possible. It's a cultural experience. Whether you're a for profit punk venue in northeast Portland, or whether you're the symphony hall, people are there for the experience and the culture not to drink. This is just some information about venues that are in niva and pretty much the same for ivc, which is the Oregon version. 143 nights of average programing, 91% of us are operating all year round, but there are 1,010% of us are summer festivals and sort of more episodic. Next slide. This is a pretty big number. And this this astounded us. This is us. And 9.2% of total us travel and tourism is because of independent venues. So you take out the big stadiums, you take out the sheds, take out, take out aeg and live nation from the equation. People are still traveling. It accounts for 10% of people's trips. That's incredible. It's an amazing statistic. There's some pretty big mind boggling numbers for me, 10.62 trillion or billion. Sorry. We have 316,000 employees. You're seeing this on your screen too. So I won't just keep reading numbers to you. But this is a really big industry. It's never been aggregated before. This is the first economic study nationally that takes a lot of this stuff into consideration. And like I said, you'll see the Portland numbers in the fall, and I think it'll back up a lot of what mia is saying. And this is just again, this is just a small part. This is just venues, not manufacturing, not recording that and all the other things that were on that beautiful, interconnected ellipses that she showed. Just another way of looking at the numbers, how much independent venues contribute to taxes nationally, 3.14 billion. State taxes 4.17. It really adds up. And if you put those together, I think it's about $20 billion in tax revenue that are paid by venues, just independent venues. Next slide please. I think this number is actually an underrepresented number because people don't always report or buy a ticket when they go see live music, but that's a pretty big chunk of all the people in our country. And again, that's ted nugent fans standing next to willie nelson fans, the left, the right, everybody nodding their heads and bringing a sense of greater cohesion. It makes people less scared to come to the downtown Portland area. The people working on a barn in washougal used to say things like, I'll never go to Portland. I've heard them say this, but when they come to a concert and I show them a good time now they come regularly. They keep coming back. They come every week. They come see shows they never would have thought to see. And that's because of the strength of independent music. Next, please. These numbers are too big for me to even say, okay, but I would love for you who are more versed in looking at these economic impact reports, to take a glance at the national report. And then when the Portland report comes in in the fall, have another look at it, because that's going to be a really exciting day when we get that, what's next? We already have an amazing city council that's working to recognize music and live performance as an integral part of how the city works and the local economy. It would be great if we had less regulation on some of the factors if parking were cheaper, if, if, if permits were as easy to get as they were in 2000, that would be fantastic. There are things we can do to prevent new development from coming in and essentially pushing out venues because of noise issues. We've already done some work. That's thank you, city council, for changing or clarifying the noise ordinances. Next slide. That's just a little thing about niva. Next slide. Next slide. This is the state reports are coming. The city report is coming to Portland. I'm open for questions. I can't promise I'll be able to be as thorough as mayor was.
42 Colleagues, let's hold our questions until the end of the presentation. And thank you so much for sharing this, this data. I really look forward to seeing the report in the fall. And we I think I'd love to have you guys back for that.
43 It's all too much to go into today. But in the spirit of where the time that you've given me, I really appreciate being able to chat about this a little bit. Thanks.
44 Oh, great. So thus concludes the section where we talk about how important all of this is and all the cool stuff that it does. And now we're going to get into some rapid fire to the best of our ability material on what we can do about it. We're starting with protecting spaces. As jim started to speak about one of the major issues in growing and changing city is new development adjacent to existing places of performance, rehearsal and general cultural activity can result in closures of those venues. And this is one policy we are in development with would like to bring to this committee and eventually turn it to law here in Portland to speak about the issues and ways forward. We have a pioneer in in venue protection from the uk, beverley whitrick from the music venue trust. Take it away.
45 Thank you very much. I don't have a presentation. I'm just going to try and tell you things that I hope you'll feel able to come back with. Any questions about. Hoping that it's clear enough. So music venue trust is a not for profit organization created in the uk in 2014, and our specific aim is to protect, secure and improve grassroots music venues. So by that we mean generally small music venues, almost entirely independent. But those charged specifically with developing new talent or giving the stages to people to trial new music and connect with audiences. And we over the last 11 years, we've worked with over 1000 venues. We currently have about 800 that we work with, and we work across the four nations of the uk. So we're based in england, but we absolutely work in scotland, wales and northern ireland as well. And we were created because notable iconic venues across the uk were closing a pace, and our founder and ceo often says he thought that someone else would do something about it. And when they didn't, he felt compelled to try our best to halt the decline. So one of the early pieces of work we got into was looking to australia, where some really interesting work was being done on the concept of agent of change, which if I just look at how it's defined in the national planning policy framework in england, it says the party introducing a sensitive receptor near an existing music venue must design and pay for mitigation. So the existing organization business is not penalized by complaints or demands for changes to its operation at a later date. One of the things we've always been really clear about is we are pro-development, we are not against development, but we love responsible development. So our interest as music venue trust has always been to champion the dialog between the developer and the existing business, in our case, a grassroots music venue. And everything that we've done has been trying to say that we need to promote awareness of a music venue and encourage the developer to take the venue into account so that they can be good neighbors to each other. So in this vein of work, we took work pioneered in australia, and we brought it to the uk and tweaked it, as you always do when you're looking at examples of good practice and in early positive moves, we, we convinced london to embed agent of change in their spatial policy pipeline, which led to the london planning policy. We worked from there with the welsh government. They adopted it in planning policy and then the national policy framework in england adopted it. But planning policy is, as I'm sure you all know, is what you should do, not what you must do. So a real breakthrough for us in the uk was when scottish government introduced it into legislation, and agent of change became written into all planning applications there. Now the history of enactment is variable. We have tried really hard. We have what's called a venue support team, and we spend a lot of time challenging planning applications near grassroots music venues. And the current policy implications are that often that process means five applications take place before the venue is properly considered. So we've continued to push towards legislation, and we've had something of a recent breakthrough because we're working towards putting on statutory footing in england and wales. And the most recent announcement in the uk is that licensing is now going to take attention of agent of change there. So developers are explicitly responsible for mitigation when building near existing venues. And the intended outcome of considering this in licensing as well as planning ordinance, is to reduce post occupation conflict and include the historical cause of complaints as a material factor in the consideration of how to settle them. So this means that expanding the concept of agent of change to applying equally to conflicts arising from decision making by residents, specifically, that resident is aware they're moving near to a potential noise source, will strengthen the work being done on planning, which is very much intended to deal with mitigating the potential for problems in the actual building process. I've spoken really, really quickly about that because I'm really aware it was a five minute slot, but are there things that you want me to add to that, or does that lay the groundwork for future questions?
46 That lays the groundwork quite well? Thank you so much.
47 Thank you.
48 All right. Excuse me while I pull up my own slide situation here. Couch. Oh, dear. Is this not loading properly? There we go. There we go. Okay, this brings us to our first set of recommendations. We could use to protect our venues in Portland. We have seen as. I said, mass venue closures in other countries and also in other cities around the united states. Policies rooted in the agent of change principle have been adopted in san francisco and advanced in cities as diverse as austin, Washington, d.c. There's conversations in chicago. This is something that is happening a lot of places. We have tools in Portland city government that we can utilize within planning and zoning, and existing structures that we use for residential facilities, abut rail and airport uses that allow us to sort of use a streamlined process to do acoustical review and just notification of new residential development. Often the umbrella for these things is just a statement of values for the city, a cultural sustainability policy. There's an amazing one in san francisco that we can speak about. And also we have one in here in Oregon, which I'm quoting here, but in the context of the farm laws. And so if we were to use the word culture instead of farm activities here, we would say live performance is critical to the economic welfare of the city. The expansion of residential uses on or near live performances may give rise to conflicts between cultural and residential activities. We must protect them, and we must do so early in the process to avoid later conflict. So we propose an agent of change development process for Portland, and that we model this based on that in san francisco, which was enacted in 2009 and is still in use, which adjustments with adjustments to use our existing resources. San francisco has a large entertainment commission body which adjudicates land use applications abutting close venues. We would propose using existing city staff in in permitting and development and utilizing the office of sound and noise to identify venues and so the catchment areas can be discrete to active venues, etc, having the smallest potential impact on ongoing residential development. All right. And we'll be happy to speak more about that. Now I'd like to introduce derek trost to speak about protecting use of homes for rehearsal and recording activities.
