The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2026-08-11
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (27,249 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Portland City Council Public Works Committee met on August 11, 2026, beginning at 9:33 a.m., with roll call confirming attendance of committee members. After a statement of conduct was read, the committee considered four items. The first was a continuation of an ordinance amending city code to allow advertising on Portland Streetcar benches and shelters; discussion covered content restrictions, potential use of ad space for city messaging such as the Portland Clean Energy Fund, and concerns about equitable treatment of businesses in future advertising policy. A motion was made and seconded to refer the ordinance to full Council with a recommendation to pass; a vote occurred, with outcomes recorded in the vote ledger. The second item was an oversight update on the Bull Run Filtration Project, covering cybersecurity measures, project costs (figures were stated inconsistently across speakers), schedule progress, the owner's representative function, and plans for an independent financial oversight panel, including recruitment timelines and governance questions. The third item was a Vision Zero presentation from the Portland Bureau of Transportation detailing data-driven approaches to intersection safety, using Southeast Division and 148th as a case study, along with discussion of vehicle safety, speed cameras, and sidewalk gaps. The fourth item was a brief update on the Tom McCall Waterfront Park redevelopment design competition process and community engagement efforts. The meeting adjourned with the next session scheduled for September 8.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
0 Okay. Good morning everyone. I'm going to call the meeting of the public works committee to order. It is Tuesday, August the 11th at 9:33 a.m. No problem. Diana, will you please call the roll?
1 Good morning. Koyama Lane.
2 I am here. I apologize that I can't be in person. I am kind of embarrassingly nursing my leg because I got an injury at the brentwood darlington potato sack race. Which reminds me that an age friendly Portland Portland is really important because we are all aging. But I am here.
3 Green.
4 I also hurt my knee just bending over the other day, so I'm here. Thanks, Smith.
5 Here Kanal.
6 Dodgeball strengthens the joints. I'm here.
7 Clark here, and I'm in great shape. Okay, we. Let's see. Claire, can you please read the statement of conduct?
8 Thank you. Chair. Good morning, and welcome to the meeting of the public works committee. To testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at Portland.gov/council/agenda/pubc works committee or by calling 311. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In person. Testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted. When your time is over. Your preserves order. Disruptive conduct such as shouting. Refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered when testifying. Please state your name for the record. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. And finally, virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
9 Thank you. Claire. Colleagues, we have a very full agenda today. We have four items, most of which we've asked for. The first one is a continuation of the PBOT bus bench advertising ordinance that we're hoping to move out today, and we'll get into that in more depth. Then we have an update that we've asked for on the bull run filtration plant and really fulfilling our oversight responsibility. Then we're going to have a presentation on vision zero, where we really ask to dig in to learn more about what's really what really works and what doesn't. And finally, we'll get a very brief update on the redevelopment work at the waterfront park. We ask for that. So let's see. Diana, can you please call the first item?
10 Item number one. Document number 2026-212. Amend advertising on bus benches code to allow advertising on city streetcar benches and shelters. Amend city code chapter 17.45.
11 Thank you diana colleagues. This is a continuation of an ordinance that we heard way back in June. I think June the 23rd seems so long ago. And as diana said, it amends the code to allow the city to advertise on bus benches and bus shelters owned and operated and maintained by the city for the Portland streetcar. So as you recall, back in June, we had quite a few questions about advertising, generally questions from the committee, and we received a memo from PBOT. I thought it was excellent. A great dive into answering all those questions, and I know the memo has been posted to the committee web page for public reference. So with us today, I'll let you all introduce yourself. I'm not sure who's going to kick it off, but I think you're going to give us a little bit of a reset just to remind us what we're talking about since it's been almost two months. And then we'll we'll see if there are any more questions about the memo. Thank you. Who's going to kick it off for us?
12 That sounds good. That would be me. Thank you councilors, and good morning. My name is caitlin ref. I'm with PBOT. I manage our major projects and transit division. And yes, as councilor Clark mentioned, we are here for the code amendment to chapter 17.45 related to the Portland streetcar. This code amendment, as mentioned, was continued from June 23rd. The memo has been provided and I'm joined here by the team. We're happy to answer any questions. I'm going to go over a few slides and then let each of them introduce themselves as a quick refresher and summary. The amendment is to allow the city to include Portland streetcar benches and shelters in future advertising contracts. It is a code cleanup. It does not create a new program or change streetcar service. The city owns Portland streetcar and the related assets, and this updates update allows those city owned assets to be included in future advertising opportunities. The cleanup is needed now because it was. The city code was actually written before the Portland streetcar system existed. The modern system. So currently our city code only authorizes TriMet for this type of transit bench and advertising and shelter advertising. Also, the current streetcar and TriMet advertising contracts are ending. So now is the time to update the code and before the next contract is put in place. Actually back to this one. So just for clarity, the amendment is limited to city owned Portland streetcar benches and shelters. It adds the city is an authorized entity for Portland streetcar advertising. It clarifies, I think, yeah, it clarifies that streetcar shelters are included, and it also keeps trimet's existing authority in place. And as we started to discuss last June, we are pursuing a joint solicitation with TriMet for future advertising contract for efficiencies. And the joint RFP was issued with TriMet on June 12th of 2026 and closed just days ago. So this is included in the RFP and is consistent with past TriMet advertising contracts as well as the streetcar vehicle wrap advertising contract that has been held by Portland streetcar inc. Our nonprofit operating partner. We are going to continue to utilize TriMet adopted advertising policies and procedures to define any applicable restrictions on advertising content. Ultimately, the city and TriMet will hold their own contracts with the successful bidder. So that concludes our slides. I could quickly let the team up here introduce themselves, and then we're happy to answer any questions.
13 Great. Thank you. Caitlin.
14 I guess I'll start. I'm ken mcguire from the city attorney's office. I've been in contact with my counterpart at TriMet about the first amendment, article one, section eight kind of limitations on this. So I'm here to answer any questions that you might have.
15 Hi, everybody. Rich eisenhower with PBOT. I'm with our office of the director of our policy resources and
16 Partnerships team.
17 Rich bauer, director of Portland streetcar, inc. We are the nonprofit partner between the city and TriMet in assisting and management of the streetcar, and we have held the advertising and sponsorship contract since 2001.
18 Great. We appreciate your being here today. In case there are any additional questions, I thought that your memo was pretty thorough and answered all the questions that we had. But just as a follow up, I wanted to see if our members had any other questions. I know that TriMet in the past, many, many years ago when I was there, had all kinds of first amendment issues on the busses that were all wrestled to the ground and cared for, but I don't know if we have any other concerns around that. Councilor Kanal you had quite a few of the questions were yours, and I think they were all answered.
19 Yeah. Yeah, I think they were too. So thank you for the memo. I appreciate all the information. I wanted to follow up just quickly on two of those. One was a question, one was a comment question was e about promoting other resources, including 311 and immigration rights. The response, I think, really covered the 311 piece, but doesn't explicitly say anything about immigration. So I guess the question is, I think the example we were using was basically perk. Can we advertise the perk hotline on there? And in the event that that's a city priority or there's just a gap in advertising at a specific location, is that something that we can do? And I just wanted to give the chance to put a finer point on it or be more explicit if that's something you can answer.
20 That's the answer.
21 I just will say, from my experience that the city owns these assets, and you can place virtually whatever you want on there as the owner of the asset. Just today, we're rolling out a new app that is designed by the city and by sy. Some of our trains have really poor paint jobs on them. And so instead of just running them around like that, we designed our own wrap and it's advertising the streetcar system.
22 Dan, you want to explain what a wrap is?
23 I'm sorry, the wrap is what you're when you're wrapping the streetcar vehicle in its entirety with a vinyl wrap. So we have opportunities for that on the horizon. We have several new cars coming into the system that don't. They're branded from somebody else's system, or they're new cars, or they have cars with bad paint jobs. There are a lot of opportunities to do that. I will say this is a revenue generating program. The reason we do this is to make money to run the streetcar. So if the city wants to make this choice to advertise to the assets or city programs, that's fine. I think that's great. We just need to recognize that we're probably foregoing a little bit of revenue each time we do that.
24 Yeah. And I think that makes sense to, to weigh against. But also if, like I said, if there's a gap in, in advertising or something like that, and.
25 There often is.
26 I think I'm interpreting at least the first sentence where you said the city can do that in terms of the design of a, of a wrap to mean the administrative side. So I will direct this comment to the empty chairs to my right and say, I would love it if that is something that was considered in those those times. But that's solid for me. Thank you for answering that about d, which is the other question about when can things be excluded. I both appreciate this information and the the initiative for the. Question ended up being mooted between June and now because a demonstrably, I think the quote you said is 2.2.1 point 1da, which says TriMet can exclude advertising if it is, quote, demonstrably false, misleading, deceptive, libelous, defamatory or infringes upon protected intellectual property or privacy rights, end quote. And this doesn't affect anything besides those first three of demonstrably false, misleading and deceptive. But the campaign that I was thinking about that might be an advertising campaign is now a moot point, because the good voters of the city of Portland did not did not keep that going. So I both from your memo and from, you know, events that occurred between June and now have have made that not a concern. But thank you so much. Thank you, madam chair.
27 Thank you. Councilor Kanal. I think that we can actually mention the first part of that to the mayor's office and to the mayor's staff that have a responsibility in that area, although she may have moved. But yeah, I think that's a good issue to bring up there. Councilor Green.
28 Yeah, I just want to say thanks for providing the memo. It was comprehensive. It cleared up all my questions. I think at this point, I'd just like to voice my support for the the amendment, the ordinance here, but but also make an appeal again to the empty chairs over there that we we don't run advertisements that try to convince people to buy cars, even if they're electric cars. I think that that's counter productive to what we're trying to do. And I understand at the end of the day, you're putting out bids for solicitation for people to pay for advertising. But to the extent that we can use some discretion to think about what it does to the ridership, let's let's keep that top of mind. I also think that, if I'm not mistaken, there's nothing to prohibit the city from purchasing ad space on these things. And so one thing that comes to my mind is when I talk to my constituents about the Portland clean energy fund, they they like it, but they but they want to hear more about it. They want to hear more about what we are doing with it and what the opportunities are, and how to engage in the amendment process itself as a community member. And so, you know, you know, if bp wants to be in the business of purchasing some ad space on the Portland streetcar system to talk about what pcf's doing in our community, I think that'd be a big win for us for, for portlanders. So just, just putting that on the record here, that I think it's also an opportunity for us to, to sort of sell our, our wins when we, when we have them and give folks some confidence that, yeah.
29 We did submit a grant for pcf funding. It was a little bit of a stretch, but it was to basically replace the advertising program with pcf controlled messaging. That's. We're open to that.
30 So it sounds like you're already on it.
31 It's again, it's just the money thing and we're not making that much money. So I, I think it's worth conversation.
32 I love it. Thank you.
33 Councilor Green that was prescient. That was very good. Yes yes thank you, councilor Smith.
34 Thank you. Thank you all for the presentation. I'm concerned when we start identifying which businesses can market on our public dollar, when all of the citizens and residents in this city, they pay taxes to and to marginalize and and minimize certain industries? I think that that is not something that I am interested in doing, but I want to go and have a conversation with you. Councilor Green, were you saying that that's what you wanted them to put in, that they couldn't advertise car companies, or is that somewhere in the language?
35 I was just putting my hope and dream here as just a person with some opinions, because there's nothing in here that says you can't. I just think it would be a big own goal if we were like, stop taking transit and start driving a car for the thing that we're trying to run here.
36 Right? But I don't think that that is the messaging that we get from the streetcar that is just for folks who are only going to use transit. Again, I am going to say thank you for your comments. And I, and I too have some too, because I have to represent all businesses. So what's next? If you if you start eliminating the car companies, what is what is next in terms of the private sector, who actually pay the bills here? We don't really pay the bills here. We get business licensing tax money. We get property tax money from everybody. And those property tax monies from people in the city of Portland, they own businesses and to eliminate their businesses wholesale. And I get what you're which direction.
37 You clarify. That's not that's not happening.
38 No, I'm just saying because someone put on the record that that's what they wanted. And I'm saying to you, when you think about this, do not marginalize your opportunity to only get p.s.f money. So you can so you can push p f messaging. I don't think that's cool. And I don't think it's right. I'm saying that the people in this city who pay the bills, the property tax owners and the business licensing tax people, if we try to eliminate one of them, then we're going to what's going to happen to the rest of the business community. So that will not fly with me, if that's your intention on putting adding some language to this, because it's not going to fly with me because I'll bring in every single business chamber of commerce in here. And they will they will fight that like nobody's business. And we can't I mean, I'm sorry, madam chair, but I'm not going to allow this kind of conversation without me speaking up. Something about it.
39 I appreciate people expressing their opinions here. That's what we do.
40 That's what we do. We have to get into the weeds.
41 That's fine.
42 Thank you.
43 You bet. Councilor Kanal. I think you want to.
44 Yeah, maybe.
45 And maybe you're ready to make a motion.
46 I will at the end. Yeah. Three quick things and then I'll make the motion. First. I agree with councilor Green completely PCEF advertising PCEF is both cool and right. So I I'm definitely supportive of that. I would love it to work with councilor Smith on something, because I agree that parts of the business community should not be excluded. And if you go down, I read 2.2.1, point one point d a if you go down to part f of that, five lines below promotes the sale or use of any schedule. One controlled substance is prohibited business right now, and marijuana is a schedule one controlled substance, so Green muse cannot advertise or can't advertise all these different folks, you know, whoever they can't, they can't advertise right now with that text. And I think they pay taxes and they should be allowed to advertise. And I think we should talk about that together. And I would love to work on that. I know you've worked with many of those businesses already, and probably some of my other colleagues have as well. Yeah. So with that, I will move to refer this item on to the full council with a due pass recommendation and ask for a second.
47 Terrific.
48 Second motion by.
49 Councilor Kanal and seconded by councilor Green. Is there any further discussion? Great. Will the clerk please call the roll?
