The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-02-26
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (20,742 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
On February 26, 2025, a joint session of the Portland City Council and Multnomah County Commission was convened to receive a quarterly report from the homelessness response system, marking the first such joint meeting with the new council and county board configurations and the first hosted in the new council chambers. Staff presented data through December 2024 on four key performance indicators tied to the intergovernmental agreement, covering sheltering and housing placements, demographic equity outcomes (with a discussed gap affecting Black, African American, and African residents), adult exits from shelter to permanent housing, and permanent supportive housing retention rates. Presenters also discussed volatile Metro revenue forecasts, carryover funding dynamics, proposed shelter unit changes including closures of some congregate sites and additions elsewhere, and city and county budget development processes for the coming fiscal year; some figures presented were stated inconsistently across speakers. Extended discussion followed on topics including data segmentation by acuity and race, administrative and per-bed costs, public safety intersections, Medicaid leveraging opportunities, regional equity in service placement, and calls for a unified city-county strategy. Remarks were also given by the mayor and county chair regarding shelter bed commitments and budget priorities. Votes, where they occurred, are recorded in the vote ledger. The session concluded with plans to reconvene quarterly.
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.
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1 Good morning. I am going to call us into a joint city, Portland city council and Multnomah county commission meeting in order to hear a report, a report from our joint office of housing and homelessness services. Welcome to all of our colleagues from the county who are here with us today. Thank you for joining us in our new council chambers. This is our first opportunity to host guests at the dais, and I think we mostly manage to make everybody fit. So thank you all for being here. And our gratitude to our city administrator and our attorneys, who graciously gave up their spots at the dais in order to make this work, to have all of our elected leaders up here today. Looks like everybody found their spots. We're doing well. We are great start, great staff. Yes. Gratitude to our staff for making everybody fit up here. I know it took a little bit of coordination. We are going to hear a lot of information today, and I just want to start us out by saying that the relationship between the city and the county as it relates to our shared work around homeless services and housing, folks who live in our community has not always been easy, but it is also critical that we work together, and I'm glad that we're hearing this report together today so that we can continue to build a relationship around collaborating on this work. We have an important charge before us to take care of folks in our community. And as we all face down budget shortfalls at every level of government, we will need to be creative to find a way to continue to provide the beds that we have been providing within our homeless service programs, to try to expand the beds that we can provide to community members, and to do so with a joint strategy, an aligned strategy, because we know that we can't afford to do anything else. I know that our strategies are not always aligned. We have folks around this dais with very different priorities. But I hope that after we hear this report today, in fact, I'm optimistic that after we hear this report today, we can dig in together to continue that aligned strategy, to do the work that we all need to do. It is, I think, imperative that we do. So with that, I would invite our county chair, vega peterson, to say a few words before we turn it over to staff for the report.
2 All right. Oh, and that picks it up. Perfect. So thank you, president pirtle-guiney and all the members of Portland city council for having and hosting Multnomah county in your chambers today. It's really wonderful to see us all gathered here. The last several times that we had these meetings, they've always been at the county because these chambers were under construction. So we always hosted on the other side of the river. So it's great to be in these beautiful new chambers and get a chance to be with all of you in this new form of government. I want to thank you for your time, but also for your continued commitment and, you know, and the importance that you give to our shared work to address homelessness. The last time we did convene, which was in February, October of last fall, it was a very different body. So I think that this opportunity is a chance to start together in this body of work, but also to make sure that we are all having the same information and we are able to move forward in this work together. So these quarterly presentations to the joint meeting of the of the city and the county is required by the our homelessness response system. It's not only a part of the ida, but it's also an opportunity for us to see the progress in the many goals, as well as to see transparently the areas of focus where we aren't meeting our benchmarks, where that we've agreed to, and what is going to be necessary to reach the outcomes that we know are not just possible, but really critical that we that we meet. I've already heard from many of you about your eagerness to have more opportunities for discussions and smaller breakouts in these types of meetings. So president pirtle-guiney and I will take all that into consideration as we prepare for future meetings. So please continue to share your thoughts on that. You know, our these joint sessions of this governing body are critical to our work. We need your investment and engagement at all levels of our homelessness response system, which include the community advisory committees, the implementation committee, which are made up of staff from both our governments, and the steering and oversight committee, which members of these bodies sit on together to provide oversight. But your close consideration and partnership to all the work that's going on. This is a system that was built very intentionally, but also a place where we provided that space for the continuous improvement that we know is going to be necessary. We designed it to be flexible, knowing that our governing bodies would dramatically change in 2025, and that all of you would have a deep investment in our current commitments and our future policies. So we have a lot to consider today. As president pirtle-guiney said, this joint session follows the release of the second set of the homeless response systems quarterly data. At the same time that we are also released a homelessness a homeless services department budget that is built on the county, receiving a smaller portion of state spending on homeless services than the number of people experiencing homelessness in our city and county actually merits, as well as the pressures that we're feeling on both our our city and county budgets and changing picture with the support of housing service measure dollars. So there is a lot to take in. And that's why the information that's going to be shared today, and the conversations and discussion that will ultimately follow between all of us, is going to be really important. I think it is an opportunity for us to work closely together to bring more people closely together, to have conversations about our priorities, trade offs required for the current state of the budget, and the needs that we have in our community to address and solve our homelessness crisis. So I look forward to hearing from the team today, our homeless services department director, Dan field, our partners at the city of Portland, and just appreciate the time for us to be together. Thank you.
3 Thank you. Chair. Councilors. Commissioners, we have a lot of information to get through and a lot of us up here. So staff have requested that we hold questions and comments to the end. We are going to let folks get through their presentations at the end of the presentations, as I hope you all saw in the run of show. Everybody will have two minutes. I know councilors, we are not used to time limits, but we are going to try it today. Everybody will have two minutes at the end, so please hold your comments and questions until then. I am going to hand the floor over to jillian shoshone and please kick us off for the presentation. Thank you.
4 Thank you. Council president and chair. For the record, my name is julian schnee. I'm the director of the homelessness response system. As it's already been said, this is our first quarterly joint session of 2025 and more importantly, the first joint session with the new council and also the new members of the county board. Our goal today is to share with you the quarterly report that we published on February 14th, some of our next steps, and then also speak to the opening position of the homelessness services budgets, both at the county and the city, as well as how all of that relates to the community sheltering strategy. And then the chair will wrap us up with a theme of continued partnership and support among all the governing bodies, who care very much about all of us meeting our shared goals. I want to stress just to put a highlighter on it. As the council president and the chair said that the information shared today represents the beginning of the budget process. All of you have a very long and productive road ahead of you, and to save as much time as possible for questions and statements, we are going to move fast. So if we need to slow down somebody, I have no doubt that the council president will tell me as such. So with that, I will hand it over to deputy director Ryan deibert.
5 Good morning. Council president, chair, mayor. Councilors. Commissioners. Really glad to be here. Thank you especially to city council for hosting us today. For the record, my name is Ryan deibert. I use he him pronouns and I'm the deputy director of the homelessness response system. As we start into our quarterly data, just wanted to remind us of the purpose of our quarterly reports for the homelessness response system, which is to transparently monitor our broader system performance and then be able to use our shared homelessness response system oversight structures that were developed between the city and the county to be able to course correct where we need. So that oversight structure is the space that keeps us together across jurisdictions to be able to drive toward our shared goals. And it brings together our political, governmental, and community partners to shape action with a broad set of expertise, a broad range of expertise, experience and insight that each of those members brings. Through our quarterly reports, we're able to share what we're seeing relative to our goals, actions that we're moving forward to course correct with, and to engage both of these elected bodies about related pressing policy and budget issues that you're going to need to be able to monitor moving forward. The data that we're sharing today is from our second report with data current through the end of December 2024. This represents one additional quarter's worth of data than what you have previously seen in the orientations that we provided to each of you coming into these roles. And also just a reminder that each of the reported outcomes look at our full system of services, regardless of which entities pay or operate those pay for or operate those services. So in other words, they mark how we're doing collectively toward meeting our shared goals. So I'll walk you through each of the four key performance measures that are identified in the intergovernmental agreement between the city and the county, with some slides that describe the outcomes, both first in text and then graphically. So let's go to the next slide. So the first of our key performance indicators tracks our progress towards sheltering our housing 2700 additional previously unsheltered people prior to the end of 2025. This goal represents a number, roughly half of those known to be experiencing unsheltered homelessness as of January 2024. To measure this goal, we look at the two years prior to the homelessness response action plan. So those are calendar years 20, 22 and 23, in which our systems sheltered or housed a little more than 16,000 people. So in order to meet our goal, that means in 2024 and 2025, we need to shelter our house. About 18,800 people. We're currently on track to meet this goal, but we need to continue our work to expand shelter and housing placement resources to ensure continued progress in calendar year 2024. We sheltered or housed just shy of 12,000 people, 11,912 people, putting us at about 63% of our goal, our two year goal. At the halfway mark of that two year period. Core to meeting this plan goal is the shelter expansion that's already underway through the community sheltering strategy that the city and county jointly developed last year. That plan set a two year timeline to add 1000 additional shelter units across all of our system's. More than 500 of those additional units are already open, bringing us to more than 3000 units open each night and 400 more currently in development. So next slide please. This is this is what that quarterly progress toward this goal looks like graphically. Any progress above the gray dotted line indicates that we're