49 Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to focus on supporting a thriving music community here in Portland. My name is derek trost, a lifelong musician drummer by trade. I'm vice chair of the music policy council through music Portland and music Oregon, I serve on the noise review board at the city. I hold a professional degree in architecture from the university of Oregon and focus on designing recording studios and live music venues, as well as informal spaces where musicians do the work of making music. I'm here today to talk with you about that last category of informal spaces to make music, and how crucial these places are to a thriving music scene, how essential these places are to the business of making music, and how we can change our city codes that in ways that will have immediate and lasting positive effects. I spend a lot of time talking with musicians about just how to manage the complex problem of making music in bedrooms and basements and garages. The reality is, and always has been, that these are the affordable and logistically feasible places to do the work of making music, places to practice your instrument, places to rehearse with your band, places to record and produce that final product that you, the audience hear on stage or in your earbuds. Commercial practice and rehearsal spaces are increasingly rare and increasingly expensive, as affordable real estate steadily disappears. We're all clear in the concept that if we want places to sleep, to eat, to congregate, recreate roads, to drive, on sidewalks, sewers, you name it, we have to make a mess and we're going to make some noise in the process. Meanwhile, we have building codes, enforcement agencies, professional licenses, permits, and crucially, we have special considerations in the noise code for accommodating the fact that this infrastructure does not come about quietly, in spite of the elaborate and thorough limits dictated by title 18 noise code for sounds. In our city, there is a very simple and across the board exemption for construction activities from 7 a.m. To 6 p.m. Every day except Sunday, you are free and clear to make a racket up to 85db, measured at 50ft from the source at any location in the city. As long as you're involved in commercial construction activity. Makes sense. It's a noisy business and we need it. And yep, you guessed it. So is the several billion dollar a year industry in Oregon that is commercial music. Just for a moment, let me drill down a bit with that noise level for exempt commercial construction activities. This exemption is not measured at the property line as per typical title 18 standards. This is measured at 50ft from the source. That would actually translate into 110db at the source, which also happens to be roughly the same loudness as a full tilt live rock band with a pa. Now, we are certainly not suggesting that dead moon or the decemberists get a hall pass to set up in their driveway, but it's simply not realistic to contain that level of sound inside an ordinary building. It's involved and expensive just to effectively conceal the sound of someone practicing drums. Trust me, I've tried. I know all the tricks and it is ultimately possible, but it's not remotely achievable for the average working musician. With careful attention to shutting doors and windows using absorptive materials in the room, we can dial it back. But what we're asking for our industry is parity. What we're proposing are limited, bookended hours, during which folks who are making music can be loud for a chunk of time, with clear guidelines for how often and for how long. Musicians can practice their instruments, rehearse their projects, and record and produce their work. Best practices for sound isolation. Clear guidelines for communication with affected neighbors, and a central resource resource for registering that information in advance. Musicians are well-versed in navigating the process of negotiating space to make a racket. We've been doing it our entire lives, our entire careers. My neighbors know they can call or text if it's too much, and they know it won't go on all night or every night. Musicians need recognition of the economic and cultural value we contribute to our community. We need formal accommodation for our professional activities. Let's work together to establish reasonable limits, best practices, communication and cooperation between neighbors and show the world how it's done. When it comes to supporting the thriving music scene in our beloved city, it's a noisy business and we need it. Thank you.
50 Thank you so much, derek. Which brings us to our third recommendations protecting home rehearsal. I'll do this in reverse order. We should direct the noise program to develop standards for sound level for musical activity in homes that is not less permissive than current code related to lawn care, and is not more permissive than current code related to commercial construction. We should utilize time based metrics to allow a certain amount of sound for a certain amount of time, in order to make coexisting neighborhoods possible. Second, we should direct Portland permitting and development to create a check plus certification for acoustic isolation of residential units and new construction. You can get a badge that says, yep, you can live next door and share a wall with someone, and it's going to work pretty well. There should be a prescriptive path utilizing readily available construction materials, use of rated assemblies, and without reliance on installation critical approaches. And the those materials. And that research exists and is available. All right. Finally, affordable art space. Generally we need more of it in this town. The reason why we're talking about rehearsing at home is that we don't have enough studios in this city. As rent has become more expensive, the development of studio spaces, commercial studio spaces has not caught up. And so we are having conversations with national pioneers in the creative use of underutilized commercial space, of tenant purchase plans for people who are leasing industrial buildings. And we are working with the office of arts and culture to expand the extent to which we can attach space grants to financial grants for artists. All right. Moving on now. We are we are running well behind here, friends. So in the in the interest of time, I'm just going to we have a great recorded comment from john whittle down in australia. And we're just going to jump right over that since it's recorded. And so whatever city regulation and enforcement, live music venues, places of assembly, regulatory umbrellas for this stuff lives within a number of different areas in the city. There are there's a lot of enforcement action that happens with Portland fire and rescue over in in public safety. The buildings code world is very important for a certificates of assembly, which is over in economic and community development. And then we have a lot of stuff that has to do with PBOT over in public works. Somehow, despite having completely rebuilt our government structure and tried to streamline things, we're still dealing with three different dcas and three different service areas for how you get your venue licensed. Park people outside of your venue, artists to live inside, and then deal with the assembly of human bodies inside of it. The relationship in Portland between venue operators and regulators is collegial, but you'll notice there's not somebody here from from the venue community to talk about this. No one really wants to rock the boat. There's a lot of concern and there's a lot of feelings of individual inspectors provide individual solutions to individual people, and there's not clarity. And so we propose. A small venue, problem solvers roundtable quarterly or bi quarterly meetings that get mayor staff and representatives from all three major bureaus in the room, together with small venues on a regular basis, producing problem solving in the moment, and also recommendations back to council for what we can change to make things work a little bit better. The large venues, especially those with commercial money behind them, do not need this kind of representation. They can they can afford to lobby. So let's get the grassroots that make everything else possible in the room and make people less afraid to speak up. Recommendation number six. Let's expand programs for musician loading and parking. We pioneered a few years ago, a musician loading zone program in which musicians can get a placard to use existing temporary loading zones in the city. Those exist outside a decent number of venues in town, but not all of them. And there is not a process that is accessible for getting one at your venue. Which is why if you walk over to the Laurelhurst pub, a great venue on the east side of Portland, you'll see a little sign that says musician loading zone unofficial out front. We just do it, you know? Tell the neighbors, please don't park here. You know, we don't want this person to have their stuff stolen while they're walking back and forth. Help us out. So PBOT could be more involved in this process. We can use our temporary street use permitting licenses, and make a program by which venues can directly access and be able to use them on a continuous basis, rather than having to reapply for each evening where it's important. Similarly, it's hard to park busses and vans downtown. This is on a case by case basis with venues, but if we want to have large, large bands at the crystal ballroom and at the roseland and at our major venues in the central city, we can do a better job of making people not have to dash back and forth to their accommodations. Recommendation seven seasonal noise code variances. You apply for a noise code variance for every event you do, one by one by one by one. A lot of restaurants hold small music programs, restaurants, and wine bars throughout all the warm months. With windows open, it would be better if we were applying for variances for these and engaging in neighborhood notification right now. Most of the time we don't because the bar is too high and it's too complex and expensive. We should create a seasonal variance program for small business operators. Recommendation eight improve document documentation standards for assembly inspection. When there are transitions in individual fire marshals who are working with individual venues, often people discover that some of the things that they were allowed to do that were approved by their fire, their prior inspector were not documented. And so at the transition point between individual employees, institutional knowledge is lost and sudden. Rapid changes in how they need to operate can happen. Your bar needs to change directions 90 degrees because it's actually one room, not two. Or this seated assembly standard that we've been approving for ten years. It was actually never documented. So you're going to have to reapply for permits every time you do a seated event. We can do better on this at transitions between inspectors. We can do exit interviews, and we can redirect Portland fire and rescue to make sure that all, all, all rated assemblies, all approved assemblies are documented. Thank you. All right. Let's dive into the last little bit here. Music and nighttime economy development. And we'll have kate becker from seattle speaking to us on this topic. Ready, kate.
