The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-07-24
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (8,379 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Labor and Workforce Development Committee met on Thursday, July 24, 2025, at 12 p.m., with roll call establishing attendance and a statement of conduct read into the record. The session's sole agenda item concerned economic conditions and workforce needs, featuring a presentation from Work Systems Incorporated on the 2024 Self-Sufficiency Standard for Oregon, which measures the actual income needed for households to meet basic needs without assistance, contrasted with the federal poverty measure. The presentation covered variation in self-sufficiency wages by family type, county, and city district, noting disparities in East Portland households below the standard, rising housing and childcare costs relative to wage growth, and limited occupations meeting self-sufficiency thresholds. Additional topics included the Quality Jobs Initiative, the Prosperity Planner tool, the Columbia Willamette Workforce Collaborative, career and technical education pathways, funding sources including federal, state, and local contributions, and risks to federal funding. Discussion also addressed potential city interventions such as HR hiring practices, coordination with school districts, preschool and childcare capacity, and connections between employment and homelessness services. Some figures presented were stated inconsistently. No additional business was conducted, and the meeting was adjourned with the next meeting scheduled for August 14.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
0 Against your hulk hogan died. I did, yeah, good. Yeah. That was I. Really. Good afternoon. I call the meeting of the labor and workforce development committee to order. It is Thursday, July 24th at 12 p.m. Daigle, will you please call the roll?
1 Good afternoon. Canal Novick here. Green.
2 Here.
3 Dunphy. Here. Smith.
4 Craig, will you please read the statement of conduct?
5 Welcome to the meeting of the labor and workforce development committee. To testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at. Agenda slash labor and workforce development committee, or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at the link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In-person testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The chair preserves order disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, state your name for the record. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent and virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
6 Thank you craig. Colleagues. Attendees. We have a fairly light agenda today, but it's an important one. I'm standing in for chair Smith, who cares very deeply about not only the current state of labor conditions and work our workforce, but also is always thinking to the future. So I do want to give her kudos for that. She couldn't be here today, so I'm honored to gavel in her absence. We will receive a presentation today from work systems incorporated. Executive director andrew mcgoff will share information from the newly released 2024 self-sufficiency standard for Oregon, an evidence based measure of the real cost of living in Portland and the rest of the state. And colleagues, I just I'm excited to hear this, see this presentation because a lot gets missed when we look at just aggregate headline statistics, when we think about our economy. And I think that everyone in this committee is interested in what is being missed and how how that affects livability in this city and who can afford to live in it. And so I'm really excited to hear this presentation and to have this conversation today. Diego, will you please read the first item.
7 Item one economic conditions and workforce needs.
8 Thank you. And at this time, I'd like to invite andrew to come on up and introduce yourself for the record.
9 Good afternoon.
10 I'm andrew mcgoff. I'm the executive director of work systems, where the workforce development board for the city of Portland, Washington and Multnomah counties. And I'm going to see if I can pull up this presentation.
11 While you're pulling that up. I just want to say thank you for being willing to come and give this presentation today. It's super timely. I always appreciate your partnership.
12 Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here. Can you all see this?
13 Not yet, but I suspect we're working on it.
14 I thought I followed all the instructions, it's like. Just skipped.
15 We've got the best and brightest on it.
16 And then we'll just that. There.
17 There you go.
18 Great. Thank you.
19 So we currently have 30 minutes scheduled and budgeted in the meeting for the presentation with committee q&a. But this is the only agenda item. So I would say let's kind of take our time with this and let us know if you can entertain questions along the way. We're happy to hold them to the end. So just let us know what you prefer.