on track to meet or exceed the goal. And at our current pace, we're projecting that we may actually exceed that goal roughly by double based on direction that we've had from our homeless response system steering and oversight committee. In future, quarters will be separately reporting those who were sheltered but not subsequently housed, from those who were housed, and will begin reporting more comprehensive inflow and outflow data to better understand net changes in the numbers of people experiencing homelessness over time. Next slide please. Systemic racism and other forms of discrimination, oppression and bias result in some groups of people experiencing higher rates of unsheltered homelessness. The homelessness response action plan attempts to address these disparities and unsheltered homelessness for those priority populations. So the second measure is just another version of that first measure. It looks at the demographic details of that first measure to determine whether populations are sheltered or housed at proportions equal to or greater than their proportion of the population of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. So, as in our prior quarterly report, we're meeting or exceeding this goal for all populations except those who are black, african American or african. We sheltered or housed more than 2400 people who are black, african American or african in 2024, representing about 20.3% of all people who are sheltered or housed. But people who are black, african American or african made up 22.8% of people known to be experiencing unsheltered homelessness before a trap. So that 2.5 percentage point gap represents a difference of roughly 300 additional black, african American or african people who would have needed to be sheltered or housed in order to meet this goal, the steering and oversight committee for the homelessness response system was was clear in its direction when it received some of these initial data. The similar data back in November that the homeless services department, Portland solutions and our community partners should begin taking actions to better meet the needs of black, african American or african people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. These data, again, because they're just through December, won't reflect outcomes of subsequent work that started as a result of that direction. But to briefly describe some of the work underway, we are working in partnership with the homeless services department to compile what we've already learned from community about how to better address these gaps, and then start working with service providers, especially culturally specific providers serving black, african American and african communities, to prioritize immediate term actions that can shift the needle in a 3 to 6 month time horizon at the direction of steering and oversight committee. We're also working to break these outcomes out again. Among those who are sheltered but not yet housed versus housed, as well as breaking out performance by individual shelters and shelter types. To better to further inform our our best pathways to improve. Next slide. Again, a visual representation from our dashboard for this measure. Current shelter and housing data again for calendar year 2024 is in blue and baseline unsheltered data is in gray. So to meet the goal, the blue bars have to be equal to or greater than the gray bar. And we highlight that 2.5 percentage point gap for people who are black, african American or african. Next slide. Our third key performance indicator tracks progress on our goal to increase adult exits from shelter to permanent housing. And that's from to move from a pre homelessness response action plan baseline of 26% of adults exiting to permanent housing to a 15 percentage point increase to 41% by the end of 2025. Current performance on this measure suggests that we're actually moving farther from meeting this goal, and require additional intervention to address that gap. In 2024, exit rates from adult shelter to housing were at about 20%. That's a six percentage points below the pre baseline and 21 percentage points below the rap goal, though more than 1200 adults exited shelters to permanent destinations in 2024, more than 150 additional adults would have had to exit to permanent housing in order to meet the goal. So the rap the homelessness response action plan includes several areas of focus to support movement toward this goal, and we're working closely with the homeless services department in Portland solutions to understand whether existing and planned future funding dedicated to this work is sufficient to get us to the goal, or whether significant gaps remain. There are several blocks of existing funding that are already dedicated to housing placements from shelter that have been allocated to providers who continue to work through, who will continue to work throughout the remaining six months of this fiscal year. And additionally, the homeless services department recently awarded an extra $2 million dedicated to housing placement assistance for ten shelters that previously had no dedicated assistance assigned to them. So as as our providers continue to assist people with who are exiting with the existing allocated resources, we should see these outcomes start to improve. And the homeless services department budget proposes for next fiscal year to continue prioritizing this work. So as we get a better understanding of whether those existing and planned resources are sufficient to meet the gap, we'll continue to bring recommendations to inform your collective budget decisions across our jurisdictions. Next slide. Again, this is just a graphic representation of that third key performance measure. Each of the blue bars represents a rolling one year look back at the percentage of adults exiting shelter to permanent housing. The gray line represents the pre baseline. The red line represents the goal to improve outcomes to 41% of adults exiting shelter to permanent housing. So that most recent bar looks back at calendar year 2024 again. 1200 adults exited shelter to permanent housing, representing about 20% of adults exiting shelter. Next slide. And last the fourth. The fourth key metric tracks the retention of people in permanent supportive housing two years after their initial placement. The plan goal is housing retention at 75%, and we currently exceed that goal at 82%. Retention. Permanent supportive housing is an important form of housing to support some, though not all, people experiencing homelessness return to housing and remain stably there. It's a specific type of housing for people with disabilities and extremely low incomes who have long or multiple histories of homelessness and other housing instability. It combines deeply affordable housing with intensive yet voluntary services with no time limits. It's an evidence based practice and an important strategy for addressing chronic homelessness. Increasing access to permanent supportive housing, and continuing the services to help people in that housing stay in the housing also helps to improve our housing placement, from shelter numbers, and minimizes future returns to homelessness. So the next slide again just shows this graphically as we progress over time. One year, look backs for each of those blue bars exceeding our goal. So as I turn it back to gillian to talk about some of the next steps, again, just a reminder that the shared commitment of the city of Portland and Multnomah county through our existing intergovernmental agreement and the homelessness response system, is to transparently track and report back on these key measures, hold each other accountable to the system wide outcomes as joint funders and organizers of the systems, and most importantly, to work together to pursue course corrections where they're needed. Though we report this information publicly and to these joint sessions quarterly, we're also actively working with our within our oversight structure, our community advisory committee, implementation committee, and steering and oversight committee to practice that mutual transparency, accountability and adaptability on a continuous and ongoing basis. So it's not just here that we're talking about these. It's every single month we're in this continuous process. Gillian will briefly summarize some of the next steps, both proposed and directed through our homelessness response system oversight. And I'll turn it to her.
6 Thank you Ryan. Thank you maggie. Just a quick process on this slide. So for your awareness at the end of each quarter, providers have 30 days to get their data into miss and make sure it is all there. Then the data team over the county pulls it. They send it to my team. We share that with our community advisory committee and implementation committee. They generate recommendations, and then we present it to the steering and oversight committee for debate and discussion. And in that space they get to review, add, modify or adopt any or all of those recommendations as official direction. Back to the hrc team. So as Ryan said, I'll briefly summarize those already adopted, as well as additional recommendations coming to the soc on March 11th. These were already spoken to a little bit, but they generally fall in two buckets. Use our existing data to better understand opportunities for system improvement, and then also to better meet goals where we're falling short. Based on the first quarterly report last year, the soc has already adopted several recommendations, and those are are are underway, being implemented, as previously mentioned, back in January when I was here, hms, just to remind you of this context, was transferred from the city to the county. Then the homeless services department got to work on cleaning up that data, as well as setting up data sharing agreements with the city, metro and health share, just for example. Which is all good news because we are sharing data is a good thing and we're getting there. That data project is nearing completion and it is my hope that it is that the soc gets to see that data on March 11th. So that is a goal. And in that meeting we would share the data, go over the stories it tells us about our houseless community members, and then also to gain a shared understanding about its limitations and where we need to go next. What I feel I most excited about is that not only are they cleaning up the data, which is great, they are also orienting the data to be able to speak to inflow and outflow, which we have never been able to do before. And I know there's a lot of interest around that. It means we are going to be able to develop a goal to drive a net reduction in unsheltered homelessness based on inflow and outflow monitoring. So that is that is going to be the highlight of my year. For those of you who share our concerns as we watch the eviction filings at the state level, like this data and goal will be incredibly helpful as we watch that. Ryan covered several of the steps that we're pursuing with community partners and system funders to address the gap in sheltering and housing people who are black, african American and african. And you'll see those reflected in some of the additional recommendations on the next slide. So these are the ones coming to the soc. So for those of you who are members this slide is for you. On the data side, they want to dig deeper into our system data, not just separating shelter and housing, but further splitting those data out by client, race, ethnicity, age and acuity. Acuity is something that we've heard loud and clear from another a number of folks by shelter type and individual shelter provider and by resource levels. As I mentioned back in January, the services and housing vouchers vary across the shelter system, such as funded case management, staffing ratios and allocated move in and rental assistance at each shelter, which is why you see disparities among shelter types. This came up yesterday at the housing and houselessness committee meeting, and this is important context to always include when discussing that topic. And I think we'll have a better idea of the success we're seeing at the shelter level with housing placement funds, with the 2 million that was recently released at the direction of the chair that was was across the system. So once all of those 110 plus ish voucher placements are out the door, we'll have a good read on that. Some updated data. And then most importantly and in summary, this data will just help us better understand which programs are working best and for whom. On the programmatic side, we've already said that we're bringing together culturally specific providers. At the direction of the soc, and that will be include a careful review of our planned shelter expansion and also housing placement. And then lastly, out of the implementation and the cac, there was a reaffirmed commitment to couple any ongoing shelter expansion with additional resources to help move people effectively from shelter into housing. I think we want a shelter system that is also effective at ending people's homelessness. So those those need to those work together to do that. Next, we are going to just transition to some discussion about the very earliest stages of our respective budget development processes at the city and the county level. And our colleagues, Dan field and anna plum are here from the county homeless services department, as is skye knapp from Portland solutions. And then in each of them, we'll just provide some context to early budget challenges that we will be working together to address as we look to preserve and build upon our shared progress. Director field.