51 Yes. Hi. Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me.
52 I am so delighted to be here with you. My name is kate becker. I'm the creative economy director for king county. Before that, I ran the office of film and music for the city of seattle for about six years. I mostly come from the nonprofit sector, having co-founded the vera project and the old firehouse, long running all ages venues in the seattle region. But now I've worked in local government for the past 11 years, directly working on developing our film and music ecosystems. My work these days entails leading king county's creative economy initiative that is very separate from our cultural funding initiative in king county. In king county, we have for excuse me for culture, which funds over 700 of our nonprofit cultural organizations throughout the county. In my office, which is an economic development initiative in the office of economic opportunity and creative economy, which is situated squarely in the executive's office. We are working to support the businesses, the working creatives, the folks who are not captured in our nonprofit cultural work that are great colleagues at for culture do so. We, as I said, we focus on both music and film. But of the two, we know that music generates far more revenue and jobs than our film industry does in Washington state. We also have learned, of course, that music ecosystems are fragile and require public support to thrive. When I say the music ecosystem, I'm not just talking about working musicians, I'm talking about the broad music ecosystem. As you have heard articulated here today. And as mary described in her presentation, seattle and Portland have many commonalities in our music ecosystems as well as well as many unique characteristics. I should disclose that I've worked closely with mara and evan over the years. I've done some work with Jamie Dunphy all around, working to grow the northwest corridor, the cascadia corridor of music ecosystems. Working together, we have shared knowledge and we have shared best practices in a way that has been so helpful to all of us in moving forward. So some of the challenges that I think we have in common with Portland are that our musician wages are lower than most other wages throughout the city and the state. Independent music venues are cultural hubs that operate with very small margins, as you have heard articulated here today, as our urban cores have developed the kinds of spaces where musicians cut their teeth and hone their skills have disappeared. And yet we know that music is a cultural magnet, a tourism magnet, and as well as an economic engine that should be nurtured and supported by political entities, we have worked to address these challenges and issues with multiple initiatives over the years in both seattle and king county, our political leaders have invested in prioritizing our music ecosystem by establishing the office of film and music and appointing a music commission in the city of seattle in king county, which is 2300mi■!s and comprised of 39 cities. Our county council declared film and music production priorities for king county. In both of these jurisdictions, we have committed to hearing from the music community what they need and doing our best to respond to the challenges that are at hand and develop policies to develop a healthier music ecosystem. In the early aughts, the seattle music community organized, wanting a seat at the city table. Like the film community had long had. In 2005, the long running city of seattle film office transitioned to be the seattle office of film and music, and we just claimed the moniker in that moment that we are the city of music. Now it is incumbent upon us to live up to that reputation. In 2008, the city of seattle commissioned the seattle music economic impact study. The findings of that study did compel the city to act. In 2010, they formed the seattle music commission. I was one of 21 people appointed to the original music commission, with music industry and city leaders working together, we identified the most pressing issues and developed the city of music vision for 2020. That was back in 2010. Some other things we focused on over the past 15 years, including include developing the music of the airport initiative, which has been going on now for 15 years. So when you arrive at the seattle airport, you know you are in the city of music. We established a nightlife business advocate role in the office of film and music. And that person, it's been around for 8 or 9 years now, and that person works actively with our music venues and our nightclub nightlife proprietors to address public safety issues, business issues, all the things that arrive with working in that environment. We produced eight city of music career days, and now we have transitioned to our second year of producing the creative economy career day. So we have expanded the work we are doing in that area, from being just focused on music to the broader creative ecosystem we have collaborated with and developed the cascadia music corridor. And Oregon has been such a big part of that, working in collaboration with alaska and idaho during the pandemic. We led the initiative to reopen every venue safely, initiative for the state of Washington, and out of that formed juanma, the Washington nightlife and music association, which formed during COVID and carries on to this day that music venue owners are working together, solving problems together, learning from each other. It's been amazing to see folks who were largely competitors prior to the pandemic pulled together as collaborators. Now, one of the things that we are focused on is music tourism. And as you all know, during the pandemic, stages were closed, musicians did not have working spaces. And so we thought, how do we get our working musicians back on their feet? So we use some lodging tax from downtown hotels and developed cloudbreak music festival. It's now going into its fourth year this November, and it is in the off season intentionally to draw tourism to seattle during the off season. And we partnered with visit seattle, our tourism agency. 71 hotels, 35 independent music venues and several hundred musicians each year to draw tourists to seattle during the off season. And the lodging tax goes into the pockets of our working musicians, the downtown hotel guests who come during the festival get to go to any of those shows for free. So that's just one initiative that we have really been focused on lately. We also, led by the seattle music commission, recently got musician load zones. After all these years, we had tried having signs up that said it was a musician loading space and that folks should respect that. Now we have a more proper process where venues actually get a year round permit and know that their bands will have a place to park outside of their venue. We produced the music policy forum and the cascadia music summit in April this year, and it was so great to have council member Dunphy, mayor mclaughlin and many other people from Portland.
53 Yeah.
54 Up in seattle for three days to do this work together. And now we have a Washington music census that has just been completed in collaboration with some renowned economists. And soon we will be releasing this data. I wish I could release it today, but we are not quite there yet. Have we solved all the music ecosystem issues in our region? Far, far from it. But we do our best every day to try to make sure that we are supporting our music ecosystem in the way that is both. That helps musicians, helps businesses, helps our city, our region, our state thrive. Our our local government is working relatively effectively with music ecosystem constituents, but the work is far from done. Our music ecosystem brings so much to our cities, our counties and our states that we cannot take that for granted. We have to continue to work to stay connected to the music industry, hear those concerns and make those concerns our policy objectives. Portland has so many good things going on in your music industry and your music community. Embracing the full music ecosystem, not just the nonprofit sector, will allow you to move forward so much more effectively. I am so excited about the work that you are all doing. You definitely have the secret ingredient here, a music community that is willing to work with their local government to affect change. The work that music Portland has done to lay the groundwork is invaluable, and offers a roadmap to fortify and grow your music ecosystem. As you are clearly demonstrating here, I really encourage you to work collaboratively with your music community. The recommendations you're bringing forward seem so spot on, and please know that you have collaborators to the north who will work with you any time. We are happy to share knowledge and best practices with you. We have learned so much from the folks in Portland over these years, and thank you for having me today. I'm available and happy to help with anything you all are doing as you work to fortify your music ecosystem. Thank you.
