The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2026-09-03
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Session summaryAI draft · not editor-reviewed
On September 3, 2026, the Portland City Council Committee of the Whole convened at 9:32 a.m., with roll call confirming attendance and the clerk reading the standard statement of conduct. The body approved committee minutes by unanimous consent and heard committee chair updates covering calendar scheduling, requests for future agenda items including a governance code (3.02) discussion, street renaming, span-of-control/management staffing questions, and downtown planning coordination. A housing committee update described the Unified Housing Strategy engagement process, including stakeholder sessions on preservation, production, and funding, with further district-based public engagement planned. The council then received a presentation from the Chief Financial Officer and City Treasurer on research into an ethical/human rights investment screening policy, covering current portfolio composition, corporate investment restrictions, and potential paths forward (internally developed parameters versus a bespoke consultant-based service), including associated cost estimates. Technical questions from council members addressed portfolio yield, liquidity structure, and screening methodology. Public testimony followed, with more than twenty speakers offering divided views: some urged adoption of a broad human rights, labor, and environmental investment screen citing international law and past divestment movements, while others expressed concern that the policy would effectively target Israel and raised concerns about antisemitism and community safety. Council members then engaged in extended discussion reflecting differing perspectives on the proposal's scope and implications. No votes were reported in this transcript; where discussion referenced prior votes, outcomes are noted as recorded in the vote ledger. The meeting adjourned following housekeeping notes about an upcoming budget work session.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions and not yet reviewed by the editor . It describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger, which is editor-verified. Captions contain errors.
Procedural markers in this session
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0 Only to learn that you don't have to start the meeting yet. Oh, there's Steve. Okay. Oh, yeah. There must be. Okay. We just haven't started. Okay? Okay. Thanks. I know it smells like tuna in here. I'm having tuna for work, but you're good.
1 Can someone mute?
2 Good morning. I'm going to call this meeting of the Portland city council. Committee of the whole to order is 9:32 a.m. On September 3rd, 2026. Rebecca, will you please call the roll?
3 Good morning. Koyama Lane. I Morillo here Novick here.
4 Clerk here.
5 Green here.
6 Zimmerman here.
7 Avalos here. And we can't see the council chambers, by the way.
8 Thank you. We'll get that corrected.
9 Dunphy here.
10 Smith. Pirtle-guiney here. Ryan here.
11 Kanal here. And christopher, can you please read the statement of conduct?
12 Welcome to the meeting of the finance and governance committee of the whole. To testify before this committee in person or virtually, you must sign up in advance the committee agenda at www.Portland.gov/agenda/committe 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. 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 results in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered when testifying. State your name for the record. If you're a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifier should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
13 Thank you christopher. So today, folks, we've got a agenda that includes first minutes approval, followed by a committee chair update. And then our two big items are the update on the investment policy. We'll be hearing a report back from the chief financial officer, based on our amendments to the resolution that adopted our financial sorry, our investment policy last year and asked for a report back by August 31st of this year. We'll also hear public testimony during that item, and then we'll move into take a break and then move into continuing our council led discussion on the budget process. And just to note, a couple housekeeping items up top. We're intending not to shorten testimony, but if you and this applies to counselors too, of course, but if. But as well as those giving testimony, if you need 2.5 minutes, we'd love the 30s back. Please feel free to to use all of your time, of course. But if there's a need or there's no need to take all of it, feel free to give any of it back. It will help us get through the agenda. And then the last thing I wanted to mention on the budget process was that we are going to have a work session next week, I believe, on the 10th, but I'll verify that date on the budget process. This is sort of the last piece of the council review of last year's budget process before the administration is also involved at the table with us. And so we're going to hear from the cfo's office will be leading that work session next week in terms of the content and run of show for that. Okay. So with that, we're going to start with minutes. Our first order of business is the approval of the committee meeting minutes from April 2nd through July 23rd of 2020. Six minutes are approved by unanimous consent. So if there are no objections. The minutes are approved. Okay. And now we'll get into committee chair updates. I don't know if I need to have you read that.
14 Item two committee chair updates?
15 Great. Thank you. Colleagues, you've got it posted. But there's also a copy here that I'm going to hand out to everybody. The calendar has been updated in part one here with quite a few different changes. I'm not going to run through all of those. I will note that the September 24th through October 8th period has a lot of moving parts, and we're waiting on some updates from administration, as well as councilors who are filing legislation. We did put in a code to better clarify what it means to be confirmed, tentative or possible, at the top of page two as well. The one thing I wanted to mention here, I've put in October 15th as a very, very early stage conversation date for the 17.93 discussion that we started yesterday in the conversation about campesinos boulevard, but the broader code conversation. The other thing I wanted to mention is if, especially if you're interested in having something heard in this committee through the end of October, this is probably the last week to request that there are a lot of people requesting time in October. So just wanted to flag that for later. As we get into part two. This is just anything else that has been requested but isn't yet scheduled. A lot of this goes back quite a few months at this point. Part three I did want to note I'm starting to put together folks, and I'm going to ask for volunteers here for the future of downtown and street renaming code, just to kind of help plan the run a show for those discussions. And I would love some support from colleagues on that. So if you are, I'm not going to do it here just for the interest of time. But if you're interested in helping plan the future of downtown conversation, I know both vice chairs of this committee were interested in that. But of course, I'm seeing councilor Green. I also want to make sure that the district four people are able to be part of of planning that for fairly obvious reasons. And then street renaming code. I know many people expressed interest, so I didn't even pencil anyone in. Just let me know. By next week you'll see the two upcoming council deadlines for administration. The first one is about to be met in the very next item. And that's it. For my part, I'm going to pass it to chair Avalos to give her update in a second. But first I notice there are two people in the queue. So councilor Zimmerman, followed by councilor Pirtle-guiney.
16 Thanks, chair. Thanks for the update. I am looking at September 10th and this is something that you and I had discussed. But as you're aware, I filed and we were on the agenda for the surveillance pricing ban in the city life committee on August 11th due to just other items running long that got bumped by six weeks. I am interested it has been filed. It's ready to go. We're still waiting on the 22nd, but I see September 10th. That looks quite light and I would certainly have an interest in moving. I actually think it might be fruitful for the whole council to to take that conversation as a committee of the whole, and I wanted to gauge your interest in moving there instead of waiting till the 22nd for our six week delay.
17 Yeah. So thank you for the question and looking forward, looking into this. I've been the process for getting something that's been assigned to one committee reassigned to the other. One is not just the chair of the potentially recipient committee. So that's something I have to coordinate with council president and possibly also the other chair. I'm not 100% sure on that part. So that is something I've asked about. I'm not sure if if either of them would like to jump in on that as well, but just wanted to flag that part.
18 I have shared with councilor Zimmerman that I'm happy to keep it on the schedule, but that if he can get it on the agenda sooner in your committee, and that timeliness would be helpful for getting the policy moving. I wouldn't take any offense to that.
19 And I'm happy to facilitate if provided the committee chairs are open to it. So we'll certainly I will finalize this decision on on Monday when we have our chairs meeting.
20 Okay. So let's consider it a possible addition, and then I'll follow up with everybody involved, including yourself.
21 Very much appreciate the consideration. And given the, the date and the and the timelines there, we may need to ask the council to hear it with the 4/5 idea on on the committee of the whole now. But like I said, it has been filed. It is ready to go. We're just we're in purgatory right now. So thanks. I appreciate the consideration.
22 Thank you.
23 Councilor pirtle-guiney. I'm not sure if it was on that or another item.
24 It is on another item, chair. This council a few months ago at this point, had a discussion on a measure that I had initially developed last fall and then had input added to from the current council president. It was changes to 3.02, which is the code that governs our operations. Some of those changes were admittedly somewhat controversial, but there were many changes that I think the vast majority of this council felt would be helpful to ensure that our operations run smoothly. We are still in that iterative process of developing how our body works. That was bumped back from full council to committee of the whole, because there were a few pieces that folks wanted to do additional work on. It was heavily worked last year in the governance committee, but there was a request to do a little bit more work. You said you would get it on the calendar in a timely manner. We had a few conversations. We bumped some of those conversations to staff. It's been on the agenda as a potential item to be scheduled, never was formally scheduled, and now is not even on your agenda at all. So I'm hoping that you can share with us why you are no longer moving forward with that. This is our only governance committee. There are significant numbers of items on this list that could be in a policy committee, but something that can only come to this committee is now no longer even on your draft list.
25 Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney. I yeah, that was updated just going into this week. I can answer most of it. There is a portion of it that relates to lawyers. It's not the most important part of it that I won't, because it's not central to the thrust of it. I'll answer the rest. But basically I was in consultation with the council president after our consultations about how to organize the conversation, and I got the guidance that there's a change to how that process should go. So I removed it from there. That's basically it was it was that conversation. So I'm happy to put it back on. It's it's effectively unscheduled at this moment, and maybe it should be listed under that. But I don't know if council president wants to add anything to that, but I think there's a I did want to correct one thing. It was referred to this committee because it needed further conversation then the full council. But I did want to pass it over and give.
26 Yeah, I mean, I will admit that it's been a couple of weeks because we had recess, so I don't remember all the fine details of what we talked about last. But it is still a priority of my office to get this moving forward and recognize that there are some structural challenges to how we are running, things that are making my job pretty hard. So looking forward to making that a priority, whether it is in one conversation or having to be broken up into multiple. But my office is actively looking to push this forward as quickly as possible.
27 Thank you, council president. And I know it's something that you're committed to, chair, if there are legal concerns you've heard that haven't been shared with me as one of the sponsors, I would appreciate knowing that offline. And if you are going to remove things from the agenda, I think that it is the best courtesy to share that with the sponsor.
28 Yeah, I did share the main point in an email on August 16th to your office, which obviously was right before the the recess, but I, I also know that our staff's been in communication, so I'm not sure if the loop got missed there. And I apologize.
29 If that's been in communication about the changes to scheduling, but I did not expect to see it, not on here on the list of unscheduled potential agenda items. That's pretty shocking to me that it's not on there at all as something that could be considered by the committee. Thank you.
30 Thank you. I see counselor Ryan in the queue followed by Novick.
31 Thank you chair. It could be because we didn't get to have our meeting yesterday or we did. Were you there? We were in here all the time.
32 No staff had a chance to check in.
33 Yeah. Okay. So I wanted to have a deeper conversation about the downtown dialog. We've also had obviously economic conversations in city life. So it seems like we get to flesh that out a little bit more. We should talk to the chair of city life as we do that, because we've when we talk about economic development, downtown's kind of front and center. So I just want to make sure we're connecting those two dots.
34 Yeah. And I think, again, you're right that we didn't get a chance to talk about it. I think you actually have been a person who not only talked about downtown a lot, but also about the importance of connecting not only economic health, but also behavioral health, also homelessness, all those different conversations. And so as this is designed to be about downtown and not from the perspective of place and not from the perspective of issue area that's there. But of course, we'll be reaching out not only to chair pirtle-guiney, but also to chairs Novick and Avalos as well.
35 And then my other question is, when I see things that say councilor Legislation tbd, what what does that mean?
36 It means we've been told that there is going to be legislation filed, but it is not filed yet. And so if you go to the top of the next page, you'll see that possible. Just means there's potential, but there's no certainty of it. And I just wanted to not make it seem as though there was an empty agenda area there. That's kind of where I'm penciling it in, assuming the filing gets done on time. But a lot of this is penciling, I think, for folks who are reading this at home, the confirmed you should. Unless something changes, it's going to be the agenda. And the tentative is basically there's something that just hasn't happened yet, but most of it has happened.
37 But we know what the topic is. It feels a little less than transparent.
38 Yeah. I think as we get closer, you'll probably be able to start seeing that as it starts working its way through the council system.
39 I just want to experience that thing where I didn't know anything about the last item before break, and that we did it was on chemical weapons. I'm not saying I didn't appreciate the topic, I just would have liked a heads up.
40 Yeah. And I think, well, as as legislation comes, there's obviously more presentations are a little bit different, but but legislation has to get filed far enough in advance that it'll be visible. And I'll.
41 Just want to prevent the last second surprise. Thanks.
42 Thanks. Councilor. Novick. And then Green.
43 Thank you, mr. Chair. I see that the issue of span of control is still on the list, but I think that it's an urgent issue that the council delve into the question of do we have management bloat? And if so, what do we do about it? And I've suggested that a place to start is look at the 50 odd positions that we currently know are supervising fewer than four people. And I have to say, I think that addressing that issue significantly advanced the budget discussions is more urgent than street renaming procedures. So I would suggest that we spend October 15th on that rather than street renaming.
44 Councilor Novick to two things. One on on the 15th, we're expecting to have very little extra time because the dominant item on that agenda is the fall towel, as requested by the administration for that specific date. So I think your broader point may hold. But in terms of the specifics, that's the consideration was something smaller. The other question I had for you when it was discussed before, my understanding was that your interest in it was for an oversight hearing, which, as opposed to just a presentation discussion item, possibly with public testimony, which is a little bit more rigorous. I'm happy to do that. That's why it hasn't gotten on. It's just there's been a heavier lift to get one of those figured out.
45 I don't care what we call it. I mean, what I was envisioning was we'd hear a presentation from the administration on those 54 positions and go through them. And have they explained that the bureau, in each case had some justification for it, and then we'd have a discussion about that and ask questions which will, you know, will probably spill into the into the area of span of control, generally, not just those 54 positions. So I don't care whether we call it an oversight hearing or what, but I think it's a discussion that we should have.
46 Sure. Can I pull you in on sort of the agenda planning for that? I know that there's been some. I'd like to talk to the city administrator about how, how, how detailed we get in about talking about specific positions too. But I'll I don't know if you want to say something now. Yes, I can.
47 Share some now and I'll be meeting with councilor Green as well, because a lot of this ties into Green seven note you'll see an update in the next report, but we're also preparing information that will be coming back to the full council as it relates to Green seven, which talks about and discusses kind of management and the number of managers we have, and also what's incorporated in that is span of control as well.
48 Okay, so I'll see if we can maybe connect the loops of of councilors, Green Novick city administrator, and at least either myself or vice chair on, on that to plan it out.