20 Absolutely. Feel free to interrupt me at any time. A little disclaimer I am not the economist in our shop who developed and worked on this report. I can fake it pretty well, but she is actually out of town. But if I can't answer, I'll certainly connect you with the right people who can or get you that answer. So again, I'm andrew mcgoff, I'm the executive director of work systems, which is the workforce development board for the city, Multnomah and Washington counties. And as the workforce development board, we're designated by the governor to receive certain pots of federal and state money to essentially try and improve the quality of the regional workforce and respond to regional workforce opportunities and challenges. So the regional public workforce system consists of more than 40 public education and community based partners, who collectively serve more than 25,000 people last year and is a critical resource in addressing some of the region's most persistent and significant challenges. I want to provide you some of this background, just because I think it will rest with the rest of the data as we move forward. So the city is an integral partner of the regional system, and I did want to shout out to commissioner or councilor Smith, now, who is a member of our board of directors and has done a tremendous job in advocating for these issues and the populations we're trying to serve. So today, I want to share some more information about our updated 2024 self-sufficiency standard. We work with the university of Washington center for women's study to update this data every two years. The self-sufficiency standard is a measure that calculates how much income a family must earn to meet basic needs. Without public or private assistance. The self-sufficiency standard ensures that the best data and analyzes are available to enable Portland families and individuals and others across Oregon to make progress towards real economic security. So I'm going to share some basic information about the standard, what some of the data is telling us now and then, how we use it at work systems and across the regional system to better serve job seekers and employers around the region. So malcolm x signed a kind of perfectly conveyed how we feel about the official federal poverty measure. It is wrong on multiple fronts and does not reflect the true cost of what it actually takes to survive and thrive in 21st century Portland. So the official poverty measure was developed in the mid 1960s by mollie orshansky, who was a staff economist at the social security administration. And essentially, how it works is it stipulates that a family whose income is lower than three times the cost of a minimal diet is considered officially poor. So this standard has not changed since 1963. So in contrast, the self-sufficiency standard calculates the real cost of meeting all basic needs. I'm sure that some of you might have heard of, like the mit calculator. This is like the mit calculator only on steroids. Our self-sufficiency standard actually determines sustainability for 700 different family types, whereas the mit calculator only focuses on seven different family types. So this is a very robust model. It predates the mit standard by multiple decades. So just wanted to provide that. So under the federal poverty measure you essentially just take the cost of food, multiply it by three. Well that might have worked in 1963. Today we know that things like rent and childcare typically take up more than half of the average family's budget in Multnomah county. So we also know that costs vary depending upon family type. So what this graph is showing you is that while the official poverty measure does indeed change depending upon family size, it increases at a constant rate of 5140 for each additional family member. So, by contrast, the self-sufficiency standard changes by family type to account for increases in costs specific to family composition. So, for example, a family that requires child care is going to have higher costs than a family who doesn't. So we also know that costs vary by location. So if you look on well to my left is a graph of the state of Oregon under the official policy or poverty measure in Oregon, as long as you earn $19,720, regardless of where you live, you're not considered poor. By contrast, under the under the self-sufficiency standard, it varies across each county in Oregon, so an adult with a preschooler needs between across Oregon, about $46,000 to $81,000 a year, depending upon where you live. And you know, the darker the Green, the higher the cost. So what did the 2024 standard tell us? So more than 440,000 Oregonians live below the standard. And that's Oregon households, by the way. So it's more Oregonians than that. A third of those, more than 140,000 live in Washington and Multnomah county's. And if you look at I won't read through all of these little indicators here, but the last one that says percentage of households below the standard, that should be 33%, not 3%. So a third of the people who are living below the standard do not have access to internet or regular access to internet. So if we sort of zoom in a little bit to Multnomah county, 21% of households in Multnomah county struggle to make ends meet, which means they're living below the standard. So a big driver of that is housing costs, as I'm sure we would all know. So housing costs have increased 152% since 2008, which is a pretty significant driver. But we also know that food costs and childcare costs just over the last four years have really significantly increased as a result of, you know, sort of post pandemic inflation. So if we drill even further into Portland here, you'll see variations across the state, the city of Portland, this is done by puma, which is a statistical sort of zip code measure. And we can do a deeper dive into this. By the way, again, our economist who's done most of the work isn't available, but we'd be happy to drill down to. If you all are interested in a specific district or a specific area of zip codes, let me know and we can we can do that for you. But you'll see that, not surprisingly, it's really east. The city's eastern section, where 47% of households there, or almost 17,000 households are living below the standard. Yeah. Councilor I see like these are astonishing numbers and sort of sobering once we get into them. So this slide shows two also that the kind of job that you get really does matter. So seven of the ten excuse me largest regional occupation. So that's by numbers of people employed in those occupations do not pay a self-sufficiency wage for an adult with one preschool child. So you'll see that the threshold for those folks is $38.66 an hour. That's in Multnomah county. So you're only three occupations that pay that software developers, registered nurses and general operations managers all, by the way, require a minimum of a four year degree or higher. So it creates quite a challenge. So here you'll see between 2020 and 2024, here's this sort of post-pandemic inflationary stuff. We did see a rise in wages. And we looked at the retail sector specifically because that's really our biggest occupational classification is on retail sales and