7 Thank you so much, jillian. And thank you, madam chair. Madam president, mayor, councilors and commissioners, it's good to be here. I'm Dan field, director of the homeless services department. Newly named. Doesn't quite roll off the tongue yet, but I'm working on it. The joint office certainly resonated for many years, but we're moving forward with the new name, and I think it signals a new era for our work together across the city and the county. I'm going to talk in broad strokes today because of time and just the nature of the conversation about our finances, and we led with the policy framework first, because that's our starting point. What are we trying to achieve and how are we trying to achieve it? And the last point that jillian mentioned, our vision for shelter, connecting people to housing, that's a very intentional strategy. And it's one of many. The strategy to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in our homelessness data. That was another very intentional discussion. And so what I would encourage, if I can be presumptuous, what I would encourage that we as your staff need from you collectively, we need to understand is that a shared vision or is there a different shared vision. And so as you talk through today, we've given you the data. We're going to give you the numbers. We're here to provide all that to you. What we need back from you is a sense of are we in the right direction? Are we focused on the right things? Are we using our limited dollars in the right way, and we can implement it from there? And you can watch us and guide us and coach us. But what we can't do is tell you what the strategy is and the direction is. We can give you our best advice. But as our officials, I think it's safe to say we all here. You have decades of experience up here, just in the five of us, not to mention the city and the county staff that are behind us and back in their offices. So there's a lot of expertise. And what we're waiting for is a sense of, are we headed in the right direction and what are our priorities? So there has been a lot in the news this week about money, and I want to just quickly give us a shared revenue picture. We have about six different revenue sources, maybe more if you include federal dollars that flow through to us. But generally speaking, our funding comes from the city general fund. We can talk about that if you're interested. This year, that's about $31 million. The county general fund this year, that's about $40 million state and federal funding. And it comes from the supportive housing services measure. Dollars are now 70% of the homeless services division budget. We not only put money into our department, we share money back with the city and we share money with other county departments. So I'm going to focus today on those dollars because as she goes, so goes this work. And the issue we're having currently is not around a million here or a million there in the county or city general fund. It's really around the dollars. We divide dollars into two buckets, generally speaking, for budgeting purpose, there's the current revenue. That's the money we get from metro and the 12 month period for that fiscal year. And then there's the carryover. And we'll talk about that in a minute. For current revenue. One of the challenges we have that's been publicized is that revenue forecast has been sort of notoriously volatile, I think going from 22 to 23, the metro forecast was off by 50%. They said roughly they'd send us $90 million and they sent us 150. Now we're seeing volatility in the other direction. That's not to point fingers at any of our economists. It's a it's a fickle tax base. And we know it's volatile. And we should expect that. So here here's a look at the forecast that we're dealing with now a little over a year ago as we were preparing our current year budget for fy 24 and 25, we were asked to budget on a mount from metro of $156 million. You can see that in the red circle on the top. We made that budget. We built out the programs, we notified our partners. And then just about halfway through the fiscal year, two months ago, three months ago, we got notified there's a $20 million drop and that's on the bottom. So we go from 156 to 134. Now, on one hand, you're looking at that saying that's a 15% drop for the current fiscal year and a 15% drop for the next fiscal year, going from the forecast of 156 to 134. And that math is accurate. For those of you who are doing that. I did that this morning. Here's the challenge. When you add those those percentages together, that's actually a 30% drop because we are pulling money in from the carryover that we had planned to budget in fy 26. That's the exercise we're in now. We had planned to budget that those dollars in fy 26, and we now have had to pull them into fiscal year 25 because we had already budgeted for that. So we're either going to cut services and programs this fiscal year, or we're going to double the cut next year. So the way we're looking at it, as we prepare to leave this fiscal year, next fiscal year, is it's a $44 million drop or almost 30%. So when you hear the news reports that there's a 25% drop in the joint office budget, this is the root of it. Let's go to the next one if we can. This is broad, broad brush. Please don't worry about the numbers. What I actually do want you just to look at the colors. And again, we're glad to walk people through this. Be totally transparent about the numbers far left. The first year of the measure. You can see on the top of the we'll just do the top half. The dark gray is the actual revenue and the light gray on the bottom. Below the line is our expenditures. So you can see we spent a little more than a third of the dollars that was well documented. We were building out infrastructure. We were engaging providers, expanding the provider base. Shelters take years to build. Sometimes even villages take a while to set up. Permanent supportive housing takes years. So we underspent that year and you can see the Green then carried over. So the Green $61 million is simply the difference between what we got and what we spent. Pretty simple. Same thing happened in fy 23 that was sort of the high watermark, if you will. We had some additional carryover. And so as we went into fy 24, metro came and said we're going to put you under a corrective action plan, and we're going to insist that you begin to spend all that money in real time in this fiscal year. We met with them monthly, sort of like going to the principal's office. We had to meet with them, document our spending, be fully accountable to them every month during that fiscal year. That was my first year at the office. So you can see there that actually in the last fiscal year, we spent more than current year revenue. We spent 143, but the current year revenue was 140. That's the dark gray. And what we did was we spent that carry over. You can see there was some more carryover into the current fiscal year. And then it drops off in fy 26. And in fy 26, we had always projected that the carryover would start to go away. And I was looking at a presentation we made to the to the county board from April of last year, not quite a year ago, but almost. And we talked really explicitly with metro staff in the room and with the county commissioners there. We talked really explicitly about the cliff. We were going to go off in fiscal year 27. And so our plan was to navigate into fy 27 over a year from now, knowing that the carryover would be gone and knowing that we needed to reach a steady state in our spending, what happened was the drop in the metro forecast brought that up a year, so that $50 million of carryover that we had planned to carry into 27, we had to accelerate that. So when people say, what's happening? We didn't know this was coming. We've actually been talking about it pretty publicly for over a year. The timing has caught us off guard because of the drop in the forecast. And I will acknowledge that what the conversation we planned to be having a year from today, we're having today. So let me go to the next slide. This just recaptures. I won't spend much time here. It recaptures the main point. If you look towards the bottom half of that slide, it's really that drives our budget. So as we talk to you about budget trade offs, it's really about those dollars. I told the mayor last year, I think sky, maybe you were there. I was trying to preview that the dollars and the carryover were coming to an end, and I told the mayor that the atm was was closing up. And I don't think he appreciated my phrasing, but I felt like it was important to signal to him that these dollars were going away. And I think we've done that effectively. Next slide please. You can see here how our dollars are generally spread across major program areas. Last night we shared with sky and mike jordan's team the next level of detail down. Glad to share that all with you. So you can see by program line where those dollars are and where those cuts are. We're at beginning of the budget process. We're still waiting for the chair and the county board to give us further level of detail. So we haven't begun to specify individual provider level cuts, but we can pretty confidently say as we as we bring the overall spending down, it's going to be spread across these main buckets. Next slide please. Just last two slides before I turn it over to anna. I hope this is consistent with the policy guidance that you'd like us to be following. Our overarching goal is to maintain a balanced system. We know that shelter without a path to housing is a dead end. And building on ryan's comments, we know that if we won't be able to eliminate racial disparities and disproportionate impact of homelessness unless we're intentional about the way we spend those dollars. And so we've we've taken that as a guiding light for our investments. And on the last slide. Again, we're open to your feedback on these priorities. These come from our elected officials that guide our work. Our priorities are one, to keep people who are housed, housed. So if we have rental assistance and eviction prevention and permanent supportive housing dollars in play right now, to the extent possible, we'd like to keep those in play. We do have an emphasis on youth, families and survivors, so to protect existing resources, we are proposing to pause some of our outyear shelter expansion so that we can preserve funding for people who are currently sheltered and housed. With that, I'll turn that over to our deputy, anna plumb.
8 Good morning all. My name is anna plumb, and I use she and her pronouns. And I'm the deputy director for the homeless services department. Next slide please. I am going to walk through the impact of our budget submission, which again is step one on the overall number of shelter units in the community and as well as specific to the original community sheltering strategy expansion plans. Before I dive into this, I want to offer two caveats. The first is that tracking and predicting shelter units at this point in time is a little bit tricky. There are a lot of moving parts. I did work with Portland solutions to land on the numbers specifically for what we say for the city, but I want to be clear about what is and is not in these numbers. So on the city side, what we see for both currently operational and sort of what we are assuming in our budget submissions, does include the 200 new overnight beds that have recently opened. It also assumes that all the other current tasks and rv sites remain open, including what the current plans are right now for peninsula and sunderland. It does not include any more overnight shelter units simply because those are still in flux. So I just wanted to make that clear about what we have on the city side. So to walk through on the city side, a stay on that slide, please. Not quite ready for the next slide. Thank you. So if the column that says February 15th, 2025, that is what is currently open as of last week for both the city and the county and what is in development. So on the city side, there are 1067 units currently open. And if you go to what we're envisioning for fy 2026, at this point it moves up to 1102. This includes reallocating all but 15 of the units from peninsula when that closes, and adding 50 recovery beds at bybee lakes on the county side, we currently have just over 2100 units open, and that will move to 117 in the next fiscal year due to the closure of 326 congregate units. But in addition of 100 at bybee lakes. I want to talk about that closure. That is three congregate shelters. One of those is greyhound, which we've spoken about publicly. The other two we are not ready to speak about publicly yet. In terms of what shelters those are, two of the three were always envisioned to be temporary. These were facilities that we always knew would be temporary shelter. We do have a shelter development team that has been working to find replacements and facilities for those units. But at this point, the budget and the timeline for that replacement is not feasible given our current funding realities. We do not take the closure of these units lightly, but the decision is an example of the tough decisions that we're making to support a holistic system. It also supports our goal of equitable placements into housing. From our data, we know that congregate shelters serve lower proportions of bipoc populations and have lower exits to housing compared to other shelter models. Some of that difference is likely related to the level of service, because our congregate shelters do tend to have lower levels of service. But it's still the case that right now, those programs are struggling to connect folks to housing and to serve bipoc folks at the levels that would be required for us to reduce disparities in who's experiencing homelessness and who is exiting to housing. I'll speak more about this in the next slide. But while this is difficult, these closures will allow us to sustain service levels at our other shelters across the system that will serve higher proportions of priority populations and have strong exits to housing. So envisioning those changes, at this point, we would be at 3019 units across the system, which is a loss of 171. But we do have other units in development. So if you look at the line that says development phase one and two, those are the units of shelter that were funded in fiscal year 2024 and 2025 as phases one and two of the community sheltering strategy. There's 404 units that are still in development. One change that we've made that I'll speak to on the other, on the next slide, is we are pulling back on one motel shelter that we had planned for this year that was going to serve adults and was going to have about 65 units of shelter. That's simply due to funding constraints in both this fiscal year and next fiscal year. What you see is phase three is what we have in our fiscal year 2026 budget. We are suggesting to add on top of everything else, you see, another 50 units of shelter. That would be for LGBTQ two plus adults. This was an original goal of the community sheltering strategy, and we are working with a relatively new housing collaborative which needs some capacity building. So we have already begun the planning and development with that group. Since that is already underway, we propose to keep those units in our system and fund those in fiscal year 2026. When you get to the end of all of that, we have an overall gain from today to the end of that funding development of 329 units of shelter. Next slide please. So that was what the overall units in the system. This really allows us to hone in on the change to the community sheltering strategy goals. These two tables are not additive. The numbers that you see here are also envisioned in the first table. So you can't add them together just to be really, really clear. So as Dan has noted, we have a very different funding reality. And so we have had to make some changes and pause some of the units. As you can see, I want to talk about phase one and two again. So phase one is again, those are the units that were funded in fiscal year 24 and 25 to add sort of as a phase one of the community sheltering strategy. And we've added or have in development 529 units of shelter. That number is a little bit different than the last time we talked about it, because as you finalize plans for sites, some of the units change. So we were able to add more units to the harrison site that is under development. There's some slight changes to the totals, and we're moving two units of micro village to phase two. Phase two is what we added last fiscal year as the next addition to the community sheltering strategy. Right now that number is 199 units. Again, that includes pausing on a 65 unit adult motel shelter due to our funding realities. So at the ends of phase one and phase two, you have 728 units of shelter. Once we add the 50 that we're proposing for the next fiscal year, we would be at 778 compared to the original goal of 1060. That's a pause on 282 units of shelter. I do want to note that we are pausing on units in the family system, some units in the adult system, and some units for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. And we are hoping that we find other funding sources to support those units. And I want to say again that this is really linked to our ability to support a holistic system and shelter that leads to housing. Really, this decision making reflects the reality that given our current funding constraints, we cannot fund all of these units as quickly as we would have liked and adequately fund the continuum of services and assistance that lead folks from homelessness into housing in order to increase our placements out of shelter according to the goal, we have had to reevaluate the balance of services, and we believe that pausing the addition of these units will allow us to begin to equalize the provision of the services and rent assistance across our existing shelter system to make sure that folks are moving into housing. And I do want to note that in the first two quarters of this fiscal year, 4447 people, unique people, have been newly served in shelter and over 6000 have accessed shelter in total. So we are serving thousands of people with shelter already. Now I'm going to pass it on to skye.