49 Thank you.
50 Thanks. Councilor Green.
51 Yeah, thank you chair Kanal. I got in the queue because I just wanted to express my support for getting the 3.02 item scheduled even even if in part, even if it's just the parts that are not as controversial. I, I know that you're you're managing a whole, you know, there's a lot here and we did spend a lot of time on that, but I as we get into the fall, before you know it, it's going to be the holidays. Before you know it, it's going to be half of December, gone to recess. And I really don't want to go into the next year. Whoever's in these seats with that with that business undone, I think we have a lot of opportunities to tune up our legislative efficacy if we can hear that. So just wanted to add another voice to support getting that scheduled. Thanks, thanks.
52 And yeah, I mean, the, the in part piece is the, is the thing we're figuring out there.
53 So yeah, I have a specific interest in, in the, the, the floor amendment piece, but, you know, we'll have a warm conversation around that.
54 Yeah, absolutely. All right. Seeing no one else in the queue, I'll pass it over to councilor Avalos. For those who may have forgotten in the recess, we do take a chance for all of the committees with fewer than 12 members to update the full group, and we kind of are rotating that around thanks to vice president Clark on that. So, chair Avalos, take it away.
55 Housing strategy. Council.
56 Can you hold on? Sorry, sorry to interrupt you. You're a little your audio is a little garbled in chambers, so just bear with us a second. I think it's more on us, but looking to tech folks.
57 Probably with their camera.
58 Okay. Do you want to try one more time? Councilor Avalos. I'll interrupt you.
59 Maybe I just speak louder. Does that help or.
60 Yeah.
61 Can you hear me? Okay.
62 Yeah, that that's actually significantly better.
63 Okay. Sorry about that. Let me start over. Hello. All right. So for those who are in housing committee, this will be a repeat. Wanted to give an update on the housing strategy. Especially because for the full council this will eventually come back to you all for some discussion and approval of a vision. And so as far as the engagement to date, as a reminder, council adopted the unified housing strategy resolution last year with the goal of bringing the city's housing work, excuse me, into one coordinated strategy with clear priorities, measurable outcomes, and stronger alignment across the bureaus and with our community partners. And so over the last several months, I've been working closely with the housing bureau and the community and economic development service area staff to help plan and lead the engagement process that are going to inform the strategy. The engagement to date has largely taken the form of a world cafe style stakeholder discussion series, with subject matter experts from across portland's housing ecosystem. Earlier this summer, we shared the stakeholder list with members of the committee and provided an opportunity to review it and provide feedback and identify additional people and orgs who should be invited to those conversations. The goal of the sessions has been to bring people together with deep experience in different parts of the housing system, and give them space to work through the actual policy and implementation questions in small group discussions. On August 10th, we held our first session focused on housing preservation. So that's how we sustain the housing we already have, protect affordability and prevent the loss of existing units. August 11th, we held the second session focused on housing production, including how Portland can support the development of more housing across different types and income levels. And then on Monday, on August 31st, we held our third session focused on funding, specifically how we build a more sustainable and durable funding strategy for portland's housing goals. In all three sessions, participants reviewed existing city actions, discuss which strategies should be prioritized, identified implementation barriers, and talked about where the city can lead versus where success will require shared ownership with other partners. I've really appreciated the depth of those conversations and the willingness of participants to move beyond identifying challenges and starting to grapple with us. What are the trade offs, priorities, and what implementation actually will require? We also have an additional subject matter expert engagement plan for September, including sessions focused on goal three of the strategy, additional production engagement and additional preservation engagement. Goal three is around innovation and particularly center social housing. We've got two more that will be virtual only, so production and preservation will be on the 22nd and on the 25th virtually. As far as upcoming engagement. So we are moving into the next phase, which will include in-person conversations in each council district that are open to the broader public. These district based conversations are going to look different from the subject matter expert sessions. They are intended to be accessible to community conversations for portlanders, who may not work professionally in housing but are directly impacted by our housing policies. That is an important part of this process because lived experience and neighborhood experience need to sit alongside technical experience as we're deciding what this strategy should prioritize. So php has already reached out to each council office. They did that a few weeks ago, seeking feedback on the approach and planning for the district engagement. For offices that haven't responded yet, php plans to reach out again to see whether they are interested in providing input or helping to shape that. And let me also add that this came up in committee. So the the housing bureau and kind of the service area are the ones who are leading a lot of this engagement with the help of my office. Right. So this is the the city bureau's taking the lead on shaping these engagement priorities, obviously, with my input, obviously seeking the input of you all, especially as we move in district. You know, I think in general, we've noticed that we've seen that it is effective to have discussions in district because each district has different things to offer. And so we want council offices to have an opportunity to inform those conversations and what that look like, how we can best reach residents in in your part of the city. Php has also created a public facing website where portlanders can learn more about the unified housing strategy and upcoming engagement opportunities. And so that is at Portland.gov/php/unified-housin. Ultimately, the goal of all of this is not to simply produce. Another long list of housing policies, is to develop a strategy that helps us make choices what we prioritize, what we measure, where the city should lead, where we need partners, and how we organize our resources around the outcomes that we're trying to achieve. There is still a lot of work ahead, but I'm encouraged by the engagement so far, grateful to staff and partners and everyone who has contributed their time and expertise. And I will, of course, keep council updated as we are moving through the next phases of engagement and then begin translating that feedback into the draft unified housing strategy. So that is the report I see. We have questions and yeah, take it away, chair.
64 Thank you, chair Avalos. We'll go to councilor Zimmerman then. Ryan.
65 Thanks. Mr. Administrator, I would encourage you to encourage your bureau directors if they are trying to put together stuff in our districts that we have some meetings. I have not met with your new housing director. She's never been in my office. So a lot of what the councilor is talking about today is a bit of a surprise, and I don't think that's the right step, given the housing bureau's history over the last year. So I'm using this opportunity. I think there's some interesting stuff that was presented, but I'm already seeing some cracks in this. Given the way the housing bureau was working. Thank you.
66 Thank you, councilor Zimmerman, councilor Ryan. And then I'm next.
67 Thank you. Thank you, chair, and thank you, councilor Avalos, for that update. I was trying to listen to hear about vacancy rates. We all know that that's one of the biggest challenges facing our public housing in this city. And we have really high rates compared to other markets. So that's a problem that we want to really understand and see what we can do from a policy perspective to improve that. Is that on the docket coming up soon?
68 That is what the preservation goal is all about.
69 Oh, the word preservation goal means looking at vacancy rates.
70 So there's four goals in the unified housing strategy, four draft goals. One is production, one is preservation, one is innovation and one is financing. And so the preservation one is about preserving our current affordable housing. Just essentially looking at a current affordable housing, how we keep housing that we have fill vacancies. All of that is under that umbrella of preservation.
71 Okay. Thank you. I just the language was lost on me for a second, obviously. Thank you. Now, I know that preservation goes under vacancy rates go under preservation. Two when I was on the committee, we had a really good conversation about role clarity between the city and the county. And I hope that that continues to be what maybe we're also talking about in that report, because that's a really big issue. And and I would include metro in the state in that I think one way we get tripped up is we duplicate efforts and we don't focus on maybe something that's not happening because another entity is doing it because no one's doing it. So was that part of what you said as well? I just didn't catch the the words.
72 Yeah thank you councilor. So as you know, the unified housing strategy is purposefully internally facing to what the city is doing with the intent that once we get our ducks in a row, we'll be able to move forward with bringing that strategy, vision, ideas, what we think is our role to those conversations with our regional partners, including county and metro and the state.
73 Because I think sometimes the public and those lobbying get confused on where to go. And so we could help with that, with that type of clarity. The third is I I'm not on the committee, which is why I appreciate these reports with committees that are five people or less that are in attendance. Was data centers also on your agenda this recently?
74 Yeah, we have data centers on Tuesday. And so apologies, I just decided to focus on us for my report, but I can share that we had a data center resolution on Tuesday passed out of committee. It is a it is about ndas. It's not a moratorium, but it does. We did pass an amendment that speaks to exploring whether we would look at those options. But feel free to look at the city website to look at the resolutions. Pretty straightforward.
75 Okay. And if did you have that in the report? And I just didn't hear it.
76 No, that's what I was saying is I focused my report just on giving you an update on unified housing strategy. So apologies that I didn't go in depth into.
77 I could see why that happened. Tell me why that conversation landed in the housing committee. I'm just curious.
78 Land use permits.
79 Land use and permits are under. Oh, and that's housing. That's also under city life. That's. See, I thought that under city life. So I think it's just one of those moments where I pause to say, I'm not saying we don't need to have the conversation. I was just surprised it was in housing, but not in city life, perhaps where we have permits and such. But anyway, I think it was good. I helped daylight that councilor Because it did happen in your committee, and I want to make sure that the public heard. And I heard actually what happened with that. Thanks.
80 Yeah. Thank you. And it's because of the housing and permitting committee. Thank you councilor.
81 Thank you councilors. I had my question answered. So I'm not in the queue anymore. And I appreciate councilor Avalos giving the report. And with that, we'll move into the next part of our agenda. Can we record could you please call items? I think it's two and three still together. Might be three and four.
82 Now items three and four. Item three investment policy update discussion 2020. Document number 2026-303. Item four investment policy update public hearing document number 2026-304.
83 Thank you so much. So, colleagues, we are here because last year, as in pursuit of compliance with state law, every year the city council approves a investment policy. It's usually in the last few months of the year. Last year in November, there was a referral of the of the resolution out of the finance committee to the full council. And then it was discussed on December 3rd. During that time, there was an amendment Kanal one, which was put forward and was adopted to it, that asked the city administrator, but specifically the cfo's office and sort of the treasury to come back with options for how to pursue a ethical investment policy being incorporated into this year's. Investment policy resolution that is coming later this year, the actual investment policy resolution. As a result, today, we don't have anything to vote on. What today is, is a report back from the administration, and I appreciate them doing it on time and being a part of helping it advance the conversation by giving us options, hearing our feedback, and helping them understand what we need in order to have that be a part of the resolution we're going to get in a couple of months. As part of that, we also want to hear from the public. So we do have testimony. I believe there are 23, 24 ish people signed up for testimony. So we're going to do that. That's why I called the two items together. So that's my framing of it as the chair, speaking as the sponsor of the amendment that started this. We're here today because we all want a more ethical investment policy that allows us to screen our investments for human rights violations. We also recognize that it is difficult to screen potential investments for behavior, rather than simply by sector, as we do now, fossil fuels, etc. So in order to be able to have that behavior based evaluation where it's not about targeting specific companies or not about targeting specific countries, but looking at behavior and, and also while recognizing that a pure portfolio, quote unquote, is not fully possible, but we can always do better. That's sort of the, the values that brought us to that amendment. And now to hear, I do appreciate again, our partners at the treasury for doing research into what is possible, what other jurisdictions are doing, and which tools exist for conducting human rights screens on investments. Today, we're reviewing treasury's research, as well as feedback we've received on the initial suite of options from treasury. I'm going to pass it over to councilor Koyama Lane to give some introductory remarks on the amendment as well.
84 Great. Yes. I'm proud to be following through with commitments that we made to the community as council to review this investment policy and consider how we might strengthen our investment practices by screening based on human rights. The work to reach this point in the process has been a collaboration between cfo biery. Thank you so much. Our city treasurer o'callahan, community members, council office staff and I want to shout out my summer works intern, sabatino. We love you, sab for his incredible work and good vibes and all he did to support our administrative partners supporting research. So we looked locally, nationally and internationally at others who are considering these issues. So thank you to different community members who helped point us to jurisdictions, jurisdictions with information to share. And I do see this as an example of how legislative, administrative, and community members can work together on important issues for Portland, and I hope that we can do more of this in the future. In the same way that our budget is a moral document, the way we invest public dollars also reflects our city's values. So to me, the most important things I want to highlight is we're following through on a commitment. There's been collaborative work on this, and this connects to the value of continually, continually working to improve, you know, even where an issue is complicated. So I'm looking forward to the presentation and continuing forward with this important work. Thank you so much.
85 Thank you so much as well. So first, we're going to hear about 15 minutes of presentation from cfo jonas biery and city treasurer bridget o'callahan on the research. After that, we have about 15 minutes for technical questions. I'm going to note here that the questions are for the people up here. If we need legal guidance, we're going to need to do an executive session later before the resolution comes back to us. Time to ask clarifying question, not substantive feedback. And then following technical q&a, we're going to hear public testimony. There are 23 people I just got that confirmed and then have discussion where anything that didn't fit into the technical questions can come up. And so again, we're attempting to provide jonas and bridget specifically with the direction needed based on their options to revise the investment policy, to include screening. That covers everything that was in the amendment. And I might just jump in at one point. I'll warn everyone now to read the actual text of the amendment if and when it's appropriate. But in the interest of time, we'll just kind of get it started here. I'll pass it over to cfo biery. Thanks so much for being here.
86 Great. Thank you.
87 Before we jump in, you're referring to an amendment. Is that the amendment that we passed last fall, or are you referring to something new when you say, read the text of the amendment?
88 Oh, thank you. I'm referring to the amendment we passed last year. Okay. Which gives framing. I assume it's in the slides or in the conversations. Okay. Yeah. So maybe I won't have to.
89 Okay.
90 Thank you.
91 And for those following along at home, it was resolution 37723 just so you can find it. But yeah. Thank you. Take it away.
