The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-12-08
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (17,022 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 Finance Committee met on December 8, 2025, with roll call showing some members present and others absent. The committee approved minutes from an earlier October meeting and heard a presentation from city financial staff distinguishing "reserves" from "contingencies," covering examples across the General Fund, Transportation Fund, sewer operating fund, internal service funds, and the citywide obligations reserve fund. Discussion addressed inconsistencies in how bureaus categorize and label these funds, concerns about terminology clarity, and the potential for future policy revisions. The committee then discussed a resolution directing the City Budget Office to pilot a revenue-source budget breakdown for Portland Parks and Recreation, including debate over scaling this approach citywide, the parks levy's "leverage funding model," and possible amendments regarding a scalable reporting framework; a motion to refer this resolution to full council was made. The committee also considered an intergovernmental agreement amendment with Multnomah County regarding Preschool for All tax administration costs, and two ordinances regarding sidewalk, curb, and driveway repair assessments administered by the Portland Bureau of Transportation. Votes occurred on multiple items, with outcomes recorded in the vote ledger. No members of the public signed up to testify on any item.
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 Together.
1 Okay. Good morning. Sorry for a little delay there. I was having some technical difficulties on my end, but it is the afternoon now of December 8th, 1207, and I'm going to gavel us in as the finance committee clerk. If you could call the roll.
2 Good morning. Green. Absent. Avalos. Present. Pirtle-guiney absent. Novick here. Zimmerman.
3 Here. Christopher, please read the code of conduct.
4 Welcome to the meeting of the finance committee to testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at wwe. Agenda finance committee or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In person, testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard if public testimony will be taken on an item. Individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise. Your microphone will be muted when your time is over, the chair preserves order. Disruptive conduct such as shouting. Refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, state your name for the record. If your lobbyist identify the organization you represent, virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
5 Okay, colleagues, today we have I'm pulling item number two back to the office. The auditor is going to. Instead, she has chosen not to present here, but will present to the full council. We'll do the minutes as well, and then we'll have some presentations regarding the contingency and reserve funds. Also a pilot project for budgeting in the parks bureau that I'm bringing to you. We've got some work to do with respect to our collection of the taxes on behalf of another government. And also, we'll hear about some assessments related to sidewalks. So with that, if we could read item one regarding the minutes.
6 Item 1st October 20th, 2025 finance committee minutes.
7 Okay, can I have a motion to accept the minutes?
8 So moved second.
9 All right, all in favor, say aye.
10 Aye aye.
11 Unanimous. Okay. Let's go to item number three. Thank you. Reserve contingency.
12 Item number three discussion of city reserves and contingency amounts.
13 Good afternoon. Welcome.
14 Hi. Do you want to take it away?
15 Yes, I do see that we have our cfo online. I know he's mid travel, so thank you for joining us. But whomever wants to take the lead by all means.
16 Yeah. Great. Thank you chair. And I think there's a presentation probably getting pulled up as I as I go here. Thanks for accommodating me kind of mid mid travel here today. Happy to be able to join. For the record jonah sperry the city's chief financial officer. So as a reminder, we started a discussion with this committee in early may about the city's general fund reserve specifically and other reserves generally. We've continued to hear questions and conjecture from counselors about reserves and contingency citywide. So the intent today is to delve down a little more deeply, continue the conversation, particularly as we build into 25 fiscal 25, sorry, fiscal 2627 budget development conversations. I think we're aiming at 10 to 15 minutes of presentation. Expect questions as we go. So chair will look for your direction about places to pause for discussion if we don't hit those along the way. Also just want to address upfront that as chief financial officer myself, I know I can say for the city budget office and for city administrative leadership, we're 100% aligned with the council's objective to be transparent about facts related to reserves and contingency amounts, and indeed, transparent about all financial information. So appreciate the space for this discussion in support of that clarity and transparency here today. All right. Next slide please. So as previously discussed this is a little bit of a reminder of prior prior presentation. But reserves and contingencies are held for a few different reasons which include to comply with specific legal requirements such as bond covenants. Those are more commonly called a debt reserve, if you've heard that term. Another category is to protect against various types of risk that might include revenue and expense. Volatility might include pending litigation or known upcoming legal obligations, or it may be to protect against things like operating operating risk, for example, you know, project contingencies for major projects or or upcoming changes in programs that that may have cost entailed with those. And then the third category is to be consistent with management best practice. And that occurs in a handful of different ways. Flexibility to respond during crises, programs that are subject to kind of volatility in either either service or the revenue streams that fund those. So we want to avoid kind of whipsawing up and down, supports fiscal sustainability and long term planning. And of course that's a critical factor. Having healthy reserves is a critical factor in maintaining the city's bond ratings. And then next slide, if we could actually skip a skip a slide to slide four please. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah. So we've. So shown here is a few different examples of different types of reserves. Different kind of ways to bucket the reserves. And some examples that sit within those different buckets. It's important to note that with within any of these buckets, the dollars that are sitting there in any reserve or contingency can either be restricted, meaning that they're very limited in their use, or they might be unrestricted. And that determination is made based upon the source of the funds, or the specific limitations on the use of the reserves, for example, by the fund creation ordinance. And we'll talk about that in a moment. So there are many. We have, I think, an inventory we're going to get to earlier, but wanted to sort of provide some examples of those three categories legally required, required by policy or management and operating reserve. Again, these are not the only ones within those categories. Just some some examples for reference. All right. Let's move back then please to slide three if we can. Thank you. So the chair finance committee chairs previously identified sort of obtuse language that we use at the city. You know reserve and contingency sometimes get a little bit interchanged. So when we talk about these things what do we mean what are what are the differences between reserve and contingency. And the key differentiator. Key differentiator is the language in the language is where and how the funds are budgeted. So generally what we would call a contingency is a budgetary commitment item within a fund. So these are often dollars held for an anticipated or potential future need. And while they're categorized as a technically as an expense for budgetary purpose to be in compliance with budget law, under state budget law, the city can't pay bills directly from that amount. So they're sort of held there and sometimes used as kind of a holding place for funds that are intended to be used in the future. And then somewhat similarly, but with an important difference. Reserves are generally set by a policy or by a specific requirement. And the key differentiator here is they're budgeted in a separate fund. So so a fund that would be called a debt reserve or another another name that's its own fund under its own fund creation ordinance. So I think I'm going to go ahead. I know there's a lot of content on that slide, but I'm going to keep us moving to slide five, please. So previously mentioned in the in a may conversation, another council conversations, I want to reiterate the city does have a few key formal policies related to reserves and contingencies. Those are referenced here in 2.04, which designated the use of contingencies generally 2.07, which we've talked about in some detail in the may conversation, which is the reserve, describes the reserve fund specifically for the general reserve and the transportation reserve and describes purposes of funds. And as I mentioned, kind of a series of fin threes, which are each fund, capital fund at the city is directed and authorized by city council under a fund creation ordinance. And that ordinance identifies the parameters around its use, etc. That's a super quick intro. So I'm going to pause, but I think also hand off to ruth if there's no questions at this moment.