clerks and stuff. And we saw 22% increase in wages, which is good. But the costs of childcare during the same period increased by 33%. So you're seeing that even though you're having this increase in wages, it's not keeping up with the with the price rises in other areas that people are relying on to either go to work or stay and work. So now sort of shift to give you like some perspective around how we're using it and how we sort of have thought about this stuff for a long time. So I mentioned we sort of ran into this self-sufficiency calculator in 2008. So we've been doing this work for a long time. And really. You know, the initial part of the journey was that this federal poverty measure doesn't tell us the true story about what's going on with people. But the other thing was, we wanted to make sure that the dollars and the resources we were investing were really helping to move people to a place of economic security and economic self-sufficiency. That's our goal, right? We want to help people become economically self-sufficient and support themselves and their family and have a good living. And so we really wanted to use the standard as a mechanism to drive change within the public workforce system. So after that, well, I'll just talk about it moving forward. So sort of the first thing we've done and again, this is a place where I would really encourage you if you're curious, I know councilor Green. You may be you have an economics background. This link that's indicated on this slide, if you go there you can search by county. You can search by demographics. It's really a great tool to drill down to. It only does at the county level right now, but we're working on trying to figure out how we can get a little deeper. But so over time, we've really used the standard to help us really understand better who isn't meeting the standard. And then to, you know, target our resources towards those individuals. So today all of the report data is available on our website and can be sorted by location, family type and demographic characteristics. And again, this is really helpful in determining who in your community or your district is not achieving economic self-sufficiency. So then we couple that data with demand side information. So we're really like if we want to work with an industry, part of the reason we want to work with that industry is it offers great careers and opportunities for advancement towards self-sufficient wages. Wages, because we know like, you know, you talk to employers about this stuff and they freak out, you know, I can't pay that much money. I'll never pay that much money. Well, do you have a pathway? We get that too. And we're working with a lot of people that are just coming in at the entry level. They're not ready to make $38 an hour, but is there a pathway for them to get there if they demonstrate success along the way? So then we can build services around that journey to make sure that people as they're advancing, they've got supports in place to help them get there. So it's really just sort of the kind of, you know, how do we really make sure that all of the resources, wraparound resources, other things are available for people as they're on that journey to self-sufficiency, trying to acknowledge that not everyone is going to get there right out of the gate. So the other thing that we've done is we've embedded the standard into what we call the prosperity planner. And this is another thing that you can click on. But this is a planner that's used by everyone that we contract with in the public system. And the idea is that it's an online career planning tool and budgeting tool so that an individual comes in and in. This tool helps them understand how much do they need to make to achieve economic self-sufficiency, and then what jobs and training are available through the public system to help them get there, and what work supports like tax credits or public assistance, etc. Might be impacted as you move on the journey towards self-sufficiency. So it will tell you when you earn this much money, you're going to lose, you know, subsidies related to your housing. So how do we deal with that when you get there? So it's a really great tool. I would encourage you if you're curious, have a look. But it's a fantastic tool. So the next thing we sort of morphed into and this is around 2010 is we created this bi state collaborative that we call the columbia Willamette workforce collaborative, which is really a partnership between us and our two sister boards, one in southwest Washington and one in Clackamas. Don't ask me why Clackamas is separate. We could get into that. That's a whole other conversation. But the reality is we've worked in deep partnership with those organizations to really look at the labor shed. Not necessarily, you know, our own limited jurisdictional boundaries. And I know that it's hard to say to elected officials, but, you know, businesses don't care where you live. They really want to get access to the most qualified people. And conversely, workers want to go to the place within reason where they can earn the best money and have the best opportunities for themselves and their families. So since forming this bi-state collaborative, we've raised more than $60 million in competitive workforce resources, and we're recognized as sort of a national leader in bi state kind of collaboration. So how the self-sufficiency standard and works in this is that we've embedded the self-sufficiency standard into how we identify regional industries of focus. So specifically industries that have jobs or pathways that require two or fewer years of post-secondary education, occupational median wage at or above start at $21 an hour, and then clear pathways or a willingness to develop pathways to self-sufficiency. So we're literally sitting down with our staff. If the health care industry says to us, hey, yeah, we want we want you to work with us, which often means provide scholarships to people or train people to our specifications. We're like, that's great, we'll do that. But first of all, they have to have access to your industry and we're going to track that. And secondly, you got to pay them at least $21 an hour. And thirdly, if you don't have pathways, you have to work with us to create these pathways to help people advance in your industry. And I'll be honest, industry has no qualms with that. They are totally they like the sort of transactional clarity of saying, look, my, my metric is to put people to work. So, by the way, if we train them to your specifications and they're not going to work, then we have a problem and they're like, I get it. So it's proven to be a really good sort of piece of clarity to work with industry. So in 2021, I don't know if you all know this, but we linked the standard to the region's comprehensive economic development strategy, which really embedded it then into any resource that comes in through the economic development industry. Under the comprehensive economic development strategy, has to tie into self-sufficiency standards. So that, again, has been sort of a policy development that I think has been under the radar. But it's been really important for our community. Sorry about that.