50 Koyama Lane aye, Morillo Green.
51 Aye, Morillo Smith. I Kanal. I Clark I with a vote of five eyes. The motion to refer the ordinance document number 2026-212 to the city council with a recommendation to be passed, has passed.
52 Terrific. Thank you all for being here today, and thank you for all the work that you put in to answer all the questions that we had earlier. I really appreciate it. Thank you, thank you. And thanks to my colleagues for really teasing this out a little bit. Let's see. Diana, can you please read the next item?
53 Item number two, document number 2026-281. Bull run filtration projects owners, representative and independent financial oversight panel update.
54 Thank you colleagues. We had a great tour of the facility under construction on Friday. It was a little hot, but we all learned a lot. We. I think you learned so much more by being on site than just getting a presentation here in committee. We learned that there are 400 to 600 employees on site every day. That was remarkable. I think we're spending probably $1 million a day. I think I heard that we also learned about how the sort of the land use restrictions have increased the cost of the project, but we understand that better now. So you're here today because we're exercising our oversight function, and we wanted to hear more about the owner's rep function and the independent financial oversight panel that you created. And I would also add something that I talked to director lou on the bus was the hacking that's going on around the country. It's been in the news quite a bit, and I ask her to also address that today, what precautions we're taking so that our system is not hacked and damaged. So with that, I'll turn it over to dca. Donna paul to kick it off.
55 Good morning, chair Clark, vice chair Smith and members of the public works committee. As councilor Chair Clark mentioned, we have an important update on the largest and most consequential infrastructure investment the city is making the infiltration project. And first of all, I want to thank the committee for joining us at the construction site last Friday, having you all take the time to see the project firsthand, walk the site and hear directly from the people. Doing the work is incredibly valuable, and it gives a much better sense of the scale and complexity of what we are building. And I know the water bureau team appreciated the opportunity to share the work with you. As many of you saw firsthand, this is no longer a project that exists primarily on paper. Significant construction is already underway, and the scale and complexity of what the city is building is substantial, not just for the city, but for our region as a whole. And I have immense confidence in director liu and our chief engineer, muriel, and the water polo team that is leading this work. They are managing an extraordinarily complex project with a tremendous amount of work happening every day to keep construction moving. And they're trying to manage risk control costs and deliver the critical piece of of drinking water infrastructure. At the same time, the project is at the project is at an important point. The current program estimate is at about 2.56 billion, and the project has experienced significant delays and cost increases, including impacts from associated with the land use permitting process. Given the scale of this investment and its impact on ratepayers, it is also important that we have strong governance and accountability accountability structures in place to support the team and give council confidence in how this project is being managed. At the previous. At a previous public works committee, we looked backwards to understand why the costs and timelines have changed and today we are focusing on looking. How do we make sure the city is positioned to finish this project successfully, safely and with as much certainty as possible. And so we are focusing on two important pieces of that framework, which is the owner's representative and the independent financial oversight panel. And with that, I will turn it over to the water bureau team for the update. Thank you.
56 Thank you so much, dc. Good morning, members of the public works committee. For the record, my name is ting liu, Portland public utilities director. We are very pleased to present to you an update on the filtration project. Focus on our progress owners, representative and established of an independent financial oversight panel. Next slide please. Next slide. It looks like it's a little slow. Yeah. Before we get started, we'll provide an update on the cybersecurity and the scada system. As the councilor Clark mentioned. We'll get into the right on the representative of financial oversight from there. Next slide please. And before I get started, I also want to express my sincere gratitude for this committee's guidance and support. And thank you so much for taking the time on the Friday afternoon, very hot weather to visit our filtration construction site. Your perspective feedback are very valuable to our project. As you saw last Friday, we have made great progress on site and is accelerating very rapidly. As of June 30th, 2026, the project is 37% complete and we are on track to deliver filtered water by September 29th. During our tour. I also want to just recap about. We stopped at the finished water intertie site where this is. A new underground vault connects one incoming conduit and from the plant and to three outgoing conduits in our distribution system, providing finished water to town. We also visited the complex filtration process, including multiple robust treatment trains designed to increase redundancy and efficiencies, as well as 237 foot pipeline shaft where raw water is going to enter to the filtration facility. And then with that, I'm going to share first about the cybersecurity and what the measures we're taking. And I know this is on many people's mind as the national alert. So like many utilities for scada system, the supervisory control and data acquisition, this is called the data system, are the core technology used to monitor and control our water infrastructure system. And protecting this critical system is one of our highest priorities. We are using an integrated approach from continuous monitoring, advanced threat detection, as well as protect proactive risk mitigation to ensure that we are compliant and stay on top of the cybersecurity. And we maintain a very close partnership with the city of bts, as well as the us cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, cisco and also fbi to remain aligned with the top industry security practices. And our operators are fully trained with the system here. With that, we'll move into the project governance and accountability. And I want to see that we maintain a robust multiple layers of accountability. This slide shows the current layers of a project accountability that has been shared with the committee and council members in the past, including including conducting value engineering, establishing project delivery advisory team, as well as the independent claims analyst. For the last few months, we have also launched a new internal reporting framework in March 2026 to enhance transparency, which has provided professional project delivery expertise and transparency to the public. As the committee directed. Since April this year, we have been focusing on develop additional owners representative function and continue to advance independent panel framework, which I will share in the next slide. And this is going to be the enhanced project accountability framework with multiple layers, including the existing financial audits, bond and wifia reporting, city auditors oversight, as well as a regular monthly pub briefings. While we are transitioning from our project delivery advisory team to an independent financial oversight panel following committee's direction from April 14th, we have moved forward forward with establishing the owner's representative function, and muriel will share more updates in the next slide. In addition, I want to share with the committee that our project team is developing an expanded kpis to track project performance, which will be coming this fall. All of these measures are aiming at proactively managing project risk and ensure we remain on schedule and on budget. With that, I will turn it over to muriel to provide an update on the project progress and owner's representative progress.
57 Thank you, director liu. For the record, my name is muriel. I'm the chief engineer for the water bureau. And before I start the presentation, I also want to express gratitude for the visit. It's really appreciated by staff and the workers on site. When people show up, it has a lot of weight. So thank you for that. And spending the time on a very hot Friday. Next slide please. So first, because costs are so important on this project and tracking. So as of the as of end of June, we are now $881 million spent on the two remaining. Well on the total program. And I'm going to bring a clarification here at the bottom for consistency. Our total program budget is 2.58 billion, but that includes financing and indirect costs. Moving forward, we're using the figure 2.46 billion because it's the two remaining open projects which are filtration and pipelines. So I apologize if there's been a little confusion between the numbers, but those are the numbers we're moving forward. So on performance reporting, we're going to use the $2.46 billion. So that clarifies that gap between some numbers. So 881 one huge progress is that last month we spent 54 million. That's the biggest productivity we've had on the project to date. And it links to the efforts we've been putting in place as far as owner's rep, as far as closing out claims and restarting the project in earnest. So that's really, you know, once you see the money being spent, that means we are we are in better chance to stay on schedule. That's a good leading indicator. Next slide please. In terms of other metrics or numbers that are proving the progress and we will we will continue to improve our reporting as director lou mentioned, but we do have a couple of numbers here. I will not read them all, but I will lead you to item six, which is the shaft which you have visited on site. You've seen the shaft. It's a massive project. It's a a deep excavation to connect our raw water tunnels to the facility. And we are now in this report as end of June. We were at 200ft deep. Last week. I believe we were at 205ft deep out of the 270, 237 is when we're going to reach the bottom of the shaft. So we're really making good progress on construction on high risk items. Also. Next slide please. One more slide on the progress to date. And some of the metrics we're tracking is the number of craft labor on site. That's also a really good indicator of work being done. So craft labor are the people doing the work. Active hands on dc. Donald paul mentioned that we have about 400 600 people on staff. Or maybe you have mentioned this. So last month we had 418 craft labor on site. So you can see that trend line since March, which was after the restart. But also when we experienced this major subcontractor change that was on a critical path. So we had a concrete contractor was let go, and I had a huge impact on the overall schedule. And we're still recovering from that. But you could see it with the labor increase. We have brought back a new contractors we're catching up to to that delay. And you can see it with that labor. So those are examples of kpis we're tracking to see progress other than dollars. Next slide please. As director lou mentioned, we in April, I believe we went to council and wondered about the owner's representative on the project. This is a mega project and it's standard practice to implement owner's rep on these projects. It's it's typically for alternative delivery, which means an alternative to a low bid approach. So it's very standard. A standard approach. Utilities use that model. Industry practice has guidance documents on what to include, how to select and how to move forward. So we we looked at different options because we realized we didn't entirely apply that model in place. So we looked at different options at this time since we were back then already at 30% construction, we looked at different options and we had sent you a technical memorandum that was looking at alternatives evaluated. So and it comes in different names, owner advisor, program management and support. And they usually have a variety of service that keeps them independent from the engineer and independent from the construction manager or the construction contractor. And really as an extension of city staff. So their goal is really to provide advice to support the owner in delivering projects on schedule and on budget. But it's also intended to marry with the city's own resources and own skill sets and, and supplement that model. So the role evolves as the project progress. And especially now that we're in construction, it's going to be really what we need is really heavy expertise in construction management, contract management, what we call commercial commercial control to evaluate commercial, to evaluate claims or notice of change and the impact of change and risks. So it's got a very big focus on on cost and schedule analysis and control. Next slide please. So maybe this is a little bit repeating, but the cost control is a big factor. I believe it's a big factor for us here. And there's many tools utilized for budgeting and earned value forecasting scheduling management. We do have some sophisticated tool with a syncro model that we use for pay application reviews, and also risk management trying to look ahead. So a big part of the owner's rep role is to be looking ahead and forecasting the risks ahead of us to see how that compares with the remaining contingencies and how we can finish strong on time and on schedule. Muriel.
58 Do you mind if we interrupt you just for a second? I think councilor Smith has a question, wants to dive in a little bit on the owner's rep.
59 Okay.
60 Thank you. It was great to to go on the tour last week, too. I enjoyed it, but is it common to have an owner's rep who also is a subcontractor as well? Because our owner's rep has a contract and he's our owner's representative and so is there, is that a conflict of interest?
61 The owner's rep? So brown and caldwell, is a separate consultant on a team. They have many subcontracts also to provide support, but they're not constructing and they're not engineering either.
62 But even if they they still have a contract on they have contracts on the project. So who's going to check the checker?
63 Did we check the checker? So the owner's rep reports to us and they.
64 I know, but what I'm saying is you can't check the checker. That's why we have an owner's rep to check the checker because you all can't do it in a, in a holistic way. And what I'm saying is there, there, I think there needs to be a line drawn between our owner's rep. And you may feel comfortable about how that's working, but I just see that there is a little bit of a conflict of interest when they have several contracts and their owner's rep as well.
65 Yeah. I can also add additional contact here. Councilor Smith so when we look at owner's representative first, we're looking really about the scope of work, what they are focusing on, which is the construction activities and construction inspections and change orders. Those are the biggest items that we need to maintain and control for during this construction phase. And then there's multiple ways we can look into that. One is looking to completely separate external consultant who haven't done any work on the filtration side. The second is because the current consultant, brown caldwell, has an existing scope of work as a project and program management. So some of these roles is already being part of that scope of work. And then the third option is we look at the piecemeal looking to we have the claim analyst. We have other ways to do things. And based on the risk and also the schedule for the construction schedule and also where the the project is. So there is a memo we provided to the council members saying, at this stage, we recommend for the enhanced ownership activity, which is utilizing brown caldwell, but we are holding them accountable for what they are going to do. And this is where they are going to look into the construction activities. And from the project standpoint, we are evaluating from a kpi standpoint, making sure they are effective in serving as owner's rep role. We worked this with the dc and also see lee as this approach. And this is the least disruptive and the least risk from a delaying construction. Because if you are bringing a new company for looking to the owner's rep, we're looking at least 3 to 6 months with getting the company on board.
66 No, I like that. I like keeping that expertise, but I'm just saying from an outside look, we're paying a person twice to do the same thing. If they're the program manager and they're the and they are the. Owner's representative, it just it just seems weird to me. I've done these before at Multnomah county, and we've never had a owner's rep that had contracts on our projects, on our bridge projects. So I'm just saying it's, it's, I don't know who's going to be watching brown and what they're doing and who's going to check the checker. You said that you'll check the checker, but I don't know how well you can check the checker because you're getting the owner's rep to check the whole thing. So I, I'm just.
67 Councilor Smith let me ask you a question. Would it be helpful if we had I don't think can maguire was he was here earlier, but I think he's left. Would it be helpful to ask the attorney to get back to us on a conflict of interest or something around those lines?
68 Yes.
69 That'd be helpful. We can we can do that. We can ask the city attorney to just clarify this a little bit for us.
70 And councilor Clark, if I may, if I may add, it might be also helpful to provide from a procurement standpoint, what are the risks and benefits of using an existing contract not connected to construction activities as opposed to going through?
71 I like that. I mean, that's a that's a plus in my book that helps me digest this a little bit better. That doesn't have a construction contract that is a professional services contract. So I do, I'm just telling you that, you know, that that is concerning.
72 I think you raised a legitimate concern. And we can we can delve deeper into that maybe offline with the city attorney's office and maybe with procurement as well. Yeah. Would that be possible? Yeah. Okay.
73 I'm not trying to hold up anything or anything like that. Just no, I just wanted to.
74 Know. It's legitimate.
75 If that was common, because I haven't known it to be common on any of the projects that I was on at Multnomah county. We did a couple bridge projects and we had a totally separate owner's rep.
76 I think we also heard that this this came in rather later in the process. We didn't have an owner's rep in the beginning. This is a switch that we made a little late and we didn't want to take. The extra time is what I heard you say. So let me we'll come back to this. I think councilor Koyama Lane may have a related question. Is that right? Councilor.
