The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-04-02
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (23,225 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
At its April 2 work session, Portland City Council convened a budget-focused session (not a formal Budget Committee meeting) to prepare for the mayor's forthcoming proposed budget. The city administrator and deputy city administrators for Budget and Finance, City Operations, Community and Economic Development, Public Safety, Public Works, Vibrant Communities, and the City Administrator's Office presented overviews of their service areas, describing budget pressures, proposed reductions, vacant-position eliminations, program cuts, and areas of continued investment, including references to the general fund, dedicated funds, permitting revenue shortfalls, parks funding challenges, and homelessness-related programs. Figures describing specific shortfalls, cuts, and budget totals were stated inconsistently across speakers. Discussion topics included equity considerations in budget decisions, use of one-time versus ongoing funds, ARPA funding, reserve levels, organizational restructuring, span-of-control reviews, transfers to other governments, contractor versus staff costs, and requests for more detailed data such as spreadsheets, organizational charts, and clarified figures. Councilors raised questions about transparency, definitions of core services, equity impacts across districts, and the philosophy guiding proposed reductions. Votes were not described as occurring in this session. The council noted plans for a subsequent public safety–focused session and anticipated receiving the mayor's proposed budget on May 5, with a related hearing referenced for May 7.
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.
Procedural markers in this session
Literal phrase counts from the official captions — a measurement of procedure, not a judgment of anyone's conduct. Click a marker to highlight its occurrences below. Captions contain errors.
0 That wasn't the strategy. She insists on being the last one, to be fair.
1 One. Two. Three. Captions test one. Two. Three.
2 Maybe that's okay, but.
3 I'm gonna figure it out. Yeah. What did you do?
4 Test. Test.
5 Test. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No.
6 No, not. Myers.
7 Myers. Johnny's first.
8 You and mike and sonya, then annie.
9 Annie brings us home. I am.
10 Calling to order the city council work session this afternoon. It is 132. On April 2nd. I apologize that we're starting a couple of minutes late. And thank you to all of the folks here for your flexibility in us getting started. About a half an hour late. Councilors, this is the start of our budget work, and it's a little bit funky in its order because we don't yet have a budget that we are responding to from the mayor. But we also know that by the time we get that budget from the mayor, we will have a very short turnaround time to address what is in that budget and ultimately pass a budget for the city. So we're doing some pre-work. We are doing some pre-work to make sure that you all are prepared for conversations that you're having in your committees. So I know some of those have started and that we are prepared for the work that we will be doing together as a whole. When we meet as the budget committee, I want to be clear that today we are not meeting as the budget committee. We are meeting for a budget focused work session of the council. You all should have gotten an email. I think that was a week and a half ago, but time is sometimes difficult to track from. Councilor Zimmerman, as chair of the finance committee and me as president of the council, talking a little bit about what we can ask now and what questions we need to save for after we have the mayor's budget and what work we will be doing as council, either in work sessions or meeting as the budget committee, and what work you all should be doing in your committees. And you may remember from that email that we will be hearing from each of our deputy city administrators about their service areas in meetings, either work sessions of council or as the budget committee over the next few weeks. And we hope that each of you has conversations in your committees about at the bureau level with individual bureaus. Today, we are going to go through just an overview to give us an opportunity to start conversations and to start to pull out what information we might need to ask during those future sessions, and to allow our staff to know what direction we might be going in, so that they can make sure to have the information that we need. I'm going to pause because I was remiss in not having us take roll. Do we need roll? No. Keelan we don't. Great. Perfect. Then we'll keep going. So I'm going to turn it over to our city administrator, mike jordan, to kick us off. And I believe he may turn it over at some point to deputy city administrator bree. And we've got a presentation from each of our deputy city administrators, and then we'll have a fair amount of time available for questions. And I think some folks from our finance committee may have some questions already, and I'll try to provide some direction on what we can and can't ask. So with that, mr. Jordan, would you like to take it away?