21 Oop.
22 I have a new phone and I have no idea how to silence it. So anyway, it's and we've been trying to push on our partners in the economic development sphere when they're doing business expansion or recruitment efforts to really consider the quality of the jobs that those those efforts are going to bring to the community. So just another way to kind of keep the notion of, you know, economic security is kind of important. Income has a lot to do with it. So sort of the next frontier for us, if you will, is what we're calling quality jobs. And it's in part because it's sort of a national, a natural progression for how we've dealt with the standard in the past. But the other reality is that the quality of American jobs is pretty dismal at the moment. You'll see that 40% of u.s. Workers think they have a bad job. More than 53 million Americans earn low wages, and in the metropolitan area, I put approximately because I couldn't find the exact number. But it's at least 150,000 households are living below self-sufficiency wages. So, you know, when you sort of dig into those numbers, too, what you find is low income workers are more likely to be disappointed with their work. And nearly one third of black women work in bad jobs, a higher percentage than in any other large racial or gender group, driven by low satisfaction and aspects of work unrelated to pay. So these are things such as control over schedule, stability of work hours, and enjoyment of just day to day experiences on the job. So it does have an impact across the board. And you know, when you think about it on the worker side, if you had a bad job, it's just financial stress. You can't make enough. You get sick more often and you're more likely to use public assistance. And then on the employer side, higher turnover, diminished productivity, reduced growth. And certainly on the community side, we're looking at more use of public assistance, which strains our coffers. So in response, we launched the quality jobs initiative, again in collaboration with southwest Washington and Clackamas county. And so by working with the council of labor representation, workers, local government and industry, we define a quality job in our region using self-sufficiency wages. Does a company offer comprehensive benefits? Is there a predictable schedule? Worker safety and engagement. How well do you feel accessibility and equitable hiring practices? And then finally, training and advancement opportunities. So, you know, again, this is sort of an evolving thing for us. But I often think about like b corporations and you know, Portland has a pretty robust number of b corps in, in I think like 135. And the last time I checked. But what we're trying to do ultimately is embed this sort of certification into something like b corp status. So if we could actually get it into the b corp application, it would be a really great way to sort of scale it up. And it's like really helping employers to focus on these kinds of. Quality standards within their workplace. And then of course offering assistance to help them get there. But it's really sort of new to us. So we're kind of just exploring ways to do that now. But on the service delivery side, we've we have integrated the quality requirements into the regional public system. So again, it's pretty big system, 25,000 people, 40 plus organizations by training staff, community partners and modifying contracts. So all of our contracts now include performance metrics around moving people into quality jobs. And then it's the same on our industry side. So when we're working with when our staff are going out and working with industry, they are looking at that those industries and making sure that they're offering pathways to quality jobs. And we're measuring it. So to promote career coaching with a focus on job quality, we've created a practical tools. So here's a good example I think I provided this in your packet. But like a peer support specialist that's a job. No one not many people would think about that as a quality job, but in fact it does pay about $21 an hour and 20 to $23 an hour. But the real question is, once you get someone into that job, what are the opportunities to help them move up? So we've been creating these profiles that are intended to help career coaches in the network and beyond. So across the region understand the pathways for that individual who's moving to peer support because they don't you know, a typical career coach is not going to know, oh, I can go from a peer support worker to a supervisor to a licensed, you know, whatever social worker. So we're doing a lot of work there. And you'll see sort of on the right side, we've really drilled down into those entry level occupations that have proven to be really accessible for underserved populations, populations that are coming to us with a background or with former substance abuse houselessness issues. So we're really trying to build out those entry points and then working with the industry to figure out ways to move up. So