55 Thank you kate. And then I think, evan, you've got some final or you guys have some final policy recommendations to close us out.
56 Two last things here, madeline.
57 Wonderful. Thank you so much. So our final recommendations are two similar similarly to seattle, to appoint a director of the creative economy. As you've seen here today, our music economy is unique and deep. We need direct community and economic development to create an RFP for the director of the creative economy. On a limited term, we need to coordinate with prosper Portland to develop cross-agency collaboration plans with the office of film and events and the office of small business. And we need to include this person in the fiscal year 26 budget. It's time that we actually actively engage and develop our Portland music and creative economy, and it's something that will help us get back on track in the overall economic picture to bring this forward and really prioritize our our music economy in our redevelopment. And finally, recommendation number ten is to create an independent city music office to allocate ongoing funding to a quasi governmental nonprofit dedicated to local economic development and national marketing of specifically of the commercial music ecosystem. For example, prosper, Portland travel, Portland rack, etc. This would focus just on music and it would work, and it would focus on collaborating with our other partners to bring forward music, economic development into the heart of our economic development strategy. So with that, we're really excited to bring these recommendations to you all.
58 Thank you so much.
59 Councilor Dunphy, do you want to close this out and then we'll move to committee comments and questions?
60 Yeah. You know, I'm so proud of the work that is going on in this city. And I'm so proud to also demonstrate to my colleagues that it's not just me talking about the music industry, that there is an enormous number of people out there, and there are meaningful ways that this body can without, you know, by by being true to our values and without compromising on other things that we are already doing, we can meaningfully move this industry forward in a way that moves our national reputation. It attracts business, it attracts visitors, it attracts investment. If Portland found a $3 billion lithium mine under the west hills, we would be a lithium city by the end of the week. We have a $3 billion music industry here in Portland. It is time for us to lean into that and use the tools available to us to embrace that identity for the greater purpose of making Portland the place that we know that people want to be. So thank you all for taking your time this morning. Thank you to all the folks who testified and got up early. I struggled to get here by nine, so I appreciate you all being here. And thank you, colleagues.
61 Thank you councilor, and I think you may underestimate the power of a west hills, not in my backyard person.
62 Thank you.
63 I want to thank everyone who came today and presented thank you, evan, for kind of facilitating this discussion, madeline, for taking us out in the last policy recommendation. That's a lot for us to consider, and I will look forward to seeing the series of policy recommendations come before this committee for formal consideration, before we move on to public testimony, I'd like to offer my very patient committee colleagues opportunities to ask questions, make comments on the on the material that we have heard. Councilor Smith, I think your first up.
64 Thank you. Co-chair Green. I really appreciate it. Thank you, councilor Dunphy, for bringing this very ambitious. And when I say ambitious, this very ambitious group of things and recommendations that you want us to look at, one of the things that I would like to do, because it was I can tell you it was too much information for me. It's too much variety of information and too many different things that I that you want us to do in these ten recommendations. I think they can you could probably put two together and do it every week so that we can understand exactly what's going on and go into greater detail. But one of the things that I do like that I think was was a good thing. And it's that whole thing around bringing the, the, the small vendors, small music folks together every week or every two weeks or once a month or however you're going to do it. But we also need to keep in mind we can't tell the other folks they have to go by a lobbyist to talk to us. I just want to let you know, y'all don't have to go get a lobbyist if you're bigger than a small one, a small venue, a group, you don't have to get a lobbyist to come and talk to me. So that part is, is really good in terms of bringing those small folks together like we do with Portland solutions. Every week we invite the community in with Portland solutions and try to identify problems and solve problems that way. I think if you can do that immediately, that that is something that's going to be very beneficial. But I would like to split these things up. Councilor Dunphy, and put them into things that are that need ordinance changes versus other changes. And you had a lot of recommendations, particularly recommendation eight, where you're asking Portland fire to do like it's getting into the realm of the mayor and city administrator. You're getting down into the weeds of the bureau in micromanaging their staff and how they have exit interviews and those kinds of things. That's stuff that we don't manage. We manage money. We're policy makers. So we let our departments manage their own people. We can't tell them how to do that. If you could do this in things that you want in ordinance and bring them out, you know, at a so we can go in greater detail because this is just a snapshot of why you want to do ten of these things. I think putting this all in one big package is too much. I think they're very important and it's critical. And I want to end with this so that people are really clear. I get that Portland music will be one of the major drivers of our economy, and I think so. And I think that there was someone who who testified earlier who said, like, when you come up here for music and you spend a dollar, you're going to spend other money for eating, you are you're going to spend other money to go and sleep and do whatever you do on a weekend. Like when I go to seattle, I spend money in different areas. In addition to going to concerts, I do go out and eat and I do spend money on hotels. So that is so true. And I think that if we use this in a way that's that's meaningful and stay in our Lane of what we can control, because I think we're overreaching on certain things. But I think that we should definitely put some resources towards the industry. You also identified opportunities to increase our budget, and we're in a budget kind of deficit form. So I would also like you all to identify what you want us to take out of the budget to be able to pay for this. And so that's very critical because we don't have a we don't have contingency money in our budget right now that says, okay, we can go take that from contingency. You have to take something out. So I would appreciate some suggestions on what you suggest taking out to put this in, to make sure that this is the kind of document and movement that you want to go forward.
65 Yeah. And just before you walked in.
66 In my opening comments, I had mentioned that this is the beginning of the policy conversation. This is the result of years of identifying where the problems are and coming up with some recommendations.
67 I identified a lot.
68 Yeah, absolutely. And I will be spending the next months and potentially years leading some roundtables and conversations about what this actually looks like before it comes back to us in a formal recommendation.
69 Thank you. Thank you, I appreciate it.
70 Thanks for that dialog, colleagues. Councilor clarke.
71 Thank you, mr. Co-chair. The councilor Smith sold a lot of my thunder, but I've got some other things to say. I first of all, I just want to thank you, councilor Dunphy, for this incredible presentation. I am gobsmacked by the whole thing. It's just amazing. It's exciting. And I agree with councilor Smith that if we can break this down into little bite sized chunks and we can start making progress, because I'm very excited about actually doing some of these things, but we just need a little bite size hugs. The more I explore the arts around here, I realize how we really are. You know, batting out of our league. I mean, there's amazing things going on here that we continue to learn and we just we didn't even touch on everything in the community. It's just amazing what we have here. I did want to just address a couple of the people who testified. Derek is that. Hi, derek. I just want to say that I really appreciated what you had to say because a couple years ago there was a group that would go to Willamette park, some musicians, and just invite anybody who had an instrument to come and play with them. And it was so cool. They didn't come this summer. I don't know what happened or where they went, but it was that kind of effort all over the community is, is, is great, that kind of grassroots. And jim, I don't know if you're still here. Thank you for all that you've done on venues. And thank you for bringing the report to us. I can't wait to see the Oregon specific report. I just want to say that your presentation really dovetails with what I want to do on asset management, because we have a lot of arts venue assets in the community that are owned publicly, that we have not cared for as well as we could have, and that will be in our in a year from now in our asset management report. And then we will discuss how to finance those improvements in our in our city owned venues. I also want to say that I really appreciate you mentioned the wow hall. That's where I used to go, and the eugene hotel for music, and that's where I first saw nancy king, who just passed, and I was able to actually get lessons from her, and I was able to sing at carnegie hall this last summer. But dovetail that with what miss spaulding had to say. I hope that we can have another presentation at some point on the sort of community based efforts that are going on. You know, we have a lot of community based choirs here, kids choirs. I sang with the Portland symphonic girls choir, and there's a whole infrastructure underneath the professional piece that I think esperanza was talking about, too, for kids. I hope we can come back to that. But anyway, I'm just you can tell I'm really excited about everything that we heard today, and I really appreciate all the work that you all staff have put into bringing this to us. And I want those bite sized chunks.