17 Great. And for the record, I'm I'm the budget director. So this slide shows you.
18 We may need to make sure that her mic is keyed up.
19 Yeah. Got it.
20 Thanks. Great. So this this slide includes the 20 largest budgeted contingencies by fund. And for the rest of the presentation I'm going to go through a few examples. Thank you. As you can see there are you know the the city has many funds and many of them have budgeted contingency. And even within each of these funds the the these numbers are kind of rolled up. So there are multiple there may be multiple types of contingencies within each specific fund. And so I am not going to walk through every single fund and every single contingency in the entire city today. Because I wouldn't be able to. And we don't have time, but I just we're going to highlight a few examples for you so that you can kind of get a flavor for what these different things are for. And I also am not the expert on most of them because I don't I'm not the fund manager for some of these. And so if you have specific questions about the fund, I may have to punt those to to the to the folks who are deeper in the weeds on those specific funds. So, so here that's kind of the the summary of what you see on this slide. You can see what the what the largest ones are. So first I'm going to talk about the general reserve fund. So as you can see on the as you saw on the prior slide, the general reserve fund. So general fund sorry, I'm just going to back up for a second. General fund here has general fund contingencies on the right hand side of the slide. Those are actually budgeted in the general fund as a contingency line item on the left hand side, the general reserve fund fund to ten at $81 million is the actual reserve for the general fund. So kind of following that distinction that jonas made between reserves and contingencies, the contingency is there are some some financial policies that govern those. But council can choose to move those out. And there's kind of a separate financial policy for general reserve funds. And this slide breaks down what that financial policy is. So there are kind of two essentially two halves of the reserve fund resources that can be used for different purposes. The first is as an emergency reserve. So there has to be a declared emergency by council. And we have to exhaust our general fund contingency first before before that can be accessed. And then the second is the countercyclical reserve, which is essentially bridge funding. And I think it's super important to remember this is this is like a stock, right. It's if you deplete it we have to refill it. It's not there to kind of the the policy itself says that if you if we draw this down, we have to begin refilling it within 24 months. So it is exclusively one time bridge funding. And then the countercyclical piece has some economic definitions about what has to be true in order to draw down that reserve. So the year over year revenue growth is below 3% for two consecutive quarters, or the forecast has it below 3% for the next fiscal year. And one of those bullets below the below the line there. So either local housing prices fall year over year unemployment in Portland rises or metro employment falls by at least 2%, so that is and then and as I said, once you draw it down, you have to refill it within 24 months. So that is the general fund reserve. So one of one of our biggest and the only truly discretionary reserve pot. Also within the general reserve fund, which is maybe a little confusing, we might think about moving them. Are some reserves specific to a few other pieces that honestly kind of got put there just because there wasn't another great place to put them. Their general fund funded things, but they, you know, are not they're not alike and not bound by the same policy that I just discussed on the previous slide. Okay. The next one we have a focus on is the transportation reserves. And this slide shows you. So this slide shows you budgeted contingency in fund 200 which is the transportation fund. And it's only general transportation resources. There is another bucket of contingencies for. Non transportation reserves. Those are all kind of restricted contingencies gt-r itself is restricted in that it has to be spent on things related to transportation. But within PBOT it's somewhat more flexible. And you can see that I'm not going to go through each of these. You can see that the largest in here is a budgeted contingency for the transportation reserve fund amount that gets transferred. So that's the $14 million. And there is a city policy on that actual transportation reserve. After that, there's, you know, things like streetcar replacement, things related to parking districts, tnc fee revenue. Each of these has its own specific reason for being there, and in some cases, restrictions. And you can see on the right hand side of the slide the reasons, you know, whether it's restricted or unrestricted and the kind of type of contingency or that it is. So this again, just gives you a sense that it is quite nitty gritty when it gets into the details of any specific fund and the funds contingencies. They're sort of a story behind each one. In the, in bts in the sewer operating fund, there are reserves and they have a sort of practice policy around how they manage their reserves, which is on this slide, some of them are legally required debt, debt reserves, and some of them are more operating reserve, more like operating reserves. And the they have a separate fund called the sewer rate stabilization fund that holds some of this, these reserve funds separately, outside of the actual sewer operating fund. So that gives you a little bit of a sense of different, a different set of reasons operating in the in the sewer fund for the reserves. The next. This came up in the fall. Tore was the conversation around the citywide obligations reserve fund, which we call corf. And it has several subfunds within it that are all that hold contingencies, again, all for different reasons. They're sort of the reason they are grouped together is because there are citywide obligations that have to be met, and that different funds with different colors of money were contributing towards those citywide obligations. And so this fund was created to be the holding bucket for those. And so there is a bit of a variety in terms of what is in here. As you can tell, there's a reasonably small legal priority as reserve for active litigation. There's sub fund related to coep one related to the integrated tax system, cost sharing, the Portland harbor superfund cleanup, which was discussed in the tao, and then the police oversight board to meet the 5% requirement in the charter language. This is the essentially the money that's not being used to operate the board is budgeted and contingency in corfe. Okay. Next we have the internal service funds which have their own types of reserves. Most of it is related to kind of equipment replacement. So as a financial best practice, you know, and this aligns with some of the other reserves like you saw in transportation that when we purchase equipment or, or for some things like facilities, we know there's going to be either replacement or maintenance needs on it in the future. And so as a financial best practice, we set aside funds up front for that. And fleet and facilities are two places where that actually happens on a consistent basis, so that the funds are there when they're needed for each specific buildings, projected maintenance needs. So that's what much of the money that's in the internal service funds is there to do. We also have things like the health insurance reserve, which also came up in the fall, tore that is there to kind of mitigate those swings in in when major bills come due and the like so that there's some cushion because we don't want to we can't budget down to the dollar obviously on things like that where there's large swings in in expense in a given year. And that's it. So happy to answer questions.
21 Great. Thanks, jonas. Thanks, ruth. Colleagues, the I'm glad we're having this conversation. And I'm going to go to our questions and comments here shortly. I'm not going to tell you what to ask, but my intent with bringing this forward today was to help us have and get us to the same language that our internal services are using, versus the idea of debating any one of these funds as the right or the wrong. I think that's the budget process. Some of the the internal policies that have established what I'll say is a multi-layered approach to reserves and contingencies. Is is. The why behind that? What's the intent? What what does it serve a legal purpose? Was a lot of the intent for bringing this here today. So I just I say that because I didn't intend and I should have prefaced this, I didn't intend for today to be a new version of the budget committee. A discussion about is our health reserve big enough or small enough? Is our PCEF fund big enough or small enough? It was about how are we? How are we categorizing them so that we can effectively make decisions in the upcoming budget and also share with our colleagues the decision making processes that the city's internal financial teams have put in place. I felt last year in the budget process that reserves contingencies. And just in this presentation, you can see that we are switching back and forth between those words. And they are highly they are used highly different in most places. And I felt it was necessary for us to get into it. So I wanted to just preface that as we get into this conversation. And with that, I see councilor Avalos, you're the first up with the hand.
22 Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for this presentation. A couple of thoughts. It seems that, you know, like chair just said, there are very distinct differences between what a reserve and a contingency is. From what I'm reading, it feels like the reserve. You're identifying that differently because it's bound by some kind of policy versus contingency is more fluid. Am I getting that right as far as how you're differentiating those two?
23 Yeah. I mean I think that's that's a as a general matter. True. I think one thing I we should have also prefaced is, I think what part of what adds to the confusion is that these aren't budgeted consistently citywide. So we have some work to do in terms of getting bureaus to be using, using to budget things according to what their purpose actually is. And to make clear like, no, these aren't operating funds. This is our reserve versus yeah, we're holding this in contingency for now for replacement or the like. So yeah.
24 Under that logic, could you say that if there are dollars that are currently in a contingency pot that, you know, maybe we don't have clear direction for or intentions for, it could be turned into a reserve pot by adding a policy to it. Is that how that works or I'm just trying to operationalize those two.
25 Yeah, I think it could be. I mean, I think there are good reasons in some cases, and I don't think it's the case that every dollar in contingency needs, you know, a specific reserve needs to be in a reserve, right? I mean, I think of reserves more as like I think the development services fund is a great example of a fund where we actually don't have a policy around it right now that's codified. And it it could have a formal reserve that things are put into. On the flip side, there might be contingency dollars that, you know, that are fine to keep in in contingency. And it's just a matter of articulating why they're in contingency rather than in a reserve.
26 And it sounds like when it comes to the reserves, once you pull from them, there's some specific intent that's related to the policy. It has a purpose that might be emergency related or whatever versus contingency. You know, you can set aside dollars and they can be used as needed for things that come up. That's kind of the general vibe, right? So then what does it sounds like you're alluding to inconsistency, I imagine, you know, as we're trying to get everything under this new form of government in how we're making those decisions. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? Like, are you all proposing any policies coming up in the future that would help add clarity to that consistency?
27 I mean, I'll look to jonas. I think we have we certainly don't have any formal proposals on the table. I think it's a conversation with you all. I think as a practice, I've been signaling to bureaus. This is something that I think is a priority to clean up. I don't think we're going to get there this budget cycle just because of time, but I, I think it would be valuable for the public and for council to to be able to better articulate it.
28 Yeah, yeah. If I if I may, I agree with ruth, you know, as we've described in the prior conversations, as we've learned through the kind of year of working through budget conversations, as this is highlights today, this isn't optimally doesn't use optimal logic and consistency. You know, I think like many things that we're experiencing over the last year, you know, maybe it's a little bit like we bought a storage unit, right. And there's some some of those years we bought a storage complex and some of those units maybe are mostly empty, some are maybe organized. And we can actually see what's in there. Some are organized, but we don't know what's inside the boxes. And some are a mess. Right. And so it takes work to to get through that. And we're, we're trying to, to use this new form of government to kind of break, break through that. And all of that probably does suggest at some point it would be prudent to, to have some policy revisions around some buckets of reserves, if not reserves more generally. But that's that's just it's going to be a heavy lift. It's certainly something that I'm interested in as we, you know, can get that bandwidth.