it's a promising sort of start. So I'll end here. But I, you know, I wrote this, I'd be remiss if I didn't come to you guys and say, you know, we're all facing a lot of headwinds here. You know, we've got the kind of same federal change and uncertainty that we're all going through. We've actually lost resources. We had a department of energy grant that was intended to move underserved populations into, into careers in, into the solar industry through ibew. And that was canceled. We have declining resources. We took about a 16% cut this year in federal resources to our organization. And competitive grants are, frankly, drying up. It's very hard right now to go out and find additional resources. And of course, we know it's going on to state it's been a it's been a challenge there as well. And then I think where we have some opportunity here as a city and as a region to work more effectively together. A I just want to say how appreciative I am that you all have started this committee, because I think it's really important, and I think it can also help propel us to be a better community, because income matters a lot. And I think if we work together, we can kind of get there. And I think of places like PCEF, I think of places like our efforts on homelessness and homelessness. I think of things like, you know, internships and apprenticeships and public sector employment. How can we work together to sort of build those kinds of relationships and pathways that are really focused on populations in our community that I think we all agree, need to have the kind of access to those opportunities because they've either historically been unavailable to them, or they offer pathways to really high quality jobs. So that's my spiel. Happy to answer questions as best I can. And these are just some resources. Click away and hopefully you'll find them interesting and helpful and available anytime if you need anything. So thank you.
23 Thank you so much for that presentation. I know that I've got a number of gears turning in my head, but I'll look to my colleagues to see if there are any questions or comments to kind of get us started. Councilor Dunphy. And then we'll go to.
24 Thank you, sir andrew. I mean, none of the numbers I saw were fully new, but certainly shocking in the direction that they're moving. I mean, so many of those numbers are moving in the wrong way, especially for my district in east Portland. I think I read on that. You said there are roughly 150,000 metro households under the self-sufficiency level. But then I think you also had a slide that said district one, roughly east Portland was at like 47% were not meeting the sufficiency level. That means that almost half of all the people in the metro area, about 70,000 people, are living in east Portland and not making sufficient wages.
25 No. Well, it's the broader Portland metro statistical area. So it's a lot larger if you get into the city. Yeah. With those puma show that. And by the way, beyond the city limits are not included in those pumas I don't believe. But in the city of Portland, 47% of the folks that live in the eastern part of the city are below the standard. And it's about 17,000 households.
26 Yeah.
27 Okay. So but your district extends right beyond the city bounds, is that right? No, no, but it's about 17,000 households.
28 Then about 150,000 people in district one total. So about I mean that's yeah, it's also you know, district one is also home to 40% of all the children in the city, 50% of all the bipoc folk.
29 Not surprising.
30 You know, we're we are we don't have jobs in east Portland. So folks are transit dependent or or transportation dependent. I'm seeing some real specific pinch points. It seems like that you are sort of calling out here, and I'm wondering if there are opportunities for intervention in some meaningful way. I'm specifically looking at you're saying the childcare costs are raising, you know, not exponentially, but like significantly, food access is a problem. It's going to get worse in district one now because the fred meyer gateway is closing. Do you see opportunities where this city council could intervene in some meaningful way to try and move that?
31 I do, I see a well off the top of my head again. I'm. You know, I think public sector employment is a pathway that could be. Better organized to really address the needs of some of the underserved communities. Because the other thing that you'll notice about your district, and I'm this it's been a while, although travis stovall is on my board, so he's always talking to me about, you know, Gresham and being, you know, the new lake oswego or whatever. But the reality is, is that only about 17% of residents in east, the east part of the city and I'm this is probably pertains to Multnomah county, too. Have a post-secondary degree or post-secondary credential that would compare to like, the inner city, like sort of where we are now. We're more than 50% of the residents have a degree. So that has a big impact on earnings. Clearly do.