9 Thanks, anna. Madam president, madam chair, mayor, councilors and commissioners. Good to see you all up here. Skyler brucker, now director of Portland solutions. I know we are running low on time, so I'm going to run through two slides. But just for some quick context, we're on a slightly different budget timeline than the county. So I'm just doing high level. But the city administrator is going to be releasing some initial recommendations on Friday with more detail. Next slide please. So this is just the Portland solutions mostly shelter budget that you can see here. And this is just our landscape for this next fiscal year. Again very high level ongoing conversations. But 41.6 million is kind of what we need for that existing alternative shelter program. We have about 11.4 million in carryover. That's a variety of sources that you can see there. And then we need that $30.15 million to meet the needs of that existing shelter. Those existing shelter sites that serve approximately 800 folks closer to 900, probably. Right now we are in active conversations with the county, the state, metro, other partners about that need for that 30.15 million. And we will see how those conversations progress and those negotiations in terms of those decisions will be put into the mayor's proposed budget. So you'll see that kind of over the next couple of months. It does not include the 2.65 million for the sunderland rv safe park. So I just want to call that out, especially for city councilors. We just made the decision or made the decision to use some estimated carryover in the current fiscal year and into the beginning of the next fiscal year for to keep sunderland open. So you all can make that decision if you want to keep it open, given the budget constraints. So it'll be about 2 million next year for the operations of that site if you choose to keep that open. We are also put in a decision package for 28.1 million in additional shelter services. We're looking at public and private funding for that. That's the presentation the mayor has given to, I think, all of you or the county commissioners tomorrow. But at this point. But that's an additional ask for shelter capacity, kind of that missing link of overnight shelter day center storage that we've talked about before. Again, in the mayor's proposed budget. That will happen in the next couple of months. We will see the upshot of kind of a lot of those conversations and ongoing negotiations for this need, but we just wanted to present this as what we're looking at from a city perspective, from my budget's perspective of folks we are currently serving, folks we hope to serve in the future. We're in active conversations with the homeless services department and the homelessness response system team every day, and we will dive deeply into these budgets and spreadsheets and the needs and the funding opportunities. Next slide please. This is just a chart to help folks understand kind of the different funding streams. I'm not going to dive deeply into it. City counselors have received this as part of a follow up from previous presentations. Happy to send this out to county commissioners if you're interested. But our team just put it together to kind of show exactly what I was just walking through. And then previous fiscal years where those funding streams have come from, you can see all the different colors that show that's come from a variety of sources. We worked with a lot of different government partners and entities to provide these services in the last few years. We're really proud of those services we've provided, and we look forward to ongoing discussions to determine what stays open, what's making the most sense in terms of our system, and how we keep serving all the folks that we're serving who deeply need these services. Thanks, jillian. I don't know if it's to you.
10 Ooh, chair. I'll hand it over to you. Thank you. Sky. Yeah.
11 All right. Thank you. So we have had a I really appreciate this presentation and the depth at which everyone has gone into both in the budget situation, the overall goals and the work that that we're trying to do and invest in to both respond to what this quarterly two report has said, but then also looking ahead and how what are the needs are across our system for both the city and the county and the and the work that we're doing together. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about those dollars. One of the things that I wanted to stress, though, was that, you know, we are in a situation where the city had put, you know, used arp dollars, right, to really respond to the crisis during the pandemic. And we've seen the impact that the really positive impact that those investments and services and test sites have had. The county has been building up the system and using the dollars, including the one time only unanticipated revenue that we had received kind of year over year from metro that were really in one time only capacity. And now we are faced with a real serious situation where we know these needed services as critical services don't have those ongoing dollars. And so what I'm really hoping that we can do today is start the conversation about our shared priorities and how do we allocate these these really limited resources to create a healthy full system and, and address that. And we're and I think as president pirtle-guiney said at the beginning of this, you know, we are going to we are going have different priorities. Right. But but our work together and I don't mean between the city and the county, I mean among individual members on on both of our bodies. We are going to have to do that, work together that and lead together in really addressing this. And so I've appreciated the conversations I've already had. I'm looking forward to working with councilor Avalos in her role as chair of the housing and homelessness committee, continuing the work with the mayor and president pirtle-guiney, and with my board and all of you. To have these conversations. So this is what we're here today and especially from our homeless services department. This is what's being proposed, right? There are no decisions that are going to be made. My budget doesn't come out until April. The budget, the mayor's budget doesn't come out, and our and our board won't be voting on our final budget until June. So there is still time to have this. But we are daylighting this as soon as we found out. I think there are opportunities for us to really recognize that when we talk about homelessness in the state of Oregon, it is the city of Portland and Multnomah county that is that is carrying so much of that throughout the state. And so in thinking about how are we going to address this gap that we share, looking at the dollars that are available that don't include raising any taxes, that don't include taking money from other places, but really expanding the pie that is available to all of this. So if we could go to the next slide. So what I have proposed is really going to the state and asking to expand the statewide resources that are available to increase funding by $55 million for the shared work that we have in making the in fulfilling the goals of the homeless response action plan. And I think that we know that homelessness, excuse me, is a statewide issue. But again, the reality is that that within Multnomah county, we have 40% of the population of people who are experiencing homelessness, even though we only have 20% of the overall population in the state. I think the in this has been a conversation that we have had in looking at metro, right? Metro has, just as we and other counties have had carryover dollars from year to year, so has metro in their administrative dollars. And so looking at that pot of money that is really flexible, asking them to dedicate that those $30 million to the need that we have here. And I have specifically asked that, you know, $10 million of that would be allocated for city priorities. And I will leave it up to you, you all and the mayor to really come on what those priorities look like. And then I think there needs to be a conversation, as there are conversations happening with the support of housing service measure in the future of that, what does it look like for us to successfully address homelessness in the Portland region, based on what that measure looks like today and what the funding looks like today and how it's allocated, and what we're going to need going forward to truly address this crisis. And that is going to take, you know, conversations in both the short term and in the long term and conversations with our with our sister counties, Washington and Clackamas county. The one thing that I do know is that we cannot pull back on the investments that we have made in the system, and the urgency that we have to address the humanitarian crisis, and that we and we need to be working together and in partnership for doing that. So I'm looking forward to the to the ongoing conversations that we will have, you know, today being just one of those. But my hope is that we can work together and advocating for additional resources for our city and for our county as we move forward.
12 Thank you to all of you on the team who have brought us all of this information today. Thank you, chair peterson as well. Counselors, commissioners, we have just about exactly an hour and a half. And what I would like to do to make sure that everybody gets an opportunity to ask questions. And I see a few counselors in the queue, but our county commissioners are not able to get in the queue in that same way. So what I'm going to ask us to do is just go around the room. Everybody will have two minutes. You are welcome to make a statement. You are welcome to ask a question. If you have a follow up question, we will make that work. But do please try to regulate your own time. The clerk has offered to put up a timer so that for folks who are making a statement, you have a sense of how much time you are taking. And we're going to see how this works with all of us up here. So I would invite counselor Avalos, who is the chair of our housing and homelessness committee on the city side, to kick us off. We have a clear question about direction from staff, and I think a lot of folks who have comments and questions. Go ahead, chair.
13 Thank you, madam president. So thank you to everybody here for this joint session, this opportunity to gain deeper insight into how our two jurisdictions are working together on the most pressing issue our city faces. As chair of portland's homelessness and housing committee, I am often inundated with information and requests, and I find myself in the midst of debates over scarce resources, constantly being asked to take sides. But what stands out to me, however, is that there shouldn't be sides when it comes to this issue. A shortfall, whether at the city or the county level, affects the same community we're all here to serve. Yet as we sit here today, we have no way to work effectively together because we don't share the same agenda. We can't be nimble because we haven't agreed on where our collective efforts are best applied to ultimately get people into the long term housing. So I share this because I think we're at the cusp of this truly historic moment, this opportunity to come together, create this singular vision for our communities. And as elected officials, we should have a unified plan in place that guides us through moments like this one that outlines who we're serving, how and why we're serving them across the full spectrum of housing needs. Colleagues, I believe that the only way we can measure our success and pivot when resources are scarce is if, by the end of this year, we emerge with these shared goals and strategies and metrics that reach beyond shelter, I am committed to leading a process that will bring us to a singular, cohesive housing plan. And I'm asking all of you as my colleagues, to also commit to helping us develop these solutions that are going to lead to the long term, sustainable housing that our community deserves. Thank you so much.
14 Thank you, councilor. Councilor Dunphy.
15 Thank you, madam president. A couple specific questions. Ryan, in your first slides, you said that there were 11,912 people housed or sheltered. Is that bed nights? What is that number? Is that individual? There's 12, almost 12,000 people who have been served through this system. That's correct. Okay. And with roughly 3000 units that exist citywide for overnight shelters.
16 Shelter units.
17 Correct. Am I correct in reading that it was roughly, I saw a bunch of different numbers about the cost of shelter. Specifically, I saw $45 million in there. At one point, I think I saw 28 million at another point. But I don't know. They're different. There's so many moving parts. But does that work out to about if I'm correct in reading that there was $45 million spent on shelter for 3000 beds, that works out to $1,200 a month per bed. Is that correct? Am I wrong? Am I reading that poorly?
18 So that amount is for the city tax and rv sites. We do have some information on sort of cost per type that we can forward on.
19 Yeah, I would love to get into the details of this because the presentation alternates between percentages and numbers, and I'm really I can't do anything with that saying 20% people exited shelter to permanent housing. I don't know what those numbers are. So I'm having a really hard time grasping these, and there's so many different pots of money that we're drawing for. I just, you know, if these numbers are anywhere close to what I'm actually seeing, that functionally we are paying for a cot on a bed or a cot on the floor of a church at the same as a one bedroom apartment. In certain circumstances, that doesn't make sense to me, but my last question, because we're short on time now that we are operating under the city, is operating under a district system. You know, my experience has been that a part of our street homelessness response system has led to outcomes where folks from a camp are swept and those individuals end up in district one in east Portland. How are we as a how are you as an office, thinking about the regional equity for how these resources are being allocated? You know, my experience is that folks typically don't fall into homelessness from irvington. They fall into it from powell, hearst, so or Lents. So how is that considered in our programmatic areas?