11 Thank you, council president. Absolutely. And I you stole most of my speech about what we're doing here and why we're here. So I won't repeat that. But as you can see before you, you have assistant city administrator and deputy city administrators for service areas. And so you can imagine that our presentation is organized that way. If we could go to the next slide, please. We're going to take time to go through the different service areas at a relatively high level like you mentioned. We will hopefully take no more than about 45 minutes for all of these presentations, leaving council with plenty of time to comment and ask questions. And that is the primary reason for this. I know many of you are associated with the budget. You've got the doorstop binders that were sent out, and hopefully you're using those as well to keep doors open and different things. Trip trip bait around your office. But but you have that level of detail. And I know some of you have delved into it, so we won't we won't attempt to go there today, but we would love to hear your thoughts or questions. And as council president mentioned, we'll be coming to committees to talk about bureau level issues regarding budget to inform all of you of that. So I'll start off very broad overview. Next slide please. So you've seen a diagram like this before. Wanted to remind you that a lot of the discussion around the general fund is where council often focuses a lot of its discussion. However, the general fund only represents about 10% of the total city budget, but it is the discretionary 10%. It's the place where council has the most ability to move money around. Decide new initiatives if you wish, and make decisions about priorities within those areas. Most of the rest of our budget is dedicated funds to either utilities or transportation or fee based activity like permitting and development. So and you've seen this and you see by the chart kind of the rough proportions of, of those things as they appear in the general fund. Next slide please. This is the first time that the city has had the ability really structurally to take the proposals from bureaus and service areas and have the ability to take an enterprise wide view of those proposals and look at them at a bit of a comparative nature in the preliminary phases of getting ready to put the mayor's proposal together. Historically, that has not been the case. Historically, bureau budgets have come up through commissioners in charge, and there really was never an opportunity prior to the mayor's proposed to take a more holistic view of the budget. The recommendations that I made back on February the 28th were both recommendations in that I did recommend some of the cuts that were proposed by bureaus and service areas, but I also left a lot on the table as alternatives for council and the public to chew on and give us feedback about. And that really is a bit of what we're here today about. Hopefully this session and the session on the 16th will help to inform the mayor as he puts together his balanced proposal for you on January the 5th. As you can see here, we took pretty high level approach to this first time. The first time we've really looked holistically at the whole city to make comparisons across bureaus and service areas, obviously trying to minimize the impact that any cuts would have both on the community and employees. Hopefully, take a look not only at what I like to call the urgency of the now, but how can we think about the city's finances in a more long term way, and how do we think about stabilizing those over the long term? I'll talk in a little bit about efficiencies and effectiveness and some of the efforts we're looking at there. And then of course, last, leveraging those benefits of the transition, which we're in a unique place regarding the organization of the city and how can we leverage this moment in time. Next slide please. This is where we are doing a number of things that I wanted to make sure council was aware of, because they don't appear necessarily in the proposals by service area. But we are looking at an enterprise scale about alternative revenue sources. So things like we are currently subject to a fee that is being levied by the urban flood safety district. That's about $5.6 million. The first year was this current year of paying that. We kind of I use the term plug the hole, but that probably is a little too, too pun like for flood safety district. But but we put $5.6 million of general fund money into that to pay that fee this current year. We've been looking at alternative ways to perhaps pay that fee in the future. And that's just one example of how to look at alternative revenue sources. We obviously have a list of all the vacant positions in the city. We are prioritizing vacant positions. When we look at cuts that won't be possible everywhere, but we're certainly looking at those. I want to remind the council that this is about the second or third year in a row of a mayor giving guidance to the city about cuts. And I will tell you that some bureaus already have been using vacant positions to balance their budgets already. And so what appears to be a vacant position sometimes has no money associated with it. And so we're we're going through that with a pretty fine tooth comb to try and evaluate, first of all vacancies period, but also utilizing those as a first tier when we talk about staff cuts. Secondly, we are in the midst of a span of control. Look for all managers at the city. We are finding that there are possibilities there about how to merge managerial functions, and also how to make sure that our management folks have the appropriate spans of control. And then lastly, and I've mentioned this both in writing and to many of you personally, we are doing an assessment of seven different internal service delivery systems from equity and engagement and communications to hr and it and procurement. I will be working with the leaders of those business processes to make an assessment of what kind of savings might be able to be gathered from a restructuring of those delivery systems over the next 15 months or so. When can those actually be implemented, and how much savings might we be able to get? And I'll be making an estimate for the mayor's proposed budget so that those estimates at least, and I'll emphasize the word estimates. Those estimates will be embedded in the mayor's proposed as potential savings in the restructuring of those those business processes. Next slide. I'm going to stop there. And as you mentioned, turn it over to cfo and deputy city administrator berry for budget and finance.