29 Thank you. My last question slash thought. You know, given the current economic conditions that we're facing, inflation interest all that volatility and property taxes, do you all see any need to adjust our reserve targets upward. Do we need to start planning to you know make those more robust given the uncertainty that we are facing in the coming budgets.
30 I'll jump in and ruth or others in the room can add I mean, it's it would be wise, right? We know that rating agencies look one of the things that they look most critically to is the health and status of our reserves. And that's both what is the strength of the underlying policy? And then what's the actual number which might be above, you know, the minimum policy. We know that things like the $3 million general fund reserve is hasn't grown. I think this came up during a recent conversation with council as well that, you know, that hasn't grown with inflation. We've been protected against that because we have other reserves that we can count against that. The other thing I'll note, which again, I think has been stated recently by the city economist, is we have a relatively volatile revenue stream in business license tax. And, you know, the county has a reserve specific to that revenue stream. The state has some capacity to accommodate their corporate income tax volatility. We don't have that. And so it would be not unwise to to think about that and make sure that we're appropriately protecting the city against those risks. The downside is of course in a budget crunch environment. You know, parking those dollars somewhere means we don't have them to deploy into services and into the community. So, councilor, I absolutely appreciate the question, and I think it is. Wise and in line with the city's value of fiscal sustainability, to have very strong reserves and look forward to having that conversation as we enter the next budget cycle.
31 Okay. Thank you. That's all.
32 Councilor Novick.
33 I'm afraid I might be breaking the rules by asking you about specific reserves or contingencies, rather than keeping it at a higher level. But since we're on this slide, it says year to year revenue growth falls to blah, blah, blah. And one of the following is true in the first one is local housing prices fell by over 10% in the prior two years, and it's just housing. It's not it's not like property tax wide. It doesn't include commercial property.
34 I believe that is true. Yes, I believe that is true. I'd have to pull up the policy to confirm that, but I think so. I think the this policy was designed. A number of years ago and so I can't remember exactly when. But I do think like things like, for example, the third bullet, the year over year metro area employment falls that envisioned a scenario where Portland was leading the metro area, not lagging the metro area, for example. So I do think there is some tweaking that could be made to the language. That said, I think I was going to add to jonah's last comment. I think by and large, this is a pretty strong general fund reserve policy, and it has actually been a point of strength from the perspective of ratings agencies. So I, I think not. We may need to look at in addition at looking at other reserves, but I just want to be very careful that it is important to kind of respect the, the this reserve policy, at least in spirit.
35 I apologize for not having this myself, because it's on a piece of paper that I left in my office. But I remember that some of the unions had a proposal for modifying this particular policy. Do you do you happen to remember what they were? I think that they were all right. They were talking about loosening up some. Okay. My other question is, so when you say this is a strong policy, you're saying, like, if we open it up and said that you could also access it if local commercial building prices fell by 10%, then that would make it less a more open policy and might hurt us with the rating agencies.
36 I potentially I don't know, jonas, if you want to answer that.
37 Yeah. Thank you. And sorry, I was trying to actually pull up the most recent rating report. I couldn't couldn't put my fingers on it right away. But yeah, I mean, I agree with what ruth said. This is a the rating agencies have historically and continue to treat this specific policy. The general fund policy with with respect. It's a it's a strong policy by that same the other side of that coin councilor is yeah a loosening this policy would would lessen that, that strength. Right. And ergo provide a little bit of maybe negative wind to the credit rating. I was trying to pull up the rating report and I couldn't put my fingers on it. Happy to follow up after this meeting. But the when the rating agencies provide their independent credit ratings, they give a little indication of what could make the rating go up, what could make it better, what could make the rating go down, meaning what could be a downgrade? One of the things they specifically call out is loosening of the reserves. Or, you know, either in dollar amount or in policy. I was hoping to have that specific language for you, but so that's probably the most direct long way to get there. But direct answer to your question is the rating agencies have specifically called out that that weakening of our reserves or reserve policies is a major risk factor in leading to a potential downgrade.
38 Thank you. And then another question about a specific topic. I think that you had a $370 million contingency for PCEF, and I thought that we heard from staff that pretty much all of the money has been allocated for the last five years to various things in the climate investment plan. And so I was just wondering what the definition of contingency means in this context.
39 Right. It's a great question. So the essentially the reason that they have a large contingency but have allocated all the money is because they have a five year investment plan, and they have part of that. That investment plan draws down, in part, the large fund balance that they accumulated in the first several years of the tax being in place before they really ramped up their spending. And so the five year investment plan intends to spend down that large, that large fund balance because we only budget. And this is where this gets into kind of some of the the ways contingency works in the budget. We only budget one year at a time. And so that extra amount that in their five year plan is being spent down to zero by year five or whatever it's being spent down to. I don't think it's zero being spent down to their intended reserve level is just stuck in contingency right now because they have the revenue. We want them to budget it. We want everyone to know it is there, but we but they can't. They're not budgeting it towards personnel or external materials and services. And so it sits in contingency.
40 Yeah. This strikes me as a a problematic wording because I think most of us, as a matter of normal english, think of contingency as something that's set aside in case of something unexpected. Right. Which is not true here. I mean, can we just have a category saying cash on hand instead of contingency?
41 Yeah, I might not call it that, but yeah, I think we we could think about it like I think the county has some other phrasing around it, like contingency plan for future use or something like that. And so we can think about and this is one of the things that I would like to work on as we're cleaning this up is, you know, we can create a new commitment, a new, you know, accounting commitment item with a title that says, like, this is in, you know, maybe it's it rolls up to contingency. Part of this has to do with, you know, the chart of accounts. And like accounting buckets, it rolls up to contingency. But it says plan for future use or something.
42 Do we have to use the word contingency in a context where it bears no resemblance to the way people, human beings, normally use that word?
43 I don't know the answer to that question.
44 Jonas. Could we use a different word?
45 Well, then, as finance folks won't feel so special if we can, if we all can be logical. No, councilor I, I'll say maybe. I mean, yes, we can. Sometimes the challenge I think ruth is getting to this is we have actual, you know, fund formation documents or sort of system, even sort of legacy system language that limits our ability to change without having to go through a bunch of effort. So short answer. Yes. Long answer is, like many things, it's not as simple as just flipping a switch. We have to jump through some kind of careful thinking and administrivia effort to to make it be the thing we want.
46 Yeah, I mean, I just think. In all whatever we can, I think that we should use sort of normal english terms or use terms that are so bizarre that people won't think they know what they mean. Like if you called it the clean energy fund, then I think that would be okay, because nobody would think that that would have meant no.
47 Appreciate that. I prefer simple, simple language. So. But point well taken councilor. And I think as we look through look to the next cycle of budget development, certainly looking for opportunities to simplify and be a little bit more consistent is a very valid point that we can we can take on.