92 Great. Thank you, chair and committee members hopefully doing things correctly, sharing and speaking at the same time. So please, if you don't see what I'm talking about, let me know. For the record, jonas biery city's chief financial officer with here with bridget callahan o'callahan, the city's treasurer, as mentioned, we're here in response to last year's resolution 37723, which included the amendment referenced regarding exploration of screening options for an ethical investment policy and presentation of those options. Today's presentation will start with a quick reminder of kind of the current portfolio and current investment policy, and then we'll move to information about completed research and potential paths forward. As mentioned, this importantly will inform us regarding council's priorities and preferred direction so we can come back before the end of the calendar year with a policy for next year that incorporates that feedback as best we can. The city's investment policy provides a clear framework and criteria that can objectively be followed by the city's investment professionals and managing the city's investment portfolio. Like most local, like most local government investment frameworks, the policy encourages safe and low risk investments. Its objectives are to preserve principle, I.e. Not lose money to ensure liquidity, which means to ensure that funds are available to spend when needed. And lastly, to earn a market return. And in this context, market return means consistent with a benchmark that mirrors the city's conservative investment constraints. The policy is guided by and superseded by state law, including a requirement for annual re-adoption by city council, and it's written and periodically reviewed in alignment with state treasury templates and expectations. Like most investment portfolios, the city is subject to interest rate changes, to inflationary impacts, and to credit risks consistent with best practices regarding public portfolio management. The city mitigates these risks through strategies of diversification, through limiting the length of maturities and requiring high credit ratings. We employ an experienced and professional manager whose full time job is to maintain close familiarity with market realities and city cash flow needs, and to manage the investment portfolio accordingly and within the limitations identified within the policy. In addition to financial risk mitigation, the city's investment policy also restricts investments in certain industries based upon prior council direction, and we'll discuss that in a bit more detail in a couple minutes. All city fund balances are pooled, pooled together and managed centrally for maximum earnings potential. As a fiscal year end 2026, the city held approximately 2.8 billion in cash assets citywide. As interest is earned, that interest is allocated back distributed back to the source fund. So, for example, earnings that are applicable to water bureau funds go back to water bureau. Housing funds go back to housing technology related funds, go to the bureau of technology services. In the fiscal year that just ended, the treasury city treasury earned $117 million in investment income to the city, and that's revenue that goes directly to the city, appropriately allocated to fund city programs and projects. A pivot a little bit to where much of the interest around the ethical investment policy centers, and that's investment or restriction on investment in corporate securities, the city's current policy restrictions on corporate investments are that they must be rated in the highest rating categories of double a or double a three or better. They must mature in three years or less, and there's limitations on exposure to any individual, company or corporation and limitations on corporate portfolio wide exposure to corporates as a as a body, critically and different from maybe other other types of investments, pension funds, international funds, etc. We cannot invest in equities. We cannot own stock. That's a restricted by state law for local governments. So we only invest in fixed income products. Fixed income meaning essentially bonds. And then of course we apply our current industry classification restrictions that are in the current policy after application of the restrictions here on the screen and those other industry specific limitations. As of today, there's only around 30 corporations that even qualify. And so that's not a statement of good or bad, just a statement of fact that there's currently about 30 eligible corporations that would meet our current policy criteria. And with that background, and happy to come back to questions when we get done here. But I'll hand over to to bridget to provide some additional detail on the current portfolio and then importantly, the research that we've done to date. Thank you.
93 Great. Thank you. Cfo biery. For the record, my name is bridget o'callaghan and I'm the city treasurer. Committee members chair, ca lee, thank you for inviting us today and for your partnership throughout this process. I think it's been educational for all of us, and it's a great opportunity for us to take a step back and look at where we've been, maybe reformat a little bit and decide where we want to go from here. And so that's what's represented on the slide ahead. I want to acknowledge commissioner Novick for his leadership. First of all, way back in 2013, the commissioner was involved in this process, and it's something that the city has been focusing on for many years. Initially, when we looked at this more specifically, looking at a social responsibility filter, we initially worked with do not buy lists, and they were from a number of sources, primarily at that time, we were focused on carbon related matters, fossil fuel related matters. And so we incorporated do not buy lists there at that time for the carbon underground 200, for example, over the next successive years, we continue to strengthen that policy by adding additional, you know, social principles around how the city invests our funds. And we continue to refine that process to make sure that we were addressing what we were hearing from community and those concerns that were raised by council at that time. So what you'll see through this progression is that we've refined that process. And in 2017, treasury actually approached council with a recommendation to incorporate an esg environmental social governance filter on our portfolio. At that time, one of the challenges we had was that esg was relatively new. It was still, you know, a newer concept, and it was in the process of evolving and becoming more reliable in terms of the information that was there. And then there were some concerns raised at that time about the ability to publish those lists of esg ratings and how available that information might be to the public. At that time, council decided that it was in our best interest to discontinue corporate investments for a period of time, and we did that. So we took that internally, removed them from the portfolio, and then after consultation with community and council, they were added back in 2018 in the form of a specific list of allowable securities. And that was consistent with an approach that Multnomah county was also using at the time. And then in 2021, we further refined that process to look at using bloomberg industry classification codes. And the idea behind the classification codes was it's somewhat the lists are somewhat of a moving target, right? Companies sometimes might behave better or worse, but we knew for sure that our community had certain industries that you wanted us to avoid. And so that's where the that looking at the industry indexes and those codes really helped us to do that. So with that, I'm going to go to the next slide. If you would, please. As a cfo biery referenced a moment ago, the allowable categories for the city's investments are in front of you, and they include things such as us treasuries, repurchase agreements, interest bearing deposits, and those are actual bank accounts, if you will, that we maintain at a number of local community banks as well as national regional banks as well. As an aside, the city does have a community banking program whereby if a local financial institution comes to us with a genuine interest in doing business with the city, we will find a way to place a deposit with that institution as long as we're able to comply with the Oregon law. So I just want to call that out as as another component of our investment policy. In addition to that, today we're focusing on the last two the corporate debt. So if we can perhaps go to the next slide. On this slide, what you are seeing is the refinements that were put through in 2021. Again, drawing on the prior input from community and prior input from council. These were the categories that were of most concern at that time. So the first category, again, is dealing with that carbon underground 200 type of company. It was really trying to get at anything, you know, petroleum or fossil fuel based. The second one was small arms. And the reason we chose small arms is because it was the most widely covered, the widest range of arms in terms of those of most concern. So same with alcoholic beverages, casinos. And then there was a concern at that time about private prisons. So that's where the security category comes in. If we can perhaps go to the next slide. The idea behind, you know, the policy and these refinements really helps take the guesswork out of the process for treasury. Right? There's a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of our investment officer and the staff and treasury in terms of monitoring the city's cash flow. When that when that cash might be needed and making sure that we're investing that responsibly. And that's challenging in our current process. Because as we mentioned a moment ago, it's roughly 30 to 32 names at any given time that the city could potentially invest in. But because we've added additional filters to that, that number is actually much smaller than that. And in any given day, another challenge in terms of the city's investment portfolio and selecting those investments is that we not only have to find a name that that's acceptable to us from a, a, a social perspective, but also acceptable to us from a credit perspective, right? That they're highly rated. But then we need to find one that's actually issuing that has investments that are available and that there's an inventory of those investments at the firms which we work with. And so finding all of those puzzle pieces together is really quite a bit of a challenge for the city. If we can go on to the next slide. Just to give you an idea, the sector allocation for the city presently is on the screen, and you'll notice that corporate securities represent approximately 30% of the city's portfolio. We have a maximum, as was mentioned earlier, of 35% and a maximum of no more than 5% with any one name. This is important because it helps us diversify the portfolio. You know, we don't want to keep all our eggs in one basket. And so having the ability to diversify the portfolio by having a number of different investment types available to us, allows us to deliver on our primary goal of keeping the funds safe. Again, reduced risk is what we're looking to accomplish there as guided by council, the treasury division, in conjunction with commissioner Lane's office, who was kind enough to give us the services or allow us to work with their intern this year. We did quite a bit of research into other policies that were out there, other pieces of legislation, other local jurisdictions, and we really did focus very closely on recent testimony from our public hearing, as well as the investment policy review. And at that time, what we were hearing from council and community was that we we really wanted to focus on military related types of entities munitions, weapons, conflict related industrial classifications, perhaps, and of course, a human rights screening. And so the goal of the research was to really understand what council wants us to achieve. That's an ongoing process, and we'll continue to work closely with you. But we have to recognize that this is a path that quite honestly, few have traveled. We're treading some new water here. If we can go on to the the slide on the screen now is the industrial classification. So the first component of research we looked at was how can we expand our existing classification restrictions? And you'll see some that are recommended or proposed on, on the right hand side, the ones checked on the left hand side are already excluded from our policy today. And you'll see that we have looked in, in conjunction with community that we could potentially expand that list. And that's a conversation that we could continue to have. The next slide, if you would, please. The next slide is where we really followed up on the specific policies that were referenced in public testimony, and with the assistance of the intern and our investment officer, we reached out to all of these entities and happy to dig into this as much as anyone wants to, but at a high level. In summary, there was a lot of good information out there. Several of them are utilizing similar tools to what we are presently using, and they give us some good ideas for things that we might consider adding. But in all honesty, there was not one policy that we would say, here's a model policy that we should follow. There are great bits and pieces of policies out there. Unfortunately, virtually all of them, as they are written today, those other policies would not be in compliance with Oregon law. And that has to do with the fact that some of these policies are pension focused. Some of them are foreign entities. So that that's one of the reasons why they presently would not meet the requirements of Oregon law. If we could go to the next. We also took a look at esg scoring. Again, this is something that the city has looked at before. There's a couple of different approaches to esg scoring or esg evaluations. The first one is what I'm going to call the simplified approach, and that's looking at what's known as a bloomberg esg score. That is the method that that Multnomah county is presently using for their investment portfolio. A more complex approach would be to purchase a subscription to an esg service provider. That's going to be a little more in depth, because those service providers interview the firms, they collect information that's publicly available, but they also monitor for the media. So they monitor for reports of human rights abuses, for example, and they have an opportunity to interview
94 And discuss those things with the firms. So it's a little more in depth. If we could perhaps go to the next slide out of that research. Treasury has identified some paths, some potential paths. One path is to employ existing external tools, as I mentioned, very similar to the process that that Multnomah county is presently using, that we could essentially do that today without additional cost. We could add a filter using a bloomberg scoring process. That would assist us to take a step forward in terms of looking at the human rights screen. A second option was the one right below that, and that's an internally developed parameter. This might include a perhaps a list of prohibited names in particular. It might also have additional requirements around a purchased you esg service where we could give, you know, a run, a list of names against that, that at a high level would cost approximately three quarters of an fte, and that service would cost in the neighborhood of about $40,000 a year for the actual subscription to an esg service. So that's one option. Another option is what we've termed a bespoke service. And this is a more customized service where we would be hiring a consulting firm to assist us in monitoring our portfolio. That cost for that service is going to range between 17,500 and $40,000 a year for the esg service. But then in the neighborhood of about $250,000 a year for a consultant to help us manage that. Again, these are very high level figures. And and of course, could be different depending upon the scope of work that we might choose. Next slide please. Community engagement, as was referenced earlier, councilor, Kanal and Koyama Lane mentioned that in August there was a community engagement. Reports of that were very positive in terms of, you know, the ability to hear what folks had on their minds and to also understand, you know, what we can do and recognizing that we're trying to work on this together, right? That, that we, we share the same goal, but how we get there and, and how we put the puzzle together is what we really need some assistance with. So again, as I mentioned earlier, the focus and the outcome of that engagement was a focus on military related munitions, weapons related concerns and human rights screening, as well as a continued focus on fossil fuels. So we appreciate the community members that that joined in that if we can go to the next slide, please. The outcome of that engagement and our sponsors identified two primary paths similar to the ones I just mentioned a moment ago. One is that in internally developed parameter option, where we're monitoring this internally, utilizing some tools and some additional staffing for treasury to perform that internal monitoring. And the other option is to really hire a consultant or a, a bespoke service, which is really going to be able to help us fine tune to exactly what we want. If I may go to the next slide, please. Some considerations for both of those pathways. They require the treasury division to have some parameters. One of the challenges was referenced a moment ago is the potential legal concerns. And there are some from a a state perspective, the treasury division is bound by certain rules, one known as the prudent person rule. So we have to be very careful about how we approach investments. And so because of those parameters, we would really need for counsel and community to assist us in identifying the path forward. So we would need those parameters of what you what you would like us to focus on going forward. That might include additional industrial classifications. Again, it might include minimum environmental scores, esg scores, and it might include a customized divestment list, a specific list. We would also need some guidance in terms of the cadence of that. How often you want us to review that, how often you would like us to report on that, how often we want to change that. But it's important to note that whatever we would do would need to be for future investments. It would not. It would be forward looking and not backward looking. And that's because we want to make sure that we're protecting, again, the city's principle. We wouldn't want to lose money on investments that we already have out there, bearing in mind that our investments are relatively short term in nature. And so they would mature. If we can go to the next slide, I want to look at a pathway for the the internally developed. It was it was discussed in the engagement as a do it yourself kind of option. And so what you'll see on this, this path is we're at that first point right now where we're discussing the options with council. The next step would be to refine those parameters a little more, work with council to put that into legislation. So actually put it into our policy and have council approve that. And that would hopefully be a process that could occur by spring of next year with the goal, ultimately, of moving forward with treasury, creating some reporting parameters around that hiring staff. And then by the end of 2027, have that in place. Again, the timeline of this could move depending upon a number of factors, but that's a high level overview of what it might look like if we could go to the next slide, please. There are, of course, potential benefits and challenges with both of those options. And you'll see those on the screen here. It's certainly allows for community involvement. It allows us to translate the values of council into an actionable plan. But the challenges are that, you know, we have limited staff and treasury. We would need to hire additional staff. The ability to report that real time is a challenge because, you know, the mechanisms aren't in place for that today. And there's a cost for implementing this kind of a solution. If we may go to the next slide, please. You'll see a similar slide in terms of the path. So both of these paths are quite doable. But again slightly different timeline here. This one we're spending a little bit more time developing a scope of work. We would need to issue an RFP for a consultant. If we decide to go the bespoke option. And then out of that, we would need a time, an onboarding time with that consultant. So they would get to know us, get to know what we need, get to know our portfolio. And so that one's going to take perhaps a little bit more time, but a similar timeline to the first option. Again, similar. There are some challenges. It allows for a third party assessment. So it's, you know, we're getting exactly what we want. We're hiring someone to monitor it and get as close as we can to what we want. And we can be very specialized. We can have a specific list of names, but, you know, there's a cost to it. And certainly it's going to be our most expensive option. If we may go to the final slide, which is the question and answers. So with that, I look forward to answering your questions.
95 Thank you so much to you both for the presentation. We have about 15 minutes for technical questions, and I do want to make sure we get to testimony to for the folks that have been waiting. So I'll open up the queue here. Councilor Green.
96 Thank you. Chair Kanal and councilor Vice chair Koyama Lane for really leading on this. I was I also had an interest in in helping make sure that this was going in the direction that we want. That leads towards a, an investment screening that is focused on, you know, human rights that are aligned with our values and can be some implementable. But I really want to say thanks to the team. This is a really tough one. You guys have brought your best work to it. We've had, I think, some really good meetings. I really appreciate where we're at and thanks for just giving us this, this information at this point, allowing us to start to talk about this publicly. So I do have a question. I just want to level set. So on the first, let's see here on slide six. Appreciate the slide on our investment portfolio, gives us a sense of the scale of what we invest. That's $2.8 billion or cash assets. So presumably that's across that's across all of our funds. Some are enterprise, some are general fund restricted, unrestricted, there's sort of utility funds and so on and so forth. So that's the total cash balance that we can most three months of a term structure. It's highly liquid.