72 Thank you, councilor Clark. I was also wondering if you were going to break out in song today, but we didn't get that today. Co-chair Ryan, would you like to offer some comments or questions?
73 Thank you. Thank you so much, co-chair. Thank you, councilor Dunphy, for bringing this work forward. I know that you've been chomping at the bit to have this day this morning, and you did it. And ibn, your leadership was amazing. I saw you working so hard to knit this all together. And you did. And you really gathered some amazing presenters. I have the pleasure of knowing some of you personally and thank you for being here. Thank you for loving this city so much. Your resources, your your resource to our city is something we covenant and we must continue to work with you. Portland needs you now more than ever. So I'm just really grateful that we're having this meeting about this topic and a special acknowledgment to you. Where'd you go, maura? You're behind evans hair. There you are. You you touched me on all of these topics, and you don't have to do that. Sorry. I like your hair, by the way, I. I probably get in trouble for that. Mayor, I just want to thank you so much for 2020. You really explained the ecosystem better than anyone had ever done. And the way that you continue to talk about it and your presentation today was spot on. Those are slides that I want to covenant for some time. So thank you so much for showing up today. It was it was really helpful. I also have a lot of personal experience in this venue. Not like you, Dunphy. I can't say I ran around in vans. That's pretty. That's that's a great story. It's been more as a consumer and as a performer in more classic venues, if you will, like theater. And I married a musician, sometimes musician. They're now getting a master's degree in something else because they want to have a little more substance in their life or reliable sources. But we have a drum set in our basement, and I've had those conversations with neighbors. And so I think a lot of portlanders find this presentation relatable. It's not something that they can't connect with. And sometimes when we're in meetings in the arts and economy committee, that's not the case. So this is truly a Portland treasure conversation. I also know that this is an economic engine that doesn't get enough attention. I've always thought it was marginalized. That's why I was really big on in the last council of elevating arts and culture mirror, of course, church me. So I did my little part to make sure that some of the money coming from the city would go to actually private musicians. It was a sliver, but it's a start. You got to start somewhere, and I'll continue to be a champion the best way I can. I think councilor Smith's comments were really easy for me to nod my head on. I don't think the comments were at all negative. It was reality. And so how are we going to go forward with this? I do have just a couple questions where I wouldn't you wouldn't think I was at a meeting. Who are the partners that you brought into this conversation that weren't the usual suspects? Like, who else were you collaborating with when you built some of these recommendations to when you say the staff recommendations, I'm assuming from that even the staff is you, but it's not the city staff, it's not the people permitting. It's not the people in public safety. Is that true?
74 Absolutely. This at this point, this is coming from us, from our research into other cities, best practices. I would say that on the acoustic zoning and agent of change conversation, we've made the most progress with people in the administration about what existing resources can be used and what their appetite is for some, some change. Some of these proposals in the in the regulatory area are sort of early proposals that are related to conversations, constituent management conversations we have been having with administrative staff. And so I don't imagine a particularly surprising and of course, we've been advocating for, you know, for a public office of music for quite some time.
75 Yeah.
76 No, evan, that's helpful. I just need that clarity in the public record, because oftentimes we say staff recommendation in council meetings, we might think it's a staff recommendation coming from a bureau and such. So I just want to clarify that I think some of what I was getting when councilor Smith was talking about just the process, and this is a lot. And what we're going to pick is when you dive into those conversations, like, where is the ripe fruit? Where are we meeting someone on the edge? We can move something forward. Where is that reality? Where's that culture change need to take place? Speaking to culture change? As a person who did the most to bring all the permitting bureaus together, to move them along, to make it so? It was a reality that we could see unification. That culture hasn't changed yet. Just because you move deck chairs, it doesn't mean that people start to think they're in a different space. Sometimes they're really wedded to that silo of that chair, if I could use that metaphor. And so we have a conversation in the next meeting about, I'll just call it code clutter, which is something I've been yapping about since 2021. And up here you can do all you want, but the roots are the culture in the bureaus that we work with, so they move much slower than I think your average person would like, but we have to stay on that. So, councilor Dunphy, this afternoon or not this afternoon, it's like right after this meeting, we will need to, like, help connect those dots. So that code clutter conversation is everywhere. And so we have a lot of people that have I think I heard the term that was valid individual perspectives on their lens, as opposed to what's the unified vision of how we can work with customers. So they actually have some certainty to what how the city is making their regulations. You can say that in almost every meeting we have today, in every committee. Is that fair to say?
77 Certainly. And I think a lot of these recommendations are about working in collaboration with our different bureaus and really helping be a part of that conversation and that culture change outside of just our specific policy recommendations. It's also about about creating the table where we can create a more collaborative Portland and bring our music partners to that table. So, you know, it's a big bite that we gave you, and it's going to be a long process. But, you know, the vision is at the end of it. We'll be able to, you know, name music and independent music. Capital name Portland a music independent capital and really be able to stand behind that culturally and in our economic development.
78 Elevation that I'm at. I, I appreciate that. What I'm trying to say is this, there's going to be some test to really see how unified this permitting bureau is behaving. This can be one of them. And we have to work with that to change it. But when we just make a policy like this, like upon high, that we're going to do these recommendations. It's like, how do we build the soil. So these recommendations actually grow. Like we were able to unify the permitting bureau after three and a half years of agonizing task force meetings, where we had people come together and working at the city for decades that never met each other before, I kid you not. And they finally met during COVID on a zoom call brought together by this new commissioner. That was idealistic. And so that's how things start. So this is idealistic and wonderful. And I believe in idealism when it comes to things that matter that are in the soil of the city of Portland. So I just want you to know, I think we're going to get there. But I do think we're going to have to figure out what are how do we prioritize this? How can we get some early wins? Which ones are the ones that are the most important? Which ones have the most best roi? So I hope that we just take some time, staff the staff right now on this to kind of help us sequence that so we can look at this with an operational plan. So this is like a vision with some policy that's, that's percolating. But then how do we make this into some implementation that actually shows up so that the people that you're representing feel it in the next year? What are those? I don't need you to answer right now because I actually want to make sure we don't that I'm that we don't take too much more time. Wonderful presentation. You've got us all thinking you have the right vision here. Now we have to figure out what's the plan. How does this move forward? Is that fair?
79 Absolutely.
80 Okay, I think I should stop.
81 Thank you so much.
82 Thanks, counselor. And colleagues. I see there's some hands back in the queue. I would ask you to be brief, because we do need to move on to public comment. And then if we want to reserve some time at the end to entertain the discussion that councilor Ryan wants to have, we'll have to do that. So thank you. Councilor Smith.