48 Thanks.
49 Thanks, councilor. Great questions. I was really looking to the closed captioning to see how they captured that term you just used, and they gave me nothing that felt good to see. But okay, a lot of this. I have a lot of similar questions. In fact. Councilor Novick. This is largely why I wanted to bring this forward, because in over ten years of municipal budgeting, one of which was Multnomah county, I was really struck coming into the Portland system. And the way that we use some of these terms. I was around when we fundraised for years to build the central courthouse here on Multnomah county's budget, and we would see that fund grow over those years. We grew it similar for the Sellwood bridge, meaning, and I bring it up because it's kind of similar to where you ended, which was related to the pcf fund. And earlier this year, I made a big deal about a nearly $500 million contingency, because where I came from, contingency meant anticipated to be used in an emergency that year. And this really sits more as a reserve fund or the five year plan makes sense when we finally get into the meat of it. But our language is, I think, not helping us as the decision makers, because just looking at this slide alone, most of the things on the left hand side category I would put into what come off to me as reserve, and we have them under a title called contingencies. Just flat there. Right. Because I've, I've also ruth, I've always worked from the perspective of. Contingency is expected. You hope you don't have to, but you're fully expecting to use your contingency in that given budget year. And so we see things like we see on the right hand side of here, a much smaller number generally reserve fund for me from an emergency perspective. Or are we going to tap the reserve fund has always been the economy took a dive in the way that we saw outlined in one of the previous policies from a previous council, because I also had that question of like, where did we get those bullet points? The earthquake happens, right? And we we see the 405 land on our fleet. But then in that case, I need that $30 million to go to landmark ford and buy every f-150 that we can and put people back to work and get our fleet working again. That's how I've always thought of these reserve funds. And when I got to the city, it was this language prevented me from being able to, I think, really dive into the budgets. Just going to the next slide. Well, a couple more slides on the transportation reserves. The. How we categorize some of these and where we'll use them in the future. I look at I've never I guess I have never really seen it broken down to the point where we have $185,000 identified as reserve. It sounds like there's some sort of legal requirement, one for 190, that to me, I'd like to just see what is the transportation reserve. And maybe this is just going down into the into the details, but at the very bottom of it, then we call it a contingency. And so this is where I don't actually know that we're going to solve this in 26, but I am going to encourage the mayor, us as the finance committee to help dive into this and present, because I want to be a partner with ruth and jonas and the administration in presenting and bringing forward some financial policies for this new form of government, because largely ours are operating from the old form. There was a statement that was said earlier. You know, not all bureaus follow it. And I, I want to be really clear just how alarming that is to me, that our central budget officer, that there are some bureaus, perhaps, who don't think they have to take all cues from the center. And I and I think that's a really important and I want to emphasize just how serious I think that is, having come from Multnomah county, where it is a very it's a strong chair. Everybody submits. And there's one budget officer in my career at that government. I never had a budget officer tell me that one of the departments where their financial employees were not going to follow the county's budget policies unless the chair had said, we're going to go ahead and let them do that specifically. But there was never this, like, confrontational piece of it because that was a typical pyramid system. I just think we're working through that, and I think I'm looking forward. I know this is this is not the stuff that gets headlines, but it's important for us so that we can then make sure that any of this money that is locked up is locked up for specific uses and not just being prevented from, frankly, putting services out to the community, but also so that the 12 of us, when we're making our decisions every budget cycle, we're using a common language, a common understanding, for the purpose of tapping into different funds and helping, you know, I'm excited that our our proposed new city manager is a young man, because I think some of this would burst someone's heart seeing some of the way that this is put out there. So I'm excited for this project, but I think it's a two year endeavor and I am all on board. Ruth, I think it's it's time to do it. I had some questions, but councilor, Novick and councilor Avalos went into it, and every time I noted the difference between fund and contingency on the same slide, I was watching you nod your head in agreement, ruth, which tells me that you're feeling the language issue here and that it is confusing, even on a slide about why it shouldn't be confusing. Right? I guess what I'm hoping, I guess, to emphasize where I want to go. I think that this next year in the budget cycle, you can plan on and you can share with all of your bureau financial personnel that I am likely to create in this committee, at least a topic and a presentation for all every fund, every contingency or reserve fund to be presented by that bureau or by their finance office, so that we can have an understanding for how the different bureaus are approaching it and see where we see trend lines, alignment. And I really want to get into the restricted and unrestricted. Some of this is legal, right. We have to have 10% set aside or 15 others have been, I think my words, my editorializing, they have been tools or tactics that have survived different leaders over the years. And I want to make sure that we still bless off on those tactics being part of our budgeting process. And so that's your notice, I think, for the finance teams, internal is that there will be a specifics. We're going to go into it so that this body can can say that we actually dove into the eaches. Because anytime we hear from a bureau about their services, we don't get the detail of it. It might be this committee's duty to get into the detail and not the service. So we have an understanding of those. And then colleagues, I think just a it's an invitation from my office and from this chair is that we one if you have financial policies that you have been thinking about in your head, that we start working collectively on that and with the central team so that we can work to bring a set of coherent but also implementable financial policies. That I hope the administration, the mayor and the new city administrator will will, you know, be supportive of. But hopefully to make our our job in budget season easier to make decisions but more transparent for our for our public because this this is a lot of money. If you think about all these slides, it's a lot of money and some of it is movable and some of it's not. But we should be able to articulate at least the philosophy. And right now I can't do that right between each of them. Councilor Novick.
50 I just wanted to share my stream of consciousness thoughts about categories that I think I would make more sense to me. I was thinking one category would be money set aside for not exactly expected, but also kind of predictable situations. I think the compensation set aside falls into that. It's not that, you know, we're not planning on spending x amount of all that money on compensation, but based on historical patterns, we can sort of expect that things will come up that'll increase the amount of compensation. And, you know, money set aside in case of like big fat overall overarching revenue or spending problems like earthquake or recession. And those are things that really are unexpected, you know, if really bad things happen, here's the money available for that. And then, I mean, maybe this only applies to the set funding, but money allocated but not yet spent strikes me as sort of a separate thing. And I'm sure if I sat here.
51 For not just what.
52 Yeah.
53 Definitely not just pdf. Yes.
54 So those are just like off the cuff, like the categories I would make up.
55 Thanks, councilor. I appreciate that not seeing anybody else from the committee in here. I just want to turn back to ruth and jonas. If you have any closing comments, you're welcome to close us out.
56 Chair. I'll just take a quick moment and just say thank you again. I think this is super important conversation, as you noted, super valuable. You know, we do have the ability to look at other entities and see how other folks communicate these same, same challenges and just acknowledge that my my commitment to continuing to do that as we go through the next cycle here, also appreciate the nod towards potential future policy enhancements and look forward to working with you on that. Thank you.
57 Ditto, ditto.
58 I'm also going to see how they put that in the caption there. Great. Thank you for putting this together. Thank you for the time. And I think we've all got a lot of work together on this. Appreciate it.
59 Thank you.
60 Okay. Clerk. If you could read the next item please.
61 Item four request the city budget office, provide balanced program. Offer information for the Portland parks and recreation as a pilot project for fiscal year 20 2627 budget.
62 Thank you. Colleagues. This is coming out of my office and something that I worked with our legal department and our central budget office on. We were so fortunate to pass the parks levy in November, and it is an area that I think. I want to make sure that we are able to one, you know, implement all the oversight that everybody on this, on this body put forward and the ideas that were put forward. But there's a real challenge that I found in the last budget cycle, and I am using this resolution because I think one overall compared similar to our conversation we just had on the last item, there's a goal that I have in the future to see. How do we want to present across all bureaus the way in which we we budget, especially for those bureaus that get money from multiple sources. So general fund or fee based parks is a bureau that a lot of the public understands and knows. So it's not a it's not a bureau that is as nuanced perhaps as some transportation things, but it is also a bureau that has braided its funding together in the past that I thought made decision making for us last season difficult. And I would like to be able to show through this resolution and ask the mayor's team, let's try one bureau in a different approach for budgeting next year in that. I think it's reasonable because it's frankly how I've worked in any other city. I think it's reasonable to ask a bureau to say, out of all the employees that work at the southwest community center and out of all the programs that are offered there, please break your budget down. So we have an idea about how much of them are, how much of the services and programs are provided through fees, through general fund or through levy, so that if we are making decisions, we have an idea about the number of employees based to the revenue source. And that has not been clear. And I think that we should strive to have clarity about how many employees are funded by what source of money. And this resolution really is about encouraging the mayor to try out a pilot project to do that. Not not insane what gets budgeted, but purely we should be provided in our budget documents. And when they prepare the budget, I would like the parks bureau to be the leader on moving us to a new system for how they give us information. If I've got ten, if I'm a supervisor, my theory is if I've got if I'm a supervisor of ten employees, I would like my supervisors in the city to be able to articulate. 50% of my employees are general fund funded, 25% are from the fees that we bring in, and 25% are levy funded. Right. Having an idea for the magnitude of funding that goes within each program, the I ran into a lot of moving numbers last year, and I, in my conversations with several members of our council during the budget, they moved. They ran into a lot of moving numbers. That was alarming to me, having done this for over a decade. How different? The answer about a program's budget resources were based on which budget analysts. You got to answer your question. That, for me was very alarming. And so this is a value statement for me. It's a value statement about where I think we might be able to go as as a city. And from a transparency standpoint, it isn't dictating what should be funded or what shouldn't be funded. It's not highlighting any programs, but it's highlighting a process. And and ultimately, I just want to just talk about the be it further resolves that we can look to what program, what type of service, what employees, to what revenue source in the most basic, basic of sense here. I'm also cognizant of the fact that it will take the mayor's emphasis from the executive branch to bring this to fruition, but I think that the mayor's team will want to implement something like this, particularly given our success in the levy. And I think our ability to be successful in the levy moving forward is to be as transparent as possible and say, look at what it delivered, and I think this will help us do that. And so I wanted to bring that to this committee in hope that we could. Discuss a little bit of your thoughts about one bureau perhaps being a pilot. And if this is something that might be of interest to you that we take to our full council. And so I'd entertain questions and I see councilor Avalos in the queue.