97 That's that is correct.
98 Okay. Do we have a sense of the 2.8 billion? Like what is our liquidity? Like? What are we keeping cash margin? Like? What is our sort of certainly not 2.8 tied up at any given moment?
99 No, it's I'm the best description of it is that it's laddered. So we try and match that as best we can to the city's known cash outflows. And we typically know large expenses every month for payroll, for example, there are certain, you know, cyclical cycles that we have out there generally. All of this, all of these monies are going to expire within that three year period. And we do have reports I can send you that show you how it's presently. Laddered.
100 So that's three years. That's that's not three months. Okay. Correct. That's great. That's a good structure that helps me understand that. And then for fy 2526, it looks like our yield on all that was 117 million.
101 My apologies. Sorry.
102 Oh I'm I'm sorry.
103 That's correct. That's the earnings off of that portfolio in the most recent fiscal year.
104 Great. So then I calculate just in simple yield that's like 4.2% of yield ish.
105 Three roughly 3.8 with our overhead costs, etc.
106 Okay. Okay, great. So I just note that just because it's when we get into the kind of, I think it's helpful to understand that that's, that is what we're getting in yield, even with an actively managed portfolio. And if you look at, I know it's not the same, but if you look at three year treasuries, you know, that's it's a pretty close yield, right. And so I think when we start to think about if we move away from some of these corporate bonds towards u.s. Securities or other municipalities, that there's probably not a huge opportunity cost in that delta, is that something that your shop kind of evaluates?
107 We do evaluate that. And as you probably recognize over the last several years, it's been an unusual market, right? The rates have been extremely low. And what we typically are looking for with an investment portfolio for a public entity such as the city of Portland is consistency, right? We're not going to be at the top of the market. We're not going to be at the bottom of the market. Our goal is to be as steady as we can. So historically, we're going to lag the market. So when rates are dropping, we're going to stay a little higher. A little longer rates are increasing. We're going to be a little slower to increase.
108 We're taking a smoothing approach to that. And it's really about capital preservation. Correct. Low risk to the city. Okay. That's that's great. And I think that's a really that's a foundational piece for everyone to be level setting on this. And then as we get into sort of, because where I'm going with this is what I've heard before, is like, why would we want to do anything that takes away potential yield by getting out of certain bonds? And I guess my response would be, well, one, we have values for our city, but two, it's probably not that much of a difference to just invest in u.s. Treasuries. So that's something that you you would, of course, advise us on if we go down this road, because it's easy for me to make that statement here from the dais, but you would have a much more precise claim to that.
109 Yeah, yeah. You can jump into I mean, I'll say sort of councilor, right. I mean, if we're talking about typically there's a yield delta, right between, for example, a double, a minus three year corporate bond is going to yield more than a comparable treasury. So there is some delta in a typical market between those two things. And as bridget mentioned earlier, you know sometimes that delta might be more will be more than it is in other circumstances. Right. We know there's been examples where the us government has been downgraded temporarily. Right. And so that changes those dynamics and kind of unpredictable ways. So I just want to acknowledge yes what you said is true. And also it's less predictable. And then just the other note is that, you know, one of our, our. Financial values is sort of in risk mitigation of the portfolio's diversification, right? And so that's another really important moment when, for example, we've had moments in history where there's been challenges with the us treasury products. Having access to corporate securities gives us a tool to continue to manage responsibly from a financial perspective and appreciate that we have other values as well beyond just that financial return. But I just want to call that out.
110 Thank you. And and, you know, and I do have I do have an interest in us actively investing in corporate products. I do for all the reasons that you said. And so that's, I think I'm interested in you've listed a couple potential pathways, and I'm intrigued by the contract for bespoke services, largely because I think I'm just fundamentally a little uncomfortable investing in staff who are not elected to manage these choices. I think that places them in a position of vulnerability, and it might produce a situation where we don't get the outcome that we want. And so the bespoke service, I mean, the most expensive one there is like an annual cost of something like $250,000 a year or more, which in isolation, out of context, seems like a lot of money. But if our yield is $114 million per year, then $250,000 on top of $114 million a year is 0.2% of the yield. And so as we're thinking through this, I want to just signal my support for us, thinking about that holistically. If we want to get to a place where we can have a firm, help us make these choices that are consistent with the human rights screen, that doesn't name any specific country. It doesn't name any specific. It just says these. These are what we like. The resolution text itself says, these are the things we don't want to be in. They would help us do that. Staff are not making these choices. And it's a pretty de minimis cost to the scale of our yield. So I think I just wanted to make sure I was can you confirm? I mean, that's the simple math is that.
111 That's a helpful perspective.
112 Yeah.
113 And I appreciate your sensitivity to the situation that our treasury staff are in. So thank you.
114 It's a it's a difficult conversation here. So it's we're we're trying to take a big step here as a city. So thanks.
115 Thank you.
116 Thank you councilor Green. We're going to go councilor Ryan then Novick. And then we'll move out of the technical questions.
117 Thank you, chair, and thank you, councilor Koyama Lane, for your leadership in moving this forward today. A couple of technical questions and good to see you, jonas, and you, bridget. Thank you. On the slide. Where you. Sorry. I'll get there. There it is. You mentioned jonas, how the allocations differ. Some need to be protected like water, sewer and then some are within the general fund. And you said it. The treasury, treasury, treasury earned 117 million in investment income and 2526. What was the breakdown?
118 Councilor. Thank you for that question. I don't know, I don't have it handy. I don't know.
119 If you could certainly pull that for you.
120 I'd be helpful.
121 Yes, I.
122 Wish I knew that, but I don't that's why I asked. I want to acknowledge councilor Novick for your trailblazing work in 2013. Thank you councilor. When we got to the slide that showed the sector allocation and we had the, you know, the the stock market type terms, if you will, t s, y or serp for muni, I think you should have a guide where it spells out what those are. Yeah.
123 Treasury's is tsyi. That's a great point.
124 Thank you. Yeah. I know some of these because I'm I, I, I would rather some are new and I just think for transparency sake we have to spell.
125 Councilor if I can. That's thank you for that observation. And just also, maybe we didn't note in this presentation that we do publish the city's portfolio details quarterly.
126 Monthly, monthly, actually.
127 On, on the treasury website. And so for folks who are interested in looking more timely and more under the hood and what some of those things are, including actual specific holdings that is available and updated monthly for public transparency.
128 And I following up on councilor Green, I was thinking a lot about the two options when we got to those, and I thought you spelled them out really well. I was trying to get a read on what I. Bridget, which one would you prefer? And you probably don't want me to ask you to tell me your preference at this moment.
129 You know, in all honesty, I'm neutral. That's what I thought. Yeah. My I the the banker side of me says, I want to make sure we're being as efficient as possible and choosing the least cost option if possible, because that's more money for our bureaus. So I have to say that that's, you know, that's where my banker hat is. But I also have to step back. My treasurer hat is that my my role is to follow guidance from council and from community. And if that's what council and committee want, then we will find a way to put that into action.
130 Your peers across the country who have gone through this decision before, have you are you in communication with them?
131 Yes. And we're not alone. I have to say, I'm pretty proud of where the city has gone on this. In all honesty, we are one of the forerunners. You know, we do very frequently have other jurisdictions reach out to the city's investment officer to say, how are you approaching it? So we we do bounce ideas off of each other. There is no good answer. There is no one single answer to all of these complicated issues. So we do speak with them. Like I said in the presentation, we haven't found one solution that that meets all of our needs. And so that's why we're looking at these two options.
132 Okay. I think that will be a really important part of this dialog. I don't want to prejudge without doing more research, but I look forward to hearing your insight and what you learned about the comparison of the two, because it seems like we're headed to that decision someday soon. Thank you. In your pathway here. Thank you very much for answering those technical questions.
133 Thanks. Councilor. Ryan councilor Novick will close this section out.
134 Thank you, chair. Kanal. First of all, treasurer callahan, I really appreciate your work and your presentation. I just wanted to ask if we hire somebody to do bespoke services, doesn't that mean that we, the council, would have to tell that bespoke provider what our criteria are, and they would figure out how to apply them in deciding who we should or should not invest in. So the the service provider would not tell us whether. Human rights, whether human rights violations just referred to a company being actively involved in advising a country on how to violate human rights, or a country simply selling products to a country that violates human rights and a bespoke provider would not tell us which which countries we should regard as the worst human rights violators. If we wanted that list, we'd have to come up with it ourselves. Is that do you think that's more or less right, that we'd have to come up with a criteria for bespoke provider to apply?
135 Counsel? Thank you for the question. Yes, we we would need to provide them guidance. However, we also have other resources at our disposal. We certainly have knowledge. Council brings to the table. We have community input. We also in. In the case of a an esg provider and or a consultant, they have experience, right? So we can look to them to say, what are your other clients doing? What are you hearing around the country so they can provide us some guidance as well. And what I would foresee is more of a fact finding session, perhaps at some point in time where we lay out what I'm going to call the scope of work for that consultant. If we go that direction or if we do it internally, it's the same process, right? We still need to understand what the parameters would be so that treasury could manage that on behalf of the city. So you are correct. We would need to come up with that. That would periodically need to be reviewed and updated. And so we would need to understand what the expectations would be around that. But you're absolutely right that that is step one.
136 Thank you. And I just want to based on my experience many years ago, I am concerned that coming up with their own criteria will be a bloodbath, because there'll be members of the public who have one view and members of another view. There'll be people who are concerned about one country and not other countries. And I, when we went through this 12 years ago, I concluded that relying on the independent rating agencies and saying, we're not going to invest in what they say are like the bottom ten companies was the cleanest way of dealing with this. And I also want to add that our resolution doesn't just talk about human rights. It also talks about environmental, consumer and labor records. And we'd have the same question about those. I was talking to a consultant in the environmental, you know, investing world a couple of weeks ago. And he could give us bespoke services for how to determine what our environmental invest, what criteria we use on environmentalism. So I just wanted to flag both those things that the resolution talks not just about human rights, but about other topics, and that the process of coming up with our own criteria as opposed to doing something that, like what the county is doing, is going to be very intense and emotional and time consuming.
137 If I may, counselor, I want to expand upon something you touched on. There are several other flavors of the options that we put forth today. One of them is exactly what you just referenced, and that is looking at the esg scores, right? So we look at one of the services and decide that above or below a certain score that we would either include or exclude. That's a very simple thing that we could do very quickly. So, you know, that's another option rather than going the full bespoke, or maybe we go down the road to a bespoke option, perhaps, but that's something that we could do very quickly.
138 And when I looked at some of the rating agencies and their scores 12 years ago, I was I frankly was impressed. I mean, they identified companies that I've ever heard of, but were very big companies that had terrible environmental. And they were involved, involved in all sorts of fraud and bribery and had all sorts of terrible labor records. And I was like, okay, if we're going to exclude ten big companies from our list, these ten look pretty good or rather pretty bad, right?
139 Yeah. Great point. Thank you.
140 Thank you.
141 Thank you. I'm going to pick up the queue for for whatever's left after the testimony. But I also want to make sure it might make more sense to just take the break now instead of taking three testifiers and then doing it. So we're going to go into a break for ten minutes and we'll pick back up at 1101.
142 Councilor I'm the only person in the queue and I have a very short technical question.
143 Okay, I'm going to put the staff on the clock. Then there were other people in the queue until I just started saying that. But if you can please keep your answer brief. Go for it. Councilor pirtle-guiney.
144 Thank you. I want to ask about the esg score piece you mentioned in the presentation, talking about a level change or a level in the esg score and cutting at a specific level. You also talked about an esg service provider subscription, which I think is different from some of these other, more bespoke options you've been talking about. Can you just very quickly help to differentiate what is the what does it look like? If we say, okay, we're going to cut off companies below a certain esg score level, how much flexibility do we have there? Is this a broad range of scores? What does that look like? And how does that differ from working with an esg service provider?
145 Great question. If we were to work with an esg service provider, we would look at industries and we would say that we want to stay above a certain threshold, right above a certain threshold score, or maybe we want to deal with, you know, a score of 70 out of 100 or better, or, you know, we come up with a threshold. The other option, which is the option presently in place at Multnomah county, is they're looking at a bloomberg score. So that's a versus a true evaluation. So the score is based on publicly available information very high level versus a subscription service where they are really digging into that company and looking at the history.
146 So both have to do with a score and cutting at a certain level. At one, it's a score just based on the bloomberg list, the publicly available information with the other. There are companies that take those lists. Do they make their own scoring based on their information, or do they say, we're double checking all of the companies above the level that you cut at?
147 They do a little bit of both. It's their own score. So it's similar to the rating agency process that the city goes through, where that firm is evaluating the company they're interviewing, perhaps leadership at the company. They're looking at press releases on on them, etc.
148 So in both cases, our role at the city is to say cut at this number.
149 Correct.
150 In one case, that number is just publicly available information through bloomberg, free or very affordable. And the other case, we pay a little bit more, but there's a little more digging as to what that score means. In both cases, our role as counsel is here's where we want to make the cut.
151 Correct.
152 Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. I really appreciate it. Thank you chair.
153 Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney. I'll ask staff to stick around after the break. There may be questions after testimony, but we're going to take a break for ten minutes. We'll be back at 1105 and we'll immediately start with testimony upon returning. Thanks so much. See you at 1105.
154 All right. We're gonna we're gonna pick this back up.
155 I'll give everybody a chance to come back to their seats, but we're going to resume this, this conversation with testimony. And I'll ask if rebecca, while my colleagues get situated, I'll ask if rebecca can call the first panel of testifiers up. And thanks, everyone for your patience.
156 I'm going to call up testifiers in groups. You can approach the testimony table right away if you're in the room, and I will get us started here. Sally, jovan or jockin. Apologies for that. If it's pronounced wrong, ricky king, betsy zucker, such, and lydia kiesling.