83 Thank you. I just want to tell my committee colleagues, I have made a commitment to go to some of the small venues and see concerts. And so this past weekend, I was trying to find somebody to go with me to the two short concert over at the roseland. And a lot of my friends were going to the homecoming at the self-enhancement center. And guess what, you guys? We had a special guest and it was too short. So I didn't I didn't have to go to the roseland, but he was great and it wasn't family friendly, but it was. It was a great. It was a great concert. It reminded me of back in the day when I used to go out. But no. Hello. No, I was just saying. So I just wanted y'all to know that I am committed to the cause. Thank you.
84 Thank you, councilor Smith. I'd like to go to some of these shows with you. Councilor Clark.
85 Just really quick. You got a twofer there. That's great. I just wanted to echo and thank councilor Ryan for all the work that he has done in the past to help bring us to this point as well. But also, it's not just code clutter, clutter code, whatever you said.
86 Code clutter.
87 Code clutter. I love that it's both code and culture. And we need that culture change too as we bring the bureaus together. I've talked to, you know.
88 So code and culture clutter.
89 Yes. Well, culture may not be clutter, but it's something else. I just want to just I just want to reinforce that and thank madeline for making that comment, to thank.
90 If we could just briefly close on that point of working collaboratively with bureaus, I'll say I have been a stagehand professionally for 15 years. And in that process, I've gone through many experiences of a new building being designed in which art was to take place, in which a very, very smart person did not plan for any storage, for all the chairs, for all of the speakers that we were supposed to use. Nobody spoke to the people who were actually going to do it. So I understand that personally, and we're committed to doing this the right way.
91 Thank you. Evan, I'll just my one brief comment will be that I really appreciated the diagram mirror that you showed. That was the network of inter related industry. That's a cluster. That's an industrial cluster that you have to cultivate like a garden. And if you do so, I think it will cement in place that we have this desirable culture. It leads to the livability of this city against the other negative livability conversations that happen right now. You can always counter that with good stuff. And our arts, our music scene is good stuff. That then also provides a really ready labor pool for the other whales that we try to lure that we usually only talk about those luring those whales. And so, you know, for years the apparel industry I'm looking at nike, adidas, you know, those places have liked Portland because there is that rich and deep bench of labor that come here because they like to go to shows and accidentally run into too short at the other function. So thank you for that. Diego, will you please read item the next item.
92 Three public testimony on the state of portland's music economy. Would you like me to call up the testifiers?
93 Yes, please. Call up our our testifiers in groups of three. Thank you.
94 John carter, lofty whitaker, phillip graham.
95 Okay. All right. Hi, I'm john carter. I am a musician. Yeah.
96 Can we get the clock up, please?
97 Thank you. I'm a musician and community organizer around arts and music. I book shows, I work with the venues. And so I'm very much, like, on the ground and seeing these things. And I loved hearing all the recommendations that were being presented because there were so many of them were like, yes, yes, I hear this all the time. And yeah, I think like to councilor Smith's comment, it's like thinking about like what is within the city's purview of what can be done while also thinking outside of the box. I think, you know, the insurance question is one that I hear a lot. There are venues that I know, independent venues that are in explicit danger of being closed because of rising insurance costs, which to me would be an absolute tragedy. It just seems like something that is that that can be solved, but it is like a question of money and where's the money going to come from? And what is within the city's control? Because the city can't just go around and say like, well, we're going to just regulate these insurance companies. But I mean, it could, I guess, but that would that would be my preference. But, you know, I'm thinking realistically, I think that the, the primary problem that I see is that we and I see this as an organizer, that I feel like I'm often swimming upstream against the current, against economic forces that are she's putting musicians and venues down and down further and further it, which scares me because music is the heart of this city, and we have all the ingredients to be like the music capital of the west coast and possibly the country. I think when it comes to questions around insurance, like musicians getting paid living wages. Rental costs for venues, the question is going to be money. And I think that that like coming up with a creative source for that money that doesn't drain what feels like kind of a tax burden populist right now is the question whether that is like a pcf style ballot measure that would go to helping support musicians and venues. I to me, that seems like an ideal solution because, I mean, we've already seen from pcf that there's a lot there's just a lot of money to be made from taxing big box corporations. And yeah, I think when it comes to insurance, just like having some kind of like municipal pool that can help support these venues would be ideal. So thank you.
98 Thank you.
99 Councilors. Good morning. My name is philip graham. I'm the owner of ear trumpet labs, a craft manufacturing company that makes microphones that are sold worldwide, used by grammy winning artists like elvis costello, brandi carlile, rhiannon giddens, as well as emmy winning television shows and the tony winning musical hadestown. We're working on an oscar so we can get the full egot. We employ five craftspeople in our workshop in inner northeast, with not just a living wage, but median wage, plus health and retirement benefits and profit sharing. I started this company 14 years ago in my basement. The company was built quite literally by word of mouth in portland's incredible music scene. Local musician and recording engineer kevin robinson tried one of my early mics, and he emailed everybody he knew in the Portland production community to check out these cool, locally built mics. That led to a visit from larry crane, the owner of jackpot studios and the editor of a worldwide recording publication, tape op. And that resulted in our first published product review. Musicians I knew from the local old time string band scene took the mics on tour, and we gradually found our niche as go to mics in the bluegrass and the folk americana world. Local musicians and engineers are the lifeblood of our company. There are advocates, our testers, our teachers, and our employees, as well as our customers. So the music scene here needs a healthy ecosystem of independent venues and production facilities, or it will die. It needs affordability in living and rehearsal spaces, or it will die. If it dies, it will take with it an incredibly vibrant small manufacturing sector of world class amp makers, pedal builders, synth builders, cable makers, in-ear monitor makers, drum and instrument makers, weirdos like us who depend on a thriving community to support us as we make some of the best stuff in the world. Thank you.
100 Thank you philip.
101 Good morning counselors. My name is lofty whitaker and I work for audix microphones, which has been making microphones in wilsonville, Oregon for 35 years now. I've been here for 20 years of that, and over the years I've seen lots of changes in the landscape for microphones, and some of them are good, some of them are not so good. But I just like to share with you a little statistic that we've noticed, and that is the grassroots player. Usually they're going to spend $100 on a vocal microphone. That's our barometer. That's our benchmark. And. Probably when I started 20 years ago, part of our customer base was local venues. And these were venues where the musicians wouldn't be bringing their equipment with them. They weren't bringing their pa system, they weren't bringing their microphones. They were supplying them. And we have noticed that business almost disappear over the course of 20 years. And I think that's a rather sad thing. Grassroots music is where it all starts. Without that grassroots, there's nothing to build on. And that was it. Short and sweet.
102 Thank you lofty. Diego, can you call up the next three?
103 Next up, mont chris hubbard, tim wilson, zach domer.
104 Good morning. My name is chris hubbard. I'm a member and elected officer of the musicians union local 99. When I introduced myself as a member of the musicians union, the number one response I get is, wow. I did not realize that there was a union for musicians. I think the part of the reason for that is our union is unusual in that many of our members do not do any work that is protected by a collective bargaining agreement. In fact, because of changes to federal labor law in the 1980s, musicians who work in places like clubs, restaurants, coffee houses, pretty much all the places you go to hear commercial, commercial, for profit music. Those musicians do not have the right to collectively bargain in those spaces. It's not hard to draw a connection between the decline in musicians ability to make a living over the last 40 years, and their loss of their right to collectively bargain. Still, those musicians join our union because they believe in our power to make positive change through collective action. So as a union, we advocate for policies that allow us as musicians, to work safely, with dignity and with fair compensation. Those policies have included access to commercial loading zones. Like ibn mentioned earlier, the right to a smoke free workplace. I think mine was the last generation of musicians that had to sing at the top of our lungs for three hours in a smoky bar, the right for musicians under the age of 21 to work in over 21 establishments. And, of course, health care for all, no matter your level of income or employment. We musicians unfortunately invented the gig economy. And as you may know, the gig economy primarily functions on the backs of the underpaid workers at the bottom of the chain. One of the ways that progressive cities can and have pushed back against gig work degrading their local economy is by requiring a minimum wage for those sets of workers here in Portland. That could start with a prevailing wage for musicians. The center of the music network that we saw on the screen a few minutes ago, Portland can plant a flag in the ground that says a vibrant city requires a vibrant population of artists, and we commit to supporting our artists and paying them fairly. Thank you, councilors, for holding this hearing and your interest in the music economy, and I look forward to speaking with each of you in the upcoming months about the ways that Portland can stand up for and support its working musicians.