32 Sorry.
33 Go ahead. But I do think like so if you look at your hr practices, do all of the jobs that you have available in the city really require the kinds of qualifications that are in those jobs? And if not, could we change them to make them more accessible for people? And I'm not saying unskilled people, I'm just saying that don't necessarily have the piece of paper that that, you know, they get automatically thrown out because they don't have that degree, but they may be perfectly qualified for the job. And so I think looking at hr policies, hr practices, and then the question is if our goal really is to elevate the earnings and the income of city residents, how do city residents get priority access to those opportunities? You guys are a big employer. And so I mean, I think you could create a bunch of opportunities. And the other place I would say that and again, we're we're working very well with the folks at PCEF. But, you know, it's we're sort of engaged with them like any other contractor. And we don't deliver services. We coordinate money. And the question should be, well, we have a federal investment, we have some state dollars, and then we have this amazingly, potentially beneficial local investment. How do all of those work together? And I think we're really well positioned to talk about how do we make sure that all of those resources are working together so that either, you know, it's lessening the burden on PCEF to do workforce related activities, or we're able to better sustain those activities. If one part goes away and another one becomes available. So those are the kinds of, I think, opportunities I see. I think it's also this is more of a metro housing houselessness thing. I mean, I think it's absurd that we have to argue that employment ought to be part of the strategy to end homelessness. Yeah, that is like ridiculous. And we had to go and, you know, wrestle with with your help, by the way, and I appreciate all the assistance we got from the city. But you know why? Like employment is really, really important if we want to actually solve houselessness. And so how do we fit all of our employment activities together in a way that really is focused on those populations? Because that's the ultimate challenge here, right, is if we say someone who's homeless or formerly homeless, mostly formerly homeless by the time they get to us. But I think in our system, we serve 1700 people who were either houseless or housing insecure or on the verge of homelessness or formerly homeless. That is a huge number of people. That's one of the biggest systems in the city. And it's like, well, how does that work in the broader rubric of housing, employment, service delivery? So I think there's huge opportunity there. And especially if we work together, because most of these services, to be honest with you, in the federal and the state structure, are delivered by state staff. So what we really need is the state staff to align their priorities with our regional priorities. And so we have to go to their boss. And their boss is the governor. And the governor needs to say, hey, if someone's houseless in our service delivery structure, we need to prioritize that person. And so those are things I think.
34 Those are great. I will say that. I think that there's I think that you're exactly spot on, that employment is a huge part of our need to be able to address the challenges on our streets with homelessness and housing insecurity more broadly and dignity and, you know, stability. I also am deeply worried about waiting until folks are homeless to start that process. And, you know, I started my career out in the david douglas school district where we knew that probably 80% of those kids are not going to college. And, you know, 80% of those who do aren't going to finish, probably. And I mean, it's just it's a it's a basic fact, but all of our systems are built around the idea that you have to go to college if you want a job with dignity. Are there opportunities to coordinate closely with some of our school districts to try and build that pipeline early of folks who are, you know, ready for making them ready for employment by the time they graduate, or maybe even post high school graduation.
35 Huge opportunities. So, I mean. This is a big area of challenge for me. I'll just pose this question because you guys are workforce people. So in the state of Oregon, we have more than a thousand approved cte courses of study. There are only 800 defined occupations in the state of Oregon. So we have more programs of study than we do occupations. And the reality is that the skills to be a carpenter aren't different in medford than they are in Gresham, but every single one of our 197 school districts has the same conversation over and over again. Well, what kind of skills do you need to be a carpenter and blah blah blah. And it's. Terribly inefficient. It and it gets in our way to bring anything to scale. We know, like here in the metro area, we have five pre-approved. Registered with pre-apprenticeship programs. Right. There is no reason that a school district could not have a registered pre-apprenticeship program focused on the building trades, so that when a kid got out, because there are all these programs are 12 week long, you know, this this could be the last half of your senior year. You go to this this program of study. And the deal would be we'd have to work with our organized labor friends. We'd have to work with building councils and whatnot. There are national curriculum standards out there for it. We just adopt it. Kids come out and the deal should be you get either direct entry into a building trade, or you go directly onto a job site where you get training, additional training. There is no reason we couldn't do that years ago. We did it for manufacturing. You know, everyone was like, oh, we can't find any welders and stuff like that. It's like, no, when you really talk to manufacturers, what they lack is production workers. We looked around all over the nation. We found this certified production technician training certificate identified by the national institute for manufacturing skill standards, delivered all over the country in high schools. And employers here to an employer said, if someone came to me with that certificate, certificate, I would hire them and there is no reason you couldn't do that in high school other than whatever goes on in high school, that gets in our way. But I think that's true. The other thing I'll say, you know, be quiet. I mean, we have to be, like, honest about, like, what you can accomplish in high school and what you can't. Like, we like I go to benson and they have these great, awesome looking, you know, like labs where they'll have those those mannequins that you can work on and you put. But it's like the only way you're ever going to do that in real life is if you go to post-secondary education and you get the certification required to either do the ekg or whatever, the real question for me is, what can you learn in high school that prepares you for work? What's the things in high school that employer locally would say, damn, if you knew that, and you came out of high school and you had a and you could either go to work at starbucks or you could go to work here for $3 more an hour. And by the way, given the percentage of our public service that's reliant on income to provide, you know, state or local services, that would have a huge difference. And, you know, we have 10,000 industrial jobs on the waterfront. If we got the schools together and got those guys together and said, hey, we want a direct pathway. When someone graduates from high school, what do you need? Boom, I think it could happen.