77 I can wait, I can, because I went to the presentations. Done.
78 Okay.
79 Thank you. Great. Thank thank you so much. Okay. Sorry. Let's proceed.
80 No problem. I'd be happy to help with clarifications. So the so the functions we've added here are cost control. So overall program cost control schedule management risk management progress and then progress reporting. And what we did really is adding expertise that was new to the project. So within brown and caldwell but new to the project that we hired them to provide these functions. And the intent really is to improve predictability, identify issues and trends early and support corrective corrective actions, and just increase stakeholder confidence through transparency and transparent reporting, and ultimately reduce surprises so that we can finish on time and on schedule. Next slide please. So some of the positive trends we've already seen to date is we did finally, we reached agreement on the construction costs and schedule impacts that resulted from the land use related delays. We've added 198 days to the schedule milestone for the filtration facility. And what that really does is that it helps establish a new baseline that we can report on, and that's when how we can negotiate other change. So that was a pretty big milestone to reach. We've agreed to the cost of the suspension as well, both retrospective and prospective. And again, this allows us to clean the slate and move forward with the remaining risks and negotiate them as as they show up, but not with this other these other risks, unresolved risks. We've also made good progress on tunnel work. So sometimes risks happen. In this case, we have significant tunnel activity tunneling activities where we had limited geotechnical data due to limited access or no access to the site prior to construction. You can see a picture here of the boulders encountered during tunneling. And those had not been expected, and it impacted the productivity of the machines. So working together on mitigating that risk, we essentially agreed to spend 3.5 million to mitigate a $15 million risk that would have been incurred had we not do anything. So this is an example of looking ahead and mitigating forward to minimize the risk to the city. We also have good improvements on reducing backlogs. Those are all activities and things that we had start seeing that were. Possibly the cause of delay. And so notice of changes, unresolved items and paperwork. They do accumulate and they impact our ability to meet schedule. So clearing those backlogs, there's significant improvement so far. Next slide please. Those are other examples. And and the benefit of time I will move shortly on these things. But we are working hard on forecasting risks. So there's pretty significant effort in the schedule analysis to make sure that we can run scenarios to see how best to mitigate impacts of certain changes, and how to stay within our overall schedule. So that requires a lot of work of thinking ahead. But again, it's thinking ahead, looking ahead, not looking backwards. Next slide please.
81 Thank you, muriel, and all the team members and partners. So I will be continue to provide an update on the independent financial oversight panel. So next slide please. This slide shows the overview of the independent financial oversight panel. So the purpose for this panel is to provide a truly independent fiscal oversight and public transparency. As we continue to move forward with the construction progress towards the September 2029 water delivery mandate. The scope of work for this panel will include reviewing existing document, including project scope, contract and pricing. What we will be looking for, the experts and the feedback on assessment is regarding change management practices, monthly project updates and risk mitigation practice cost avoidance, and how can we proactively managing this project moving forward? At the same time, we want to recognize and align with other governing bodies. For instance, Portland utility board is a key role as part of the community focused utility budget review. We'll look for transitioning 1 or 2 members from the project delivery advisory team that to the panel once a PBOT conclude in October 2026. This will also ensure that institutional memory. While we are beginning a fresh, independent technical perspective. This panel will report to the director with the findings shared directly to the pub, city and council members. Next slide please. So this is a showing the recruitment timeline and the process. We're looking for a five volunteering members, including 1 to 2 members transitioning from the pub board. Recruitment will take place through August and September. Time frame, giving the technical complexity of the project and our focus on financial oversight. We're targeting professionals in public, public works, finance, construction management, large capital project delivery to provide that rigorous review for the project cost and accounting documents. Next slide please. This shows additional details about desired qualifications and candidate profile. We're proposing to target qualified peer volunteers who bridge the community perspective with the technical auditing. Since this is a truly independent panel, the best way to identify qualified peer volunteers and ensure this is unbiased oversight is going to be volunteering perspective and panel members will disclose disclose all relevant financial interests. Members are prohibited from having current contracting relationship with the city or contractors associated with the project. Candidates. We are looking for that. It will be regional peer volunteers in the public pacific northwest with hands on mega project and capital accounting experience. They will bring that independent technical expertise without financial ties to the city or the water bureau. Next slide please. So this shows you our planned outreach and recruitment strategy, which will focus on leveraging regional industry associations, direct executive outreach, and also trade media to attract qualified non-conflicted candidates. We're going to targeting utility leaders, project managers, finance, financial construction, professional professionals with deep expertise in mega project schedule, risk, capital accounting, coordinating candidate selection closely with the city cfo's office as well. To reach top talents, we're going to engage networks like pacific northwest, a, wwa, and some of the water associations, while also conducting direct outreach to non-conflicted executives from peer regional utilities. And then we'll also have a dedicated landing page and application portal on the bureau's public website. There will be formal process press release and as well as the public role city connection e-newsletter to announce this recruitment. So I'm looking for any additional feedback regarding this recruitment strategy. The last slide is showing the recruitment timeline implementation implementation timeline. Next slide please. So we're planning to launch this recruitment in August 2026, followed by a candidate screening in mid September. And having members transition in mid-october. Once a PBOT formally closed here, onboarding is planned to take place in October 2026 with a regular monthly cost and risk evaluations beginning in November. So this will be an annual work for from November to September, and we'll provide the monthly update to the committee and council members, as well as upon the annual assessment, we'll look for what the committee and panel will look like for the next year. With that, before we start the q&a, we also have this area overview at the next slides, which captures the full scale of the current site activities. And we would like to show you for. Thank you so much.
82 Thank you.
83 Thank you. Thank you very much for the presentation. I know we have a lot of questions. I'm very impressed by the degree that you've zeroed in on oversight. I really appreciate that, and I appreciate the update on the oversight panel. I know some of us may have some suggestions of names for me, especially from having built light rail systems. There are some great people in this community that nothing this big, but there's a lot of expertise out there. I don't know, I don't see how you're not compensating these people. So is this something that in the industry, people do between utilities for each other? Is that common?
84 Yeah. I mean, from an independent perspective, like a blue ribbon panel where things it's to maintain objectivity. There is a just a volunteering. It's the best way from that unbiased perspective.
85 That's good.
86 Okay. Councilor Koyama Lane you have your hand up.
87 Thank you. Thanks for being here today for these presentations. I like hearing about, especially the independent financial oversight panel. I'm wondering if that's a panel that council has to confirm.
88 Yes. Yeah. We will be looking to the review and screening initially and before appointment will provide council update on where we are and the the names before the fully onboarding the panel members.
89 And just to add to your outreach and recruitment strategy, I'm not sure how many people are qualified who subscribe to my newsletter or follow some of us on social media, but if you send out to all of the councilors a little blurb also, I'm happy to put that into my. My comms. I am wondering if it's okay with you, chair, if I if I am wondering if this oversight panel. I appreciated vice chair Smith some of her questioning and would be interested in hearing from her now or later if this is a bit of. When she was saying like, who's going to be having another check on the project if this kind of gives her any more sense of ease or. Yeah.
90 Let's have councilor Smith respond.
91 That that is a common thing to have this this oversight that they're talking about. But we have to have a paid, experienced person who is our owner's rep, and they're not cheap. And I understand that. But this is good to have this this oversight committee. But I am talking about the paid guy, the guy at the end of the day, who is responsible for watching our back. And that is what solely that's their sole job.
92 Okay. Thank you. I know you've experienced more projects than me, and so thank you for breaking that down and appreciate your attention to that. I'll say I, I want to thank the the water bureau one water for working on how can we build accountability, public accountability, have it be public of public dollars, have that be built into this very big. Sorry. Can you guys see me? Okay. Hear me.
93 We can.
94 Okay. I think it's really important. We are hearing a lot about, you know, concerns about transparency, cost controls. So I appreciate that there is work in this area. There's thoughtfulness and just want to make it abundantly clear to the staff that, you know, members of the public really are hurting and rising bills are a huge concern for many households. And so, you know, my expectation is that costs are managed, that the water bureau is actively working to think about strategies to manage costs, but also to be reviewing rates and how they impact constituents, and that we're continuing to examine how we can be making Portland more affordable for, you know, everyday portlanders. And I'm wondering if, if you can speak a bit to how rate design connects to this or what that timeline is if, if that relates at all, I think hearing about that could be helpful.
95 I think. Councilor. Koyama Lane. That's opening up a whole nother can of worms here or another issue. It's important, but I think and we can come back to that today, it was really just to look at the oversight and cost controls. I appreciate you mentioning that, but I would just suggest that maybe we come back to rate design and rate control a little bit later. I know councilor Green has a big interest in that topic as well, but is it okay with you if we take that up a little bit later?
96 Yeah. I also just know starting July 1st, that we that ting has been part of leading kind of a rate design, like looking into that. So I think if, if at some point we can hear how that's happening alongside this, I think that would be really important.
97 Excellent. Councilor Green, do you have any comment on that? I know you're working on that.
98 Yeah, I mean, I just I think it's a relevant question. And I understand that we could get deep into the details, but I think what we need to hear is because the the rates are going to be a function of the cost of this project. And so the rates that we've already talked about, that we've already communicated, that were a function of what the bonds that we issued assume that we don't have any cost escalation. And so it's going to be really important to kind of connect these pieces that can happen at a different meeting. And we should. But I just wanted to, because I was actually going to ask some questions that are similar. So I think it's, I think it's germane that when we build this oversight panel, that we are putting people on it who understand that their job is to make sure that we're controlling costs so we can control rates. I think that's kind of councilor is that your interest in making sure we're.
99 Not exactly.
100 Yeah, yeah.
101 Terrific.
102 I think we got the point across. Did you want to say something. Do you see a.
103 Yes. I just want to quickly respecting the time here. The water period takes the, you know, rate design and rate rate conversations very seriously. And director liu and team are working together. And we look forward coming back to the public works committee to share more details on that. And that being said, relevant to this conversation, I know the water bureau is using a wide range of tools to help achieve with cost control for this project as well, including value engineering, financing strategy, risk identification and risk mitigation that was discussed in the previous public works committee presentation. So I want to make sure that we mention that as well. And I also want to take the opportunity to address one of a comment that councilor Smith made. The contracts for the program management and the owners representation are not separate contracts. They're not going to be paid twice. It is just an amendment to an existing contract. So it is it is just an extension of scope of the existing contract that they have. That being said, we hear your concerns about who's going to check the checker and whether there's going to be conflict of interest, and we can get back to you with the city attorney's recommendation.
104 Thank you, chair, and thank you, donna. That's kind of what I was hoping to hear and give you a chance to say. Can I ask one last question?
105 Of course. Sure.
106 I'm wondering when we look at the costs, there was a slide about how much has been spent. If we have a number, if we know how much of that is, is because of delays or lawsuits or the slowing down, not trying to to point any fingers. But I am curious about how much cost has been added on because this has been delayed. Do we know that number? Is that number we can get?
107 Yeah, yeah.
108 We currently have change orders and amendments in progress and a total about the total 202 million. That includes construction impacts and that includes support cost impacts. So we're extending everybody's contracts as a result of the delays. So that's people tending to construction. That's our own time staff. So those are the amendments they include. They're not all related to the delay, but the major portion is associated with the delay. And those costs were all included within the amount that we ask. Council last spring for the $450 million increase and associated bond sales, those were covered in that amount.
109 Can you say 202 million?
110 That's what I said.
111 And that's as a result of the delay. And then there are other pieces that came with that. And we experienced some of those. The slow speed, the limit on the number of, I guess, vehicles, the limit on the hours that you can work. There are a lot of constraints that have increased the cost as well. Am I right on that?
112 Thank you, councilor Clark. Yes, there are land use condition of approvals that came as a as a part of the outcome of the closing the land use remand. And so condition of approval imposed additional constraints to construction, for example, traffic limitations, hours of work limitations. And so those those are increasing costs that were not foreseen when signing the contracts.
113 I.
114 I just think as we're talking about cost overrun and how it's impacting portlanders, that we are transparent about different things that are bringing the bill up, even if they are, you know, we have to do them or they're important to answer certain questions. I do think we need to be open with the public about what those costs are. Thank you.
115 That's it.
116 Thank you councilor. Let's see who's next in the queue. Councilor Smith, are you next?
117 Yep.
118 Thank you, madam chair. Just so I'm clear, I don't know it in the back of my head again. Could you tell me what the gmp is?
119 We have two gmp, and I'd have to get back to you because it depends if it's amended yet or not amended yet.
120 The the one that we've already approved. What's what's that? Gmp.
121 I believe it was 1.3 billion for the filtration facility and around 400 million for the pipelines. But I would have.
122 Which is the the guaranteed maximum price. Guaranteed project is called gmp. For those of you who don't know what that is, I try not to use acronyms. So 1.3.
123 I want to add that during the 2020 for the latest gmp is $2.13 billion.
124 2.13 billion. Okay, perfect. Thank you.
125 Thank you, councilor Smith, councilor Green.
126 Yeah, thank you. Just briefly, I like what I'm seeing with the kind of process you've outlined for recruiting and and just building this independent oversight panel. I want to offer a suggestion on places to recruit. I think I think the electric utility industry in the pacific northwest has a, a very robust and deep bench of people who have a lot of experience with integrated capital plans and really understanding how to to councilor Koyama Lane concerns, really connect that with the long run rate pressure and sort of ratepayer stewardship of funds. And so local organizations would include the public power association, which is a trade association for municipally owned public utilities who are customers of the bonneville power administration. I've sat on the other side of the table from these organizations who have critiqued my rate proposal and my analysis and methods, and I know they've got the stuff and they've got an interest in kind of public stewardship of funds. And so that's one org northwest requirements utilities as well. And these are all boards of folks in their public service or civil servants northwest requirements. Utilities tend to represent the really small, tiny utilities in Oregon and Washington. They might also have just a vested interest in the water bureau, because they might also serve electricity to some of our wholesale customers on the water side. So I think there's just an opportunity there to, to kind of look locally at some of these trade associations and see if they'd be interested in having anyone apply to be on that panel, even though their, their book of business is not not water utilities, but electric utilities, they have the same problems that we face. Thanks.
127 Yeah, that would be great. We'll providing additional follow up on the blurbs and for other council members. And feel free if you have any association, we can reach out and I would love to hear that.
128 Thank you,
129 Councilor Green. I'm going to intervene here and let myself ask a couple questions. So I'm going to go down to the 500 zero foot level and some really simple questions. Can you explain to me how the what the city auditor's role is through the project, or is it at the end of the project?