20 Let me to start. Sure. Thanks, councilor. So I would say a couple of different pieces, but happy to dive in with you on this at a different time too. The impact reduction program. So I think the camp removals that you're talking about are all across the city. I would encourage everybody to look at that dashboard that we have just shows kind of where that work is being done. It's geographically diverse. So the whole city really is represented there. I would say also, we're very intentional about putting resources in different areas. So working with my team of current shelter and also in our new kind of incident command structure, that under the mayor's direction, we're looking at putting shelters where there are maybe gaps on a map, basically. So we've plotted private, public, city, county, any kind of shelter or resource, and we are able to see where those resources are, where those gaps might be. So not only shelter, but, you know, food bank services, day services, storage services, like all those different pieces of that puzzle, and also trying to make sure that those services are near transportation and where folks might be already engaged in a community. We don't want to separate them kind of from that network. So we look at all those different pieces as we're adding shelter to the continuum, actively looking at different spots. We look at that map every day to say, this is where we might have gaps, and this is where people are asking for those services as well.
21 Thank you.
22 Can I make a quick add to that? We are really trying to develop an our shelter strategy that's responsive to the specific neighborhood. For example, we just opened the oak street village facility and with support from the city of good collaboration with the city, even though it's a county operated shelter site, we committed to pulling people from that neighborhood from the blocks that surround in the Montavilla neighborhood. It's at the foot of mount tabor, where there may not be a lot of homelessness, but I guarantee you on 82nd there is. And so I can't promise that nobody from downtown Portland will end up in a shelter on 82nd. But I can tell you that we're intentionally prioritizing moving people out of their cars and off the street in that neighborhood. Similarly, in Gresham, we're working with city of Gresham to open a shelter later this year out there, same commitment. It's going to draw people from the Gresham community and not from downtown Portland.
23 Great. You know, I'd love some additional information. Now is not the time to dive into details, but I'd love it more additional information about the cost per person that we're spending on the street and some of the cost per site, and also specifically, if we can even have a better understanding of what not only what resources are being made available in my district, but also just how that fits into the funding more broadly.
24 Very quick comment. I appreciate you're asking great questions. One, we have that data. Two when we talk about shelter costs, shelter is expensive. And I think that's kind of what's underlying your question. We also have very variable shelter costs, congregate shelter that we purchase from some providers that may be in the $60 a night range, well up to over $100 in a motel. One point. The shelter that we're purchasing is shelter with services. So it's not just a cot on a floor in a church, it's actually caseworkers, service providers, housing navigators and a whole array of services designed to move people out of the shelter. But we will get get everybody that data.
25 Thank you.
26 Councilor Smith.
27 Thank you, madam president. Thank you, county and thank you, city partners. It has been great to see all my friends in one place, and I appreciate your call to action. Dan, in terms of us giving you guidance on where we should go. But first off, I cannot give you guidance until I have the full picture. We did not get the numbers for short term and long term assistance. And my question to you is what percentage of the homeless dollars that you are over? What percentage is spent on long term and short term assistance? I've been saying 60 to 70%, but I want to make sure that I'm correct.
28 Did you want to do you want to lean into that? I was pulling up our presentation to just talk about that briefly. I don't have that exact number. Councilor Smith, we're glad to get that to you. I think that number is high that you shared the large, but.
29 Do you think it would be more than 50% of the money is being spent on short term and long term.
30 Assistance, two largest buckets of our spending are shelter and supportive housing. Supportive housing, by its nature with the services and the rent is very expensive. So those are by far the largest share of our expenses. We can get you the exact percentage of the rehousing dollars.
31 Just just so that I desegregate the data, the supportive housing services, the wraparound supports are given to people who have rent assistance. Correct. So you can't take away rent assistance from wraparound support. So that's all that's I would include that as rent assistance and supportive housing. That is a bulk of what we do in the housing and homeless ecosystem. So you can't separate that out in that manner.
32 Our. Go ahead.
33 I just want you to kind of noodle on that a little bit. So the second question.
34 We are still spending more than that on shelter.
35 Okay. But what we got here today is just a presentation on our shelter system, not on the entire ecosystem of housing. And so in order for me to give you direction, I need to see the entire ecosystem of what's being spent. And the other piece is what I wasn't clear on is the money that we have taken over year to year. How much do we have right now in the in the previous fiscal year 21, 22 and 23, are we holding over how much is in that bucket? It wasn't clear.
36 Can we go back to the slides just very quickly?
37 I saw those slides, but you said you were saving some of it for 27. But I just want to know what is the whole dollar amount.
38 We're down.
39 So no that's it. That's that's perfect. You can see the Green again is the carryover. First year we didn't have any carryover because it was the first year the carryover I.
40 Can't I can't see that Dan but could you add up the numbers I can't I can't read it. So I just want to know what dollar amount. So do we have all those Green dollars at the top right now in our backlog that are waiting to be spent.
41 They're budgeted. Every dollar except for the dollars for fy 26 is budgeted. And we're planning.
42 To spend. How much do we have in that carryover. Just just give me a dollar.
43 As we end this year, we're budgeting to have $46 million in carryover into next year.
44 That's what I need to know. And so that will be done. We have no more ARPA money, no more nothing that's going to be obligated.
45 Those are these are hhs dollars only and those will be done next year. And my point was we expected to carry them over into 27. But because of the drop in the revenue year to year, we've had to spend the carryover more quickly than we anticipated. So it will be gone in the first few months of the next fiscal year.
46 Right. But it's not fair because we had $80 million in ARPA money that you were spending for one time only money. And for us to backfill with carryover money does not make a whole lot of sense to me. Secondly, I'm going to go to a second question. I'd like to know how you desegregate the data of black, african American and africans who are being served. I ask this question before, when you all were here, could you desegregate the data because you talked about going into the community and asking the community to help with this, but you have to know which community you're going to be talking to. So if you could actually do that for me to let me know, what's the percentage of african, african American and black so that I know exactly so that we can pull the numbers? And the reason why I ask you this, if this is a priority, if this is a priority group of folks that you want to help, you did not get, give it a number. You did give the LGBTQ community a specific number to hit. And actually, the black and african Americans were the ones that needed more attention. So I would like you to give it a number, just like you did for the LGBTQ community. When you added additional beds, give it a number so that we know what we're working with. Thank you.
47 Thank you. Did you have any comment on that?
48 I'll call you.
49 We'll follow up.
50 Commissioner jones. Dixon.
51 Great. Thank you. Thank you, president, and thank you, staff, for the presentation and for the comments. It's truly an honor to be here at this table and looking forward to the future. My position is a little different. As one of the commissioners that's representing four other cities out in east baltimore county. So I'll highlight that and then I'll say I'll take my comments for your presentation tomorrow, mayor wilson. So I'm looking forward to that. Primarily in east county. I know we have the east county leadership forum or table, and we're looking to address the various needs we would like to see more direct or intentional partnership as far as where those funds are going, specifically with the hope team and helping us serve our neighbors that are that are there in the 1000 acres, and then also thinking about the whole continuum, which you've touched on already as far as the rapid rehousing, rehousing dollars, and then specifically with the challenges that we're facing within the african American community and the african community, I would encourage you to reach out to some of the churches, like linda ellerbee, who's been doing a ton of programing out in east Multnomah county through new hope church, doctor payne as well, and even city team, as far as I know, that's here in downtown Portland. As far as including them. As far as the feedback, I'm not sure if you've done that already. I think this is a great a good start as far as the conversation is concerned, and we look forward as far as east Multnomah county, the leadership, as far as continuing to address the needs within within our community. So thank you for your leadership. Thank you for your time. Thank you.
52 Councilor Kanal.
53 Yeah. Thank you. It's great to be here with with colleagues and with our partners at the county as a co-chair, the city's community and public safety committee. I'm very interested in ensuring that the impacts of, of homelessness are not creating a safety risk for either the house or the unhoused, and that the public safety system is being used appropriately as a part of this and as a district two councilor, I want to say thank you to Portland solutions for helping keep sunderland open through the end of the fiscal year, and for making public the desire for $2 million to keep it open for another year and keep those 55 safe parks spots for arv's open. I have three questions. I'll ask them all together for time one. Does the request to keep sunderland open indicate any change to the plan to open 70 new spots in north Portland, or is it is the intent to still have the net increase? Second, on the third kpi, you noted that 20% of all adults who exited shelter are going to permanent housing, and I'd like a little more information on what exactly you mean by permanent housing in the context of this kpi, and also where the other 80% are exiting to. And in the big picture, my third question how can the how would you like to see the city's public safety system support the goals and the achievement of those kpis? Thanks.
54 I can go super quickly. Sunderland. We've opened the 70 rv spots at north Portland road. It comes with 90 pods as well at that site and then we still have sunderland open. So net increase. Yep.
55 We'll follow up on the second one with the data that you're requesting.
56 Just what anna said. So on the on the third question we can also follow up with those data. Those 80%, the largest chunk of that is actually unknown status. So it's the exit destination at the point that they leave shelter. And what shelter operators are able to report. So but we'll get back to you with the specific details on that and some thoughts about how we're trying to know more about that larger chunk of unknown.
57 And to public safety, I think larger conversation. Happy to have anytime. I think there's a lot of intersection and we're trying to mitigate, I think, any negative interactions in any way possible. So I think chat and psr and our city outreach team, we're trying to bulk up, I think all of those different programs because we've seen them be really successful. I was on a behavioral health coordination call this morning with chat and psr and other outreach teams that work around the city, and I think we're trying to coordinate better, frankly, and use the existing resources in the best way possible. I think one very small thing that I think would have a really big impact is a release of information that actually allows all of those groups to talk about who they're serving, because right now it's very siloed and they're very frustrated. So that's just one piece that I'm really interested in working on. I know there's a lot of legal constraints, a lot of privacy constraints with that. But seeing kind of how we can connect all those pieces, folks doing really good work on the street. But I think who are having interactions with the same individual multiple times and not really talking to each other about what they're doing. So there's a couple different pieces that I think would make a huge impact and wouldn't require more resources.