36 Councilor Novick.
37 I was just worrying about your budget and just want to know if you could elaborate, like where does your money come from now? I mean, what's the breakdown and what's at risk and what's what's not. What does the picture look like?
38 So about 50% is federal comes through the department of labor as part of the labor hhs annual appropriation. We are we are close to level funded through June of 2026. After that, there's two proposals that have been offered up by the current administration. One is called make America skilled again, which essentially consolidates 11 federally funded workforce related programs and consolidates them into a state block grant and cuts the funding in half. Thanks. Yeah, so that's proposal one. Proposal two, which is probably more likely there was a bipartisan bill that passed to replace the current primary workforce legislation at the federal level. I can't remember the acronym. It's pretty bad. It's like rsa or something, but. The problem with that is it again, picks at local control and does lean a lot into states having more discretion in how money is distributed. Right now, the governor is required to distribute money to local areas based on a formula that he or she can't manipulate, so it provides some protection for us and also some stability in the funding. But that's about 50% of our funding. And yeah, it's very precarious right now.
39 And what's the what's the breakdown of the other 50%?
40 The other the state contributes about 20% of the resources. And then the remainder is a variety of federal competitive grants which have a life state competitive grants and then local funding, including very generous contributions from the city of Portland. But Multnomah county, city of Portland, Washington county, and some philanthropic investment, but not much.
41 Thank you.
42 I guess I'll take take the mic for a minute. So I'm going to start off with a question. So the self-sufficiency methodology that that wage that ultimately comes out of it is a function of cost, right? It's a function of the basket of goods that you need to be whole as a, as a household. Is that correct? Yes. And so you and I did some skimming through the document, but it's kind of trying to get hyper specific about location and look at, you know, not just big aggregate inflation indices, but but sort of like what does it really cost in the county that we're looking at? And to me that's pretty alarming because on the one hand, so there's two sides of the ledger as far as I'm concerned. So there is the cost side. And then there's the employment side. And you guys are focused on the employment side. But I also see this vision where you're you're also cultivating a resource for the future that should help the cost side, because there's this inter-industry flow concept here. You're taking a regional approach to saying, how are we going to prepare the workforce for the next generation? So that way they can be supporting an abundance agenda for, you know, which then which should drive down costs for the next generation or maybe even the current generation. So I really liked when I saw on the slides that some of the targeted and high opportunity sectors were were in what I would call the care economy. It's peer counselors. It's early childhood education. It's this very crucial skill set that is going to support an increasingly aging population. But as well as kind of, I think, picking up the cost side, it's providing a resource to develop a labor resource that should give us the capacity to lower the costs on the on the big ticket items for households, like preschool, for instance. Is that kind of like the philosophy that you guys are taking?
43 Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah.