157 And first to sit down gets to go first. Take it away, please.
158 Sally, it's you.
159 Okay, I'm going to go.
160 My name is lydia kiesling and I'm a member of Portland dsa and the Oregon coalition for human rights. I'm here to ask the city to amend our investment policy to reflect a commitment to human rights. I have testified at two previous meetings on this issue and heard from the cfo about the logistics of applying a human rights overlay to our current investment policy. I want to thank the councilors who have stayed engaged with this issue, and the cfo and city staff for researching what other cities have done and how these scenarios might apply to Portland. When donald trump assumed office and put a target on the city, and in particular on our immigrant community members, many members of city council appropriately sprang into action to see what tools of resistance were available at this level of government. As a consequence, we have sanctuary policies written into code, and I know that some members of council continue to work with state officials and immigrant rights groups to learn what else Portland can do as a sanctuary city, one that has made public commitments to human rights. We should not be in the business of lending public dollars to companies who are actively collaborating with ice, with the trump administration, with genocidal regimes around the world, or with companies that exploit workers, our environment and build profits on the backs of human suffering. I know that our existing financial tools are not set up to make it easy to make the connections between these atrocities and our economy here in Portland, that is, by design. These conversations and these efforts by city staff are important for highlighting realities that many corporations would prefer to stay hidden. To that end, I think the current prohibition category of security services puts some of our current investments out of compliance as it is, but that's a separate issue. Divestment is a tried, true, and foundational principle of nonviolent resistance. It's a tool that is available to individuals, but its real power is when it is wielded by institutions that have economic leverage. And if divestment is a controversial word to you, consider instead from a pro-social, positive human angle. As a city that is apparently sorely in need of revitalization, don't we want to think about investing in our own communities first? Don't we want to send a message about who we are, just as we did when we took steps to halt trump's encroachment into our city? Are we really going to say there's no ethical anything under capitalism and leave it at that? You should see this work of city staff as part of a national shift for communities to demonstrate their ethical commitments, at a moment when the broader world seems cruel and very scary. I am grateful to councilor Novick for starting the work years ago of asking if the city is invested in companies that are, in his words, evil. I know bureaucracy is not set up to measure evil, but I am asking this council not to pretend that there is no place where you would draw a line. We don't invest our city dollars in exxon, and you all know why. I'm not asking you to tear up the city's whole economic model. I'm asking you to take a creative, yet ultimately modest step to align our priorities and our policies with our values. Future generations will look at today and tomorrow and ask, why didn't people do more? Here's an opportunity to set a better precedent for our city. Thank you.
161 Good morning. I'm sally joplin. I live in city district three and I'm active with Multnomah democrats and one of my committees there is the foreign policy study group. We have an item in the county party's platform that says oregon's investments at the state and local level should respect international human rights law, and we call for immediate divestment from entities that violate it. Our study group proposed a resolution about ethical investing at the April 2026 meeting of the Multnomah democrat central committee, and it passed unanimously. I am the foreign policy study group's rep to the Oregon for human rights coalition. Here are some of the ideas my foreign policy group expressed in its resolution. There is no reason not to gain good financial returns while investing in ethical companies and entities that do not abuse people's human rights or threaten the planet's environment. Oregon taxpayers, including all public employees, have a right to expect that their money will be ethically invested. We gave a lot of examples of unethical behavior in case everybody didn't know what that was. I won't tell you all of them, but one was creating software that invades people's privacy without their knowledge or informed consent, and sharing surveillance technology with those who use it to harm people, for example, as being which is being done by ice and dhs in our city. Environmental harms, including those intentionally affecting particular groups of people. And there were many more things on the list. And I'm not stating them here because Portland is currently invested in in all these. Harms. But just to point out the importance of instituting a general human rights screen so that unethical entities will not be considered for investment by our city, either now or in the future. So this is what I'm calling for Portland city council to do, institute an investment divestment policy that screens out entities that abuse human rights and achieve financial goals through ethical choices. Thank you.
162 Good morning. My name is betsy zucker. I'm a Jewish constituent of district three, and I'm here representing Portland jobs with justice. We are a coalition of over 100 labor, faith and community organizations active here in Portland for over 35 years. Jobs with justice strongly supports enacting a broad human rights screen for the city's investments, with the main goal of avoiding investments in corporations complicit in human rights abuses. J with j has a long history of fighting for policies that strengthen labor and human rights for everyone here and abroad, including, for example, the rights of immigrant and contingent workers here and sweatshop and computer chip workers abroad. We have long advocated for health care as a human right, and co-organized the powerful labor against ice March last January. Yet in recent times, we have all watched so many illegal and horrific government actions at home and elsewhere. Often these horrors are facilitated by corporations, supported by government investments. Portland says it is a union town, a sanctuary city, a city which cares passionately about climate and social justice. We passed safe. Let's make sure that these values are reflected in the $2.8 billion of portland's investment portfolio. So Portland, let's put our money where our values are for universal human rights. Thank you.
163 Sorry, I thought there was a timer sort thing. My name is ricky king. I'm with Oregon for human rights as well, and I live in city district three. Grew up there. I was here last December as well in support of the development of a human rights screen in city investments. I was really glad when that passed 8 to 4. The investment policy, including Kanal amendment one, which was the directive to include human rights as a criteria. As noted in that first presentation this morning, Portland has in the past led the charge in terms of environmental considerations or ethical and considerations in our investments. And I think it's a part it's I think it's a time for us to be one of those forerunners. Again, there are other other cities and other municipalities that I was actually really glad and grateful to see those in the report back that came out of the treasury and out of the cfo's office, that other cities already have human rights criteria in their investments. I think that's very in line with the ethos of Portland. As a city, I would really like to be more proud of the city that I am from, since our investments and companies aren't really like an abstract thing, it is an endorsement of their actions. I think that the criteria, including behavior, is is really strong. And as noted by the treasurer, that that is like a step that the city has taken similar pathways in the past, especially with considerations for the environment. I think given the current political climate, I think it's time to make another step in the same direction to include human rights as a criteria, be it through bespoke or internal services. And I hope that as this advances through through council, that you keep in mind that the tide is moving in terms of, one, how much the everyday person even thinks about this kind of stuff. You have people like me who just kind of work normal jobs, who don't come, who cannot be here very regularly, but who have, you know, taken time out of a working day and out of like everyday life because this is something that we really believe in. So yeah, I just want to support the development and like the, the, you know, I am not the person to say which path is better, but I just want to say that there is growing public support for such a policy. And thank you for your time.
164 My name is rod such. I'm with the Oregon for human rights coalition and I live in district three. I recently read an article that investigated city and state investment portfolios entitled investing in our own destruction. That is the issue here today. In a nutshell, destruction is obvious on its face when it comes to climate change and investments in the fossil fuel industry. It may not be so obvious when it comes to human rights, but recent events in this country should make it clear that investments in corporations complicit in human rights violations give a Green light to the destruction of the international laws and conventions that followed world war two. Those laws were intended to ensure that genocide would never happen again. The last few years have been a horror show. We have witnessed our neighbors grabbed off the streets of our cities by mass federal law enforcement agents without judicial warrants, sent to detention, hellholes, and deported to countries not of their origin. We have seen u.s. Citizens murdered on our streets by those same law enforcement agents. We have witnessed genocides and a war without congressional authorization, a war that our own president declared would end in the destruction of an entire civilization. What is not so apparent is the degree to which corporations have become enmeshed in these human rights violations, especially tech companies contributing cloud services, surveillance software, data processing, and artificial intelligence to the agencies carrying out these violations of human rights, not to mention a whole host of new horrors, such as autonomous weapons systems that decide who lives or dies without human oversight. As someone who campaigned against apartheid in south africa, I came to appreciate just how important local politics can be. During that period, 1200 city councils passed resolutions banning investments in the apartheid state. That was narrative changing. What we need to do now is also narrative changing, and we have an easy way to implement it. Do we just pay attention to the findings of the international court of justice, the international criminal court, the united nations human rights council, which has produced a list of 60 corporations complicit in genocide and war crimes. All we have to do is pay attention to those lists and we can do the right thing. Thank you very much.
165 Thank you to our testifiers.
166 Next, isaiah kaplan, mark blattner, carol rom, david taylor, randolph splitter.
167 Feel free on your left, my right to start us off.
168 Morning council members, and thank you for the opportunity to testify. I'm mark blattner, I'm the president and ceo of the Jewish federation of greater Portland. The central planning, fundraising and convening organization for the greater Portland Jewish community. I'm here to ask the city council to think long and hard about this process, not because the underlying idea of ethical investing is not important, but because our concern is that this process will ultimately be about city divestment from the state of Israel. Understand the precedent you may be setting if this council treats itself as a forum for adjudicating behavior in foreign conflicts through investment policy, we will expect every right, every human rights concern and geopolitical dispute to show up on the city council agenda demanding the same treatment the Portland city council and any ratings company that you use does not have the diplomatic expertise, the intelligence access, nor the institutional institutional mandate to fairly judge any of these, let alone all of them consistently. As for the city comparisons shared in the presentation, if you note all of them were passed following the horrible attack on October 7th, 2023 in Israel. Many of those cities directly mentioned Israel or gaza. However, what was neglected in the presentation were the dozens and dozens of cities in this country who have voted against this type of policy because it was unsure if it could actually focus on human rights and not focus on divestment from Israel. Corvallis is one example. I want to share this as plainly as I can. The potential of singling out one country's conflict for this treatment, while dozens of others with long standing, horrific human rights records go untouched reads to many of us, including many Jewish portlanders, not as neutral ethics, but as selective targeting. If this body wants a genuine, consistently applied human rights investment screen, that is a different and much larger conversation. I'm not sure this is what that is. Today, I ask you to weigh the cost against the benefit. The resolution is performative. It will deepen a rift in this city, strain relationships with Israel supporters and Jewish organizations, and potentially anger large Portland companies who do business in Israel, all for a vote that changes very little and certainly nothing overseas. Jewish and non-jewish portlanders who have a deep connection to Israel, not necessarily the government of Israel, but to the state and its people may feel marginalized by this potential policy.
169 Good morning.
170 My name is carol rahm, and I live.
171 In district three, and I want to say that I'm proud of Portland for having a socially responsible investment policy, and I commend you for your work on it today. I'm here because I'm concerned about taxpayer funds supporting fossil fuel industries that are causing climate destruction, and basically a threat to humanity's existence. On a personal note, my husband and I have divested our savings from all fossil fuels, and we found that our funds have not suffered from a decrease in their rates of return. In fact, indices that exclude fossil fuels have performed better than the stock market average over the last decade. Although the excuse me, although the city's current policy prohibits investments in petroleum products and their distribution, it makes no mention of methane or coal investments. Methane, so-called natural gas, is a powerful greenhouse gas. In its first ten years, it is 84 times more destructive to the climate than carbon dioxide. After that, it breaks down into carbon dioxide and water, and the co2 remains in the atmosphere, continuing to harm the planet. As for coal, it only generates it not only generates greenhouse gases, but also harmful particulate matter near the sites where it's burned. This causes public health issues for people living nearby, particularly in vulnerable populations. Oregon closed its last coal fired plant in 2020, and legislation passed in the Oregon legislature in 2024 directed the Oregon state treasury to divest from coal. So please include natural gas and coal production in your revisions to portland's investment policy. Thank you.
172 I'm david taylor. I'm representing. Well, first, I'm a district four for 37 years, and I'm on behalf of fosna, which is a christian advocacy for Palestine. I don't think we're talking here about divestment from the state of Israel. I think we're talking about identifying what is the best thing in terms of human rights and other sorts of divestment policies that the city can and should undertake. Gloria steinem died recently, like within a day. And you wonder, well, what would she say about this as an advocate for human rights, feminist rights, civil rights, all human rights. And I thank her. And a lot of other leaders would think, let's look at the long game. Steve novak and others started this in 2013. Where are we now? Well, we're moving forward 13 years later, but there's still a lot to be said and done. As Mitch Green mentioned, difficult conversations. So you have an opportunity here to carry forward a vision and to be advocates for doing the right thing. That includes identifying bad actors that harm people, that do what's going on in gaza, that do what's going on with ice and imprisonment. The policies have to have the big picture and what's best for the city's financial side of things. But also you need to think about your own legacy and how you would be viewed down the road. Would you be a gloria steinem, or would you be someone who was indifferent and didn't care? Thank you.
173 Hi, my name is isaiah kaplan and I'm an organizer with Jewish voice for peace, which was one of the founding coalition partners with Oregon for human rights. I'm here testifying before you in favor of implementing a human rights screen. As a Jew and a descendant of holocaust survivors, I implore this council to use your power to reduce portland's complicity and violations of international law. The current rules based order of international law was developed in the aftermath of the greatest humanitarian catastrophe, world war two, a catastrophe that saw civilians routinely bombed, starvation used as a weapon of war, and the genocide of the Jews of europe. American companies such as ford motors, eastman kodak international telephone and telegraph provided material support for the nazis war effort. Ford motors even utilized slave labor from auschwitz concentration camp, where many of my family members were murdered. These companies never faced any consequences for their complicity in these atrocities. In fact, in complete contrast, they were compensated by our government for damages to their holdings in nazi germany. We live in a world where international law is increasingly undermined, and where corporations rarely, if ever, face any accountability for the role they play in aiding, abetting or committing atrocities
174 Around the globe. American weapons, fuel surveillance, technology and information technology services have all played roles in human rights violations. American weapons have been used in the genocides in south sudan and Palestine. Facebook's platform was utilized in inciting violence in the ethnic cleansing and genocide campaign of the rohingya in myanmar. And companies like google and other information technology companies have aided dhs and ice in their mass deportation and mass detention of our immigrant neighbors. Instead of accountability. Accountability. These companies have been rewarded with super profits and investments. I don't know if divesting from companies like ford motors would have prevented them from aiding the nazis in world war two, but we do know that divestments played a role, an important role in ending the apartheid regime in south africa. What I am asking here is really the minimum. Please show this city and the world that we care about human rights and will not allow companies to trample over international law to profit off our public dollars. Thank you.