12 Great. Thank you michael. Again, for the record, deputy city administrator of budget and finance and chief financial officer jonas berry. Just one quick update on the record. The city administrator mentioned the upcoming mayor's proposed budget and mentioned a date of January 5th, with the city administrator meant to say was may 5th. So just wanted to clear that up for any folks paying that close.
13 Attention, you've actually used that line. I really appreciate it.
14 Not only for us, but for others watching.
15 So I'll talk quickly here, and then we'll hear from each of each of the dca's about the budget and finance service area. Just also flag. I'm also here to help support fellow gca's as they go through their budgets. We also have a staff from city budget office in the room. And other financial staff within service areas to help support those conversations if necessary. As we as we go through and get into the future parts of the presentation. Next slide please. So as mentioned at a prior work session on the service area, core services within this service area have been subject as city administrator mentioned, to sub to multiple budget reductions in prior years. While service expectations and financial compliance requirements have continued to grow in volume and in complexity. This has left the service area strained to maintain basic service levels, and I recognize that this can present a speed bump in providing the background support to advance city priorities. Despite that reality, we're leaning into the multiple organizational realignment efforts to get tighter and to support citywide efficiency efforts. Next slide please. Just a quick snapshot of one lens on the budget for the service area. The pie chart here. As I think many we might see in many of the pie charts, doesn't necessarily tell the full story. What you see here is about a third of the budget and finance pie chart is attached to the fire and police disability and retirement fund. So dedicated property tax levy that's contained within those restricted revenues. And then around 275 million for fund management which includes things like debt proceeds, general fund reserves, transfers, etc. So the core kind of operational component of the service area is that that bottom component, around 289 million of funding, which includes both interagency revenues and general fund revenues. Next slide please. To maybe get to what's most relevant, how did we approach proposed cuts of for the upcoming 2526 budget? My direction to managers within the budget and finance service area was without limits or without specific targets, but instead to show how deeply we could theoretically cut without breaking the system. We then had discussions about the near term and long term impacts of those potential changes, including potential equity related impacts, from which we developed a list of suggestions which were put forward and ultimately all proceeded into the city administrator's preliminary budget recommendations. So what were those results? In addition to reducing materials and services and training budgets down to the absolute bare minimum, we also identified a few reductions that weren't specific highlighting. We recommended elimination of four total positions, two in the city budget office and two in the business operations division. And while these are currently vacant positions that will not result in direct job losses, they will reduce the ability of these two teams to respond to growing needs from our customers within the city, resulting in reduced response times and less ability to respond to ad hoc analysis or information requests. And it will further stress our ability to support organizational improvement efforts that are underway or just beginning. We also chose to allow two limited term positions in the revenue bureau to expire, which will result in reduced ability to respond to customer service requests from portlanders and will likely result in reduced revenue collection to the city. And then I'll highlight three items that are non personnel related. The risk team identified reductions to a few detailed elements of the city's insurance coverage policies that will produce, we estimate around 270,000 in ongoing savings. And while this does reduce some types of coverage in the event of major events, we believe these reductions are reasonable and an acceptable trade off. We've also suggested the possibility of reducing certain external grants, which are managed via special appropriations. It's about 350,000 in total ongoing, which equates to about a 5% reduction to nearly all of the grants to which that reduction is applicable. And lastly, we suggested reducing funding to the small donor programs by 8%, which is just over 100,000 annually, which does lower the resources available to that program, but hopefully remains aligned with potentially lower total participation as fewer positions will be up for reelection in future cycles. So what will we stop doing? We really don't have any services or programs that we can fully eliminate without materially increasing cost or risk to the city. But I will be again explicitly clear about what can be expected. Our financial services and business support teams will likely be unable to keep up with increasing service requests. Customers of our services, both internal and external, will likely see delays in response times and turnaround times for analysis and information. Additionally, there are large ambitions for the future of the city, which I advocate for. But I'll also allow the advocate that as we explore those solutions that we should be looking in future years to reestablish appropriate financial and business support to help realize those long term ambitions. Finally, what will we continue to do? Most of the work we do is every day is simply to keep the wheels on. We'll continue behind the scenes to keep the city running quietly and without major disruption. We'll also aim to prioritize all of that back office support for ongoing organizational and process improvements. And now I'll bump over to sarah morrissey to talk about city operations.