105 Thank you chris.
106 Good morning councilors I'm tim wilson, I'm the board president of music Oregon and the board treasurer of music Portland. I've spent 40 years of my career working in artist development, including 25 years at western arts alliance, the regional performing arts market based here in Portland. After I left western arts alliance in 2022, I started starlet farm, a boutique artist management agency with clients based here in Portland, new mexico, los angeles and london. I appreciate you taking this opportunity to convene this hearing, and I want to thank Jamie in particular, and also acknowledging credit mirror, whose hard work vision really laid the foundation for this conversation that we're having today. I'm here today, of course, to affirm kind of the value of creating a city music office. And I think that we're really in good company here with cities across the country that are sort of taking similar steps now to shore up the music in their communities, including seattle, austin, madison, huntsville, alabama, and houston, texas. I want to take a moment to speak to the regional value motivating cities to do this work. The fragmenting effect of social media and streaming services services is opening a Lane for regional music building, supply and demand for local artists and asserting a regional identity while reinforcing the diversity of music in the regional market. Last month, the guardian published a really interesting article about bands in australia, and they looked at bands that previously had toured nationally in australia. And these bands are facing increasingly difficult times for routing. They're not selling tickets, they're hurting, they're having trouble getting in to kind of major venues and doing these large national tours. And what they have done is pivoted to smaller communities and smaller venues. And as that sort of moved to the regional, they've had tremendous success. And that trend has been sort of mirrored by the growth of regional festivals across australia, away from the big mega festivals, into these boutique festivals that are often in smaller communities or rural areas. Think pickathon, not lollapalooza, and it's a really important kind of trend that I think the city of Portland has an opportunity to exploit. At a time when the central business district is struggling, and music events and music events and festivals can boost downtown traffic and tourism. I'll leave it there, and I want to thank you for your time and attention.
107 Thank you. Tim.
108 Once more for zach domer. Next up, nelson silva, andre middleton and I see ian lofty whitaker again. Was that just a duplicate sign up.
109 Duplicate sign up. Sorry.
110 No problem. Thank you.
111 Introduce yourself for the record and begin. Thanks.
112 Good morning councilors. My name is andre middleton. I live in district two and I'm represented by council president Elana pirtle-guiney, councilors Dan Ryan and Sameer Kanal. When I moved to Portland in 1985, one of the first things I remember doing, aside from hanging out the Sellwood docks or cruising up and down 82nd, was seeing slack at the blue gallery. I came of age in a time in seeing bands like the crazy eights, robert cray, oblivion seekers, cool nuts, poison, idea hitting, birth crew spinning and hazel crack a bash and so many more. From that experience, I was introduced to venues like satiricon, zoo nights, belmonts, x ray cafe, mount hood jazz festival, candlelight room, the 1201, la luna and starry night. Sadly, I was only able to go to most of these venues after I turned 21. Occasionally there would be a show at the northwest service center, but by and large, x ray cafe and luna were the only consistent all ages music venues that teen could go see. Live music. This is one of the reasons why I helped found friends of noise. We are an all ages music nonprofit that values youth participation in our music ecosystem well before they're old enough to drink and buy alcohol. Friends of noise teaches music industry workshops like how to make your own merch, how to protect your hearing, and how to be a sound engineer. Next, we put young people to work at our all ages concerts and for other community building events like the annual juneteenth celebration in Gresham, pickathon benefit shows for other nonprofits. Even the northwest hardcore fest happened this weekend at pica. These events are all opportunities for the youth we serve to get paid, to perform and even run sound. We're on the verge of opening, of finally opening our own all ages music venue slash work teen workforce development center in north Portland at the former dancing bear strip club there were thrilled to call the offbeat. I shared all that to demonstrate the rich legacy that the Portland music scene has and its capacity to provide jobs as part of an overall arts and entertainment economic engine. The youth we have trained and supported are joining the ayatsi union. They're going to college, they're recording and releasing albums. They're planning and booking their own shows, and they're even touring. They're playing, they're paying taxes, they're paying rent, and they're helping to create events that people want to attend. Recently, we were awarded a grant from the office of violence prevention as a testament to the impact that our organization is and can have on youth, dare I say, the future of our city. A strong and vibrant music scene is a piece of the puzzle that makes Portland a vibrant and fun place to live. Much like affordable housing, affordable child care, meeting the needs of the most vulnerable clean water, safe communities and schools that inspire live music, like so many other activities, give people a reason to get out of the house and have fun with others. We need also. We need so much more of that in our city. In this day and age, every dime that supports our local arts is spent by local artists and goes back into the community via food, clothing and shelter. The return on investing in the arts is a city that people want to spend their most precious resource in their time. Thank you.
113 Thank you.
114 Once more for nalin silva. I don't see him in the room or online. So that concludes testimony.
115 Thank you diego, and thanks for everyone who showed up and waited for the testimony. I've taken notes and your your viewpoints are valuable here at this point. I'd like to offer, before we do closing remarks, I'd like to offer councilor Ryan to tee up a sort of late. Add to this you wanted to talk about a specific. Issue. If we had time at the end.
116 Yes. Thank you, co-chair.
117 And by the way, we've got we have until 1140. So we have a little bit of time. I was able to confirm that the, the council clerk that we can run ten minutes long.