175 Thank you to the council. My name is randolph splitter. I live in district four. I'm here representing the Jewish Palestinian alliance of Oregon. We came together in October 2023 to promote a shared vision of justice for all. We've held a weekly village sorry, a weekly vigil on the corner of pioneer square for over a year. We've had many meetings with members of congress, and we continue to do that. And so as a member of the Oregon for human rights coalition, we strongly support a broad and comprehensive human rights screen, not limited to any single issue or region. And I just want to say, parenthetically, what I'm saying here today is not just about the direct investments of the city in corporate bonds, but also at least down the road in the local government, the state, you know, local government investment pool, which I believe the city can use its influence to, to change as well, because that's also an important collection of investments. Okay. So. Corporate human rights abuses, perhaps not to the members of the city council, but maybe to the people, to the public at large. Corporate human rights abuses are somewhat under the radar. We think that governments perform human rights abuses, but corporations facilitate those abuses. Corporations are very much involved in those abuses, either directly or indirectly. And we invest our tax money in those corporations, and we have to exercise our moral authority in choosing what whom to invest in which, to which corporations to invest in and not to invest in. Similarly, corporations have a global reach. So this too is somewhat under the radar. Directly or indirectly, corporation facilitated human rights abuses worldwide. So international multinational corporations may facilitate human rights abuses here in our own country. And for example, mass surveillance of border crossing refugees, of journalists, of dissidents and of ordinary citizens has been facilitated in many, many countries worldwide by corporations and their partners in different countries. And finally, I just want to say, financial issues, we question whether we can financially do the right thing. Well, I mean, of course we can. But I want to say that I used to volunteer for a anti-poverty advocacy organization, and we learned that pro-social investments such as the child tax credit, paid for themselves many times over. So similarly, pro-social investments in corporations as opposed to antisocial investments that, you know, not only cause harm, but also force taxpayers to pay for these things down the road. So keep that in mind as you're making your decisions. And for all these reasons, the Jewish Palestinian alliance of Oregon supports a broad and comprehensive human rights screen. Thank you very much to the city council.
176 Thank you to all of our testifiers.
177 Doctor manar al-attar, isai aguilar, michelle bombay minch, randi rosenfield, sharice bok.
178 My name is randy rosenfield. I'm a longtime Portland resident taxpayer and a Jewish American. First off, I need you to know that some of my friends wanted to be here today and aren't because they're afraid that testifying might open them up to being harassed. Life has changed for Portland Jews. We have armed guards protecting our Jewish day cares and cameras positioned all around Jewish businesses. And when there's a Jewish festival in Portland like there was on Sunday, people's first question isn't, hey, that sounds fun. You want to go? Instead, the question is, is it safe? That's happening here in Portland. I'm saying this because it ties to three words for you to face as you vote on these options intention, impact, and integrity. What's the intention behind this proposal? Your December 2025 resolution calls for a policy that screens city investments for genocide, war crimes, and human rights abuses. Let's be honest, for many, that's a dog whistle for divesting from Israeli companies. I'm concerned that there are some, but not enough, significant guardrails in this proposal to prevent people with political agendas from hijacking ethical intentions. What's the impact this proposal would have on us as a taxpayer? I object to the huge cost that defining, enacting, and monitoring this proposal would have. It could quickly add up to thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, let alone hours of city council and staff time arguing over the definitions of war crimes, genocide and human rights abuses. We portlanders, need you to spend this time and money on the problems here at home that we've elected you to fix. And you know the list. Another undeniable impact is there's no track record to show. This option would save lives here in Oregon or anywhere around the world. However, it feeds accusations and distortions and gives people who are looking to justify harassing or attacking Jews the ammunition we need that they need. Sorry. Which brings me to integrity. We. You want us to support this council's work and to reelect you city councilors make us proud to do so by bringing portlanders together. This proposal does not do that. Thank you.
179 My name is asahi aguilar, and I'm a member of the Portland chapter of the international coalition for human rights in the philippines. I'm here today to voice my support for the proposed screen on investments for human rights. If implemented, this screen could help ensure Portland is not complicit in human rights violations, such as those carried being carried out in the philippines in order to protect the profits of u.s. Corporations. I will briefly highlight just a few examples. Sugar giant cane sugar, which is attempting. Which has been attempting to strip its u.s. Workers of their union union benefits, also sources some of its raw sugar from island in the philippines. This is the same island where, on April 19th of this year, the armed forces of the philippines massacred 19 people, two of whom were filipino Americans who had returned to their homeland to understand the dire conditions of the sugar cane workers, many of whom earn less, earn as little as a dollar a day for their backbreaking labor. This repression ensures companies like c and h have a cheap source of raw materials to maintain their profit margins. Meanwhile, wilsonville based weapons manufacturer teledyne flir, as well as drone manufacturer institute, which has offices in hood river, are two Oregon based companies which sell weapons technologies to the armed forces of the philippines. These examples show how critical it is that the city adopted human rights screen to ensure we do not invest our public dollars in companies which contract with fascist governments around the world. Finally, I want to highlight how the current race to develop ai technology led to companies led by companies like amazon, google, nvidia and open ai is threatening communities from Oregon and the philippines as we speak, indigenous communities in tarlac, philippines, are resisting the theft of their ancestral lands to develop a 4000 acre economic security zone. Under the us led pact silica initiative. The race to secure dominance over the semiconductor and critical mineral supply chains are already resulting in widespread human rights violations in the form of displacement, militarization, intimidation, intimidation, arrest and state violence. And we must ensure that our public funds are not invested in these projects. Through the human rights screen, we can ensure that our city invests investments aligned with the values of our city and do not come at the expense of upholding human rights. Thank you.
180 Good morning councilors. My name is jerry bock. I use she her pronouns and I'm the climate policy director at 350 pdx, a local nonprofit with thousands of members around the Portland area working on environmental issues and climate justice. We fully support the goals of a human rights screen for portland's investments and commend this body and the city treasurer and cfo for working on creating a more just policy. It's incredibly important to us that the city does not invest in funds and companies that are committing genocide and other human rights and labor abuses. In addition to our overall commitment to a just transition to a sustainable future that upholds the rights of each person, refusing to invest in human rights abuses, relates to 350 pdx work. And that wars, particularly in the middle east, are very much wrapped up in the united states. Imperial desires for control over fossil fuels and extraction of other resources the world over, such as the philippines. Our tax dollars are funding weapons surveillance and unjust incarceration in the perverse hopes that we can have keep having cheap fuel for our cars and flights. All these injustices are connected, and I hope our cities funds can help catalyze a more just way forward. I believe one area is missing from the current proposal. However, members of 350 pdx have been working for a decade to get the city to fully divest from fossil fuels, serving on the socially responsible investment committee. And we have a climate justice platform that includes a section on divestment from fossil fuels and supporting ethical investments. Several members of this council endorsed that platform. We've also been part of an excellent statewide network for the last five years called divest Oregon. That's been making some progress on with the legislature in the state treasury to move our state funds away from fossil fuel investments. Recognizing the extreme risk posed to our global economy due to climate change. As we consider updating our policy in Portland, I'm really glad that Portland has already excluded investments in oil, but I would encourage the council to expand that section to include coal, natural gas and all kinds of fossil fuel extraction, production and all the other categories applied to oil in the current policy. We're also concerned about the banks that the city is working with, due to their financing of fossil fuel projects, and we'll put a bit more about that in a written comment. Climate change is a major human rights issue. The warmer the planet becomes, the more difficult it is to grow food. The more difficult it is, the more expensive it is to recover from frequent climate emergencies, the more difficult it is to have a thriving real estate economy, the more impossible it is to provide insurance, the more expensive it is for cities like Portland to care for our people. The city of olympia recently passed a human rights investment policy that lists what it excludes, as well as exploration of positive new investment opportunities, which is also important for us to pursue. Thank you again for all your efforts on this. I encourage you to add in exclusion of fossil fuel investments and invest in solutions that will be beneficial to all people. Thank you.
181 Michelle is online. Michelle, you can unmute and go ahead.
182 Great. Thank you. Hi, my name is michelle bombeck and I am a Jewish American and strongly opposed to the proposed strongly opposed to the proposed ethical investment policy. I have watched this city struggle with increasing homelessness, empty buildings, crime, deteriorating infrastructure and serious financial challenges. Let's make an important distinction. There's a difference between responsible management of Portland taxpayers money and using the city's investment portfolio as a tool for foreign policy advocacy. Six councilors announced a pledge on October 16th, 2025, calling for an investment into portland's connections to Israel, specifically investigating city investments in or contracts with companies considered complicit in Israeli policies. Shortly afterwards, resolution 37723 was adopted, directing the administration to develop options for human rights screening of investments, including companies alleged to enable or facilitate war. Given the council's documented history and the language of the earlier pledge, we have every reason to assert that this, quote, ethical investment framework will ultimately be used to target Israel, Israeli companies or companies doing business with Israel. Don't hide a foreign policy objective. Incite vague investment screening criteria. My argument is not an argument against human rights. It's an argument for transparency, accountability, fiduciary responsibility, and appropriate priorities for our municipal government. Portland has enormous challenges that are directly within this council's authority to address homelessness, public safety concerns, emergency response challenges, empty buildings, and a downtown that needs revitalization. The city faces a $170 million general fund shortfall while making cuts to homeless shelters, parks, police support and other services. These are the problems Portland Portland taxpayers expect you to solve. I am asking this council to keep portland's investment portfolio focused on its fundamental responsibilities protecting taxpayer assets, maintaining liquidity, managing risk, and obtaining a reasonable return. Portland can stand for human rights without turning its treasury into an instrument of foreign policy, and apply a policy that divides a community and continues to put a target on the back of the Jewish community. Please reject this policy and focus your attention in portland's limited resources on the people who live, work and pay taxes here. Thank you.
183 Linda zahavi. Steve gould. Donna cohen. Steven. Goldberg. Garrett. Wright. And linda, you can unmute and go ahead online.
184 Okay. My name is linda zahavi and I am part of portland's very vibrant, diverse Jewish community. I spent a great deal of time in Portland, and I'm here to express my strong opposition to the proposed ethical investment policy. I understand and appreciate deeply the desire to promote human rights and ethical conduct, but I believe this policy, as it is, is misguided, and it crosses an important line. Portland has many urgent issues within the city council's jurisdiction. They've all been stated. There is more than enough important work to do right here at home. Complex and deeply divisive international conflicts should not be part of the city council. It. It should not be taking sides on these complex international disputes because they are far beyond the council's expertise and authority. And I am also concerned, as others have said, that it's. The policy appears to single out Israel. If the goal is truly to establish ethical investment standards, these standards have to be universally universal and consistently applied. When you target one country while everybody else, including you know, our country, is engaging in serious and troubling conduct, it does not promote peace or demonstrate impartiality. It instead risks turning a city investment policy into a political statement. And there's a very real local consequence. When a public institution singles out Israel, Jewish residents of Portland can feel that their community is also being singled out. And this will play out at a time when we should be working to make Portland a place where people of different backgrounds and viewpoints feel welcome and safe. The city council should be especially careful about policies that can deepen division. Please reject this policy as it is proposed. Focus on the problems where we can actually make a difference. And when you address human rights, do it in ways that bring portlanders together rather than importing one of the world's most divisive conflicts into our local government. Thank you.
185 Excuse me. On your left. My right. Yeah. Okay.
186 Thank you. I'm Steve gold. I, too, am a Jewish resident of the city. I live in district four. My extended family members live in district four. District three, and we all vote councilors today. You're considering pathways that will lead to reducing investment options and adding costs to the city's portfolio. While our economy is fragile and the tax base is eroding. You've already been forced to drastically cut the city budget. And without good stewardship of public resources, we know that we cannot fund the housing, schools and services that our community needs. The portfolio is a public asset. You all have a stewardship responsibility to manage that asset wisely. Further, reducing investment options will harm all portlanders, reducing yields and putting greater strain on city budgets. Already, the portfolio is limited to, we heard, less than 30 corporate securities adding the nebulous screen of human rights. Further handcuffs our investment professionals and will only worsen the return. To be clear, everyone opposes human rights violations. But in practice, as you've heard others say, these proposals end up finding only one country guilty of human rights violations Israel. So why is this? Well, one reason to me seems to be the vehemently anti-israel policy that the dsa councilors keep injecting into portland's investment decisions that doesn't serve Portland, that serves the dsa. In the presentation, we saw saint louis and alameda county, oakland. Are these really our peers? Are we comparing Portland to these cities because they have superior performance that we can learn from? No, they actually performed worse than the 3.87% performance that Portland generated. But a common thread is the dsa fixation on Israel and Palestine. And my concern is this proposed human rights pathway is a trojan horse to inject anti-israel politics into our local investment strategies. Israel and Palestine have nothing to do with improving the lives of people in Portland, or improving the performance of our public assets. But anti-zionism is a foundational plank of the dsa, and although all of you councilors serve the people of Portland, the dsa members must also answer to their comrades on the steering committee of the dsa. Their anti-zionism is not open to a vote. It is toe the party line or face expulsion. So I ask the council whether you're a democrat or whether you're a socialist. Please focus on the people of Portland, on our economic health and strengthen our public assets. Thank you for your service to our community.
187 Do you want me? You can go ahead. Okay. My name is Steve goldberg. Good to meet you. I'm a retired attorney, a constituent in district three and a longtime member of congregation havurah. Shalom. I can't not more vehemently disagree with the testimony of mr. Gold and mr. Blatner in terms of saying somehow criticizing Israel is equated to issues like anti-semitism or whatever. That's a much more complicated discussion for us to have, but I strongly support the ordinance as it's being developed, at least in the city of Portland. My concern is that I don't want you to make this process so complicated that it becomes difficult to focus on what it's really about, which is human rights violations, which is something that every portlander should be concerned about. The idea that the treasurer's office has talked about using a sector analysis, I think makes things more complicated. What we've tried to do in in our ideas towards the ordinance are, number one, based the findings not on hiring a bespoke company or something like that, but on findings that have already been made by various united nations entities, international court of justice, etc. Which have found human rights violations. And we should use that as a starting point, perhaps the end point for determining whether human rights are being violated. Virtually none of the cities, and I applaud the treasurer's office for looking at a lot of different cities and states who have also instituted human rights screens. None of the cities or or entities that that were mentioned by the city treasurer's office, none of them use a sector analysis. If you look at what those cities all do, they all generally are relying on a human rights analysis. And again, relying on such findings by entities like the united nations. So if we look at the experience of every other jurisdiction which has been dealing with this, what the treasurer's office is now talking about is really developing a different kind of analysis and procedure. And I think it just is the danger of making this a much more complicated process. And the final point is, again, the testimony before, I think, made clear that if we change our investments in some of these bonds, we're not going to lose any money. And I think that's important. The idea that we should be concerned about ethical and moral issues, human rights issues, is critical on part of your work as city council people. Thank you.