58 Thank you. And it's great to hear Portland solutions endorsing the work of psr. More on that to come.
59 Commissioner singleton.
60 Thank you.
61 Thank you, thank you, madam president. And this will probably be the only time you hear me say, I wish I had more time. I've got a couple of comments I'll make and I think there's a lot of follow up it sounds like we'll get from folks on additional questions. So I want to start with black disparities. This has been an issue in the system since I started working in Portland. It in fact was the driver for me convening the first racial equity conversation when I was at the Portland housing bureau in 2014. Seeing it persist today is frustrating when we couple this with the reality that the Portland housing bureau state of housing report has told us that black households cannot afford rent in any neighborhood for years. It is downright infuriating. This discussion happening during black history month propels me to say that we are tired of waiting. I want to know specific strategies and timelines to inform our budget. I want monthly updates, and I want to know what the community and providers say need to be done, instead of just what we think needs to be done. On the larger components of this presentation today, I've heard a couple of you all say there'll be some follow up and some talking offline, and I think it's important that we have these discussions in the public sphere and across our jurisdictions. We need a strategy that allows us to look at investments across jurisdictions, to fund the range of services needed to shore up our system, from outreach to emergency shelter to psh and everything in between. I want to look at our shelter investments across both jurisdictions and find the right mix of types of shelter to fulfill this critical safety off the street opportunity. For those of our neighbors stuck outside, I want to evaluate the outreach work we do across jurisdictions, whether it is navigation work or housing placement focused outreach. We need to evaluate those investments and ensure that we are not duplicating services and make a functional system focused on the goal of getting people back into permanent housing and helping them stay there. For example, you mentioned $2 million that will be going. I think it was slide seven that will be going to placing people out of shelter. I want to have that conversation. Is it more effective both cost and on outcomes, to have mobile housing teams visiting our shelters to get people placed, as opposed to putting resources into certain shelters to do that placement internally? That's the type of conversation we need to have and the policy direction that I think we want to be able to give you. Lastly, I'll say regarding budget shortfalls, I think that and my county, my commission colleagues have heard me say we are not currently leveraging funds that we could be leveraging. And so one of my primary goals is to look at opportunities to leverage medicaid dollars for things like Portland street response, as well as for our housing work. We could be leveraging in a way that we are just not doing, and we have got to figure that out. I know I'm over time, so I'll stop. Thank you.
62 I apologize, commissioner Councilor. Ryan. Go right ahead.
63 Yes. Thank you, madam president. First, I want to thank those who are working on the front lines for this humanitarian crisis. We see you and we appreciate you and Dan field and your team. Kudos. The reports are improving. They're way more digestible, first of all. So thank you for that. And I'd like to hearing that there's data discipline with the providers being required to turn things in monthly. That's new information for me. So I appreciate hearing that. I would like to start with my north star, which is to move as many people as possible in one year's time, from their dependance on services and substances, to living independently with annual targets and goals. And I struggle to see this from the data. In fact, if we're on track and that gets to the heart of the matter. And so it's still tough to see that. But I have faith that you'll figure that out. To that end, have you considered separating the data into two audiences, knowing there's many more that we could do? Those who are recently houseless due to economic conditions, coupled with those who on rent burden and are receiving rental assistance in one cohort. And then the more challenging cohort and definitely more expensive to serve properly. Those who are chronically homeless with dual diagnosis, such as behavioral health, into cohort two, separate those from the beginning. And then can you make that adjustment so we can track those two groups, progress through our current system of services, which would give us more information and how to more efficiently tackle the humanitarian crisis that's holding back the prosperity of our city and our county. Question.
64 Yeah, thank you, councilor. I'll just say that when we when we spoke to separating some of the data by acuity, that's exactly what we're driving toward. So understanding the folks who have long term disabilities, long term experiences of homelessness, understanding that group as separate from the group with less. We use the short term acuity to try to capture exactly the separation that you're describing.
65 It's another layer though, right? Because we know that substance abuse doesn't discriminate based on any other demographic. It's everywhere.
66 Correct.
67 So what I think I still don't see it decoupled in the way that I said, but you said it's in there and I just can't see it.
68 No. When we said we have recommendations to move forward, to decouple our data by acuity, we're agreeing with you.
69 Oh, this is in motion.
70 Yes.
71 Okay. Great. I look forward to the next quarterly report.
72 And then I just want to add to that councilor. I just want you to know, these were the four key performance indicators that were agreed upon when the iga was renegotiated. But we as a team, once the big data cleanup project is done, we have inflow outflow. We separate housing for shelter, particularly for black, african American and africans like we are open to new and different kpis like so I think once we have a new data landscape and an understanding of what the existing data set tells us, the stories it tells us about our houseless community members and naming the limitations. So we were all on the same page about how we can slice and dice it. We're going to get to new kpis around acuity and other things.
73 Councilor Koyama Lane.
74 Hi everyone, I agree that it feels really great to be in the same space together. I think there's something about just physically being around each other that's really important. I believe that the intergovernmental agreement states that we do this quarterly. I'd advocate for us to think about doing it even more often. I'll bring up the idea that maybe there is some set. There are set times where your committee chair, Avalos, I, is bringing in county or county colleagues. I think this is really important. In case you didn't know, I'm pretty new here, but that means I've been learning really fast. There's been lots of new learning, and it also means that I'm able to come to a lot of this with some fresh eyes and a bit of an outsider perspective at times. And so I'm just going to zoom out and just say a couple things that I have noticed and see, just generally, one thing I want to point out is while I think we know this, but no one person can get us through all of this, we all here, every single person up here, has to be pulling in the same direction. And I knocked a bazillion doors this summer, and that is really what constituents want. Ones that have all different views. They want to see us pulling in the same direction and on the same side, or on the other side of that same coin is that oftentimes there usually is not just like one person or one problem to blame for everything too. I think that would be actually a really simple, easy solution. If it was, if it was that easy. And I think that sometimes that can be a bit of a lazy take on things. Last night, my colleagues from district three, including commissioner Edwards, showed up to our town hall that was at tabor space. And one thing that came up was this idea of narrative, like, what's the narrative around Portland and storytelling and how powerful that can be and how important it is to play a role in changing that narrative. And, and, and president pirtle-guiney just wrote a great op ed about, you know, like really diving in and making portland's what you make of it, which I agree. And so I think my ask to my colleagues here is that we just really think about what is this new story of Portland, of us working together, that we're going to write because we get to do that together. We get to hit the reset button. And my question to you all, if we have any time, which you can also tell me later, but is if there if you have any specific asks for us of ways that we can be working better together to support your work and vice versa, and can either say them or you can whisper them to me later.
75 Well, I would just say I thank you. Take the bait. Go for it. Take the bait. I just goes back to when I was training women who were running for office to lead with curiosity, to gain that shared understanding and to learn together and then make those hard decisions as the in collaboration, as we do that and hold each other accountable to those goals. So I just leading with curiosity and asking these great questions. It's our job to get them answered. But that's how we build shared learning. And I just this is what it's about.
76 Councilor Morillo.
77 Thank you, president, and thank you everyone for being here today. It is really refreshing to see everybody in the same room, and I really appreciate all the work that you've put in to getting us all of this information. Actually, something that happens often in meetings is that because councilor Dunphy sits before me, he always asks the questions that I want to ask. So he's covered. He he actually covered all the questions that I wanted to ask. And I look forward to getting that information. I think something that I see a lot in these presentations is that some of the costs for having people in shelter spaces, when I calculate it out per day, per month, it seems to be a little bit over $3,000 or more than that sometimes. And when I think about the average cost of a one bedroom apartment in Portland being $1,700 a month, it just makes me curious about how we are curious. I'm taking your lead already about how we should be investing these dollars in the best way possible. I think I'd also like more information if there's a way of getting this about how many of our unhoused neighbors are actually in need of really extensive supportive services, versus people who maybe just actually need help paying rent and getting into housing. You know, there's a lot of unhoused people who have master's degrees, who have jobs, who are simply, you know, maybe had a health issue or something that got them in debt. And that's why they're on the streets. And I would love to see the breakdown of how many folks we can get into housing immediately with just some assistance paying rent or something like that, versus people who need extensive services so that we can better use those dollars in the best way possible. I'm also very interested in commissioner Singleton's ideas around using medicaid dollars to do things like expand Portland street response and leverage our federal dollars, and I have a deep fear around the fact that most of our federal dollars well, I don't want to say most of them. I don't want to scare everybody. But there's a deep fear that they might be going away soon. And I'd love to see some information on like worst case scenario, mid bad scenario, and then everything gets saved and we're okay just to see the different impacts that we have to prepare for. Should federal dollars be lost at some point. And yeah, overall really grateful for your presentation. I don't have much anything new to add, but I would just love to see more of those breakdowns about the cost of our shelter spaces per person per day, and how we can get people into long term housing, because I fear sometimes that in our goals, we're going to get people into shelter spaces and will hide the homelessness problem, but we're not necessarily going to address it long term by getting them housed permanently. So that's always going to be just a north star for me. And I really appreciate your time today. Thank you.
78 Can I just respond to that? Councilor I so appreciate that that insight or those insights. One of the things when we talk about a balanced system we try to do is maintain multiple paths out of homelessness. So for example, the chair had a sort of a signature initiative housing Multnomah now, and that was focused on people who were unsheltered, getting them directly into housing, bypassing shelter. And so we were doing that at the same time as we're also trying to increase what we call placements out of shelter. And so, you know, no one path into homelessness, no one path out of homelessness. So the challenge is how in a time of shrinking or limited resources, can you create multiple pathways? We never want to be in a situation where somebody has to go to a shelter to get a housing placement opportunity. We also know that is the path for many people. And so keeping those all those paths open is really the goal of a balanced system. And it's why when we look at the major buckets of our spending, they're not going to be all equal. But we are trying to maintain a balance between between those. So thank you for that observation.
79 And just in the spirit of mutual accountability on the medicaid question, I've had one internal meeting. I need to have another one. But we do owe answers to the city as to what are the opportunities, if any, there.
80 Councilor Novick.
81 First of all, councilor Koyama Lane I think it's always a good idea to be able to blame one person for everything. I personally like to blame sam adams, but that's just me. But a couple a couple of quick questions. This might be obvious, but I think the city was sort of hoping that the county would take over operation of our temporary or task sites or providence sites or whatever they're called. I assume that that's no longer in the cards based on the county's budget problems. That's not that's not something we can expect.
82 I think we decided not for this coming fiscal year, but I think that's part of our ongoing discussions and frankly, will be decision points, I think, for all of you. So, okay, we're we're pushing it off. But further discussion for everybody.