118 Okay. Councilor Green, some of us that have the next meeting probably aren't as thrilled about that extension.
119 We can always go shorter.
120 Okay. So first I just want to say thank you. That was great testimony. Really. Thank you so much for coming today. It was really well done. I want to touch before I go into this topic about the insurance rates. They're everywhere. Like every storefront in this city is suffering. We have a lot of storefronts that can't pay insurance anymore. They'll tell me they're one broken window away from going bankrupt. It's just a story out there. So please know that you're paying around. Insurance rates is felt by the entire industry. All of the storefronts and main streets around the city. So I just wanted to put that out there. It is a big issue, and it's connected to a lot of the complex problems that our city is facing at this time. I just wanted to put out there councilor, councilor Green, our conversation this morning that we had briefly was driving in. Is that. The news about the economic challenges of Portland are on the tips of the tongue of everyone right now. So how is this committee going to move forward to help align the city on what our next steps are? Just as we asked you to prioritize, we're going to be doing a lot of that type of prioritization, and we have to look at it holistically. And I think what's going to be a robust conversation that you and I were having this morning is how there was a lot of data out there that gives information about our challenges. How do we digest that? How do we collectively perhaps get on the same page about it? Perhaps not, but explain why we're not on the same page. But portlanders are not being served well unless we accept the reality of the problem, and we start to really get strategic about the next, like the top three economic drivers that we want to focus on. I'm not saying music industry isn't going to be one of them. I think actually you made a really good case for why it should be elevated, and I'm excited about that. But how are we going to help align this body of 12 to really take what we're experiencing seriously? It's not great data right now from what I'm seeing. And I just don't want to continue to not appear like we're doing what I know we sincerely want to do, which is to respond and make sure that we are taking leadership, bold leadership at a time when we really need it, and really look at the cross-sections of the different aspects of the city's infrastructure and how that plays into it. And so I think I'll just leave you with a story. It's a story that I didn't know I was going to share, but I spent an hour with a music venue in northeast Portland along alberta, and they're just having the hardest time after midnight. Some bad things have been happening, if you will. They're not getting any response. They're having customers not want to come in yet. That's the time when they make the most profit. The night time entertainment district consumes a lot of our police force, if you will, at that those hours. And when there's a street racing incident, a riot or a protest going on, plus a gang activity in the entertainment district, the police can't respond to the call in northeast alberta. These are the kind of honest conversations we need to have even when we're talking about this. And so we just I just want to make sure that we look at these things holistically as we go forward, and that we really come forward with some strategic planning. I know that we have some items in September, but I hope that we can get a return of some of the objective data that we can get clear about, that we can take these studies that we're getting from multiple sources. And like councilor Smith was mentioning earlier, really focus and align, like, what are the ones we're going to pick and choose. So really this is just an opportunity to say this committee is hearing this. We understand and we need to take leadership on this council to really focus on economic development and how it connects with the other top priorities of our city. I also think this city council has to become more strategic and focused on what our top 3 or 4 priorities are, and I'll stop there. Thanks.
121 Thank you. Co-chair Ryan councilor Smith.
122 Thank you. I want to thank both of the co-chairs and councilor Dunphy for bringing this forward, and thank everyone. You all provided a lot of good information in a very short period of time, and you left me with a lot to think about at a time when the world seems to be full of doom and gloom. I'm glad for the opportunity to spend a couple hours discussing something that's important, but also it's truly enjoyable. I think the Portland small venue music industry is an important one. It is an economic driver, but it also is an important part of our community. And I can tell that from listening to all of you today, community safety depends on a sense of community in addition to a sense of safety and vibrant economic development in the music industry will also drive that community and public safety. So I just want to say to you, you all have left me with a lot of interesting policy ideas and proposals. I and my staff will look forward to working with you, or at least alongside you, as those new policies are developed and they come forward. For now, I'll leave this committee meeting feeling really good. Today we had some nice conversation and it was great to meet all of you here today. Thank you.
123 Thank you, councilor, councilor Duffy.
124 Thank you. You know, colleagues, I really appreciate you giving me the space to be able to demonstrate what I think is my theory of the economic case. And. But, councilor Ryan, you're so exactly correct that we need, as a city, a guiding vision. I firmly believe that there are no amount of police driving up and down Hawthorne boulevard at two in the morning that will have the same effect on public safety as a concert getting out and people being in the space. I have never felt safer on public transit than I did on the max going to a thorns game, people being out of their houses, away from netflix, around each other creates community safety so that our our few police officers can go do the hard work in the scary situations where only they can do. I went on a ride along with the Portland police entertainment division, and I was out until 330 in the morning with these folks, and I got to see how drunken revelry evolved as folks got into their ubers and started going home. And as folks high on fentanyl came back out into those same spaces. And the kind of difference that that had in terms of tone and tenor, and we know that our small businesses are struggling. I said early in the thing, I was a musician. And so for me, music is the obvious widget. It doesn't matter what the widget is. And I think we made a really good case that music is an easy opportunity for us to pick something up that's positive and run with it, but we as a city council need to set the tone. We need to ensure that communities are going to feel safe, that when people go out of their houses, they feel like this is a welcoming place where they want to spend money. We need to make it so that small businesses and investors see a return on their investment and want to come back to Portland and feel that if they're going to put the effort into building their bar, their coffee shop, their boutique, that that investment is respected and viewed by the city in a holistic way, that the police play a very important role in community safety. But the community also plays an enormously important role. And so I hope that from that perspective, you all can see that this is a widget, this is a thing that we can pick up because it's sitting right there, and we can use that to try and drive seats, you know, drive people out of their houses, into restaurants, into businesses and really embrace that sense of community, whether it's concert goers downtown or community concert in the park, those all really contribute towards the identity and the economics of our city. And so I look forward to having this. I hope that the city, I hope that we can move towards finding 4 or 5 things that this city cares about and really lean into it because we need it. That's the only way we're going to get out of the hole we're in right now.
125 Thank you, councilor Dunphy. Councilor Clark, you were in the queue before, and then you're now later in the queue. Okay, you can go next.
126 Okay. Thank you, mr. Chair. I want to just offer maybe an approach to what councilor Ryan was talking about, that I'm a very visual person, and I thought that mirrors chart. The bubble chart was really, really helpful. So if we had the economy in in the middle, there are all these things that we've identified that affect it. And we could do multiple charts. It just would help me visualize where should we put our effort, because there isn't, you know, 1 or 2 solutions. We're working on multiple fronts all over the place, whether it's public safety or the arts or whatever. So maybe I don't know if we can have a session or we can do some charts. I'm certainly a doodler, and I know you are, too, councilor Dunphy, but we could doodle, you know, sort of a approach to the economy. And then out of that, see, if we can't pick those 3 or 4 things to really focus on. And thank you again for bringing this particular piece to us today.
127 Thank you, councilor Clark. And, you know, co-chair Ryan, I agree that we need to ground ourselves in the data and we should do that often. We started our committee work with a presentation on economic data, and we had, I think, a pretty robust conversation there. It's been eight months now or so. So it's time for a refresh. But I would like to make sure as we go into this, you know, data is just a presentation of raw information. Interpretation also matters. And you have to be able to sort of make a causal claim from those data. And if there is a narrative, we should we should subject to that, that to critique and robust discussion. And so I welcome that. I'm open to that. We need to we need to program the time to have that type of conversation into into our into our meetings. And we'll be I'm hearing the call to do that as we go forward.
128 Thank you. Co-chair Green, I, I agree that I'm a big believer in critical thinking. I'm worried about that going away from our democracy. And so of course, we should have other data and we should have robust dialog about it. Councilor Dunphy, I appreciate what you said. I also would agree with much of what you said. I just would like to offer that. And I think that that was what was missing for me when I sat and listened to this, these two owners of a bar on northeast alberta who have music on weekends. And when I listened to their pain, when they when they had to handle something very dangerous by themselves, they want both. And I think we can do both. But when there's only 12 officers on the night shift on a Saturday night and all of north and north greater northeast Portland, the whole north precinct, and there were three incidents that pulled some of them away. They didn't have the capacity to respond to that incident, and that's what I'm talking about. So I think we have to be careful, in my opinion, to not make things either or. But it's an and so I just had to give that a kind. I hope that you found thoughtful rebuttal to that. Thanks.
129 Okay. And I'm going to leave you with the last word on that topic when I'll be looking forward to a future committee meeting where we where we engage again on the economic data and the sort of I agree, we need to have some guiding principles for the work that this committee drives us for, for our city. To close this out, I will say that our next meeting is Tuesday, September 9th, and I believe that we have welcoming presentation from the incoming prosper Portland editor as part of that, as part of that meeting. So that should be very interesting for folks in attendance. Before I close this out, though, I'd be remiss if I didn't recognize my lovely wife up there in the top and her parents. So everyone say hello.
130 Hi.
131 They're the ones that make it all happen for me. Okay, with that, I will adjourn this meeting of the arts and economy committee.