130 The city auditor's office has always been selecting large project as part of the audit. Because of the nature of the filtration project. This has been selected for the last couple of years as being always part of the audit. So it's going to be the audit for next year as well.
131 So they're following through monitoring the entire construction process. Is that what's happening.
132 They are monitoring from more of a higher level project or accounting kind of a level, not directly on the construction activity side of things.
133 And when can we expect their audit report?
134 Yes, we can provide that link to you for the past reports.
135 When you when you think the next one is, is one of the prospective one, you said next year or.
136 I need to check on the schedule when they will be done with their report, but we can provide the existing ones and follow up on the new schedule.
137 That's great. Thank you, director ting. This is a very small issue, but you know, you mentioned the concrete contractor that you had to change contractors. We had a problem at darcel plaza with a concrete contractor. I just wonder what's going on with that industry. Can you say anything more about the what what the issue was with the concrete contractor? Or is that privileged?
138 It was quality issue. If you want to put it in a big bucket, it was quality issues and they were let go. Even though we were right on the critical path. So it was a major impact to construction.
139 It's the same issue that slowed down the opening of the darcel plaza, by the way. And a question on the boulders. It looked like a dinosaur egg. Are we when we when we come across those boulders, what do we sell them? Do we to? What do we do with all those boulders?
140 I, I don't know, I should, I could follow up on that.
141 There's probably a market for those rocks. Okay. Councilor Kanal.
142 Thank you. Chair clerk so as we get to the panel, I had a couple questions here. Five seems to be the standard. I know we do that for the parks levy. Why is it. Five it seems like if the point is to have a diversity of perspectives, that a larger number makes sense, is it difficulty of recruitment or is there another reason I just don't know about?
143 That's just the typical process. And to ensure that there is an active discussion and engagement and providing a feedback for, for, for the project on a timely manner. And also it's number that five versus 4 or 6. So. Sure. Yeah.
144 But I mean, is there a reason it's five and not seven? I understand the odd number issue, but.
145 Right. We can look into that. I think the, the just because of the, the numbers and things and we are open if we have more qualified expertise, but I think beyond seven will be probably too big for the panel to, to having that discussion and engagement. But we can look into that structure and numbers there.
146 Thanks. And I'd obviously love to see at least one of the people on it, whether it's 5 or 7, be from district two. In terms of information access. Do you what's the plan? How how do you intend to get the this panel, the information they need? I'm noting that and this has nothing to do with public works at all. But there are other parts of the city that commission audits. And then don't even don't make that available to anybody else. So I'm trying to understand how does the information that you have about what's going well, what's not going well, how does it get to them? Do you have a plan for that?
147 Yes, we are in the active process of developing the plan here. Councilor Kanal so, you know, it's based on the scope of work, what they are going to be focusing on and what are going, what are the things they are going to deliver. And then based on that information, it will be compiling all the project background information. And as well as having a dedicated two day, probably going to be orientation for them to understand the project before they jump in and having that active discussion. And we will be having dedicated resource from the bureau to support, as part of this serving and supporting the panel as well. So there will be additional details about this information as we move forward.
148 Okay. Thanks. Yeah. I think the main thing I'd be interested in knowing is the direct access to the data and financials, not to the narrative around it. I think, you know, again, looking at the seats that are empty to my right, we have a challenge at the highest levels of the city with narrative as opposed to spreadsheets being provided. I know that doesn't exist in this. That problem does not exist in public works. So I'm mostly encouraging you to keep doing what you do well. For the folks who serve on it. Will there be stipends available?
149 Of course. That's going to be the one of the first orientation to be a part of the site visit.
150 Great. And then I would just ask, as you develop the particular mechanism by which people, you know, apply, designate interest, however you decide to do it, just to share that with our offices so that we can help boost and get folks out. I think obviously there will need to be some industry expertise on the panel, but every now and then, it is nice to have folks who don't have that expertise but just are coming at it as a ratepayer, coming at it as a person who experiences the end goals of it. And I think we can help a lot with helping to circulate those opportunities. Yeah. Thank you, thank you.
151 Thank you. Councilor Kanal. And perhaps there will be an openness to expanding that to seven as a possibility so that we can include more of a person on the street. Thank you. I don't see any other hands up. This has been terrific. I'm very confident in the work that you're doing. I feel really good about it, and seeing it firsthand was very meaningful. But we'll have you back to talk about the next iteration and the oversight committee, perhaps later in the fall, I think. I don't know what we're scheduled right now, but we'll look into that. But thank you so much for all the work that you do, everything that you've had to put up with out there, the delays that have cost us so much, both from the worker standpoint as well as the city and the cost standpoint and a contractor. So thank you. We'll have you back, and we always appreciate having you here. So thank you very much.
152 Thank you. Thank you for your support.
153 Diana, can you please read the next item.
154 Item number three. Document number 2026-282. Vision zero data analysis and intersection safety.
155 Thank you colleagues, I hope we're okay plowing through. If we need a break later, let me know. But I think we can do this. I had asked that we have a discussion of vision zero. I know it was in the committee of the whole very recently, but what I would like to do today was to really have a deeper dive and get
156 A better sense for what works and what doesn't. Where do we get the biggest bang for the buck in vision zero? So that's why I scheduled this today to really go in a little bit deeper. So director williams, would you like to kick off this conversation? Welcome.
157 Thank you so much. Good morning. Good morning, council vice president Clark and members of the committee. For the record, I'm millicent williams, director of the Portland bureau of transportation. I appreciate the opportunity today for PBOT to share more about the bureau's vision zero program. The city council's commitment to vision zero has been consistent and heartening. Starting with your. September 25th, 2025 resolution, recommitting to the goal of eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries. This resolution also ensured that the commitment to vision zero is not PBOT alone, and acknowledges that a number of bureaus and partner agencies all have a role to play in advancing vision zero. That said, we recognize that the Portland bureau of transportation is the entity that often provides the most visible realization of what vision zero translates into from an infrastructure and policy perspective. I want to thank you not just for that resolution, but also for your very recent work on the no turn on red ordinance, which will help us to continue advancing a key intersection safety tool. Today, we are here to share more about PBOT role in vision zero. Staff from across the bureau play a role in advancing this goal from our work. With speed cameras to people focused programs, to large and small capital projects to support the ongoing implementation work. We have several staff that are fully dedicated to the work, and a significant number of subject matter experts and technical experts that spend time planning, designing, constructing and operating the system that supports our overarching goal. Today, you will hear from some members of this core vision zero team, who will focus primarily on our approach to making intersections safer, making streets safer often means making changes to streets. When we change streets, we are also asking people to use them differently. Frankly, this kind of change is not always welcome. This is not work that can be done quickly. Even relatively small changes like the intersection safety work that the team will be focusing on today can take many, many years. We also work on larger street transformations, which only come about after years of planning, designing, seeking, funding and building. All the while working with a wide variety of stakeholders to develop projects that reflect community input and needs while meaningfully addressing safety. While we can't satisfy everyone, these careful and collaborative processes are designed to ensure that we've addressed concerns as well as we can. This is difficult work, and as clay often says, it's not just hard work, it is hard work, but it's also critically important work. So again, I want to thank you for the support of this council that this council has shown, and I will now turn it over to city traffic engineer wendy cully and vision zero section manager clay baker.
158 Thank you director. Good morning councilors. I'm wendy cully, city traffic engineer for PBOT.
159 And good morning. I'm clay baker, vision zero section manager for PBOT. Thank you for having us here today. We'll share the following as part of a presentation and then look forward to conversation. After the presentation, we're going to jump in with an overview of PBOT vision zero program. Then look at PBOT approach to traffic safety data analysis. Specifically, we'll then look at intersection safety risk and really use an example of southeast division 148 to kind of understand more about that topic. Then we'll jump in to talk about data driven treatments and end with a look at current areas of focus to advance intersection safety. Vision zero is fundamentally about human life. It is built on the belief that no person should be killed trying to get where they are going. This slide displays the name of the 39 community members who died in traffic crashes in Portland in 2025. Each of these people were loved ones parents, elders, children, siblings, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. Their loss impacts their loved ones profoundly and has ripple impacts into our community. We also believe that these traffic deaths are preventable, which is partly what we're here to talk about today. Over the last couple of weeks, you've heard about different facets of portland's vision zero work. Dana dickman has recently been here to talk about the citywide vision zero effort that city council initiated with the vision zero resolution last year. That effort is bringing together many bureaus to identify opportunities. Each has to advance traffic safety. Pbot is part of that effort. Pbot has also been the lead bureau working on vision zero since its inception in 2015. Today, we are drilling down on PBOT vision zero efforts, which are guided by the vision zero action plan. We are implementing the fourth action plan that Portland has developed since 2016. There are 33 actions in the current plan, and the actions are organized into the four safe system action areas over which we have influence safe speeds, safe streets, safe people, and safe vehicles. We track implementation and report on progress at the conclusion of each calendar year. While vision zero is a key commitment within our bureau, and most of the nearly 1000 employees do work to support it, we have seven core vision zero team members. The team has multifold functions including data analysis, education and outreach, project planning, engineering and evaluation, supporting policy development, working with partners on safety from the local to the regional, state and national levels, and reducing speed limits, to name some of the core functions. Now I want to jump into talking about PBOT approach to delivering traffic safety infrastructure. With limited resources and significant needs. We use a data driven approach to identify where and how we get the most safety benefit for the investment. Our data analysis starts with identifying the top safety hotspots, which we do in a couple of ways that I'll talk about next so that we can prioritize where to invest next. We follow national research and local data to ensure that we are delivering treatments with known safety benefits. We focus on reducing serious injury risk by lowering exposure, the severity and the likelihood of a serious crash. So those are kind of three three areas that we're focused on. Vision zero data guides our work. A key data source is statewide traffic crash data, which ODOT collects and publishes. It is comprised of police reports and self-reporting. Pbot then takes that data from ODOT, geocodes the data and analyzes it in five and ten year ranges. We use the data to identify the highest injury hotspots in the city, looking at the data in a few different ways. We develop an annual high crash intersection list, which has helped PBOT prioritize projects and funding for safety for over a decade. These are the intersections with the highest rate of serious injury crashes in the city. About two thirds of those intersections are on PBOT streets, and about a third are on state facilities or at interchanges. We also identified the 30 streets with the highest number of serious crashes in the city. That makes up this kind of high crash network, which are the 8% of Portland streets that account for about 70% of traffic deaths. To get more nuanced, kind of going beyond the high crash network, which is looking at entire street lengths annually, we zoom in on our serious crash hotspots to further refine that focus area. These hotspots show the 150 miles of street segments with the highest number of serious injury crashes. With these analyzes, we have a clear idea of where to seek grant funds, spend local funds, prioritize maintenance activities, and invest in education. We also prioritize work in communities that have an overrepresentation of traffic violence. Going to get just a little mathy on us for a second. We know that intersections are like real conflict points for crash risk in the city, and that big intersections are particularly risky. 64% of serious crashes in Portland occur at intersections. So intersection safety is really a key vision zero strategy. The physics of injury risk entails three components looking at kind of serious injury risk, including exposure severity and likelihood. So exposure is really how often and how far people travel in motor vehicles. The kind of fewer miles traveled in motor vehicles, kind of the less exposure for kind of crashes to occur. Severity is really looking at how fast and how heavy cars and trucks are when crashes happen. And then likelihood is looking at how often users meet in the same space at the same time. And so a safe system approach really focuses on reducing all three of these. Exposure focuses on approaches like changing the land use patterns to improve walkability and support 20 minute neighborhoods, investing in transit service that is fast and reliable, providing tools to travel without a vehicle in the severity space. We're in the severity space. We're really focused on slowing speeds down in every way possible. And then in likelihood, we're really focused on implementing measures that limit people colliding in the same space and at the same time with each other. So use this framework in thinking about intersection safety opportunities.