16 All right. Thank you. Good afternoon. Councilors. My name is sarah morrissey. I use she her pronouns, and I'm currently serving as the interim deputy city administrator for city operations. Thanks for the opportunity to provide you with an overview of our approach to budget development for this upcoming fiscal year. Next slide please. As the city took on new programing in the face of the pandemic, the core service teams within city operations did not grow in concert. Thus, the service demands that continue to outpace current appropriation levels for these business functions. And we continue to be strained to maintain basic services while trying to comply with updated policies, state and federal laws, as well as evolving bureau needs. In addition to providing efficient and effective services to both city council, the administration, and all city of Portland employees, there are three other key priorities that I want to focus on this slide. The first is optimizing service delivery for city operations functions. See jordan spoke about this earlier today. The existing models for services like human resources, procurement and technology are going to be under evaluation to align with the new organizational structure that was announced on Monday. The evaluation is designed to unify approaches across the city and reduce the footprint for our operations. Some of these changes will be captured within this upcoming fiscal year's budget and others in the future. The second priority I want to highlight is ongoing work related to internal service fund rates. These rates are charged to bureaus and exchange for services like rent, fleet maintenance and technology. They have increased over time due to a myriad of factors, including inflation projects like remodeling the Portland building, increased software costs, and increased labor costs. Over the next few months, we will review systems and processes that aim to simplify our rate structure for the next fiscal year, budget development, and provide greater predictability and clarity with added transparency. We'll provide an update of this project to the finance committee post budget adoption. Finally, a budget note for the current fiscal year directed that we explore the establishment of a city wide asset management office, as well as a data office that serves the city. We are working closely with the city administrator and mayor on these efforts, and look forward to updating the transportation and infrastructure committee on this later this year. Next slide please. So city operations is funded through a variety of ways. So we have internal service funds. The city overhead model direct general fund allocations, health insurance operating funds and more. You'll see on this chart the office of community based police accountability, as well as the office of city operations, which includes 311 procurement, integrated security and the independent police review. In developing the proposed decision packages, the city operations leadership team evaluated business needs and worked to ensure that critical programing could continue while providing reductions in areas that would have less of an impact on our overall functionality to provide services to bureaus. I did not recommend taking reductions in procurement because the program had cut five permanent positions as part of the fiscal year 2425 budget, and we've seen service needs from bureaus to continue at the existing level. The need has not been reduced. I also limited reductions in human resources due to the volume of work they are currently managing, as well as legal requirements that we must comply with. We felt like the cost of noncompliance with these requirements would likely be greater than the cost of removing positions. Additionally, I held the independent police review and office of community based police accountability. Harmless as potential reductions could impact the existing d.o.j. Settlement agreement, and the charter language requires that the city fund the oversight system proportional to at least 5% of the police bureau's annual operating budget. In total, the city operations service area proposes to cut seven fte, six of which are vacant and 5.3 million overall. Next slide. I'm going to go over a few of the cuts in the ads to see what is in the package. So fleet and facilities completed a fleet reduction exercise which identified over 130 city vehicles that were driven less than 1000 miles a year. We're now partnering with the bureau owners of those vehicles to evaluate, need and finalize the list. In regard to technology services, we've proposed options that would reduce our total costs through efficiencies. For example, we're contracting with a firm called wireless watchdogs to evaluate cell phone usage and adjust upwards of 1800 plans in real time for cost savings. And we're also proposing to sunset the strategic projects and opportunities team that we're working on. The one time funded charter transition work, one position from that team is proposed to be realigned and remain in city operations, with a focus on the city wide asset management office within my office. I'm also proposing to reduce my administrative suppor, and will continue to share an executive assistant and analyst with the dca of