63 Okay. Thank you. I really appreciate the intent behind this. I think this is definitely within the scope of what our committee should be doing. Just trying to figure out how to make it easier for our colleagues to get the information that we need so we can make better decisions. The last presentation is a good example of that as well. I. Have lots of thoughts on it. I think broadly. I agree with the intent. I want to talk more about piloting it, mostly just because I think pilots are good, and I understand that that is a way to kind of start to test out how we restructure this information and all of that. My concern is what is our plan for scaling it up? Because ideally, I want all of these bureaus to have that. And I think, you know, the intent of it. Behind the parks levy being a big reason for wanting this increased transparency makes sense, but that does come with political sensitivities that I'm concerned about. I don't want the parks bureau to feel like they have some, you know, standard that not everyone else is being held to, and then they've got all these other layers to it because of the politics of the levy and all that. So those are the concerns that bubble up, although I definitely agree with the intent. So I kind of just want to talk through what your vision is for like is this? And also I want to hear what you heard from the budget office and the feasibility of this. Right. Because if we could, my desire would be to just say, can we just get all this info now for everything. I don't want to have to wait a whole other budget cycle before I can get this kind of transparency from some of the other budgets that have this and that also have, you know, levies or other things that are funding it. So, yeah, maybe just help me with that. Like tell me a little bit more about your intention and what that could look like about scaling, because that's where I would like it to go.
64 Great questions. And all parts of my thought. Where I started, councilor, was I'd like to introduce this idea for all bureaus, all offices. I don't think from a changing of our either it's our software, our narratives, or just the the experience. I've been convinced that it probably is not possible in this next year to achieve the entire city. And so I've that's where I scaled back because my, my goal was similar to what you articulated. I wanted to go full force. And so my reason for scaling it is so that we can create what I hope will be one crown jewel, and that we have got one bureau who's at least from their budgeting perspective, is unimpeachable in terms of the transparency, the knowledge, the command of information and how we all have their stuff. So we all, when we look at our budget documents this spring, that I know that what's in your binder is the same as what's in my binder. And last year I didn't feel that way, and that was a very big concern. So in talking with the central services, our legal team, I think one bureau is definitely achievable in this next budget and right now is important. The reason it's happening now is that as they're going to present and prepare their budget documents in this manner, that has to start now. And I think they can do it. The. The other reality I think that exists here is. We I think that this finance committee and this council have got to give enough backing in our policies to. The way we want central budget office to get information from the bureaus. I think they get it in about 26 different methods, because many of those systems were built in a time when it didn't matter if you kept the central budget office happy, it only mattered that you kept your commissioner in charge happy. It would be great to think that that all changed when a form of government switch happened. But those that that muscle memory is still there. I would like to incentivize better budgeting instead of using the stick approach. And so I think that this the parks bureau being successful this November and with how familiar the public is with it, I think that's why I think they're a good pilot bureau as well. And my goal, and I think that all feeds up to wrap up, it feeds to the idea that I would like the parks bureau to be the easiest for us to look at after this and say we understand it. And there were very few question marks. And when there was a question mark, it was easy to answer. So that's why I think a pilot is reasonable and why I think that the parks is a good nomination as the pilot.
65 Yeah, I get that. I wonder if some of that intent, I feel like that's what I wasn't reading in the resolution and maybe, you know. As far as legislative process, I would be open to talking to you before it came to council to maybe update some of the be it further resolved. Because what I want to see in here is our intent as council, that this pilot is because we need this information in the future, and that there's also parts of the pilot that say, like it. Maybe it collects information from other bureaus, even though it's not doing the full like scale of this to the other bureaus, but it starts to collect that information ahead of time, because what I don't want is for it to be like, okay, we do this whole, like you say, crown jewel, and it's all this great work that we do this year, but it doesn't set us up yet for at least how I'm reading it for prepping that the goal is for more, right? Okay, so I'd love for the language to reflect that. And maybe there's some tools in how we shape the language that we could scaffold it a little bit for the other bureaus. So we say, you know, parks is going to get the full treatment, but we expect to have this much in from the other bureaus, and we want to have some kind of collection. I don't know, I need to think about that. But so that way we build it into the, the process. And then maybe there's some other process things. And we could talk with the budget office on feasibility because I also get that too. But yeah, I think that's what's missing for me that I want to correct, because I want to signal to the administration, but also to the councilors that we want to move in this direction. And we and I want to end the conversation when we bring it to council to get more from councilors on what they need to feel successful and what they're wanting to look for. I know that will be part of the discussion, but I want to have that discussion in the lens of the full city, not just parks. So that's my main intent, but I am supportive of where you're going with this. So does that make sense, though? Is that something we could work through? Maybe like if it comes out of committee, I'd be happy to move it out of committee. If we could talk through what we bring to council with some of those updates.
66 I'd like that a lot.
67 Okay. Yeah. Sounds good.
68 Councilor Novick you have your.
69 Hand up?
70 Yeah. First of all, I just me personally, I haven't felt like I really need to care about what's funded with the levy versus the general fund, because my understanding is that generally it's pretty fungible. And it's one big parks budget that's funded more or less half and half by both of them. Well, plus program revenue. I've been told by parks that the way they do things, they're under instructions to spend general fund money first before they get to the levy in order to sort of preserve levy funds. But to be honest, I actually I know they said that, but I didn't really ask what that meant and like a programmatic way. So I'd actually like the parks folks today to come up and explain what that means. It also occurs to me that, I mean, I think that that kind of implies that the allocation isn't made in advance, but sort of as you go along, they can tell me if I'm wrong, but it occurs to me that if we ask them to start making the allocation in advance, one thing people might assume, or maybe something we should ask for, is that since the levy is a. Less reliable form of funding than the general fund, should, we say, we want you to come up with a list of what the most highest priority things are, and fund the highest priority things with the general fund. Leave the extra things to the levy. I think that's something that we could do it also, if we start presenting it as here's what's funded by the general fund, here's what funded by the levy, without some caveats, the the public, or at least people who really pay attention might think that's what's being done already. So if we're going to present information might be interpreted that way, we need to sort of think about what you know. Well, is that will that be true? Et-cetera. So, I mean, could the could I ask the parks. To explain how the division currently works and is it prospective or retrospective?
71 I think I saw the director in the room and there she is. She's moved seats as they come up. I want to just there's a question about. If we direct. And so one of the concerns I've gotten from another colleague and I, and I think I hear a little bit of it in yours as well, is. Is do we direct, you know, percentages of different programs to be funded by one source or the other or say, this entire program is funded by one source or the other? So I think I'm agnostic on that topic. What I am serious about, though, is that if the council were to do such a thing, the budget documents should be able to reflect accurate numbers in that. And I think we can I hope we can all agree that that should be accurate. My feeling is that has not been the case. And so I don't I don't have an opinion or a politic on on if programs should be split 100% versus 0%, etc. I have no intent, by the way, to get into the that employee over there is levy funded and that employee over there is general fund funded. I also don't think that in the previous government's, we have always known that we had a grant funded employees, especially in the social services where I was before. Certain things, you know, is grant funded. So there's a little bit of like it's it's unavoidable to some sense and there's a seniority that gets into that. And I think that that's fine, but it would be important to me to keep it at the program level instead of saying employee a or employee b, but just knowing that x number of fte are funded one way or the other. But like I said, I'm agnostic. My point is, if we were to do that, I want to know. I want the budget document to be accurate in that. And then if we want to go to the to the parks representatives.
72 Can I go first?
73 Absolutely.
74 Good afternoon. Sonia shimanski, interim director of the parks bureau. I want to say briefly and at a high level before claudio answers your mechanical question. We appreciate this council item. We are very happy to go. First, we share your intent and have really appreciated all the attention and the dialog about how we budget funds and use funds and how that allows or not you and community to understand impact. So thank you for this, and I'll preface and you can correct me when I hand it over that I think on the technical side, this is a relatively straightforward, relatively modest lift that we're very happy to do. And councilor, I think you're right. Where it gets tricky is if you start to understand it or look at it as a prioritization exercise when you really haven't done that exercise, and then you're talking about it in that way and it gets fraught and potentially confusing. So as to whether it's just proportional across everything according to the percentage or it's some other application, we would appreciate your guidance or yours, ruth, as we do that. So thank you for raising that.