160 Great. Thanks, clay. And I'm going to pivot now and talk about intersection safety and specifically safety infrastructure that we implement at intersections. And I'm going to use southeast division and 148th as an example of our efforts to prioritize based on data analysis that clay mentioned earlier. Now this intersection was flagged in our first high crash intersection listing in 2013, and at that time, it ranked at number 13. That same year, a school bus driver tragically hit and killed renee jean bates, who was crossing the street with her husband to the nearby grocery store, leaving her husband, her ten year old child and loved ones behind. In 2015, southeast division was flagged as a high crash street for all modes pedestrians, people riding bikes and people driving. And this aerial image shows that intersection in 2013. This is the 2013 street view of the same intersection. This is facing westbound toward downtown. You can see the risks that were described earlier in physics of injury risk. The exposure is high here. This is a car and truck dominated space. The severity of injury due to speed is something to be aware of. The likelihood of collision is concern, and the expanse of asphalt here leads to more time during which a crash can occur and more potential crash places than smaller, tighter intersections. In 2013, the pedestrian crossing was almost 120ft long. Pedestrians had to cross six lanes of travels. Sorry, six lanes of traffic and travel speeds were likely high. This is the same view of southeast division in 104, at 148th in 2019. You can see that we've started to minimize the risks through some mitigations. The space for people walking and bicycling begins to be defined with those concrete islands and curb extensions at the intersection. This also slows drivers down as they turn onto division and from division. Collision opportunities between all modes are reduced, with fewer travel lanes, shorter crossing distances, and more protected bike facilities. It's ranking on the 2019 high crash intersection list dropped to number 47, so we're already making progress there. The next slide is a westbound view of division and 148th and 2024. At this point, this intersection design has minimized serious crash risks. All of the pedestrian crossings are shorter. On this particular one was 120ft long. It's now 45ft long. That means crossing times for pedestrians have reduced from 35 to 40s to 13 to 15 seconds to cross the streets. We've seriously limited exposure for pedestrians. There is physical protection and markings for people riding bikes. The street design is slower, with narrower travel space and tighter turns making slower turns for vehicles. We have high visibility markings for pedestrians and people riding bicycles, and you can also see, though it's hard in in this slide. I have another slide later, but you can see that the signals have been up, excuse me, upgraded including separate phases for different modes for bicyclist transit and drivers. The signal heads are more visible. We've restricted some movements including no turn on red. And at this point division 148 has dropped. Now to number 65 on the high crash intersection list. The next slide shows an a side by side aerial images of the north leg of the intersection, with 2013 at the top and 2024 at the bottom. It highlights many of the safety features I just talked about, but I want to point out the red circle in that image. This is where renee bates was hit and killed in 2013 and that you could you can see that by 2024, she would have been well out of harm's way. I also want to talk about the sustained commitment to vision zero. And this requires that is required to move the needle on safety. People often ask us at PBOT why it takes so long to make change. Portland, like most u.s. Cities, built up a lot of infrastructure with the intention of moving cars quickly and generally, generally providing priority for car movement over the movement of people outside of cars. I also want to point out, at a location like division 148, this was much more rural as we were developing infrastructure back in the 60s and 70s. This wasn't even part of the city of Portland at that time. It was a county and less dense that, you know, as things change, we need to relook at our infrastructure and start making some of the changes that you see that we've made here. We're now redesigning our streets to move people safely. However, this transformation does take time and funding, and it involves significant change, which means we often have to move slowly and work through changes with community, taking a layered approach and starting with things we can do today and moving toward a more significant design change is one way to start making progress on our safety goals. This also gives us time to budget for the larger projects and work with communities to ensure that the project not only meets safety goals, but meets community goals. This intersection is an example of incremental changes that started small and then became significant. Each change brought some safety benefit and gave us time to seek funding, develop designs and work with community on the change to come. I want to talk a little bit more about the signal safety improvements that I mentioned earlier today. The signal at division and 148th and many of the signals or most of the signals along division now is much more advanced than it was a decade ago. The signal prioritizes busses, pedestrians, and bicyclists and separates users. We have bus priority here. You can see maybe you can see there's a specific signal for busses. We have bike separation with a separate bike phase that you can see on the far right there. We have pedestrian priority phasing through leading pedestrian intervals or pedestrian head starts. Those are interchangeable terms for the same thing that gets pedestrians out in the intersection before autos even start moving. And we also have a no turn on red sign here. Also, the signals are more visible. We have a larger signal lenses, reflective back plates. That's the yellow strip or the yellow backing on the signal that make them more visible and bigger reflective street name signs, which are important for people that are new to the area at nighttime, when it's hard to see where you're going. Let's see. Pbot safety investments are data driven, grounded in national research and local studies. Many treatments we deploy at intersections throughout the city are what the industry refers to as proven safety countermeasures. These countermeasures do have crash reduction factors that we utilize when we're looking at what we're going to implement, and they are identified through national research of effectiveness in treatments and locations across the country. And these are based on many, many locations across different cities. We have implemented many of these. We are seeing very similar crash reductions when we implement here. And so we use this as we go through our design process to determine what is the best treatment, what will be most effective at division and 148th. We this table shows the mitigations that we used at that intersection. It includes curb extensions that reduce the crossing distance for pedestrians and people on bicycles. It also reduces the severity and likelihood of all crashes. And we expect a crash reduction of about 30% for all crashes when we use curb extensions. We also have improved intersection illumination, new lighting at the intersection. That, of course, reduces nighttime crashes and in this case, at about 42% for pedestrians and bicyclists. When we add new lighting at intersections, larger signal heads are great for reducing the angle crashes or, you know, red light running that results in t-bone crashes. It, it reduces those types of crashes by 42%. The retroreflective back plates that I pointed out has a reduction of 15% for all crash types. No turn on red. As we talked about last week at the committee of the whole has a 9% reduction in all crashes, but probably more importantly, a 41% reduction for people walking and bicycling, leading pedestrian intervals have a 37% crash reduction, as I mentioned before, allows people to get out into the intersection before autos even start moving. And then we also have the Green bike lanes that reduces bicycle crashes at about 39%. So all of these things, when layered together, really start to have a significant reduction on crashes at all of the intersections where we're implementing these types of treatments. Pbot intersection or sorry, making intersection safety improvements will continue to be a high priority for PBOT safety work. Big changes can make a big difference. As we've seen at division 148, they can take time and money and political support. We'll continue to make these big changes, like the recently completed roundabout at halsey and 80th. That reduces both severity and the likelihood of crashes. We'll also continue to make smaller, faster improvements that make a safety difference. Pbot is replacing the led units in our traffic signals for red, yellow and Green lenses, and we're going to be doing that over the next five years. The vision zero program is partnering with our signals and street lighting teams to stretch council designated funds for safety and support deployment of the recently adopted no turn on red ordinance. While traffic control is in place and the aerial bucket truck is deployed, we will deliver no turn on red at high crash intersections that meet PBOT guidelines, and we will install reflective back plates and bigger signal lenses simultaneously. We are working to advance pedestrian head starts at many of these signals as well, and I'll turn it back to clay to wrap us up here.
161 Thanks, wendy. This is our last slide. And then then we'll turn it over. And really, we want to thank you for your strong commitment to vision zero and your leadership in prioritizing safety treatments. The recent no turn on red ordinance will support us in continuing to deliver on some of the kind of small, systemic work that we know is needed. We also appreciate your continued support in making some of the bigger moves that have more noticeable impacts on how people travel, and where we can get a little bit more pushback, but are extremely important for saving lives. Please be in touch with the dc office if you want more information about the traffic safety data or best practices, or if you want to explore opportunities to support the work, we really welcome the collaboration and appreciate your leadership.
162 Great. Thank you. Thank you so much, all of you. This is exactly what I was looking for, is just where where are the investments pay off? What are we actually getting for that? I have lots of questions, but first I'm going to turn it over to councilor Green, who has his hand up.
163 Thank you so much, chair Clark, can you go back to the slide, please? That had the the data, the sort of percent reductions on the margin concepts there?
164 Yes.
165 Thanks.
166 Just a second. To get.
167 There, I just want to clarify a few things there.
168 We're working on it. Yeah.
169 We you know, 20 is plenty. And that also applies to slides.
170 Thank you.
171 Okay. I just want to make sure. Thanks for laughing at my dumb joke. I, I just want to make sure everyone, everyone understands what this slide is saying. So you've used it in the context of southeast division of 148 and which I think is a great success story. By the way, thanks for showing the before and after. After that is a transformed intersection that has had meaningful safety improvements there. And it's a good model. So I appreciate that. But when I see this, I see that this is sourced from the Oregon department of transportation's crash reduction factor model. So these these coefficients these parameters are designed to think about being applicable basically anywhere. Is that right? It's not just localized to southeast division 148.
172 Correct. And most of the reduction factors in or odot's manual are from the fhwa. They have a website called crash modification clearinghouse or factor clearinghouse that has many of these. So they'll cite that in their manual. But they've come up with some things that we do in Oregon that maybe other jurisdictions aren't doing.
173 Thank you. So that means that even if we're looking at, you know, downtown Portland, southwest fourth avenue, if you will, if I'm looking at the first line curb extensions, I should expect that the data would suggest that, on average, putting in a curb extension as an improvement would reduce crashes by 30%, controlling for all other factors. Right?
174 That's correct.
175 Okay. So I just needed to say that because I you'll hear sometimes at this dais that, and I think it channels some sort of a kind of grumpiness out there around changing how we do things and seeing, I think it's been described before as the taj mahal of intersections. But I think that if that grumpiness were to translate into retrograde policy making, then we would be basically saying we were willing to tolerate 30% more crashes because we don't want to have the taj mahal of intersections. That's the way that I interpret that slide. Is that correct?
176 Yeah, it could be interpreted that way. Thank you. I'll just add just a smidge more. You can see under the crash type we don't the studies are very specific and they get very specific about the type of crash it will prevent. So installing lighting isn't going to do much for daytime crashes obviously. Right. So it's very specific about nighttime pedestrian and bicycle crashes. The bigger signal heads are very specific to the t bone angle crashes, right? So you can get very nuanced and layered. And just for the wonks in the room that these factors, you know, a lot of people will say like, well, that adds up to more than 100. So we shouldn't have any crashes. It's multiplicative. Like.
177 Well, it's a holistic approach. You're taking a systems approach on this, which kind of leads me to the other thing I wanted to sort of say is like, we've had a lot of recent conversations around vision zero, which I think is extremely welcome. And the through line that I just want to emphasize here is if we're going to be successful in our vision, zero goals and our reaffirmation as a body, then it's this holistic systems thinking that needs to be at every point in our planning process. And I'm encouraged that that I'm hearing that you guys are thinking about it that way, and that our job up here is to make sure that we are reflecting that back out and uplifting the importance of that work and, and holding the line when we do it well and being willing to talk to this council when when we need more support.
178 Councilor greene, if I may add, thanks, wendy, for that explanation. To your point around some perception of excess in the way that we build out infrastructure, it is informed by the folks around this table and others about what is not just a best practice, but what is most practical in the spaces that you see. Those improvements being made in to the naked eye, to an untrained resident who's walking along or using it. And I'll use the ADA ramps as an example. It may seem excessive. There's a reason why it chases back as far down the block as it does, because the slope is important for a person who is trying to use a mobility device to mount a curb and be able to move about the city safely. So we recognize that sometimes our work is perceived as being excessive and that our process is onerous, but it is not without merit, and it is with not without intentionality. In our effort to ensure that we're providing the best experience for system users, and that we're providing the greatest clarity about how these improvements actually do impact the quality of life for portlanders.
179 Thank you so much. And you know, change is hard. I know that the first time I tried to take a left turn on jefferson after the completed concrete barrier bike Lane was there, it was a little bit of a what am I doing this right? Am I going to screw this up? Am I going to get written about in the Willamette week about this one? Yes. All of those all those things I know as a cyclist, when I'm there, I feel much safer. And so thank you for this. Thanks for the presentation and keep them coming. Thanks.
180 Thank you. Thank you, councilor Greene. I share the same experience since I drive that every single day. In fact, I've been meaning to talk to you about that. Councilor Kanal. I think you're next in the queue.
181 Thank you, madam chair. Thanks, everybody for the presentation. I first, I don't have a lot of questions about it, but I just wanted to say I really appreciate the walk through of that intersection and everything that was done there, but also how clear it was. My questions are more on a couple of the other things related to the action plan. And before I get to that, I'll just say no, turn on red, I think is actually this week. Technically, I don't think we've voted on the final vote is tomorrow or day after. Okay, so I love the, the initiative and the, the support. I just wanted for anyone who's wondering if they missed it online, I just wanted to get that out of the way. I wanted to ask three things. So first of on slide eight, you talk about a couple of things related to safe vehicles. There's nothing there about weight. Everything like the solution is all about speed. And this is going to lead into a different question I have on the speed side. But on the weight side, I think this is mirrored in the action plan itself. So it's a page 40 of the action plan, the 2325 update. It's a lot there about under the safe vehicles section about how Washington, dc raised the annual registration fee for heavier vehicles. We have pickups bigger than some apartments in the city rolling around in parts of my district, and those have much higher safety risks in a collision and higher, heavier, larger, etcetera, etcetera. And I'm just curious what the I understand the state's got to be involved in this. It's not something we can do solo, but what is the what is the the current status of conversation, either through the ODOT side or through the state legislature side on anything with relation to weight and size of vehicles?
182 Great. I'd be happy to take that. And shoshanah you may want to also join as a vision zero team, we. I really appreciate that question. Councilor. Kanal. It's weight and size of vehicles is something that we as a city of Portland, don't have a lot of influence over. We do have kind of a short wish list of safety measures that would would be wonderful for the state legislature to take on. One of those is looking at kind of dc style kind of funding structure for registration of heavier, bigger vehicles and making some some kind of monetary disincentives for that, of course, with considerations for large vehicles that are necessary for, for kind of particular functions. And so it's kind of identified as a, a hope at some point, but hasn't quite made it on to a more concrete legislative agenda item. I do want to say that within the safe vehicle space, places that we as a city do have more agency are with our own city fleet, and we have a really great city fleet kind of program that is kind of exploring with us right now how to use the new telematics that were recently installed on all city vehicles to consider intelligent speed assistance or kind of monitoring safe driving behaviors and helping encourage kind of following the speed limit, limiting hard braking. We've also done a little bit of exploring of the kind of visibility impediments in large cabs. And is there an opportunity for some kind of higher visibility cabs as we look at electrification? So there's kind of some explorations underway in that space. And then finally, the federal government, through the national highway traffic safety administration, regulates vehicle safety and has kind of that five star rating system. And so over the years, including recently, just a couple of weeks ago, we've had the opportunity to submit comments about being able to kind of improve what safety requirements there are in order to get that five star rating that tells customers who are interested in a vehicle. This is kind of a, you know, kind of a really safe vehicle choice for your purchase. And so those are different ways that we've either explored or directly engaged in vehicle safety.
183 Shoshanna cobid PBOT chief of staff I'll just add very briefly that, as you know, the vehicle registration fee is set by the state. And in this next conversation about a 2027 legislative transportation package, there are going to be conversations about changing the vehicle registration fee and basing it on something like size or weight is something that comes up perennially. So far, it hasn't gained that much traction, but there are already conversations considering it again. So it's, you know, it would be a big statewide conversation.