budget and finance. In terms of the ads, we have a employee central and time and payroll project. So sap, which is our enterprise resource planning software, is beginning to end. Support of our human capital management module. We're starting the work to transition to new platform. We have to get there by 2027. And we're now in phase two of the project. So this is for limited term positions as well as some contracts. And for 311 is a request for 24 zendesk licenses and 1.25 additional 311 customer service staff. That's to help constituent inquiries for both council and executive offices. It also includes some piece of administrative funding that's incorporated in pcf's package to provide information, intake and customer service for pcf funded city programs such as cooling Portland, which aims to provide 25,000 ac units to Portland over five years for fleet and facilities as an add. We received funding through pcf for a project called collaborating for climate action program. We are ensuring the funding is reflected in the budget, and it's going to be used on system upgrades through various city facilities, including improved hvac systems, lighting and more. And then finally an integrated security city hall turnstiles as well as council protection. So the turnstiles that you use coming in off of fourth avenue are past their serviceable lifespan and need to be modernized. And then also, instead of having one off requests for council related security needs, we're asking for an ongoing package of general fund for council protection for all 12 councilors, as well as the auditor's office. This shift will eliminate unpredictable costs, create fiscal stability and ensure continuous protection without the need for repeated adjustments to security spending, which is how we've been operating that delivery over the last few years. I appreciate the conversation. Look forward to the discussion, and I will pass it over to dci of community and economic development danny oliveira.
17 Thank you. Sarah.
18 I'm going to have you pause for one minute. I see that there are councilors with questions in the queue. I want to make sure that we can hear all of these overviews together, because I worry that otherwise we will get bogged down in questions. So I'm going to ask folks if we can hold until we hear from all of our dca's. And then we will get all of the questions that are in the queue. We will have time, I promise.
19 All right.
20 All right. Thank you. Council president. Good afternoon. My name is danny oliveira. I use he him pronouns, and it is my honor to serve the city of Portland as the deputy city administrator for the community and economic development service area, which aligns city programs focused on building prosperity for all portlanders. The service area achieves this by creating and delivering efficient, transparent and equitable solutions for our communities. As we unlock the potential of our built environment. And let's be honest, based on this conversation this morning at council, it's housing, housing, housing, so comprised of the bureau of planning, sustainability, Portland permitting development, the Portland housing bureau, prosper Portland and our spectator venues, this service area collaborates and innovates with stakeholders to develop housing and economic solutions that contribute to livability, resilience and, yes, leadership of Portland. And given the makeup of the service area, our task is simple yet robust. We must simultaneously design and plan for the future while developing the tools and providing resources for implementation. So the service area has a wide portfolio of programs and resources that our communities value, whether it be managing our waste program, our community technology and digital justice programs. Our new office of small business. There's a lot of amazing work happening in the service area, but I'm going to focus on the priorities of our budget and how we're going to solve for those. I must start with acknowledging that a couple slides are going to talk about permitting, development and the challenge of the forecast, but along with that, there's still some hope we're going to be prioritizing the continued improvement of permitting timelines and the customer experience of our pnd bureau while working with our permit improvement task force, which includes working with the public works and vibrant community service area. We continue to look at code alignment programs and process improvements to increase that experience, reduce timelines, and reduce costs that will continue to be a priority and hopefully council will support that request. The housing production strategy is our current north star for housing production for the city of Portland, and we'll look to be implementing the early targets of that of that plan, which will hopefully spur housing development in all income levels. We're going to be focused on the tools that we have in our toolkit, working with the housing committee to generate the new policies that will help us achieve those goals. We've launched the process for standing up the committees for the tax increment financing district committees, which we're very excited about, and that will be a couple two year process. But this budget focuses on the staff and the