188 Donna, you can go ahead online.
189 Thank you. My name is donna cohen. I live in district two, singling out Israel by singling out Israel. You're acting in accordance with a long standing tradition of singling out that state for special inferior treatment. The obsession with the country of Israel does not represent an enlightened nor a progressive view. If anything, it reflects a lack of understanding of a very complex situation, which to many seek to simplistically paint in right and wrong terms, often using a vast array of propaganda, an example of which I put in my written testimony, where the preeminent genocide scholar of the un who said clearly there was no genocide in gaza, was fired by the un at the size of new jersey, with a population of 10 million, of which 18% are muslim muslims who identify as Israeli. Israel is the only democracy in the middle east and the rare country in. In the area where all of this council's members could feel completely comfortable visiting. Indeed, generally elsewhere in the area, several of you would have to fear for your life because of who you are. Don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of netanyahu at all, and I don't support a lot of the government. But that's a different situation. That's a different story. The hubris of people who think they understand the middle east never fails to amaze me, and I run into it all the time. I'm not an expert, but let me just say that as a teacher and research librarian whose middle name is information, I'm quite sure that for each one minute most of you have spent studying the situation, I have spent an hour or two or more, and I'm happy to share my research with you. It would be a disgrace for any of you personally to pursue this investment approach targeting Israel, and would be an insult to our city if you would choose to do so. We live in divisive times. We live in scary times. Jews make up only 2% of the united states population, but suffer almost 70% of religious bias crimes. And it's getting worse. Targeting Israel in this policy would divide us more, and it would certainly make me and others feel and be less safe. Thank you.
190 Garret, you're next on line. You can go ahead.
191 Thank you. Good morning councilors. My name is garrett wright. I live in portsmouth in district two, and I'm a proud member of the national organization of legal services workers local 2320 exactly 20 years ago, as a summer law clerk, I had the honor of being able to contribute in an extremely small way to legal research for a lawsuit that was filed by the center for constitutional rights on behalf of five iraqi torture victims against u.s. Based government contractor khaki international. After surviving 20 motions to dismiss the case, a jury in 2024 found khaki liable for conspiring to torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment at abu ghraib and awarded the plaintiffs $42 million. It was an historic victory for survivors of u.s. Torture policies, and a rare example of corporate accountability for crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, just last week, the fourth circuit court of appeals threw out the jury's verdict pursuant to the united states supreme court's June 2026 ruling in doe v cisco systems, the supreme court's decision eviscerated the alien tort statute, which is one of the only laws available to try to hold corporations accountable for participation in and aiding and abetting crimes against humanity and war crimes. As the federal courts continue to become even more hostile towards human rights and to racial, gender and economic justice, it is more urgent than ever that the city of Portland take action to ensure that our public funds are not investing in and supporting corporations who violate human rights. This includes divesting from corporations such as alphabet, aka google, amazon web services, microsoft, and nvidia, who provide products and services to the fascist and murderous ice shock troops and to governments engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity, including, but not limited to, Israel, saudi arabia and the democratic republic of the congo. My father was Jewish, and many of his family members were exterminated during the holocaust. Never again means never again for anybody, and we must take all available legal means to stop ongoing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity anywhere and everywhere it occurs, including in Palestine. Thank you.
192 Edith gillis, emily hawley, sammy ortoleva, doctor manar alattar. Edith is online. Edith, you can unmute and go ahead.
193 Edith gillis, district three. Can you hear me?
194 Yes.
195 Thank you for having a human rights investment investment screen and for the public listening session. By doing this, you're helping to earn trust for voters. Our willingness and our ability to pay taxes and to pass bonds and to increase the value of our bonds. When I was on my church board, we divested from multiple things for moral reasons, and those things that we had invested in before were highly profitable. But when we got out of war, alcohol, drugs, private prisons, etc. Fossil fuels, we actually got more money. We were further ahead financially, but also socially and morally and spiritually. I want you to make sure that you screen out nuclear radiation poisoning as from the ai data centers, the central bank of central banks, the bank of international settlements, and financial leaders like the bank of england governor andrew bailey, warned that massive debt fueled 1 trillion plus dollars in ai investment boom and data centers, construction and fossil fuel and nuclear energy for them will cause a crash and global depression far, far worse than that of 1929 and the 1930s over investment for market dominance echoes historic bubbles like the.com crash debt, opacity secrecy with dark money violates democracy and accountability for crime syndicates. Money launderers, tech giants, shadow banks and data centers, as well as new fossil fuel industry and militarized police private prisons. Using surveillance to prevent democracy and environmental resilience. Data center short term boom before the crash. Massive serious economic weaknesses. So it's harder to correct the interest rates and manage inflation and invest more wisely. And what we need to do, which is for social justice and and environmental resilience. Ai data centers depend on violent human rights violations to get the slave labor, to steal the minerals and chemicals, stealing the water, land and labor, destroying the climate resilience and keeping things secret and having control over violation of democracy, having nondisclosure agreements, etc. They increase the waste and poisoning of our land, water, air and democracy, destroy the lives and the health of the workers. It raises the cost of water, energy, land, and reliable economies. I want to let you know that locally, Portland police violently violated my human rights near kill me several times using the tactics, the attitudes, the weapons, and the intelligence they used when they got the training in Israel against Palestinians, where there are human rights violations elsewhere. That brings an attitude back to us, to Portland. We must fight against it. Human rights violators practice global contempt, cruelty, dishonesty, bullying and theft. Anything. They do that to get those things, they're also going to cheat investors, taxpayers, the environment workers. So we must use those human rights Green as our best protection. Thank you so much.
196 Chair, vice chair, vice chair, Koyama Lane and Ryan and members of the committee. My name is emily hawley. I'm a human rights lawyer and atrocity investigator. I currently focus on corporate accountability, but I'll note that my background is primarily as an authority on crimes committed by isis, specifically the crime of genocide. Given my current work, however, a theme of my testimony before the city of Portland has been the danger of the profit motive returns for shareholders, and bottom line profits drive corporate actions, not social benefits. In some cases, this leads to complicity in serious abuses. These incentives are the same reason we have an economy built on chasing the next hot app sports and atrocity betting, and the hot air of llm speculation, rather than an economy which has spent the past several decades building out Green infrastructure and transit, robust education and health care, and accessible and enjoyable spaces, all with a safe and thriving workforce at its center. The profit incentive creates a question what costs to human life can we justify for a return on our investments? But this screen is one of those moments when the city of Portland can take the lead and challenging this incentive structure. Councilor Smith, you spoke so poignantly, poignantly yesterday about these moments which arise before council, where you can make a meaningful change and how much it meant to you. The screen is just such an opportunity with an ethical and universally applicable investment screen, Portland can help rebalance the profit motive. Portland would be the largest city in the us to take this step, establishing the city as a leader in the movement for a more just economy. This sets a precedent for other major cities will follow as more companies face the risk of divestment for involvement in atrocities and abuses. Respecting human rights becomes part of the profit motive. Less investment in pernicious and predatory industry opens up more investment for benign and ideally beneficial economic activity. Over multiple hearings on this topic, council has somehow heard commentary that this is both too small to matter and irrelevant, but also somehow massive and disproportionate and threatening to a single country or community. I propose instead that this is rather a rather moderate step, but one that really matters. I urge the committee to support this effort and to end the risk of portland's complicity in atrocities. With this screen, the city of Portland has the opportunity to place its weight on the scales towards justice, as do each of you. Thank you.
197 Hi everyone. My name is doctor sami ortoleva. I'm a queer Palestinian. We heard a lot of arguments today, and one of them was that adding a human rights screen would negatively affect the returns of the city. But companies that generate profits through gross human rights violations are not earning money. They are stealing it. We have an unfortunately rich history in this country of stealing in this manner from people through gross human rights violations, from land theft of indigenous peoples, through genocide on this land, to slavery, to grossly exploitative labor practices that continue today. When the city invests in companies generating profit through human rights violations. Mediated theft, the city of Portland is padding its coffers through that same theft. We heard that if this council treats itself as a forum to adjudicate international conflicts, everyone will show up before council asking for the same. But there are forums that do adjudicate international issues, such as un bodies like the international court of justice and the international criminal court. We are not asking you to independently adjudicate international issues. We are asking you to take the barest minimum actions to respect the international rulings that have already been issued. I also want to acknowledge councilor Novick's concern that arriving at criteria for a human rights screen would be emotionally charged. It would be an intense process as a particularly illuminating comment, but I don't think it points to the thing that Novick may have thought it did. If there is a motivated opposition in Portland to banning investments in the grossest human rights violators, most egregiously violators who contribute to genocide, then the problem is not how emotionally charged the debate is. The problem is that council would even entertain the views of an extremist minority in Portland that reveals itself every time someone dares to mention Palestine Palestinians, or to suggest that my people deserve to live in our historic homeland at all, city council must reject this extremism. Thank you.
198 That concludes testimony.
199 Okay. Thanks, everybody, for testifying and for being here and your patience. Two quick housekeeping notes, and then we'll get into the queue. One, we are able to go a couple minutes over if we need to, to get into and just allow some housekeeping notes really only on the budget conversation, but we'll try not to do that. Just wanted to flag that. The second thing I wanted to correct, a thing I mentioned earlier, with apologies to councilor Novick, I had just called this a human rights screen amendment, but as a result of councilor Novick amendment to the amendment back in November, it also includes labor rights, environmental rights and consumer rights. Apologies for not mentioning that earlier. All right. We'll get into the queue. Councilor Zimmerman, you are first in the queue.
200 Thanks, chair. I had a couple questions, actually. I think they were technical, but initially, so I wouldn't mind if the staff presentation could come back up. Thanks. Bridget. You had mentioned working with community. I guess since we passed the resolution in December, and I'm trying to get it. You mentioned working with some council offices. I'm trying to get a sense for what that looked like, who that was, what this was, because that wasn't something I was familiar with. And so when we say with community, what does that mean?
201 Yeah. Great question. There were there was a group of four council offices that were the sponsors. Of course, councilor Kanal was leading that effort on behalf.
202 Clarify sponsors of what.
203 Of this process of reviewing the investment policy and coming back with some options to add the requested screens. So that was the amendment that was just discussed a moment ago. The amendment to the investment policy.
204 Okay.
205 If I can just add one piece to that. So after the amendment passed, councilors Koyama Lane and I were asked to to help ensure that the information was necessary for them to develop the staff, to develop the the options, we asked councilors Novick and Green to help us with that, to come up with some folks to give community input directly, as opposed to us just being conduits for it, as this is just a statement of options today. It's not designed to be like, here are the people you listen to and not. It's here are some voices you may not have heard on this that included some groups ranging from government portfolio advisors, coalition of communities of color, Jewish voice for peace, sunrise movement. There are a bunch in here. I can get the the list out. And then there was one meeting where the the staff was able to present similarly to our presentation today and get feedback from those particular groups.
206 Okay, thanks.
207 That sums it up.
208 Yes. In. In addition, of course, the testimony that occurred last December okay, was influential.
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209 Thanks. You know, colleagues, I, I, I guess my, my request, I want to start with my request here is just, and it kind of relates to yesterday is that in terms of the impact that we consider. That there may be a majority moment here and a lot of harm to a minority. And I think that that's what I'm sensing. Again, I think it's a it's a a a week of that. And so. I'm having a real tough time with, you know, I think one of the councilors was referenced that was worked with. And, you know, everybody's up here and they've been elected by by their constituents and their districts and. They all have their right to their their different opinions. I've found it to be a difficult time to serve because I've never served at a time when such anti any one group was so permissive and accepted as we're experiencing right now. So I'm, I'm troubled with this because. One of the aspects behind this or excuse me, one of the councilors that got referenced, you know, some really unhinged stuff has been posted to that official account. That doesn't surprise me that we have members of the community who were afraid to come here today and testify in opposition. There is artwork up in a counselor's office right now that erases the country of Israel. There are six of you who want to investigate businesses who do business with Jewish companies out of Israel, and. I have heard this divestment conversation for as long as I have been in politics. And the dog whistle is no longer a dog whistle. It's now a screaming from the mountaintops moment, and it is so clear that it is about anti-jewish and anti Israel in a way that is different than being opposed to a country's current operations or current politics. And that has an effect on our constituents who live here, who are an identify as and a part of the Jewish community. So I think that the current ethical investment platform that the city of Portland has meets a great deal of our needs and our values as portlanders today would. Today's testimony might lead you to think that we have no such ethical standards. And yet we heard earlier that only 32 corporate organizations are investable by the city of Portland. And I think when most of us think about where to invest, we think of thousands of opportunities. And city of Portland has 32. Because of how much restriction we have placed on ourselves, councilor, Novick and others have led that previously. I think those are important and good directions to take, but there has been a fixation since before we took office on things that this council could do to send an anti Jewish statement. We fought it everywhere we could. This is a continuation of that fixation. I think, because I worked in bangladesh, part of my job in bangladesh was to monitor human rights. No one's brought that country up to me. We haven't brought up other countries who violated human rights. So when you keep hearing the same thread, you have to know that there's a focus here. So for me, this feels somewhat of a trojan horse to continue down. The folks who want to investigate companies that do business with Jewish companies, this, this has a lot of hurt that comes with it. And, and not for a lot of good that comes out of it. And so I would ask you, I know and you've all made it very clear where you're at in terms of with your own constituencies and your thoughts about that. And that's okay. And I think that that you you'll have those conversations within your district, but on this one. We have the potential to do harm here to members of our community because of the moment, the politic moment for a country in which they don't control, but they still have identity with and family ties to. And I want us to be cautious here. What's the saying is wisdom is knowing how to apply the knowledge. My wisdom tells me what this actually is about today, and that gives me great pause. And for those who are hearing the dog whistle as the screaming screech, I agree with you. And I'm seeing that, and I and I wish that we didn't live in a time where politicians could be so outwardly anti-semitic and get away with it. But but we are. And it's wild. It's wild to me, so I, I like the current ethical investment guidelines that I've seen the city invest in over, over and develop over these times. I think that the environmental pieces that are involved in previous. I think we've done good stuff, but there's a. There's a part under here that is the. I'm not sure if it's the underlying or the overarching, but there's a thread in here. If we could if we could excise that from this, I would feel good. But having this largely come from the group of folks who have been advocating for some pretty. Tough things, I think puts this whole conversation for me slightly in a less than credible position. And so I'm going to struggle with that. I wish it wasn't the case, but I would I would end again with with where I started is that I'd ask you to please do no harm. Please don't target a minority in our in our community. And I do think that this has the great potential to do that. Thank you.