83 Okay. Going back, I think this might be sort of a response to councilor Smith's question. Under the budget shortfall list, it has housing placement and retention, safety on and off the streets and supportive housing. Would it be right in thinking that safety on and off the streets is basically shelters and housing? Placement and retention is mostly rent assistance?
84 Yes.
85 Okay. And finally, just I mean, last time we heard from you all, the city did. I was asking what would we expect the normal level of homelessness to be, given how higher rents are at our incomes and we are not producing housing at the rate that we should? I don't see any prospect that we'll start, although we'll try. And I do think that it's worth looking at a scenario where you say we can't expect to move a lot of people into housing because there is no housing. So we have to rely largely on shelter. So if that that has to happen, what does that look like? Thank you councilor.
86 Commissioner edwards. Good morning everyone. It's great to be here with all our colleagues. I had some questions and also some comments. But instead of doing that, I'm going to try and answer director field's question about the right direction. Are we using our limited dollars in the right way? So I'm just going to share my response from the my perspective from the last year. So right direction, I think in many ways, especially in terms of our work with the city, the first day of office, I actually sat at the dais that's no longer there, stopped by the city to pledge my commitment. Director, I'm sorry councilor Ryan was here, but pledge my commitment to work with the city to get after our biggest challenges. Because, like councilor Lane, I also knocked on a lot of doors where people said their expectations. The city and county work together to get after our biggest challenges. And I do think that happened this past year. We did a lot of work together. That was foundational, I think, to the work that was described this morning. The community sheltering strategy was built with city and county commissioners. It's an essential component to our work together, and I'm really appreciative this morning of the questions and the statements that I heard from my new colleagues on the city. And I'm looking forward to the work that councilor Avalos with the homelessness and housing committees is going to be doing. I appreciate the mayor's sort of relentless focus on sheltering and getting after an issue that I know our community is expecting us to work on. So all those things, I think are the right direction. I'm going to say some things that I really am concerned about. I'm concerned about the removal and the ending of central city shelter beds that aren't being replaced. And while it might be called a pause, I think what I would interpret it as is a backtracking on our commitment to expanding shelter. I'm concerned about the continued lack of data of inflow and outflow, because we actually have no idea whether there's a net reduction in homelessness without that, and we've been promised that for a while. I'm glad to hear it's coming on March 11th. We were supposed to get that last year and then in January, and without good data, we can't. We can put out cheery press releases. But actually, if we're not, if we don't know the status of whether we're actually making progress, we can't make statements to our community that we are making progress. I'm concerned about unilateral actions on funding requests that aren't done in coordination between the city and the county, because I know from talking to the governor and legislators, our other jurisdictional partners, that they expect us to come together with a common plan, with a common ask about how we're going to do this work together. And I'll just say I'm concerned and I'm interested in commissioner Singleton's question about how we improve the flow through, because we were shooting for 40% exits from housing, and the data shows that we only had 20% exit from shelter to housing. So really answering that question is like, why are we so far off the target of something that's really essential that we don't have people just sitting in shelter? Yesterday, the auditor announced.
87 I'm going to ask you to wrap.
88 The auditor announced that she's going to be conducting an audit of dollars. I think that will be very helpful. Our community is expecting us to work together. So I really appreciate councilor Avalos asking for and calling for a common plan. I think that will be essential for our work together. Thank you.
89 Councilor Clark.
90 Thank you, madam president. Thank you all for being here. This is really a unique opportunity, and I wish we actually had time to have a discussion and not just make statements. Normally, I'm a very optimistic person. I give people the benefit of the doubt, but I'm not feeling that way right now. Let me just make a short statement. I don't really have any questions, but yesterday we, the city council, had their first meeting of the arts and economy committee and we had a presentation from econorthwest. And we learned that in their surveys, it shows that the people of Portland and the region still have homelessness at top of mind. And just like councilor Lane, I heard it on the doorstep. I heard the frustration. People asked me, why don't the county and the city just merge? For heaven's sakes, if we can't solve this intractable problem, maybe this is something we should be thinking about in the future, but clearly, I mean, it goes without saying. We need to be pulling in the same direction as everyone has said here. I want to echo what commissioner Singleton said about the future, about leveraging other resources, because I'm quite concerned about the future based on what the remarks of councilor Morillo. Also, I want to say that I'm really worried about how we're going to triage this when the money isn't there. And I hope that you all have a little room somewhere where you're sitting down and you're plotting out what those strategies are, that if this is cut and that's cut, this cut, what are we going to do? That's of great concern to me, where the cost per per shelter, the administrative savings, the efficiencies we could look for, how to reduce costs because it just seems to me there are some answers here, but we're going to have to triage at some point in the future. And I'm sorry to be a debbie downer here, but that's what that's what concerns me right now. Thank you, madam president.
91 Councilor Green.
92 Thank you, madam president. Thank you to the directors czar, city council commissioners, I welcome this discussion, and I just want to start by saying I really agree that we need to have good working relationships between the county and the city. That's based upon trust. I also want to acknowledge that I do not think that we have the public's trust right now, and we desperately need to get it and keep it if we're going to expect them to continue opening up their wallets and their hearts. So my colleagues have already raised important questions about the unit cost of service delivery. And I know it's not apples to apples to compare this work to apartments, but they're right to point it out because the public doesn't have any issue understanding what the cost of an apartment is, but they're struggling right now to understand how we're spending more on homeless service delivery than an apartment. So it's like a make it make sense proposition here. So the thing I had to add here is, is a couple of comments on fiscal stewardship. And I use the phrase fiscal stewardship and not fiscal responsibility, because the latter is often coated with this idea that government shouldn't be spending any money at all. And I think we desperately need it, but we have to do it efficiently if we're going to keep the public's will for it. So if you look at page 145 of the geo fiscal year 24 report, this is what I prepped for today in appendix f on page 145, there's a table that shows the allocation of our positions that these dollars go to fund. And folks, it's pretty alarming. Our dollars fund a total of 5802 positions across all of our providers. The city has about 7000. Okay. Of those 5802 positions, 1897 is administrative overhead. That's 41% of our spending is administrative overhead. There are 196 executive leader positions that these dollars are funding, at an average cost of $140,000 per year. And so if you just trimmed the administrative bloat from our dollar spending, you would close this gap, okay, we shouldn't be closing beds. We should be trimming our administrative bloat. And I understand why we do it, because we rely upon a distributed contractor model so we don't have control. But we have got to get this under control. We cannot keep going back to the state and other buckets of money providers for money and hope to kind of continue to, to pay this cost unless we're willing to ask the hard questions and say, is this the best use of our costs? So I see no way around bringing this in-house, making this a public sector delivery that the county offers or the multi-jurisdictional partnership offers that our public sector employees, because then we would have some oversight over this cost. If we don't do it. I know it's going to make some providers nervous, no question. But if the money dries up, they don't get paid either. Okay, so this is my this is my contribution to the conversation. Thank you.
93 Councilor Zimmerman.
94 I've never wanted to kiss councilor Green more than that statement, so thank you. Oh, I'm fired up after hearing that. Okay, so a very quick question please. Is just there is a budget line item in your in your submitted documents. 30210a safety on the streets. It is a $2.3 million budget item, with 1.9 of that coming from what does it fund.
95 Might be outreach. Outreach I think outreach.
96 So there's a different one that talks about navigation and service coordination. So this is just purely people out there talking.
97 So we can follow up with the details. But safety on the streets is typically the services that keep people safe who are living outside. So we will follow up with the details because there are there are different aspects in different areas of the budget, but we can follow up with more details.
98 My comments. Thank you. I'm being quick and I apologize for cutting you off. My comments will be relative. I thought it was some material costs there in terms of things we give for folks who are choosing to continue to live on the streets. So I have another question I hope can be asked offline. But when we identify wright as a member of the lgbt community, when I identify 50 beds that are identified, I'm really curious when we do that, what we're giving up in terms of if we didn't segment those out, could we achieve more numbers, etc. My community, right? We cover all the other demographics as well. And so I'm really trying to understand what that means so that it's not a performative number. I wasn't aware that we were creating any of our new shelters who were allowed to operate as anti LGBTQ. And so I just want to get into that because I don't think that I'm ready to kind of hear the just because you list my community isn't going to get me there to be supportive. So I'm just looking for some more data, like does that really make sense? And I think there might be a way we can make even better inroads into some of the stuff that councilor Smith brought up. So to meet director fields's request here, here, my here, my directional items, I'm hoping that we have a robust shelter program with neighborhood responsiveness to minimize the neighborhood impact, but maximize the available units. And I think that means that we stick to last year's and this current year's community sheltering strategy. So I'm worried that we're backsliding. I think we need to going along the lines of councilor Here is a no close but a new provider approach for shelters. If they aren't meeting the mark, fire them. Find a new provider. Flexible, fast paced, short term emergency rental assistance program that should be robust, but a minimal sized long term rent assistance program that is designed just for those who are chronic cases you know, whom are never going to be self-sufficient enough, and that that is a very murky area right now for to understand how long term is used. Number six, minimizing or any minimizing any programs that are designed to aid in the continued living on the streets as we increase our shelter capacity, I think we need to be decreasing the things that keep folks here. I don't think it's by accident that 40% of the homeless population is the chair mentioned are in our community. When we represent 20% of the population of the state, there's something going on there. I think this is related. And lastly, a program that can speak about populations when it comes to the cohorts. And it kind of goes with my question about the lgbt beds. Lgbt beds is not helpful for me, but lgbt beds for those who are mentally ill, who are who have addictions issues, that that's where I'm looking for some more information. I don't really want to just do the demographic check mark, and I feel like that came off as a little bit that way. So that's it for that was seven things. They're happy to share them in a better form. And I hope for the chair and for the council president. I'm also looking for future meetings where we have discussion amongst this group, and this was one time helpful, but we need to talk together. Thank you.