75 Yeah. Thank you sonia. So claudio campuzano finance property technology manager for public works business services supporting parks. So yeah, I think that and also want to acknowledge yeah that's absolutely great. Transparency and accountability I think would come out of this resolution. I'm we're eager to work with cbo. In fact we've already started working with them on some, some concepts. So so really looking forward to being the pilot and looking forward to being sort of a way to to sort of be that that sort of, sort of consistent way of doing things across the city, so really eager to be involved. So to the question about about the parks levy being the last resource in that was really a conversation that started when we were first implementing the levy. So, you know, for starters, it's worth talking about before the levy, parks was largely a general fund bureau. And like all general fund bureaus, the sequence of resources is program. Program resources get spent first, then that preserves general fund all general fund underspending falls to balance. So that was kind of the starting point. And and I think during the the passage of the first levy, there was a lot of discussion about maintenance of effort. There was a lot of discussion about making sure that the parks levy and this was this happened in public in the tsc hearing and, and a couple of other locations. And so there was a really big drive not to structure the way that we used the funding, as in any way being a way to supplant general fund resources. And so the way we the way we structured what we called the leverage funding model coming out of that was that, you know, the main principle was this is a marginal resource for marginal activities, right? So things that we would otherwise be unable to do, we're going to do those with this with this additional resource. And so how do you actually implement that. And so we put, we put the the levy then sort of at the end of that waterfall. So program revenue first general fund next and then and then parks levy. But so the the leverage funding model was designed to implement that. And the way that it was implemented was we looked at all of the services that parks provided and all of the expenses that we had, and we created basically two buckets, those that are general fund only and those that are eligible for parks levy. And within the eligible for parks levy, we identified those that are applicable. And the difference was we really wanted to make sure that there was really no, no, you know, even though they might be eligible because the language was broad, we really wanted to focus parks, levy resources on that, on on specific services that the public would identify as being those, those additional that additional effort. So that was so we and we used the program offer structure that you all are familiar with and familiar with. And we actually broke it down a little bit further. And then we broke it down into we also cut it across fund centers, which is that organizational cut. So you've got the service cut and the the organizational cut. And we identified for every bucket you know, which this bucket hit, you know these particular commitments etc. And so that's how we, we, we we tagged each of those combinations as being something that would be eligible. And so then that would be then, you know, we would fund all of those things with general fund first, and then everything else would be some blend based on the total remaining cost. And then in keeping with this general fund first concept, we would only do a reimbursement at the end of the year based on actual expenditures. So so what may have been a, you know, 6040 blend of levy general fund may actually end up being a 5050 blend at the end of the year because we didn't spend as much. And so the general fund covered more of it because we needed to pour less levy on top. Does that help to clarify how that worked?
76 It does help, but I think now I have more questions. I mean, so based on what the last thing you said, it sounds like you don't really know how much what was levy funded and what was not founded until the end of the year, because you wait and see how much you were able to get out of the general fund and only do the last billing at the end.
77 Right. And we and based on that, we actually do go down to the line item level. So we actually look at all of all of those eligible expenditures and make sure that we're tagging individual expenditures for that reimbursement as part of our audit packet.
78 But in advance you spell out which things are levy eligible and which things aren't. And is that based on an assessment of the general fund things or the things you think of as sort of park's core services that you want to, these are the things that come hell or high water we want to pay for, and the other things are sort of more.
79 I don't know that I would yeah, no, I don't know that I would describe them necessarily as being those things that we would pay for come hell or high water. They're the things that are identified as being eligible and appropriate given the levy. But but actually you're getting at a great point, which is one of the things that we've been talking about with the city budget office in terms of this, this revision, we can work through rework that based off that, that sort of flagging, based off of the will of this council. And so we would then review that it would it could effectively function in the same kind of model, but with different policy inputs. Or we could change the model and that would and like I said, you know, eager to, to work with cbo and also to iterate with whoever in on your staffs might, might be interested in sort of working through some of these questions with us. But but yeah, we can absolutely change which of those things. We would just want to make sure that, you know, we, as we did last time, we're working to do it this for the next one to make sure that whatever that list is, the city attorney has reviewed, it feels confident that it's covered by the levy, etc. So I don't know if that answers.
80 Yeah. I mean, how many different categories are there? I mean, like, are there 35 categories of things that are general fund only and 78 that are combination?
81 I don't recall the exact number, but it's about 5050 out of about 180. And I think sarah huggins. Okay are. So let me see how close I got on that.
82 Yes. So when we look at the functional excuse me when we sarah huggins Portland parks, when we look at the functional area, functional area level out of about 170 things, about 50% of them were funded by a levy blend. When we roll up to a program offer level. So there's about 22, I think, program offers at the bureau level. I think 16 out of those, 22 were experienced some amount of levy blend different dependent on their budget amount and how many functional areas within each of those program offers were levy, blend or not?
83 Okay. That would be interesting. Both of. Well, I'm scared to say this about 170, but both of those might be interesting to see. And with some explanation, particularly of the program officers of okay, here's why these here's why these six are just general fund and here's why these 16 are not. No, I do actually, I don't have a question, but a warning, which is that I'm planning to drop my own parks budget related resolution, which is what I'd like us to start looking at soon, is based on current operations and current funding. Where are we going to be in five years? Are we going to be in a situation where to keep on doing what we're doing? We're going to have to increase the levy or not. My guess is that under current, you know, conditions, if they're extended out, we would have to increase the levy, if only to pay for five full years of the north Portland aquatic center, which I think that is only paid. We only paying for like 2 or 3 of those in the current levy. Right. But I suspect there are things that contribute to it beyond that. So the conversation I hope the council and you will have over the next couple of years is all right. Unless we change something, then we're going to have to increase the levy again by x cents at the end of five years. What are some options for how to avoid that. And I'd like to have a discussion about what kind of options to look at. Like, you know, one option would be maximize fees. Another option would be the one that I not so eloquently, you know, raised a few months ago, which is close down the things that we're going to have to close down anyway because they're falling apart. And so what I have, I mean, I so that's what I'm planning on. What to talk to you about in advance is a resolution asking you to spell out where we're going to be in five years, unless we do something, and then have some options for avoiding being in that situation to explore. So that's just a heads up.
84 We would love that. And we would love to coordinate that with the level of service and funding strategy work that we're doing as an outcome of the audit.
85 Great.
86 And I'll note that as part of our budget submittal, we'll be putting together a five year financial plan that will sort of speak to that in in numbers and will help to sort of tee up some of those conversations. So very eager to have that conversation.
87 Thanks. Councilor. Councilor. I'm going to go to council president who's on the line, and she just can't raise her hand. So vice chair, if you're on the floor is yours.
88 Can you hear me?
89 Yes.
90 Fantastic. I apologize, I couldn't get the call in on the screen to work. I really appreciate the conversation that I'm hearing, and a lot of the things that have been raised. I think the leverage funding model is an important model to make sure that we don't inadvertently change. It makes sure that we use the levy as wisely as possible. But we also know that with the eligible and the not eligible programs and with the outcomes at the end of the year, we can have a pretty decent idea of what things will look like for the next year. And what I found during the last budget cycle was that it was very hard to get clear answers about how the how the funding split worked in different programs. And I want to be clear when I say that, because this has come up in the conversation. Parks folks, I'm not talking about breaking out. This is a program that's levy funded. This is a program that's general fund funded. But to be able to understand these programs are split. And here's the split. These programs are not. And I think from my reading of this and what the chair has said, that that's where he's trying to get with this resolution. So I just want to hear from the parks folks, if we pass this resolution, is this going to help us get to a place where we have a clear sense, not at the end of the budget, but at the beginning of the budget, where we are saying to voters, here's how we plan to use your money on what programs are just general fund funded, what programs have the leveraged funding model and the split funding, what percent the split is for those programs and what we are actually what what dollars we are actually spending in what programs within the parks bureau for the next budget cycle. Is that where this will lead us?
91 Based on my read of it? Absolutely. I think we can get there. And in fact, I think that one thing that I would note is that with each phase, with each phase of the process, as the numbers change, as the total expenses change, the the resources sitting underneath them may change and may not change. It may change to, you know, the percents may change as well. But I think one of the lessons that we learned in the last process was to make sure to to actually run that model every single phase so that there is like perfect balance at the at the level of each program, so that when you're looking at it, whether it's the requested budget, the proposed whatever stage, you're seeing that balanced budget, because it is a pretty big lift to run the model. And I think that one of the big challenges was that we didn't run it coming out of the requested budget. And so so there was that there were some places where it was unbalanced. So, so big lesson learned there, eager to eager to address that and to to that question about will we be able to see it, you know, which are funded with levy, which or not? Absolutely. Because we do have like our starting point is that that list, which is sort of the more policy statement on things, and we apply that policy statement to the budget process. And so we can make that eminently visible on the front end. We, you know, we can take input on it and actually shape it as we go through. But really it's that's the, that's the, the big the, the big first step. And then after that it's mostly math. And we can certainly support that and do more math.