44 So that's that's good colleagues. And I was playing with the self-sufficiency calculator, which I encourage you guys to do. And you know, I was just curious in like the single, the single earner with a couple kids scenario because I know that's maybe not the most typical household, but that is a pretty vulnerable one in my view. And if you're a single adult in Multnomah county with two teenagers, so that's you don't need preschool costs. There's no childcare costs. The self-sufficiency hourly wage is 29 bucks an hour. Okay. That's still leaves you pretty vulnerable. Like you're basically only going to be able to live in east county. And there's, I think only one zip code in east county. Like if you're if you're a black person, it's just 122nd in division. Where, where there's affordability. But if you change that to two children who are in preschool, I'm just going to do that right now or preschool age, then you need to earn $54 an hour. And so as we kind of think about how do we cultivate and lower, you basically raise the standard for as many people as possible. We need to give you guys the resources to do what you're doing. But we also need to be pretty aggressive about recognizing that we as a city council and, you know, in partnership with the county. And frankly, this is a regional problem. So in partnership with metro, need to be really serious about making those public sector investments that bring down that cost. I'm grateful we have preschool for all. I see opportunities for implementation and scale so we can kind of get that going further. And so I just wanted to kind of offer those comments here. I don't know if anyone else. Oh, the other thing I'd like to say is our tradition in the united states for the last 40 years, I suppose, has been to deal with poverty through cash assistance and vouchers and kind of lean on the market. And that's kind of worked to a certain degree. But it only goes so far as there's resources to purchase with those vouchers. So if we already have a lack of housing in a city like Portland or a county like Multnomah, vouchers will only go so far. And the same thing is true with with child care. The same thing is true with assisted assisted living. So you really do need the labor force there standing ready to enter that field. And you need the capacity in our our infrastructure to deliver that if we want to stretch those dollars. So I just wanted to offer that as well. I don't know if anyone has any desire to kind of be in dialog with this further or any further questions, but I think that's all I wanted to offer their colleagues or give you an opportunity to also just.
45 No, I again, I think that was great. Council Green. And that's kind of yeah, the way we see it, we believe that, you know, despite some of the bumps I mean I think some of the progressive things that we passed as a community are really the right things to do. We need to figure them out. We need to be better and faster and be able to scale them more rapidly than we have been in the past. But I think the underlying principle behind that is really smart, and I think we'll position the region well into into the future. But, you know, we're going to have bumps and bruises trying to get there. And again, I, I just, you know, I said this yesterday to someone and it felt weird. But like reagan once said, you know, the best social program is a job. And I would just modify that to say the best social program is a good job. And I think, like there's like the person that's implementing our quality jobs initiative was a senior vice president for a long time with salt and straw. And, you know, you don't think of as an ice cream person as being a quality job. But when you look at the infrastructure that salt and straw put in place under the direction of our staff person. Now to really think about that job and to add in the things like safety and advancement. And so I believe that you can turn almost any job into a quality job, as long as you have the sort of guardrails to help people when they're ready to branch out and the companies there and acknowledging that, yeah, our job might only go here, but I'm going to give this person every opportunity to connect when they're ready to move up and to move on. Even so, I really feel like that's where we want to be, is we want to help our employers sort of live the value of quality jobs. And it's not all about wages every time, but you can create quality opportunities, and then you can also create those relationships that help people move up. And it might not be in your organization. And that's fine. So thank you again for the time. I really appreciate it and look forward to working with you in the future.
46 Thank you, andrew. And I'll just before I pass it over to councilor Novick, I'll just say, you know, everyone remembers when you think about a good job. Like, I think our mind goes to manufacturing and the postwar period, like those were good jobs, right? We lost manufacturing in the united states. We lost our good jobs. Those weren't necessarily good jobs. It was hard work. Physically. It was dangerous. They were physically demanding. What made them good jobs is you had a union, right? And you had an organized. There was this, sort of this, this sort of postwar accord. In a sense, you can apply that to any job. So I so I really appreciate that there. And one last thing. You know, the civil rights movement in the united states, the forgotten part of it was the demand for a job guarantee. And that was the legacy of coretta scott king, who continued to struggle for that throughout the 1970s and remind the federal reserve that they have a dual mandate for both price stability and full employment, obviously, beyond the control of city council, to tell jerome powell what to do. But I just wanted to remind that the community here, that everyone has a right to a good job.
47 Absolutely.
48 I just wanted to say how encouraged I was by something you said earlier and you just kind of reiterated, which is you get such good reaction from employers when you say you'll only work with them if they either currently have a pathway to self-sufficiency or are willing to work with you to develop them. That was really good to hear.
49 Yeah.
50 Well, they know labor market shortages are here to stay. So, you know, we're seeing some bumps and bruises now. But they know. And so yeah. But I also think it's because at their heart they're good employers. So you know yeah I find that encouraging too. So thank you.
51 Thank you very much mr. Goff. Colleagues our that was our only agenda item. Just in terms of closing remarks, I'll say that our next meeting is Thursday, August 14th at noon. And we are still finalizing the agenda for that meeting. And with that I adjourn.