outreach and engagement programing necessary to do that. Well, we're taking the lessons from the cully tiff to implement across all six districts, and that will be critical not just for our housing, but our infrastructure investments and the job creation opportunities for the tif financing. And last but not least, I want to acknowledge that, you know, we have a robust implementation plan called the climate investment plan for PCEF. And so we'll be working with our city bureaus and our community partners to implement that vision. I'm really excited to announce that we just released RFP for with with the for our community grants. And those proposals are due at the end of may. And so we continue to focus on ensuring that getting those resources out to the community, organizations that are using those dollars so well, the challenges within our budget are pretty straightforward. First and foremost, it's no no surprise to you all here that we have a $14 million forecasted shortfall in revenues for the permitting and development bureau. This is significant because if not addressed, it will absolutely reduce result and reduce in programs, not reduce in services, and full programs would be threatened to be cut. That's a concern that we have to address in the upcoming committees, whether it be through general fund, one time support or fee increases or unfortunately, perhaps staff reduction, that is a gap we have to address in the last. It's a challenge to more of an opportunity for you all to work with the Portland clean energy fund to think about how we utilize the cip to best advantage for all of us today. I know there's a lot of emerging interests in the fund and how we utilize that, and so look forward to working with you all through the existing programs and processes to do that. Well, next slide please. So this is one view of the budget revenue. Excuse me for the community economic development service area based on revenues. This is sort of skews because a super majority of the money that's listed in this pie chart is money that goes out the door. So the obviously the big slice there is the Portland clean energy fund, housing bureau, planning, sustainability. Those make their way out through the our bureau partners, through community grants or through the strategic initiatives. The large portion of the housing bureau that you see there is a federal dollars. So I don't think it's a shock to anybody here. But those dollars are always at risk with uncertainty at the federal level. But that makes up the significant portion of that revenue stream. I also want to just acknowledge the office of community economic development has a $61 million revenue that encompasses spectator venues, revenues and other travel related resources. Next slide please. So the impacts to the proposed budget that you all have seen, we're really solved through being responsive to the mayor. Mayor wheeler's initial guidance of 8% general fund reduction that was achieved for bts prosper and the housing bureau by looking at programs that we could either reduce but not eliminate. So for us, that was reducing digital justice grants in our community technology program. It was sort of cutting back program elements in planning and urban design, and it was sort of reallocating resources within the bureau that was focused on climate, that was funded by general fund, to be funded by pcf. So bts was able to solve for their reductions through some reorganization within the bureau for prosper, those that $1.4 million general fund reduction were cuts to programing and largely focused on small business lending staff support for that we provide to the business community at large. We were hoping to have the repair grants that were appreciated by our small business community put back into the budget, but that was also a potential impact of the budget cuts. And then for housing, a lot of the programing that will be reduced is helping residents stay housed. So whether it be the eviction legal defense fund, home repair grants, people, programs that keep people housed, those were unfortunately parts of the proposed budget cuts that are funded by general fund. And then just some housekeeping changes that I want to flag for in the in city administrator jordan's proposed budget, we have a request for resources to keep the graffiti program going at current operating levels. That's historically been funded by a modest amount of ongoing general fund, and was supported by additional one time dollars. Those dollars have sunset. And so to keep the current service level up, we would need resources for that. We've also asked have a decision package coming to increase staff capacity for pcf to support all the new programs that the new fund has been generating. We have asked for two positions to maintain the current staffing level that's working on the permit improvement program. That's helping both p and d and public works bureaus on streamlining our code and systems. And then last but not least, just housekeeping, that as a part of the new organization, the chief sustainability officer is moving from bts to the city administrator's office. So that's the high overview, high level overview of our service area. And with that, I'll hand it over to dca. Myers for public safety.