184 Yeah, I appreciate both answers. And thanks for coming up, shoshanna. Yeah. I think for me, the, the cost element of it is the compromise. I would prefer to just get every overcompensate or 5000 off the road just in general and, you know, get to that place unless there's a legitimate business need, of course. But I think that's a, a broader conversation. And I also think that the bottom left of this slide has fast, reliable transit, which is another thing because often we're stuck in the position of we're just going to talk about walking and biking. And because we don't have control, but transit is the thing that can, for every human being out there, actually achieve that, regardless of their mobility or anything else. I, I do note a lot similarly, a lot of what we're talking about is tech. I have absolutely no concern about putting those sorts of things on city vehicles. But in terms of private vehicles, I have concerns about that. Automatic braking is one of the things mentioned. Great. Love it. But a lot of the rest of it is just basically backdoors to surveillance. And I'm trying to their trade offs to every policy, right? Some of them are just cost and you're weighing like $40,000 to do this, or it's a human life. That's an easy trade off. There is a cost, which is money, but a human life is worth way more, obviously, some of the rest of it. I think where we start talking about, you know, how are we creating a surveillance state is a is to me a much larger cost than I want to avoid. So that was the long one. The other two questions I had, one is, and I've asked this before, do we have the rate by vmt on these streets every. As you look at the maps of all the higher injury, high crash corridors, whatever terminology. It is also very similar to the heaviest trafficked roads total. So I'm interested in understanding if we do the type of infrastructure that gets people off of those roads. For example, the road diet that happened west of I-5 on lombard moved a lot of traffic off that road to Willamette. And with that traffic came greater levels of or higher levels of crashes. Now, with more bicyclists involved, because Willamette is a heavily biked road. So I'm trying to understand, is it because of the design exclusively, or is it because of the nature of just heavier traffic means more likelihood? And also, how do we fix it without moving it? And I'm trying to understand that, do we have vmt based rates for the the high crash network?
185 I mean, I we can both tackle it. What I was going to share is that we used to do rate based analysis when I first started at PBOT for, for quite a long time, we did the crash rates on our high crash. At that time, it wasn't called the high crash network, but we did provide or produce a high crash intersection listing based on crash rates. Many of those intersections that showed up 20 years ago, based on the rate analysis, still show up based on the severity analysis that we're looking at now. So there is somewhat of a correlation. And clay, you can speak to this a little bit more. And then as far as like, how do we make safety improvements without shifting people? I say that that doesn't happen most of the time it can happen. But we've done other road diets like on division between 60th and 80th, where volumes actually went up on division after we did the the Lane reduction from 4 to 3. And we try to analyze that before we make the changes and say like, where do we think people will go? What do our models show? Are they diverting? If we do think they are diverting, what can we do to either prevent that or mitigate that by slowing people down, things like that? So I would say for the most part, we don't see much migration when we do our safety improvements, but it just depends on what the treatment is.
186 And to answer your question directly, we don't do much rate based crash analysis work. The one place where that shows up is in our high crash intersections. Those do take adt into account and on our kind of corridors and segments. I think wendy mentioned we we used to we've shifted away from that because we're really looking at really wanting to know what are the segments where the most people are dying and being seriously injured, recognizing that that's really kind of saving lives and reducing those injuries. Where can we get the most kind of safety benefit for the investment? So if we have a street that has, you know, 5080 ti and three serious injuries, and then we compare it to street with 20,000 and adt and maybe, you know, eight serious injuries and a traffic death. We would not want to necessarily kind of have the street that has had more injury and death get kind of lower on a priority list and have a street with lower adt kind of get that that bump up for prioritization. And so we've we've done some recently, we don't use that as a practice, but would be, you know, very amenable to kind of understanding what you would like to know more and doing some work to get you the answers you're looking for.
187 Thanks, I appreciate that. And that's a really good example. Those numbers that you just gave, I think what I'm trying to get at is if we were to reduce the adt on the heavier traffic street by moving it to the the more risky but lower traffic street, are we actually like, I don't care where the names on the map show up. I just don't want the names on the map. Right. I know we all do. That's that's not a unique thing to me. That's. We all believe that I, I'm trying to figure that part out. I also appreciate the comment about division I, I believe you. I don't represent that area. I do represent and I live off of that stretch of lombard. So I've experienced this. And I also think it's a pretty big difference between going from 4 to 3 and 2 to 1, that getting where you can't change lanes and people start looking for the, the, the less trafficked street to go and get where they need to go. That's the concern I have. If you go from three lanes in a single direction to two, 4 to 3, it, you can still do what you got to do. But there's that feeling of the sort of driver psychology of, I'm going to get around this traffic. And for people on lombard, it has historically been going to either columbia or Willamette, and Willamette is not, although I will say historically has not been built for that. There's actually been a lot done on Willamette recently. I do want to credit you for that last thing. Has traffic circles been a conversation recently and specifically on prescott 60th cully, that five way intersection? I'm very interested in the conversation of how to make that intersection work better. I get a lot of input into my office about it, among thousands of other things, of course, but that one, I think gets a lot. And I'm curious not only from the perspective of that intersection, but just in general, where the traffic circle conversation has been.
188 Yeah. Traffic circles, I assume you mean the bigger ones that are like roundabouts, like at halsey and 80th, the picture we showed.
189 Yeah. I don't know if it would actually.
190 Be round.
191 Per.
192 Se in that one. This one would be more of an oval. I feel like just looking at that, the map on it and as you drive around. But yeah.
193 Yeah, yeah, they can be different shapes for sure. But yeah, the bigger ones, we would like to do more of those in the city. It's a little bit challenging sometimes we have small right of ways. We have built in buildings built to back of sidewalk, but we would like to do more of those. They're safer than traffic signals. And a lot of the other treatments that we put in, I don't know specifically about the intersection that you're talking about that doesn't I don't know of anything in my head about project there, but it is something that we want to consider. And clay and I have been talking about creating guidance for roundabouts and when to consider roundabouts. We have looked at them at multiple intersections trying to again, install more. Did you want to add anything else?
194 Great.
195 Councilor we can go back and see if there are any current plans to do work in the location that you've identified to determine if there's a potential path forward for us to consider doing something alternative to what we have historically done.
196 And it doesn't need to be a traffic circle. There are two separate but related.
197 Absolutely.
198 Thank you.
199 I'm glad you brought that up. That's great. A couple quick questions from me. The. Thank you so much for giving us the example. How much did that cost? Can you give us the cumulative cost of all of those improvements on that example?
200 I don't know if I could give you a cost of all of them because they were phased in. I will just say the very first thing we did that we didn't even talk about was that slip Lane where renee was killed was there wasn't even a stop sign there when when she was killed. So we put in a stop sign, we added a marked crosswalk. And that was something that we did within like two months and probably cost at the time, $2,000. So that was the very first thing we did in response. And then we got a grant from ODOT for maybe $200,000, I think it was to, to install some of the concrete that you saw in the 2019 slide. The next part was much more involved. It was part of the outer division safety project and also division transit. And that was millions of dollars, probably. We rebuilt the signal. We added a lot of communication and fiber and separated everything not only in space, but in time with the traffic signal. So but a lot of the substantial improvements were made prior to that multi-million dollar investment at the intersection, probably less than $1 million for sort of the first two levels of treatment that we installed.
201 Do have a total figure for 148, but I think it would be interesting for us to know what the price tags are generally on each of these kinds of improvements, just what they cost. Yeah. Second, we didn't talk at all about I know what you call the speed cameras. Did they play into anything that you talk about in vision zero? I know we we want to do more of them and the high crash corridors. But where do they fit in vision zero?
202 They're a really key component to vision zero. They've been a part of our kind of action plan process since the inception in 2015. The city of Portland was successful at the legislature to get the very first speed cameras. And since then, kind of expansion of the speed camera program is one of the kind of safe speed actions that we've really leaned into the one of our colleagues manages that program, and in close partnership with the Portland police bureau. So it's an important component, and we'd be happy to provide more information.
203 Didn't see it listed. I just wonder where it fit. And it seems like it should be an important component to vision zero. Next question. I don't want to speak for councilor Green, but in our district, I get a lot of concerns about lack of sidewalks and speed and folks feeling unsafe. And how come you guys don't do something about it? Well, we haven't had any deaths here. We're all we're all waiting for somebody to die so that we can get an improvement from PBOT, which is really kind of sad, but I'm just wondering, you know, I don't know what is the the likelihood that residents could actually do something there or, and I'm thinking of the, you know, vista way out, you know, I like your, your transition from rural to urban. That's kind of what's going on in some places in district four. But I mean, how do we respond to these people that have asked for help have asked for one of those what's it called? The what's.
204 It called? Speed reader board, speed reader board.
205 Get the speed reader up to try to slow people down. I don't know how do how do we respond to these folks that. Well, we haven't had anybody die yet, so we're not getting any attention from. Pbot.
206 Yeah.
207 I think one of the ways that we respond is with the systemic treatments that we're layering out throughout the system. A really great example is the flashing yellow arrows. I don't know, you know, when you're waiting to turn left, usually there's a red or Green arrow. Sometimes there's a flashing yellow arrow. We have taken those almost exclusively out of the system because it's very hard to eliminate pedestrian conflicts, right? When pedestrians are crossing, you have a flashing yellow arrow. That's not a good thing. So we're doing those, taking those out of the system. Again, we're doing the systemic improvements where we're revamping our signals, putting in the reflective back plates, those don't you know, we're doing those proactively. We're not only doing those where there are crashes or serious injuries. I think sidewalks is harder, harder thing to address because they're so expensive that that's hard to do systemically.
208 Just painting stripes, or is that.
209 It can depending we do have in southwest in motion some treatments in there for striped shoulders, for pedestrians that have either plastic delineators or concrete curbing, that kind of creates just a separate space. We've done a little bit of that on southwest barber. As you approach downtown, we've done it on b h highway, where it would have been a very expensive project to get in full proper sidewalks. But we did create a concrete separated space for pedestrians by narrowing traffic lanes. So we are looking at that more often. And we know in southwest in particular where you have grades and lack of drainage, those are really important treatments to lean into. So southwest in motion really has some really good information in there about how we can make pedestrian improvements without having to go to full sidewalks.
210 I think folks in district four are pretty familiar with southwest motion. It's just the implementation they're concerned about. And what you did on barber was fabulous. I really appreciate that council.
211 I just I'd like to share that. I think we've discussed the ways that our projects have heretofore been funded, especially those that are more transformational in nature, that that funding comes from outside sources. Given that we now have the tough and the street damage restoration fee and the dedication of that funding, some of that funding to cip and other initiatives, we might be able to address some of the things that your community members, your constituents, are calling you about. We we also receive the calls. And inasmuch as I hate for our response to be, well, we don't have any money to do the very basic thing that has been the heart of what has been the problem for us. I agree that we should not have to wait for someone to be injured or worse, on our streets or in our communities before we do something. Unfortunately, we have not been able to have a proactive stance, and I'm looking forward to us being able to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction, because we will be able to make thoughtful investment in areas, regardless as to whether or not it is high crash, regardless as to whether or not it is in one part of town or another, but rather because there are people and human beings that are living, working, navigating in those spaces and deserve to have comfortable spaces in which to do that.
212 Thank you. Gave me a couple of ideas to go back with. Last question for me, and then I'll turn it over to councilor Smith is we've been having some conversations about autonomous vehicles here, and I just wonder if your team is involved in those conversations, because safety, I think, ranked as the number one issue when people were queried about autonomous vehicles. And is this a part of your conversations as well? Are you involved in those conversations?
213 Yes, yes.
214 Okay. Good. All right. Glad. Good to know that. Now I'm going to turn to councilor Smith and then we're going to if we're done, we have a couple more hands up. We need to take a ten minute break before we go to the next topic. So just a heads up, councilor Smith.
215 Thank you.
216 I'm trying to get used to this microphone on the left left hand side. So I just wanted to say thank you for giving that very expansive definition of vision zero and all the things. It's something that we have been very supportive of since day one, that we started this new council. And I think, you know, living in, in, in district one and seeing that we have a lot of the high crash network in our district, it has started me to think about different things that we can do. So I just wanted to have a conversation about a couple of things that me and the chairwoman have talked about. And she's she's been on my case because I haven't given her an updated ordinance on this. But. There were four things that that we thought were would reduce the number of lives, fatalities, crash fatalities in district one, a right turn on red restrictions. And so we worked on that. The automatic walk cycles to implement automated default walk walk signals. I know this is really expensive. I can see director williams looking at me like that.
217 That's a no. I'm sorry. I'm searching my.
218 Brain a lot of money.
219 But it is. Yes.
220 And then the updated to update the code on curb extensions. And that's our next one that we're going to release that we'll be talking about in September, because we already have this mandate. For the for the ADA mandates that we're doing on the curbs. And since we the code says that the curb extensions are not mandatory. And so we want to change it to making it. It's it's voluntary, but you all do it more than not. But you don't have to. And so we want to make sure that those curb extensions are put on, particularly now that we're doing the work for the for the ADA stuff that we got approved for last year that we voted on. And that's, that's an issue. And the lighting requirements mandating enhanced lighting for all the crosswalks to improve lighting citywide. So that's a, that's a big, big deal. But we thought that we would start with the curb extensions in light of the, the, the lawsuit that that was put out. I don't know when the lawsuit was, but I know we had to pay for it and we had to do an ordinance to do bonding on it. Right. Are you familiar with it? I know.
221 The creek settlement. Yes, yes.
222 Yes yes.
223 Yes, yes. That happened in 2017. And so we've been working to fulfill those expectations.
224 Exactly.
225 Since that time. Many of the projects that we work on that are dedicated to us improving the ramps. There are instances when it is the first path to include curb extensions. Yes, I would I look forward to continuing to work with your office and with this committee on the language, because I do think that there are some feasibility that needs to be considered. As we talk about doing bump outs and curb extensions, there are places where, based on the amount of space, it may not be the option that we would need to go with. But I will say that, generally speaking, our team leans in to do as much as is possible. I know you do the safety, so I, I am not afraid of the language in terms of the mandate or the direction. As much as I want to make sure that we aren't over promising on something that is impossible for us to deliver on. Right? So I would I would want to talk about the language there a.
226 Little bit more. And that's, that's what I wanted to talk about, to see if, if we needed to put something, I'll give you the baseline ordinance that we've drafted. We were going to put them out in like a group of three. And so we decided, let's start with the no turn on red first just to get make sure that we get it right and that we're able to talk to the community about it too, so that they can see, just like you had up here, you know, what does that do in terms of saving lives in our city? And I think that's, that's my goal.
227 And I appreciate the layered approach as well. Just as we use the 148th avenue example, we were able to layer on things. And so you talk about the curb extensions, you talk about the additional lighting. All of those things are components that we know not just create safety, but make people actually feel safer. And safety in a lot of ways is about how a person feels, not just about what they physically experience in the right of way. So we are excited about the opportunity to continue to talk about how we can help to inform that strategy and help to realize what I believe your goal is in terms of creating that safety and community.