210 Councilor. Morillo.
211 Thank you. Councilor Kanal. Thank you everyone who came and testified today in person and virtually. I think we heard a variety of opinions from a lot of people. And I think we heard a variety of focuses on this policy. We heard from environmental advocates about investments in oil companies and community members who have even made some of those decisions in their own private investments. We've heard from Jewish community members, we heard from human rights lawyers who don't focus on Israel, who focus in other spaces. And to me, this policy was actually written to be quite neutral, to expand our screening for human rights across the board. I am deeply disappointed that this is being couched. Obviously, this is being pushed to be perceived in one way, and I see the disappointed faces of some of our Jewish community members who are sitting here before us, whose experience is being ignored because they came to testify, to tell us what they believed and what they wanted and how they are taking in this policy. So there is not a monolith that agrees upon what is right or proper within any community. And I say this quite often because as an immigrant, I can tell you my mother has very different opinions on immigrant rights and what should be done than I do. There are generational divides, there are gender divides. There are all sorts of things that inform our opinions differently. And to uplift the opinions of one part of a community, while negating the opinions of the other that have come here to also courageously testify, who have also been rejected from their communities, sometimes for taking principled stances is very hurtful. And when we use language around anti-semitism, anti-semitism is real, and Jewish community members across the united states have been harmed. And we have a federal administration, frankly, chock full of nazis who are openly fascist, who are targeting Jewish community members, immigrants, and anyone who doesn't look like the german ideal of a white person. But to water down what anti-semitism is makes it more difficult for our communities to identify it and to fight back against it later. And that applies to any descriptors that are used when we are trying to fight injustice. This human rights screening is meant to be broad so that we can look at this holistically and what we choose to invest our funding in is a reflection of who we are, our values, what we are willing to gain, and what we are willing to lose. So I am profoundly disappointed that my colleague would level such a heavy, horrific, and painful accusation when we are trying to do something to the benefit of a lot of people. To me, this is very broad. But while we're on the topic. I am never going to forget going to the airport to visit the Palestinian family that had come back with their kid who no longer had limbs because his family was attacked by bombs that were funded through American taxpayer dollars. His eyes were vacant. And you could tell from the trauma that he had suffered that he's never going to have a normal childhood in the ways that many of us were lucky to have. And that is not about Jewish people at all. That is about the failures of our country choosing to fund bombs in other countries. Many countries. That's what the u.s. Does. And I know a lot about u.s. Imperialism because of what the united states also did in paraguay. I'm paraguayan. They helped install the dictator in my country that was a dictator there for 30 years and did a lot of human rights abuses. So our investments and what we choose to fund are a part of our moral obligation. And the idea that at the local level, we should never try to make the world better in every way that we can, is a personal opinion that I think lacks. There is an abdication of responsibility on this council constantly. We can't do this. It's not the right time. Maybe in a few months we'll do it. Maybe if we had a better process, maybe if your tone was better, there's always a reason to not do the thing. And at a certain point, we just have to ask when we're going to do the damn thing. This is a wide human rights screening. I think it has a lot of important factors. I appreciate the fact that it's talking about climate justice. It's talking about genocide. It's talking about all of the things that we would want to intervene on. And. I'm thankful for the community members that came from a variety of perspectives. I understand why there are concerns about it, and I don't dismiss that at all. And I'm not going to sit here and erase the other Jewish community members who came and testified in favor of this, because they want to see something different. So thank you for being here today. Your efforts have not gone unnoticed. And I also know from speaking with some of you that you have faced a lot of rejection and hurt in your own community, sometimes for taking a different stance. And that's painful too. So thank you.
212 Thank you. Councilor Morillo. I'm going to go to councilor Green and then Smith, and I'm going to just note that between the two I'm going to close the queue. So if anyone would like to get in now's the time. Councilor Green.
213 Thank you. Councilor Kanal I have to respond to councilor Zimmerman's comments because they were wildly off base and they were, frankly, I think, a breach of decorum. But I'm going to first begin by saying that. I, I have been approached with requests and proposals to say I want an investment policy that very specifically says, we will not invest in any company that does business in Israel. That's been a request of me. And what I have said is, I don't think that's the right way to approach this. I actually think that we need to be taking a broad human rights screen. And then that expanded into a broad human rights and climate and labor screen. And at no point during this presentation and no, there's not a single word in the amendment that says we are going to single out Israel. But what you have done is you have jumped to that to say, this is what's in there, because you're trafficking in sort of a second hand assertion process, which I think is unserious and it's not in good faith with this body. But there's a particular egregious thing that has happened here, which is to conflate any criticism with the state of Israel or, or any state, but particularly with the state of Israel, of being anti-jewish. That is appalling. That's its own form of anti-semitism, because it collapses a critique of a state with a people. And I think it's wrong, and I think it actually produces the very harm that you're seeking to be concerned about. I do recognize that Jewish members in our district and our city writ large do fear for their safety, because there are a lot of people who make that conflation all the time. There are a lot of people who inappropriately say, I don't like what this state's doing. I'm going to go to this synagogue or I'm going to go to this place, this school. And I think that's that's horrendous. And no one deserves that at all. But when we connect those and sort of say, councilor Green's anti-jewish, you've engaged in that. I've never been anti-jewish. You've basically called all of us up here as anti-semites because we are trying to advance a human rights screen that I think aligns with our vision of a of a city that doesn't invest in atrocities. And by calling us anti-semites and making that conflation, you've called portlanders who think the same thing, that same word. So I hope that you reflect upon that, because I want you to debate the merits of the thing that we're doing, not the thing you think that we might be doing. And I would appreciate that respect. I try to give that to you whenever we have a disagreement, I think I don't think I have say on that. Thanks, thanks.
214 Something council already approved with an 8 to 1 vote. Sorry, 8 to 3 vote on the amendment, as amended by councilor Novick, and then an 11 to 1 vote or 11 to 0, I think, on the underlying investment policy last December 3rd, councilor Smith and pirtle-guiney.
215 Thank you. Council president, micro and macro aggression is real up here on this dais. While we may be appearing to be broad when discussing this investment policy, when really we're trying to go after Israel, it's clear. I agree with you, councilor Zimmerman. If councilor Zimmerman jumped to being or being made to feel as if this was anti-israel, many who testified today felt the same feeling. So he was not alone. And he is not alone right now because I feel the same thing. I remember when you all tried to do this back in December, and we had this conversation, and you wanted to put up an anti-israel amendment. So, you know, my grandmother used to say, don't throw a rock and hide when you know what you're doing. I know what you're doing. And you're trying to act like this is a broad conversation, but it is not a broad conversation. And councilor Zimmerman has every single right. He did not call out any particular councilor, but he has every right to say what he said because he felt it. And I felt it, too. And many in the audience felt it. So just like every black person doesn't feel the same way about every issue, that's the same with every other issue. But we know and we were asked, and I sit next to councilor Pirtle-guiney and she felt threatened this weekend to come to the Jewish festival. She could identify with the testifier up here. The struggle is real for Jewish people and the struggle is real for Israel. So to pretend to be disgusted by what councilor Zimmerman suggested, it is fake. Because we know what this is. Thank you.
216 Councilor pirtle-guiney, followed by councilor Ryan.
217 Our city has a proud history of leading with our values. That work should continue, and it should be periodically updated, including in our investment policy.
218 I am looking forward to a robust discussion about how we can ensure that our policies keep up, and whether we should add additional industry codes to our prohibited list, and learning more about returning to an esg screen in the future. I'm particularly interested in learning how those two things can interplay together, and whether that's possible and done in other locations. We should always lead with our community's values. This conversation has become deeply anti-semitic in places. Let me be clear. Simply saying, Israel, Israeli, Palestinian is not anti-semitic. Weighing in on international politics is not inherently anti-semitic. You
219 A lot of you have spoken for my community today. I wish some who had chosen to do so were still in the room. I want to tell you what I heard as a Jewish member of council. I heard one and only one group of portlanders have to identify themselves by that group today. I heard one and only one group of portlanders feel pressured to adhere to some sort of litmus test. What kind of Jew are you? And I respect the opinions of everyone who showed up. And I appreciate you sharing your opinions. But when our conversations begin to put pressure on a single community to adhere to a litmus test, when that community is Jewish, that is anti-semitic, we are allowing what is an actually incredibly important discussion about values based investing in our city to become a space where we separate someone's idea of an acceptable Jew from those who aren't. And depending on who that person is, frankly, who is acceptable could have been any of the people who testified today. But the reality is that folks felt they needed to identify that. Friends, my people cannot be divided this way any more than any other people can. And I don't believe anybody who showed up today and divided themselves that way did so because they individually thought that they had to, because they individually wanted to bring that to the conversation. No, that happened because there are groups who have, outside of this room, made this conversation about a single country. And so people felt like they needed to address that. We cannot ignore that. If this were happening to any other group, we would rush to address it and failure to do so as a policy choice. Letting the conversation become a litmus test is a policy choice. I would like to thank councilor Novick for reminding us. Last year and when you first brought up our investment policies of a decade ago, how important it is to discuss how our investments address labor rights, environmental rights, and human rights. All I would like to ask our staff to share more information about the interplay between esg screens and industry codes, and I would like to ask all of my colleagues to do everything within your power to address the groups outside of this room who are putting the pressure for a litmus test on this conversation to stop doing so because it creates a safety issue, a safety issue that maybe not every Jew in our community feels, but that we heard loud and clear today. Some do, and that is unacceptable. Thank you.
220 Thank you, councilor Councilor Ryan.
221 I actually took my hand down. I really want to applaud what I just heard. And we're short on time. So thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney.
222 Okay, well, I'm last in the queue. I'll start by thanking the addressing the staff. Thank you for developing the presentation and the options and engaging throughout this process. The only option I didn't see here that I wanted to discuss is a heavier role for an expanded investment advisory committee, including appointment of members by council as well as the mayor. I think that when gray areas arise and some of the rules. This is an important place to create both democratic accountability and a place for community participation. And I think that's true regardless of whether we use other tools or not. Within the options that were listed, I strongly support having bespoke tools. I think councilor Green raised the importance of or raised the the relative importance of the $250,000 amount as 0.2% of the yield. I also wanted to highlight the idea of expanding one piece of the classifications to include not just oil, but no fossil fuels. I appreciate that from the testimony. And while we're on the subject of sector classifications, I actually want to lift some of the sector qualification classifications, not merely not add to the list, but actually consider removing some of them. I don't think that it's comparable to, say, investing in alcohol is the same as investing in guns or private prisons, for example. I just don't value that at the same level. Especially in a city where we have a significant portion of our economy developing craft alcoholic beverages. And I agree with the testimony, and I'm interested in encouraging, if not requiring local investment to the degree allowable by law, which does not only encourage a strong yield in the investment portfolio, but will have the multiplier effects that are noted. My values on this underlying policy are very simple. Human rights are good, international law is good, labor rights are good, environmental rights consumer rights are good. And I'm grateful for not only the colleagues who voted for this last time, but also for the colleagues who helped make it better. Like I mentioned, councilor Novick did. I also agree that it is important that this be universally and consistently applied. I have had similar experiences to councilor Green, where I've been asked to single out countries. I have pushed back on that very strongly and I will continue to do so. And my track record on this going back 19 years to when, as a student activist, I tried to create non country specific investment. I think bears that out very strongly. I did want to respond to the critique that this is beyond the council's expertise and authority. Our authority applies to how we invest our money. That's a very clear thing. Local governments have authority over their local investments. As for expertise, I won't claim to speak for other people. But, you know, maybe a councilor Doesn't obviously have this. I, I personally have studied human rights, international law. I have a master's degree in it. I've been fortunate to travel to several places where this is relevant. I've been to the hague, I've been to srebrenica, I've been to the border between india and pakistan. I've been to Palestine and Israel as well. I also am very fortunate that I have a network of people who've mentioned, as many have here, the rohingya people, for example, and the concerns not only in myanmar, which was mentioned, but also in bangladesh and that entire area, as well as many of the other places we mentioned coltan, democratic republic of the congo, and so many other places as well. Finally, I wanted to add on the subject of the direct piece here that we need to advocate for what we come up with at the local government investment pool, as well as purse in the state to implement ethical investment rules that ideally are in line with us. I think as a part of a standard practice of advocating for what we come up with to be more broad, and, of course, at the national level as well. And I'd love it if after we figure out what we're doing in the short term, we talk about a future bespoke tool that other jurisdictions can opt into because Portland can lead again. And what better place to lead than on ethical investment? What better place to lead than on human rights? It's outside the scope of this conversation directly, because this proposal never was about a specific country or specific people. But I do want to take the opportunity to say that I do agree with one of my colleagues who noted and multiple noted, that anti-semitism is real in this community. I do want to note that I have been approached by several people who have said that they did not feel comfortable testifying here because of their identities, and that includes being Jewish. That also includes being Palestinian, by the way, but that I went to the the Jewish festival this weekend, and among many of the other locations and events I've been to, there is heavy security. That security is needed. And that's something that we should be working on as well, including advocacy at the state level, which I've been talking to the Jewish federation about, that there's a need to help with the support for some of the security around Jewish cultural events, as well as locations of significance. And I hope that we are able to have that conversation with the urgency that it deserves leading into the legislative session where that ask will be made. And I want to take the opportunity to say publicly something I've said privately, which is that we've seen it in the context of this council to during the council president election, there was an instagram account that posted a picture of councilor, pirtle-guiney and myself and posted it with a image of the Israeli flag in the corner of an image of her and a picture of the Palestinian flag with a. In the corner of the image of me. I think councilor Pirtle-guiney handled that with incredible grace, and I think that we actually had a conversation, the two of us, in the context of a very, very heavy council president conversation that was on its merits. And I've always appreciated that about her. But despite the fact that I've said privately that that was unacceptable, I've not said that that was unacceptable publicly, and I regret not doing that before. That was completely unacceptable. I don't care if you were supporting me, her or any political side of this. It was never about our identities, and I was appalled by it. And I needed to get that out because although it is not about this particular topic, it has been something that should have been made public in January. With that, I did have two housekeeping notes before wrapping up this meeting. One is that the budget conversation did not happen today. There is a budget town hall budget process related work session. I apologize next week. It's September 10th, I believe. And jonas, as our chief financial officer, will be leading that. I did also want to appreciate the testimony that mentioned the passing of gloria steinem. And in the conversation about human rights. I think it's really important to recognize people who spent their entire life devoted to the human rights of all people in this country and abroad. Thank you for that. With that, this meeting is adjourned.