92 So can I.
93 Chris.
94 Sorry. Ruth levine, budget director I just wanted to add one thing to that, which is I think some of the changes and I think councilor Avalos this also speaks a bit to your question. Some of the changes cbo is looking to make with program offers writ large in the city, I think will also help support communicating what parks is talking about and what this resolution is aiming at in the budget documents themselves. I think that has been one of the sort of gaps in the structure is that parks had, like their levy documents. That was a completely separate document, and it didn't always translate clearly in the budget documents. And so we're trying to make program offer both the financial data that gets printed with them and the narrative content of them clear, so that we're moving in that direction city wide, and that it's very obvious what types of funding are are being used to support them. I think the lift for for parks and for other bureaus to do that is in actually moving resources around in and and cleaning up the actual budget data, the the narrative packet. And like what we present, we can change and we plan to change it in the coming year. It's the work that they're talking about with like, okay, what how much general fund goes here, how much how much parks levy goes here. That would have that has to be replicated 26 times or whatever citywide. And we plan to do that. Just I don't know if we'll get 100% of the way there this year.
95 Councilor Avalos, please.
96 Thank you. I have just been taking a few minutes to draft something up. I don't I won't necessarily propose it right now, but I want to bring it up to you, especially for ruth and jonas to react to on feasibility. And we can workshop this later. And I'm just dropping in the chat so you counselors here can see it. So here's the concept that I'm going for that we would add another further resolved clause that says to ensure the pilot establishes consistent and equitable transparency standards across the city. Council directs the city budget office, in partnership with the bureaus, to develop a scalable reporting framework based on this framework. Sorry, based on this pilot, this framework should outline the data, system, staffing and preparatory work required for every bureau to produce a comparable revenue and expense breakdown beginning no later than the next budget cycle. So this is a standardized template, a readiness assessment detailing what support bureaus need to meet those expectations, and a proposed implementation schedule that ensures all bureaus can adopt this enhanced transparency standard in the next budget cycle. This is super first draft, but figured on the record. Might as well just get your reaction. And from my colleagues, if that is welcome, is that does that feel based on what we've been discussing for how this pilot will shape out, does that feel within this next year, feasible to be able to produce that kind of a report to us? And maybe that timeline isn't right, but we can workshop that too.
97 Yeah, I think definitely sometime before July of 2026, that would be feasible. We'd have to just work out the timeline. But yeah, it is definitely aligned with some of the work we're trying to do with bureaus, which is to look at their existing program offers, figure out what needs to just be cleaned up, what needs to be combined, etc. And then how to better communicate how they're funded and what they do with those. So I think it is very much aligned with that process.
98 And to my colleagues, is that does that make sense? What I'm asking, does it feel welcome?
99 Councilor to be honest, I was I was trying to find the chat and given my historic incompetence with teams, I wasn't able to find it. So I actually don't really know what you said.
100 You can just read it right on my screen right here. Basically, I'm just adding a clause like I explained that I would love for this to for this pilot process alongside it, that we create a system for how we're going to eventually scale it, because that should be the it is the ultimate goal. From what I heard from the councilor.
101 So councilor, I would, I would. Say if this that what you've sent is able to after today get in front of ruth and our attorneys and have any and make sure we get the right dates and all that. If you brought this up at full council, I would consider it a friendly amendment, because I think you've encapsulated some of the intent and the design that we're not done at one. Right. We want a jumping off platform for others and a learning point. So I appreciate this. And you sending it.
102 Okay.
103 Well then I'll work on that with you all and then yeah I'll be prepared to bring that at council.
104 Thank you. Thank you.
105 Councilor Novick.
106 As far as bringing bringing something at council, I actually don't think that I'm prepared to vote to move this forward. Today. I want to hear actually, somehow, for some reason, I don't feel comfortable until I've looked at the lists of 16 out of 22. Et cetera, et cetera. As to how parks is behaving now. Just just like to have that background before. I mean, I don't really think I've got a problem, but I just want to be more informed.
107 I'd like to. Here's my counter I'd like to give to you. Is that one of the. One of the goals here is that as the budget directions are coming out in the end of this calendar year and in the very beginning of the next, that the budget office and the administration have this as a and it's it's great that we have parks bureau here testifying that this is implementable, but also to have this as a look like now now they're taking action. And so that was part of the timeline around it I think. If there are if there are aspects of the what you just cited, I think the 22, 16 or 22 that that were to give you pause about it. You know, bring those up in full council, you know, regardless of the topic and how anyone feels about it. When we moved a program last year, we were told a certain number accounted for a certain type of service and a number of employees. And when it moved over to another area, we learned that that number didn't actually encompass that entire program. And and good, bad or indifferent, I want to avoid that happening in the future where we can look at a program and if it says it's got $1 million in the program and 7 or 8 employees in that program, that no matter it's braided system or where it lives, that it actually does account for that. And I, I didn't feel like we got that last year. And so that's that's a piece of it. And I don't the reason if we can do this ahead of time, it allows the budget prep I think to. Avoid that again. And so that's that was part of the timeline that I was thinking councilor. But I do understand your, your position or your your point.
108 I think I'm worried about is if we ask parks to do this based on how they currently do the breakdown, but council is not bought into that breakdown, and we don't resolve that. When we're discussing this at full council, then we might be asking parks to present information to do something that, based on what they're already doing, without being instructed to do it, otherwise, that then we complain about afterwards. Does that make sense?
109 So it does. Yeah.
110 I kind of I mean, I, I mean maybe I could vote to move it forward today with the understanding that I wouldn't want to vote for it at the full council unless we, the full council have some understanding about that, that either we have some agreement on what we think that the levy general fund division should be, or we make it very clear we're not going to get mad at parks for using their current division when they haven't gotten another direction.
111 I think that's a very fair point, right? I think the one thing that was brought up was the leverage funding model. We heard also, just in terms of the timing and how we square things up at the end of the year. Et cetera. And yet we haven't said like, this is the way forward, right. To that end, a little bit about how I'm approaching it, because I'm not sure what the right blend is. I'm not sure what the right approach is, but I look to at least the initially, I'm going to look to the administrators of that bureau to say, make your proposal like I do any other budget proposal. Make your proposal in the way you would like and what you think is most responsive to like what you're hearing here, but also in your way to be a bureau who can execute its programs effectively. For me, the executive's approach gets at least an initial leg up, and I would like to hear that as long as they can present it in a way, for me, that says that meets the the intent of this, I give that a lot of leeway as long as they can meet the intent of being transparent. Now, if we have a discussion that changed that, or if we say we want to adjust how the model goes, I'd be fine if that just met the intent of this, which is transparently describe what service, what employees from what revenue source, so that it's flexible to whatever model we use. Because I think the transparency piece here, it might be unrelated actually to the model. And I'm okay going that direction, because I just want to be able to describe to the public that, oh, you like the program that's at this part of the district that you know that thank you for voting for the levy. It's about this much funded by levy, this much fees and this much general fund. If I can do that, I think my relationship with with constituents is easier to describe, like how this impacts what they're feeling. So that's where I'm coming from. I'm rambling a little bit. I'll stop.
112 So what I would it's always hard to get councilors to look at anything in advance of the actual moment, but what I would hope that we could do is in advance of council looking at this, try to get our fellow councilors to, I mean, to have the the 170 and the 22 and the 16 and sort of submit that information to people in advance, saying this is how you'd expect to get the information unless we give parks other direction. So unless we as council give parks other direction, this is the kind of breakdown that you can expect to see. So that people before voting for this will think about whether they think that if that's the breakdown, that's something they're going to be comfortable with.
113 Okay.
114 Does that. Well I should ask you if that makes sense. I mean, it's obviously not hard to get. I would assume it's not hard to get the full council. The current list of 170 and 16 and.
115 No, I just checked with sarah. We could probably do that tomorrow. If you wanted some annotation about the 16 of the 22 would take a bit of time, but it's pretty quickly done.
116 Okay. Thank you.
117 Okay, colleagues, I'm going to do one last check in with councilor Pirtle-guiney since she cannot use the hand thing. Councilor, if you have anything to say before we move on, this would be your moment.
118 Yeah. I just want to check in about the proposal that councilor Avalos was bringing forward. And I'm cognizant of the fact that we've done a lot of things this year where we've asked for reports that have actually slowed down some of the reform work we want. And I want to ask ruth and if jonas is there, jonas, if that report fits with some of the transformational work around getting better budgeting numbers that we have been asking for, or if it could inadvertently slow that work down.
119 Yeah, I can take that. I think that's why I was we just should chat about the dates, the timing, because I think if it's I think we are we are moving fast right now. You know, bureaus are going to submit the first round of information at the end of January. And so right now it would slow it down if it was before that had to happen. But if it's a later thing that could be done in the spring, then I think we can do that and we'll do our very best knowing, you know, what the direction is from you all, and then we can produce the report in the spring and kind of iterate from there.