228 And who in your office should I talk to, or should I send it to you first? And you.
229 Can you can send it to me. It'll be any number of us either around this table, our planning team. So kristen hall, our engineering staff as well would need to be involved. And then our project manager. So it's a number of folks. You can send it to me and we'll we'll get it out to the right folks.
230 So when are we doing the, the bonding? When is that going to be on the, on the docket to vote on that.
231 You've already approved?
232 Did we do so much is going on? Is the 550 how much?
233 550 I am I'm not sure about what you're talking about.
234 Okay. So yeah, because I don't know what I'm talking about either, but no, no, no. So we already voted on that, right? On the bonding.
235 For the ramps.
236 Not not the ramps. No no no no for for the water filtration.
237 Oh I that that's I don't know.
238 Okay. You're in PBOT.
239 That's right.
240 Right.
241 Yes, ma'am.
242 You are.
243 No. Not sip.
244 No no no. The water bottles.
245 Yeah. Yeah. The water bottles. We had that a couple of weeks ago didn't we?
246 It was, it was during the budget.
247 It was doing the budget. Okay, so I'm getting confused because you guys have so much stuff that you have going on in terms of infrastructure. And, and I am really happy that we turned this into the public works committee instead of just transportation. Even though we did see all the public works through transportation. But I think it's so important to, to make sure that we're clear on what's going on. And I, I know that you all are doing great work, and I appreciate the work that you're doing. If there's something that you think that we need to be doing and that you see that we need to change something, a code or something, let us know.
248 Just thank you. Councilor we've had in the past year and a half in our opportunity to work with this council, more opportunities to provide information about what we're doing and a greater depth of information sharing so that you can be well informed about our plans, our projects, our efforts. What we need most is continued support to be able to lean into and realize the plans that we've developed. And as we shared at the top of this presentation, the changes that are going to be required in our communities are often hard for people to take and understand. And so what we'll need most is your support to be able to engage with your constituencies, to help them to understand it's not just about doing this for that, but rather it's really around a broader need to ensure safety for all system users. Yeah.
249 Colleagues, we're running out of time here. So I'm going to if it's okay with you councilor, I'm going to let. Councilor. Koyama Lane. Okay, go for it. Okay.
250 Thanks. I just want to express support and interest in, in getting creative under the or s eight. Ten road authority clause are existing allowances and authorities. I think we've got some pretty broad sweeping powers to regulate certain things on our highways. And if we can do it on our highways, it probably affects our surface roads too. And so I don't think that we should tolerate really, really high lifted vehicles to operate in the city of Portland. And also, you know, they get too wide and it's like, you know, it's now you're, you're taking up two parking spaces. It's just, it's a nuisance. And I think that we got to do something about it. And I don't know that we need to change the law at the state to do it. So thanks.
251 Maybe we can ask PBOT to come back with something on their councilor Koyama Lane.
252 Thank you, chair, and thank you so much to this wonderful team. Thank you, director williams and shoshana clay, wendy, dana, really appreciate all of your commitment and the work you're doing. And I just remember a year and a half ago when I was first talking to many of you, and I was asking, what is vision zero need? There was talk about, you know, needs to need support. Exactly what you all are saying. We need you to back us up. We also need folks to know it's not just PBOT and we need the different bureaus and services.
253 Oh, shoot.
254 Oh, they.
255 Need the different bureaus and service areas to work together. So I see us, you know, I appreciate what director williams said. It's this work takes time and we have to be persistent at it. It's we're seeing seeing improvements. We have to keep investing. I would love to hear from you all who are with us today. If you and I want to make sure that staff and subject matter experts in public works in PBOT are really the ones that are helping us prioritize. What are the ways that we can maximize our dollars, our limited resources for traffic safety? What are ways that that we as council and this committee can be better understanding, like what to prioritize and what how we're going to make sure that we're saving the most lives.
256 Really appreciate that question. Councilor. There are systemic safety treatments that make sense across the board that, as wendy was describing, kind of are just part of what we deliver today. High visibility crossings, retroreflective back plates, leading pedestrian intervals. There's kind of a whole suite of kind of systemic safety investments that don't take analysis to identify where to deliver. And then there are kind of location specific needs that it ends up needing some traffic safety analysis to identify what's going to be kind of the safest layering kind of suite of treatments that's going to get us the biggest safety benefit. And so kind of leading with safety as the focus and giving some flexibility within the delivery of treatments to ensure that we're layering the right treatments for the right locations, is going to be something that will help us kind of do, do the most safety good with the, the funding that we have.
257 And I appreciate it. I could hear vice chair Smith kind of asking, you know, how do we connect with you all? Is it is it really just reaching out to you all and saying, hey, can you help us look at some of these lists? Can you help make sure that we're doing making data driven decisions? Is that what I heard?
258 Yes. Please do. One of the things I wanted to share, and I know that we often hear from city councilors about constituents coming forward with concerns and needs. They they have often come to us as well. And we've already begun to track some of the inquiries, requests and analyze the needs and how we might be able to be responsive for each of the districts. I would dare say that there are hundreds of requests for things that come in, and we have the ability to provide for you that list. I know that in working with at least councilor Green on a specific set of needs we shared with him, yes, this is important, but here are the 300 other things that happened in this in the span of a year. That or that not that happened, but that we've heard from folks on. And so this is not to suggest that, you know, it comes in and goes to the bottom list. It's not important. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that there are hundreds, if not more than hundreds of needs that we're hearing about on a regular basis, and we will need the help and prioritizing. And we do want to be able to lean in to help you as you are thinking about how we can support community most effectively.
259 Thank you so much for that, director williams. I really appreciate it, and I appreciate that you all have a lot of the staff with that expertise that we can lean on for helping to make some of those decisions. My only other question was around collaboration and communication. I was wondering if, if maybe director williams or anyone up there can speak to how PBOT is working with other bureaus, and with dana doing the city wide work on policy, on priorities, having conversations so we can understand what the priorities are from, from the different bureaus, from other disciplines, not just transportation. That is an important one in vision zero. And it's also not also just all on on PBOT too. We have to make sure that that there's collaboration and other bureaus, service areas are invested and see them as themselves as vision zero, part of the vision zero champion, champions, table and teams also. So can you speak a little bit to that?
260 I'll I'll take that one. Thank you councilor. Great question. The work that dana is leading out of the public works service area really is, as you know as well as anyone, that is kind of the body of work. And PBOT is a core partner of that city wide effort as well. And so we're kind of developing relationships and partnerships to identify priorities collaboratively. One thing that dana presented at the committee of the whole two weeks ago is a safe system approach pyramid, that the bottom layer of the pyramid is where we get the most benefit of kind of population level safety benefits from investments in 20 minute neighborhoods and land use and density and mode shift. And that is a space where many of the bureaus are coming together and collaboration. And we're all saying, hey, this is this is a way we can make a bigger difference for safety outcomes. And we each have a role to play in this kind of lower level of, of the socio economic land use pyramid. In addition, we've built partnerships PBOT around vision zero with several agencies. Over the last ten years. We've worked closely with the Portland police bureau on a regular basis with monthly meetings, closely with fleet. When we delivered side guards on all heavy trucks that are owned by the city of Portland and continue to look for those collaborations, we work with fire on an ongoing basis as well. And so we we already have some of those partnerships in place and through the city wide effort, are leaning into and building, building on those with other bureaus.
261 Thank you so much. And if there are any ways that councilors or this committee can be more can be supportive of that work, let us know. As always, thank you.
262 Thank you, councilor Koyama Lane. And we are going to take a ten minute break. But councilor Kanal guarantees me. This is 15 seconds.
263 Yeah. I just wanted to say I agree with councilor Green. And if we can ticket the people in smart parks who park over the lines, that'd be incredible. Thanks.
264 Parking, hygiene, I think we call it. Thank you so much for the presentation. Really appreciate it. And we're going to take a ten minute break. Let's be let's be back here. I'll be generous at five after 1212. Colleagues welcome back. I'm sorry. We're running a little bit late. Diana, would you please read the next item?
265 Item number four. Document number 2026-283. Waterfront park redevelopment update.
266 Great. Thank you. Colleagues, I've asked parks and recreation to give us a very brief update on the work that's going on, the progress on the work that's going on in the redevelopment of the waterfront park. So we get a little bit of a history and then maybe learn about the current design process. And I'm sorry, we only have about 2025 minutes to do this. And I know you have a presentation, so let's let's do it. Thanks, art pierce.
267 Yeah, thank you so much. So art pierce, interim director for Portland parks and rec with laura lillard, who's the project manager for this project. We're going to start out with a little bit of fun. You might have noticed as we're trying to promote the waterfront park, we put out a video last week to try.
268 To show that video.
269 We're going to show the video.
270 I'm going to share it. So I'm going to start sharing it. Okay. Yeah.
271 Oh my god.
272 Hopefully that comes in.
273 Access more trees, a picnic shelter, no. Two picnic shelters, places to swim, more dragon boats, beach. Definitely lots of beach. What about a playground with a big slide? Whoops. Definitely. Whoops. What about a place just to sit and read a book? Nah, it's.
274 Not a rescue.
275 New restaurant. What's he doing? River sonic definitely need a river sonic pickleball? No dodgeball, community gardens, workshopping, native plants, maybe a dog park, food trucks, local music, art installations all year round. A place that people don't want to leave. All right, that's good. So we thought it'd be fun just to start with that. We're in a moment of, I think, a pretty large conversation, both about waterfront park, but also about the future of downtown. And so we're really trying to throw the door kind of wide open. And I thought it was a fun idea from the comms team to throw me into the river to try to start the conversation off, but really with design to make sure that you all know and portlanders know that this is a big moment for us to think about how, as a city, we embrace the waterfront, how we embrace the river, which is one of our greatest assets. So we're I'll give a little bit of framing. Laura is pulling up the slides. Maybe one more. Yeah. One of the grounding premises that we really want to reinforce with this is that we need to understand downtown Portland as a neighborhood. And really, while it has always been a neighborhood, it's been one that's been really reliant on commuters working downtown to create its its culture, its presence and its feel. And if we want to create a space that more people want to spend and perhaps even decide to live and stay longer, we need to really change the character of downtown Portland in order to do that. And the the public sector's really central role is in the convening of the design of our streets, such as the conversation you just had with PBOT and in our public spaces that is governed largely by parks and recreation. Hold for one second with a technical adjustment.
276 With sound. Yeah. Thank you. Okay.
277 There we go. Let's go to the next slide. Maybe. So when we're thinking about how waterfront park can help to signal to portlanders that there's a character shift to downtown Portland, we can look to cities globally and how they have really embraced the presence of a river in their city to really shift people's understanding of, of what they would come downtown for, how they would spend that time together. And when you think about the possibility of thousands of people living downtown, they will need a place a day to day in and day out park to visit. They will need to have attractions that they will want to use as a as a resident that also will will serve as an anchor destination for people traveling from throughout the world to come to visit Portland. And it's important to remember we've done this before. While this is a like a bold proposition, we've done this before in districts such as the pearl district and my own experience working in south waterfront, where if we can convene around a really clear and compelling vision, we can bring the resources together and align all of the bureaus and public and private parties together to make a large scale investment happen. So we're really excited to engage with you as council, but also engaging with all sorts of constituents who care deeply about waterfront park to have a really full and vibrant conversation over the next year as we're entering into the design competition. So laura's here to give a little bit more details into the specifics of the design competition, and we'd love your feedback and ideas to help the process moving forward.
278 Thank you. Good afternoon councilors. We are here because, as you probably know, metro awarded a planning and development grant to the city of Portland. Our application was initiated and supported by two project partners, the human access project and Portland waterfront pavilion, and the grant is funding an open design competition for governor tom mccall waterfront park. The outcome of the grant will be a concept design for the waterfront park and a deeper and more detailed design for the bowl area, and I'll show you what that area is, along with cost estimates and funding and implementation strategies. And this project really lays the groundwork. The groundwork for capital funding. So just a really quick history. I just want to kind of ground us. It won't we won't dwell here. So buckle up a little bit. I also just want to recognize that the images don't acknowledge that the park has always been a place for gathering, trading and river access since time immemorial. But over the last 120 years, it has seen some transformation and some really big moves, and it's been shaped by people and activities. Some of the bold moves have been good and some may be worth rethinking. In early portland's trading and shipbuilding era, this was the location of docks and wharves, as you can kind of see in that upper left photo. And the city frequently flooded. So in the 1930s, the city built a seawall and harbor drive, and then it made a very intentional collective civic decision to take down harbor drive, which is a very celebrated and bold move. And it's in recent history for many portlanders. We replaced it with a park that, through the many decades since, has offered continuation and hasn't really changed too much over the last 45 years. The park is a place of regional festivals and events, and though we don't launch hot air balloons necessarily like in this picture, the grassy lawn is reserved for these events and for the large scale events that you see at the bowl in this photo on the right hand side. And it is also a pass through for walkers, joggers, cyclists and the like. But and these three functions haven't really changed a whole lot over the past few decades. I just also want to acknowledge that this project is not starting from scratch. It builds on many different policy documents and projects that have gotten feedback and thinking from many portlanders over the past few years, previously adopted city efforts. So our history really grounds us. These documents guide us, and the public conversations that we're having will help move us forward into the future. Tom mccall waterfront park is approximately 30 acres owned by Portland parks and recreation. We will be asking for a concept, design and vision for this entire length of the park. So the northern end is that steel bridge, and then it goes all the way down to the bowl, which is southwest clay and river place. We will be asking for concept design for this whole park, and this is the focus of the design competition. Many of the areas we know are beloved and they work very well, and we aren't thinking that there will be a lot of transformation. And I'm thinking like the Saturday market area or salmon street springs. But there are areas that do need help and transformation. The bowl area, which is defined from the salmon street, springs to that southern end at harbor drive and southwest clay, will be the focus of the winning design team post design competition. To take that more detailed design and feasibility, we also have the opportunity to potentially expand the design of the entire park in a more focused way, just like the bowl, with additional funding from a metro 2040 grant if approved.