21 Thank you donny. Good afternoon, madam president and councilors. For the record, my name is mike myers. I'm the deputy city administrator for the public safety service area. Thank you for having me here today. I am joined online in the commons there by members of our public safety team to assist in answering questions should they arise. Next slide please. Our priorities include improving public safety response capabilities to better serve the diverse needs of our community and ensure that every resident feels safe and protected. To enhance collaboration internally with partner agencies and community to break down silos, improve communication and ultimately build trust to increase focus on well-being of the public safety workforce and system by fostering physical, mental, and professional health for staff while modernizing technology, upgrading infrastructure, and ensuring long term financial sustainability, and to continue to make upstream investments in preventing emergencies, supporting community resilience and recovering from emergencies. Among our many challenges we face in public safety, crime reduction is the leading issue. We will continue to focus on crime reduction while aggressively hiring qualified police officers in an attempt to reach adequate staffing levels and reduce overtime. I would like to credit Portland fire and rescue and the bureau of emergency communications for their commitment and dedication to reducing overtime this past year, saving the service area over $2 million. Next slide please. The public safety service area business operations team. The public safety service area business operations team. Is led by elizabeth perez assist bureau directors and managing well over $550 million in budgetary obligations. We monitor expenditures, auditing every overtime hour and dollar spent in a monthly accounting period. Report. To date, the service area is trending to be on or under budget this fiscal year. Next slide. The responsibility for reductions ultimately falls to me. The initial direction we received was to hold Portland police bureau, Portland fire and rescue, and the bureau of emergency communications. Harmless. This left us with three remaining work units Portland bureau of emergency management, community safety, which houses the cease fire program, office of prevention and Portland street response. And finally, our business services unit, which manages our budget and finance, payroll, time, card procurement and purchasing teams. We asked directors and managers to evaluate their service areas, their areas of operation, and make recommendations for 5% and 8% reductions. Again, in the end, I take full responsibility for recommended reductions and I will say none of these options are good and all will have lasting impacts. I use the following criteria to make these recommendations. We first looked at combinations of people and positions. We assessed all vacancies. How long have we had them? How long have we been holding on to them and can we do without them? We assessed all limited term positions for ongoing. Do we need to continue this position for next year, especially the ones that we're using limited term like full time staff? We weren't able to meet the 5% requirement when we looked at all of these programs and some. Ultimately, we looked at programs for elimination. Finally, we looked into a combination of all those three. We also had specific requests for additions and continuation of funding, and these included maintaining current service levels, on duty emergency response, staffing for Portland fire and rescue fund, police staffing and overtime to support crime reduction such as gun violence and human trafficking. Staff emergency public alert and warning position in Portland bureau of emergency management add funding for legal and accountability requirements for body worn cameras, and ultimately continue the violence prevention and intervention work to ceasefire office of violence prevention and to maintain current staffing for Portland street response. Again, thank you for having me today. And I'll now turn it over to dca. Dana paul.
22 Thank you. Good afternoon, madam president and councilors, I'm priya dana paul. I use she her pronouns and I'm the deputy city administrator for public works service area public works is the backbone of our city. When Portland is turned on their faucet, walk their kids to school, bike or drive to work or take transit, they're relying on us. We provide the foundational infrastructure that supports public health, the economy, and the quality of life we all enjoy. Our service area includes the Portland water bureau, the bureau of environmental services, and the Portland bureau of transportation. And together, we manage 90% of the city's built assets and provide essential services to every portlander every hour of every day. Today, I'll walk you through our priorities and challenges we are navigating and strategic investments. We are proposing to ensure a strong, resilient foundation for our city. Our core focus is on maintaining and modernizing the infrastructure portlanders depend on. Like roads, sidewalks, pipes, storm drains, and treatment facilities. We're also balancing long term investment and prioritizing regulatory compliance within current fiscal constraints. However, rising costs, which are driven by inflation, regulatory requirements and aging aging systems mean we must stretch our dollar further while still ensuring safety, reliability and compliance. We are also preparing for the future. That means investing in climate resilience, strengthening our systems against extreme weather, flooding, wildfires and seismic risks. And what that looks like is expanding our wastewater treatment plant, advancing our water filtration facility, and building seismically resilient bridges that also support safer multimodal travel, which is an important strategy for reducing carbon emissions. We also remain grounded in equity. Infrastructure investments must benefit all portlanders, especially those in historically underserved neighborhoods. We also face significant challenges. Pbot general transportation revenues remain flat, with lower post-pandemic parking demand and rising operational costs, and across three bureaus, decades of deferred maintenance have resulted