99 Counselor Zimmerman, will you please email that to me? I'm sorry I was listening and not writing. Thanks.
100 Commissioner moyer.
101 Yes. Thank you.
102 I don't want to repeat the many excellent comments and questions, but I will just highlight a few that I will. Second, I think we do need a greater level of detail, and I understand that wasn't what today was, but for me, I want to go deeper, know exactly what each kind of sub category means and what we serve under that and the amount we're spending and that type of stuff. Second, I see a lot of strategies that just have or, you know, here's our problem. And we're putting 18 million to that or we put 2 million. Money isn't strategy. So I'd like to differentiate between the financial investment and what the strategy is. The third and if you've ever met me, you have certainly heard me talk about medicaid. But I think this is incredibly important, and I appreciate what my colleague, commissioner Singleton said. And council member Dan Ryan and others that there has to be a specific conversation. And I you know, I'm going to question what data do you even have on acuity that would give you the right information, but also others do have it. And I do think my experience has been a little bit of resistance to open up who you're talking to and bring in people who are actually experts on severe persistent mental illness, dual diagnosis, the forensic population, which is our people who experience mental illness and then interact with our justice system. Because I could probably tell you pretty accurately how many people today in Multnomah county are at very high risk and fall into that category. And, you know, I have sent to many of you my framework of what a medicaid strategy looks like. I think it's time that we be open to radically doing things radically different, where it's not working in one specific area that I have concern is I don't think we have the right strategy for housing navigation. I actually could not agree more with commissioner Green that I think we need to have a serious conversation about bringing some of that in house. I don't think the. Delusion of these workers doing this work is actually getting us the result we need. So I put that out there. Third is to councilwoman Avila's point, Avalos, we have to have one strategy, and I would go so far as to say that this joint body, potentially with metro and it and where it is appropriate, are Clackamas and Washington county partners and other city leaders. We need to publicly have hard conversations where we're hashing things out because we will pay the price like we own the decision as an entity. So I'm asking that that we be uncomfortable and we do that together and in public. Thank you.
103 Mr. Mayor. I know that this is a joint council and commission meeting, but I appreciate that you are here with us today, and I'd like to give you the opportunity to share some remarks, if you'd like.
104 Definitely one of the new and improved sort of city council and commission. So where does the mayor fit in? Council president, thank you for this opportunity to speak. Vice president as well. And our city county colleagues, welcome to our new digs. It's nice to have you here, and it's nice for the conversation. In 2017, the city and county agreed to stand up the joint office of homeless services under the management of Multnomah county. At the time, 1668 people were living unsheltered in our county. Of those, 79 of them died on our streets without a home domicile. Unknown. In 2020, our region passed the supportive housing services ballot measure. The lawn signs that were distributed throughout the metro region were delivered by me. Those signs read end homeless crisis. Now, that year, just four years ago, 2037 people were living unsheltered in our county and 126 of them died on our streets. Domicile unknown. Today, we have one of the highest unsheltered homeless rates in the nation, over 5398 of our neighbors live unsheltered, and 456 died. Domicile unknown. These numbers shock the conscience. We must immediately and decisively deploy an emergency humanitarian response strategy. Portlanders have given us a clear and unequivocal, unequivocal, unequivocal mandate to act. Now. Why are there plans to lower the number of promised homeless response action plan beds from 1000 to 800? Our county partners have stated that they are on target to reduce unsheltered homelessness by 50%. Can they point to which half of our unsheltered neighbors matter and who they'll leave in the cold? We have a responsibility to everyone who lives in our city to ensure that the lowest rung on the housing ladder is never on the street. We have a responsibility to never make excuses for allowing people to suffer and die on our street. These are our neighbors and we must act like it. Portland is committed to working with Multnomah county. This partnership is accomplished, important work in our community. A few weeks ago, we began much needed initial expansion of scalable, cost effective emergency nighttime shelters. A critical missing link in our homelessness response. Under my leadership, the city of Portland made a simple request to our county partners follow through with the 1000 new shelter beds they committed to open by December 31st of this year and maintain the 41 million funding for existing safe rest villages and temporary alternative shelter sites. As part of our iga, we are disappointed and dismayed that doubt has now been cast on that commitment, and we expect our partners to fulfill their obligation. Portland has a responsibility to solve the crisis of unsheltered homelessness in our city, and Multnomah county is a critical partner in that effort. We will continue to pursue alternative funding sources to carry out our emergency shelter plan repairing, restoring, and revitalizing quality of life for both the housed and the unhoused depends on the successful outcome of this effort. I ask my city colleagues to continue the hard and important work required to ensure we provide a safe bed for every portlander every night. I thank you for your efforts, your support, and your moral clarity as we face this together. Thank you, council president.
105 Thank you, mr. Mayor. Chair peterson, would you like to share some remarks?
106 Yes. Thank you.
107 Again. I just okay. Thanks.
108 So thanks again everyone for the time, the really incredible discussion today. There is so much I know staff has been in the room taking down notes and questions for follow up and further discussion. I appreciate everybody being really clear about what was important to you as we continue this conversation. And I said at the beginning, I think looking at ways that we can change this and have an opportunity for more discussion within these, you know, within these quarterly sessions or something that we will be working on. You know, and I, I will just reflect on just a couple of things that were mentioned. I appreciated the comment on the public, like the question, and how can the public safety system support the work that is happening? You know, when we have had a conversation about inflow and outflow, and one of the things that is in the homeless response action plan is the fact that we know part a big part of inflow is people who are leaving carceral settings, whether it's jail or prisons. And so that is something that we are going to be continuing to work on as part of the plan. But I also think when we're looking at programs, you know, that we've started here, like for instance, deflection, where we are trying to move people away from our justice system, away from our public safety system into the pathway to stability, health recovery, treatment. Let's see what those opportunities are, as we're talking about, that for people who are experiencing homelessness and doing some of the same things, because we know that there is overlaps there. So I'm really excited. That's just one of the ideas that I'm excited about working with all of you on. I think that this was a really good start, and I appreciated the clarity on how people are approaching this issue. I will say that this is this kind of conversation is going to be critical as we continue to work together to recognize that the systems that we have built, we don't have the revenue to continue in its entirety next. And how are we going to prioritize and work together? And again, make sure that we have a holistic system that is successful in moving people off the streets and into housing, into shelter and then into housing. And then, you know, really recognizing that we have a lot of people who are in severe housing instability and how are we going to make sure that we are not also increasing the inflow because people can't afford to live and need that rental assistance. So I think there, you know, we still have to have those conversations. I appreciated staff, thank you so much for all of your work today and getting ready for this presentation and delivering this information. I know there will be a lot of follow up on the questions and the additional data that's been asked for, but everyone's voice, perspective, and priorities right now are critical. They're helpful in our work going forward. And again, just thank you so much and more to come.
109 I want.
110 To thank councilor Avalos for setting up a frame for this conversation about the big picture, because we know that the presentation we heard from all of you today is just one piece of a larger continuum that ties into a medicaid conversation, a housing conversation, and many other conversations. And we need to look at this in those contexts. I have a couple of just clarifying questions. You showed data that, at the end of the day, shows more shelter beds coming online, even in the face of significant cuts. Are you making an assumption when adding those beds that we are getting additional disbursement from metro or other counties, or that there are additional dollars coming in from the state? Or are you proposing that even with these cuts, we can continue to increase the total number of shelter beds in our community?
111 What the one area that what we share does assume the tax and rv sites stay as they are with the potential changes to peninsula and peninsula and sunderland, and that's the only place where there is not sort of funding for the ones that you see in the proposed budget and either. So that is still the one thing to work out.
112 And that's the funding. Who funds those sites. Okay.
113 But other than that caveat, I want to be clear. We submitted a balanced budget to the chair that includes those target beds, with the caveat of the city beds staying whole. And it does not rely on additional funding. What we would do with the additional funding from metro and the state is start to buy back some of the reductions that we've made, including the additional shelter beds that we showed you. We had paused along with psh spending that we've paused and a lot of other things that could go into. But no, it is part of a balanced budget. Assuming that the city beds are continue to be funded.
114 So with those numbers, I see a decrease in county beds, an increase in city beds, and then the city continuing the responsibility of paying for some of those beds. Is that accurate?
115 There is the 400 beds that are being developed. Those are county beds. So it's an increase in both.
116 Okay. With those 400, it's an increase in county beds and in city beds.
117 And also to be clear, our our office, our department budget submitted to the chair does include a proposal for one time only county money coming to the city to help close that $41 million gap. So that's our $41.
118 Million that the city would be paying for those those specific beds.
119 Say that again.
120 The $41 million that we would.
121 We're proposing to help close that $41 million gap with money from the county general fund.
122 So the proposed budget includes $13.3 million of pass through from the state, which would fund the city and the test sites, and then an additional $10 million. We're asking for of county general fund to send to the city to support those sites. So it's not the full $41 million.
123 For the reason that underlies your question, which is we're looking at this systematically. The slide that anna showed presents city and county shelter beds together for a reason. We consider it to be a system, even though the funding is disparate and we are trying to do what we can do to help close that gap, because we're equally relying on those shelter beds. And that's why we included that in our budget.
124 And I appreciate you noting that it's one system. These are one set of beds, and I appreciate that. I generally look at this as one system. Also want to make sure I understand where beds are expanding and capacity is shrinking. What that looks like. You asked during the presentation if the vision was correct and you stated a vision that was ending people's homelessness and ending racial disparities, and I have to share that. I'm a little bit disappointed because the data that you shared shows that we're meeting many of our kpis, except on those two things, and we are far below where we need to be on ending individual portlanders, individual Multnomah county residents, homelessness. And we are far below where we need to be. On serving the black community. And I hope that when we see the next sets of data, we're doing better on those two things. Because if our system's goal is to end people's unsheltered homelessness and close racial disparities, we're measuring some great things and doing well on all of them. But that goal. So I just I think that needs to be noted. As I think about our system, I hope that we're trying to do three things. I hope that we're trying to keep people from living on the streets. I hope that we are trying to, in doing so, save lives, as the mayor talks about. And I hope that we are trying to transition as many people as possible to housing as we face these budget shortfalls, because there are budget shortfalls at the county and the city both. We know that the state is struggling to figure out how they can meet all of the demands across the state for programs like this, and there are shortfalls within the metro programs. I think we need to keep those goals in mind. And you've heard a lot today about what folks focus is, but we need to make sure that we're giving you clear direction on how to get there. And I don't know if you got that today. But I trust that we will get there. I hope that the charge that we all heard is to get there. I heard loud and clear from some of my colleagues that we need to be able to have more discussion. We used the format today that had been used at the last meeting like this, but we certainly can change that and have a format that allows for more discussion next time. This is something that we need to do quarterly, so let's figure out how to do that in a way that works, so that we can give you all the clear direction you're looking for. I appreciate the presentation today. I appreciate the comments from all of my colleagues. Chair, do we have any other business on your agenda?
125 No, we are finished with our business.
126 Okay. And I think I'm actually going to give us all a little bit of time back. I will close the joint city council and county commission meeting, and we will do this again next quarter.
127 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
128 Thank you.