279 And I think adding one note here, if you look at the illustration of the dashed area of the outline of the design competition, you'll note it also includes the morrison bridge ramps and also includes naito parkway. So we're also inviting designers to help us really, really rethink the character of that connection from downtown and into the park, as well as the park itself.
280 This diagram shows at the top the major stages of the project, with a special emphasis on the design, competition itself and public engagement. It's intended to show sequencing, so the first phase has really been about getting us to this moment. All of the preparation listening sessions is an umbrella term for one on one conversations, stakeholder interviews, open house survey, webinar, etc. We've done a deep dive into some existing conditions, data looking at topography, soil stability, land use, zoning. We've had conversations with the stewards who are actively involved in the memorials and monuments of all of the many memorials and monuments in the park, event producers we've also done, we've worked with bes on environmental studies, and we are also doing an economic analysis for the park. We have hired a design competition manager to run the competition, which is malcolm redding consulting. So that's that's led us to this orange phase where we are in in the thick of this design competition. We're at this moment where we have issued an rfq, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. But beyond getting through, the design competition will land on a finalist who will then take it to the next phase, the design development in pink, and produce that schematic design for the bowl area. We do recognize that we'd like to come and have some touch points with you all in these different stages. So when there are three shortlisted teams that will be producing concept designs, that would be a good moment to have a touch point with you. And then at the end for this project, when we wrap up the design development. Again, we've been engaging with a lot of different people who have an interest in the park, and we just wanted to highlight some of those organizations that we've engaged. This is not a complete list, but it does represent the broad reach of this park and this project. And we placed an asterisk on the organizations that have representation on our project advisory committee, which has been helping us develop some of the project aims, goals and objectives. So speaking of the project advisory committee, this is an 18 member group, and we are also convening a technical advisory group with many of our agency staff, as well as the county and metro. We've had several meetings to help hone in what it is that we're looking for from a design teams in this competition. We've done several site tours to just give a lay of the land. We've had focus group discussions about events, accessibility and river, river access and river use. We hosted a community wide workshop at the end of June, and we have this community survey, which you saw that video has a link to. So we're really excited about that. We've received over 1000 responses to date, so we're getting some really good feedback. The design competition calls for qualifications at this stage, not design responses. It opened on July the 8th and received, as you can see, 50 responses. It just closed a week ago. And we are in active review and we're extremely excited about this turnout and interested and interested in Portland. This is a really great showing of both local talent and national and international excitement. That's building the rfq again is part one of the competition where no design work is required. This will result in a shortlist of three design teams, which will be invited to participate in the next stage, which is request for proposals, and they will be developing those three different design concepts for waterfront park, and we will host a public exhibition for folks to view it, as well as an online gallery, and those details will be announced shortly. I just wanted to flash in front of you the vision statement. This was in co-creation with our project advisory committee. It really calls for this bold, intergenerational waterfront park that reflects who we are as portlanders, reflects our culture, our landscape, our identity, and really centers the river in its transformation. It is a key piece of downtown revitalization. As interim director pierce mentioned, and also long term economic vitality. So it really starts with this statement. I just also want to mention the themes that were developed with our project advisory committee. Again, thinking about defined areas for events and civic gathering. We know that this is host to many of our beloved community festivals. River access is a very key piece of this design competition. The bowl is the only area that is not bounded by the seawall and is an opportunity to touch the water. Integration of neighbor nature and habitat will be really important, not only along the river edge and the riparian restored riparian habitat, but also upland and diversity of canopy and habitat. Upland in the park itself. We recognize that this park, because it is used for events, it is sometimes lacks that everyday use and really sticking power. It is a pass through space much of the year. And so we're really looking at how design teams will respond to this opportunity to hold people there as a neighborhood destination that works for residents, workers and visitors. And then, of course, we have our Willamette river greenway trail. That's very important for folks that continue to use the the park, and it needs to be maintained and improved. And that's what I wanted to bring to you today. There's a lot of community supported dreaming, and we know it will be a balance with all these themes. We're so excited to see what clever designers will come up with to inspire us and reflect the portlanders at waterfront park.
281 Great. Thank you laura. Thank you art. Thank you for the presentation. You really brought us up to date. I think we only have about ten more minutes. If we have any questions, I'll just kick it off by asking you on the rfq. Do the respondents actually reveal other projects that they've worked on as a part of the rfq? Here's what I've done in other parts of the country.
282 Yes, the rfq asked for the lead, the lead design team, as well as their design team makeup, and they asked them to reflect on projects that they had worked on similar to this. And they also asked for their methodology. How would they approach a project like that? That was the four criteria.
283 Great. Okay. And one other question. Councilor Green and I were down on the waterfront this morning. As a matter of fact, with Oregon walks, we had a pretty good group of, I don't know, maybe 40 or 50 people. And you could tell that it is a pass through area. And when we had to cross to go over into the ankeny alley, that connection with downtown really needs to be improved. And I'm hoping that whatever project gets selected, that we can really increase that connection. It's it's just really awkward. It doesn't feel like it's a part of the downtown really. It's quite separated. So hopefully we'll look forward to seeing those colleagues. Do you have any questions or comments for lauren? Sure, councilor Green.
284 Thank you so much for the presentation. I've been really excited about this work. I think we're all going to have questions when when it's appropriate to talk about how to pay for such a thing. And, you know, with the implications of change and design commitments are. But I think speaking, I think I speak for all of us when our constituents are really hungry for some activation down there. And I've seen some models around the world that that, that we could almost sort of get inspiration from top of mind for me as we go through this is, is and I'm glad I see on the slide about flexible everyday park use. I think that's so critical, but also having an opportunity to have a little commercial experience as well, like get a cafe, get a coffee, get a beer, and have a safe place to sit and watch your kid play on a, in the, in the park. I mean, that, that seems like a really good thing for families right now to be, to, to be a reason to come downtown. If we're kind of thinking about the family experience, but also recognizing that sometimes you got to sit there and take take a beat and you're tired, you need like a snack and, you know, a glass of wine. That's, that's, we should acknowledge that and embrace it. And I know you guys are thinking about it. So thank you. And then I think that we should bring in maybe randy gragg or some of those folks to give us the other side of this thinking. There's some kind of bigger design Portland ideas, some of the charrette type of learnings come into this committee, because I think motivating this to the other districts is key because there's there's other thinking that's going to be part of the broader Green loop, which is a central city district two, three, and four kind of shared interest. So that's. I'd be interested in that. Thanks.
285 Thank you, councilor Green councilor Kanal.
286 Thank you. And thank you for the presentation. Obviously, we've talked about dodgeball and how much that's a great idea. We'll figure out how to do it in the water up there. I think the big takeaway for me, and I hope we get a chance to talk about this more in October at the committee of the whole, when we have the the broader downtown conversation is slight to. Downtown is a neighborhood. There is, I think, no single bigger thing we could do with relation to not only downtown, but frankly, our budget. Then get people to live downtown to make it work. And we've seen post COVID how the, the arts and culture districts and the actual neighborhoods have both recovered in terms of downtown's nationwide, much better than business districts. We are not going back to not by the way, the pre 2020 is not when people came downtown pre 2018 where people would come down to work at the higher levels before we got to so much telework. But yeah, I just wanted to talk about that. I think the other piece you talked about, placemaking tool, it's kind of a little bit of our fairgrounds as a city. And you know, we've talked about this. There's, you know, another thing being constructed every, every few weeks in the, in the summertime, which I think is great. These are all important activations, are all economic drivers too. And I think the physical landscape of the park and we've talked about turf and things like that, that piece is so inextricably connected to whether or not it's easy to attend and do events there. Last year, many of us did the dragon boat race, and it did not rain that weekend, but the sprinklers had gone off beforehand. And so just it doesn't drain well. Right. And so it's June, it's hot and we're slipping on the on the grass with the mud, I guess, and those, those sorts of things. I think just ensuring it's a slope, it's right by the water. Whatever we can do there is vital. And I hope that that's a part of the the decision making process. I really appreciate that. You included the city block on each side of the morrison bridge as a place that we can talk about doing something with, instead of just a ramp and parking lots down there, I, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up having seasonal or permanent ice rinks there as a district two councilor, but also just knowing the, the, the love that that has gotten in the past. The other piece, where did it go? Gotta find my my notes here. I think councilor Green brought up the idea of this being something that affects multiple districts. That's true not only in the way that that you mentioned the Green loop and the sort of transportation elements of how we get people out to it, but also in the sense of if downtown works and I'm, I'm channeling my, my district two colleague, councilor Ryan here, that it's the where the property tax revenues come in that fund all the programs elsewhere. So I love that this is being connected with. I appreciate the shout out of who to include in it. You know, I know pmc has has had a lot of ideas here in general. And so I'm very appreciative of that conversation in terms of the activations that are not giant events. So not just the daily use in terms of coming in, but in term and, and also not like city fair level. What is the I mean, this is obviously coming not only from the dodgeball side, but but like, what are the what's the, the plan there in terms of this isn't a design thing alone. So I don't know if it's a parallel conversation about how do you get those small activations.
287 I actually really appreciate you asked the question. We didn't give an update, but I think we will in October with the rest of our city colleagues about the work that parks is doing together with PBOT and prosper and arts and culture to look for near-term opportunities this winter into next summer. Of what are some smaller scale engagements that we can embrace? So the, you know, the work happening at the pink light district, how can we echo some of that type of activation as we're heading into the waterfront and those adjacent areas? So we actually have a meeting this afternoon with staff to start looking ahead to next summer. And what are the ways that we can really embrace some smaller level engagement, either put on by parks or enabled for a partner to take on? And I agree it's critical. It's going to take us a number of years to get to a capital investment scale of what we're conceiving of. So we have a number of years of temporary activations that are essential. Yeah, great.
288 In terms of councilor Green also mentioned the the ability to get a beer. I definitely would love to hear more about that floating stuff that attaches to the waterfront park is not the only place I know salmon street springs, that whole area. There's been discussion, but. I. It would be nice to know if parks is is more open to that conversation than maybe a few years ago.
289 I think we certainly are right now. One of the things we're looking into is whether there's adjustments to parks policy or city code that might need to be enabled by council to make that more ready for us to do. Right.
290 Yeah, I guess happy to happy to help.
291 Yeah. When someone says council has to authorize, well, we know those folks, we can bring something over to them. Sure.
292 There's there's a lot of interest, I would say, in that. And then finally, in terms of nato, you mentioned that too. I know there's some challenges with having two way bike lanes on the water side and some of the safety issues there crossings, and especially where the ramps are as you get further north to get onto the bridges, I. Are we in a position? I mean, has there been you mentioned talking to PBOT. It's been redone, but not very recently. I feel it's there isn't. Are you experiencing any sort of resistance in terms of we've done it too recently to redo it.
293 No. In fact, the great benefit of having come a month ago from PBOT is I was sort of already supporting this process previously from my PBOT role. And the transportation planning team is already doing modeling right now to better understand broader traffic and circulation patterns, to make sure we're supplying to the design competition, what might be possible in terms of ambitions they could bring. One of the ideas is also that there might be time based changes. So there may be that the nato functions as a festival. Street is actually a place for some events that may take some of the pressure off the park itself, depending on how we structure the design together of those two facilities.
294 I love that. Just one last comment on the. I would love to see more asterisks added on that. Slide nine. In particular to the culturally specific community groups. I'm noticing a lot of them on the list, but in terms of direct access to the decision making processes, great. Thank you.
295 Thank you, councilor Councilor Smith.
296 Thank you. And I'm going to keep this really short question. What have you done to get more folks of color to to participate in this rfq process?
297 Do you want to speak to the meeting last week?
298 Sure. We we've done a number of briefings with folks. Our most recent was a partner briefing that brought together all of the different river related developments and organizations that are creating places along the river within our central city. So albina vision trust, 1803, williams. Williams and russell, thank you. And then some of the other organizations as well. Just to talk about omsi with the central center of tribal nations. So just to talk about some of the our shared vision and our shared goals with our projects, and also not to duplicate or ask folks the same questions as we're all doing these sort of big transformative efforts along along the river. So that was a very productive conversation. I know there's a lot of collective energy around the city to do really good things and, and, and show up together in these spaces. So we're sort of lifting each other's projects up.
299 And I would add that the parks community involvement team has also been really targeting its outreach to try to bring in voices from a broader geographic area, in particular, because I think currently waterfront park has great significance for cultural events and seasonal events and wanting to make sure that we're really recognizing that and sort of bringing that that into the conversation. Yeah.
300 Perfect, perfect. Thank you so much.
301 Thank you.
302 Thank you, councilor Smith. Thank you for a great presentation bringing us up to speed. I know we have more questions, but we'll have you back. And I think the councilor Greens recommendation, maybe we bring randy gregg or some of the other players that are also working on things like the morrison bridgehead and other connections to downtown would be terrific. So thank you both for being here. Thank you for the presentation. Really appreciate it. We'll see you again. When it comes to that point.
303 Thank you so much, colleagues.
304 This is our only August meeting, and the next time we're going to be back together is in September, September 8th. And at that time, I plan to have a discussion of public private partnerships with a variety of panels on public private partnerships, looking across the city where that's happening. And we'll also be bringing back the autonomy of the I want to say waymo, but that's not right. It's the automated vehicles to discuss that. Again, as we maybe hone in on some action that we want to take before the end of the year, hopefully, and then we'll want to get an update on local transportation funding one more time. And at some point, we're also going to revisit, hopefully, we're getting very close to the final asset management plan. I don't know if that would be done by the end of the year as it's supposed to be, but we'll come back to that as well. And let me know if you have any other suggestions or issues that you want to bring up. I know we're pretty time limited. Yeah.
305 Just for your public, your public private partnership panel, do you have anyone from labor coming?
306 I'm not putting it all together. I'm asking for help. So that would be good. Yeah. Yeah.
307 Sure I would. I would extend an invitation to some public sector unions. Okay. Thanks.
308 All right. Super. Without further ado, I will adjourn the meeting of the public works committee.
309 Thank you.