120 Okay. Thank you, I appreciate that.
121 Okay. I'm not seeing anybody else in the queue. So colleagues this is a resolution. And I would certainly entertain a motion to move it to the full council with the recommendation that it be adopted.
122 With by previous caveat about what I might say at full council. I so moved.
123 Second.
124 I take that and I appreciate that.
125 That was moved by councilor Novick and seconded by councilor Avalos. All right. With that.
126 Currently there's nobody who signed up for testimony. I'll lead with that and then I'll take the vote if that's okay.
127 Great. Yes, I'm used to people never having anything to comment at finance, it seems like. So I always move past that. But thank you clerk for keeping me honest. And with that we can move to the vote.
128 Thank you. Green is absent.
129 Avalos I pirtle-guiney. I Novick.
130 I Zimmerman. I and with four eyes the motion to refer the I to refer the resolution to city council with a recommendation to be adopted has passed.
131 Thank you colleagues, we have about 20 minutes left and I actually think we can get both of these. But we'll go to the next item, please.
132 Item five amend intergovernmental agreement with Multnomah county for the revenue division to administer the preschool for all program tax.
133 All right, you're up. Take it away.
134 Thank you. Good afternoon, chairman and vice chair pirtle-guiney and members of the finance committee. I'm thomas lannom. I'm the revenue division director. The city of Portland revenue division administers all local, regional and regional personal and business income taxes for the city, the county and metro. Annually, these tax programs generate about $1 billion in revenue for local government. Joint administration of taxes provides lower costs to all three jurisdictions, and gives taxpayers a single point of contact for all their local tax needs. The item before you today concerns the preschool for all income tax intergovernmental agreement with Multnomah county. The county and metro personal income taxes have unified customer service and return processing. The city's cost of administering these two taxes was intended to be split between the county and metro, based on their relative tax revenue. The county's revenue has come in higher than initially projected back in 2020, which has increased the cost allocation share to the county beyond the amount allowed currently in the iga. The county board of commissioners unanimously approved the iga amendment at their meeting on November 20th, and we are asking the finance committee and ultimately city council to also approve this change. Happy to answer any questions.
135 Thank you. Director colleagues, I see councilor Avalos in the queue please.
136 Yeah. Why is there a cap for maximum transfer in the first place?
137 I think it was just to give the county some assurance that there was an upper end anticipated for the cost of administration, and just based on the revenue split that, you know, we saw back in 2020, I think it was an echo northwest evaluation that projected the revenues. And, of course, we've all learned that projecting these personal income tax revenues has been exceedingly difficult in the last five years. So we also provided metro a cap as well. And it's the concept of course, is full cost, right. The city is not subsidizing the collection of either of these taxes, but to provide some assurance that there was an upper end.
138 Thank you, counselor Novick.
139 So is it based just on cost? We don't get paid a little extra for our trouble helping to administer a somewhat popular, in some circles, a very unpopular tax.
140 It may seem like that would be more appropriate, doesn't it? But no, we don't.
141 Did we try? Did we say, hey, if you're going to have us administer tax a whole bunch of rich people complain about, then you need to give us an extra 2 million a year.
142 No, I didn't try that.
143 I love the concept.
144 Yeah. Do we at least have a provision that the county agrees that the county takes primary responsibility, and metro take primary responsibility for handling complaints from rich people about high tax burdens, from taxes on rich people?
145 No, we don't even really have that in place, although they do get their share.
146 I'm tempted to suggest, you know, adding that to the iga as a requirement.
147 Well, you know, there's a number of different avenues, of course. I mean, people do write to the county board, they do write to the metro board, and we get complaints routed back to us. That way, most taxpayers contact our office directly.
148 They do. So you do have to deal with people complaining about these taxes that we administer, even though they're not ours.
149 Well, I mean, to be completely blunt, councilor People complain about all taxes. There's no taxes that are exempt from that. So yeah. So the answer is yes. Our customer service staff are outstanding and are on the front lines. And they, you know, often will have to listen to complaints about taxes before getting into the meat of the, of the, you know, material reason. The person's calling.
150 It is our folks time. Dealing with those is the cost of that recovered through the iga. Yes it is. Okay. So you sort of factor in how much time we do kind of factor in how much time our staff will spend replying to complaints about these taxes, right?
151 I mean, so they directly fund about 50 staff that help with these phone calls and administer a wide range of different pieces. All the tax return processing and emails and, you know, the whole the whole gamut of services.
152 Okay. Thank you.
153 You're welcome.
154 We could have made thomas the pilot for the last thing. He just nailed it. 50 of my employees. Okay. I don't see anybody else in the queue. Thomas, anything else you want to share with us?
155 No, sir.
156 Okay, colleagues, this is an ordinance, and I would entertain a motion to move this to the full council with recommendation.
157 So moved.
158 A grudging second.
159 All right. Moved by councilor Avalos and in Novick fashion. Seconded. If we could see if there are any public comment.
160 No one signed up.
161 Okay, let's call the roll.
162 Green is absent.
163 Avalos I.
164 Pirtle-guiney I'm not sure. She's still.
165 She's dropped off.
166 Okay. Absent then.
167 Novick I'm talking to commissioner Julia edwards later this afternoon. I'm going to make her thank me.
168 I Zimmerman. I with three eyes and two absences. The motion to refer the ordinance document number 2025 466 to city council with a recommendation to be passed, has passed.
169 Thank you. Director lannom. Okay, we can move on to the next item.
170 We're going to read the next two items together.
171 That's right.
172 Item number six assess property for sidewalk, curb and driveway repair for the Portland bureau of transportation. Y1106 and item seven assessed property for sidewalk, curb, and driveway repair for the Portland bureau of transportation. Y1107.
173 Great.
174 We didn't move any chairs. You're still here.
175 Good afternoon. I'm still thomas lannom and still the revenue division director. These next two items that we're reading together concern property line assessments for damaged Portland sidewalks, curbs and and or driveway repairs. Portland city code, administered by PBOT, requires property owners to maintain sidewalks, curbs and driveways to city standards. When they do not meet those standards, repairs are necessary. The general process is an inspector will visit the property site following a complaint and issue a sidewalk repair notice when appropriate. The repair notice is mailed to the property owner, listed in county records, and includes a description and a diagram about the hazard and the estimated costs of repairs. After receiving the notice, the property owner has 60 days to complete repairs. If the property owner fails to complete the repairs within that time frame, PBOT works with its contractor to schedule the repair work. A reminder letter is said to the property owner at least 30 days before the contractor is assigned to do the work. Once the work is scheduled, the contractor also provides door hanging notices to the property site at least five days before the work begins. After the repair is completed, the contractor submits an invoice to PBOT. Pbot pays for the work and sends the total repair costs notification to the revenue division for these lien assessments that are here before you today, there are 180 assessments on the docket totaling $518,000. The second ordinance simply cancels the sidewalk repair charge for one property. The city council action is required to authorize the final assessment at zero, allowing the lien cancellation to occur. So I'll wrap up there. We do have staff in the room from PBOT as well as revenue. If there are any more detailed questions.
176 Okay.
177 Colleagues, I'm not seeing any comments or questions. So with that, do we have any public comment for any of these items?
178 Clerk no one signed up.
179 Okay.
180 I want to make sure since we've got these together, we're going to take two different votes on each one. And. I think at this point, we'd be ready for a motion to refer this to the full council.
181 So moved.
182 Second move by councilor Avalos, seconded by councilor Novick. And we can take the roll.
183 Let's see. Green absent Avalos. I pirtle-guiney is absent Novick. I Zimmerman. I with three eyes and two absences. The motion to refer ordinance. The ordinance document number 2025 467 to city council, with the recommendation be passed, is passed.
184 Great.
185 Now for item seven, right?
186 Correct.
187 We'll do if we can call the roll on that.
188 Okay.
189 Avalos I.
190 Novick I.
191 Zimmerman I.
192 And the same with three eyes and two absences. The motion to refer the ordinance document number 2025 468 to city council with a recommendation to be passed, has passed.
193 Great.
194 Thank you director.
195 Thank you.
196 Appreciate it. Colleagues, we have ten minutes, which means that you were very fast on those last two. So thank you. I appreciate that this body will not meet again until January 5th. And so while I know we'll see each other in our other meetings, I want to wish everybody a holiday, a good holiday. And on the January 5th meeting, we'll have a discussion of the the aquifer as well as the upcoming budget calendar approval. And with that, I'm going to gavel us out this meeting.