in nearly $13 billion in asset backlog. And delays in maintenance don't just affect pipes and payment, they also show up as service disruptions for water, sewer and stormwater and transportation, inaccessible sidewalks and unsafe streets for children and families walking to school. Next slide please. This slide gives a high level look at our service areas funding picture. These are total resources across all funds in each bureau, including internal fund transfers, carried over fund balances and spent bond proceeds and bond reserve contingencies. The real revenue available for budgeted expenditures, after accounting for those factors, is about $463 million for PBOT, $1 billion for water and $662 million for busses. We manage most of the visible infrastructure portlanders see, such as streets and sidewalks, as well as invisible, invisible infrastructure that keeps the city running like pipes, pumps, water systems and treatment plants. But yet our ability to maintain and improve the infrastructure is increasingly constrained. The mayor issued a guidance to utility bureaus to keep the combined rate increases under 6.02%, which is about five percentage points below the earlier projections. And that translates to approximately $1 billion, sorry, $1 million less per bureau than originally expected. We support definitely support the affordability goals, but when these are paired with consistently rising costs, it increases the risk of service reductions and system failure. We have prioritized compliance with regulatory requirements, but difficult tradeoffs still remain for PBOT. We have a particularly particularly difficult reality. The parking revenues have not recovered, and federal and state funds haven't kept pace. And without new revenue tools, we. We are making cuts to the core services, but across the service area we're committed to protecting core functions. But without strategic investment, reductions in water, sewer, stormwater and transportation services will eventually result in impact, livability, public health, public safety and economic vitality. Next slide please. This slide outlines both the cuts we are facing and the strategic changes we're making to preserve service delivery. And we'll start with PBOT, where the proposed cuts are the most severe among the three public works bureaus, with the potential elimination of 97 general transportation revenue funded positions, we'll see minimal payment repair and no preventative bridge maintenance, delayed project delivery and a shift to emergency only responses for traffic signals, street lights and landslides. Biz. We are proposing to consolidate facilities and defer long term planning work and reduce brokerage and contracting support. This limits our body's ability to proactively meet regulatory and climate goals. The water. The water bureau is facing reduced maintenance capacity and greatest system risk of system failures and increased long term costs for our ratepayers. Despite these cuts, we are moving forward with strategic shifts. We are leveraging bond savings from the ADA ramp work to help reduce the scale of PBOT reductions. We are repurposing $1.3 million to fund a cross-functional, six cross-functional positions that will align capital planning across the three infrastructure bureaus to develop a unified capital program. We are also looking forward to expand implementation of our one water framework between water and biz, and support more integrated, collaborative public works service delivery. These changes reflect a shift from siloed operations to coordinated citywide problem solving solutions. Exactly the kind of system our new form of government is designed to support. And this is where we see the real opportunity to work smarter, break down silos, and ensure that every dollar we spend is moving the whole city forward. We're doing everything we can with the resources that we have, but we need to plan for what Portland needs. We are committed to investing equitably, coordinating across bureaus, and delivering public works services that meet the moment and also the future. We welcome your support as we explore long term funding options, shared capital strategies, and operational innovations that help us build a stronger, more resilient Portland. Thank you for your time and I look forward to your questions and continued partnerships. With that, it's my pleasure to pass this on to dca. Sonia shymansky okay.
23 Hi. Good afternoon. I'm blast even though I'm on the end. I'm sonia shymansky. I'm dca for what has been the vibrant communities service area, which includes the new office of arts and culture, the long standing Portland children's levy, the longer standing Portland parks and recreation bureau, and the newest of them all vibrant communities support services unit. We could probably go to the next slide. You have heard from me and from others many times before that. This is a service area about connection, connection to place, to culture, to neighbors and to opportunity. These connections drive community safety, cultural resilience. And a dynamic.
24 I apologize, you probably saw people looking distracted because there were baby. Oh, I saw.
25 A baby.
26 Above you. Yeah. I told annie.
27 For folks here who were wondering where everybody was looking, there were baby pictures happening.
28 And dynamic, strong, stable economy. You've also heard me say that this service area is uniquely leveraged in many good ways, and for today's purposes, including financially on voter approved funds. This challenge is structural and occasionally acute. I would say it's becoming acute now. So to the budget picture now and for next year, I'm not going to speak much to this, but we'll say that we've got folks here who can answer deep questions. If you'd like. You can see, obviously, that parks and recreation is the overwhelming majority of the total budget. The dca office is quite small, and we've got our children's levy, which mostly reflects next year's grant funds. Arts and culture similarly. So let's go to the next slide. The budget picture for next year. I think I'll go down the list in order you. So we are in the final year of current children's levy grant awards, and you will be seeing this spring the next round. That round will reflect awards which are smaller by about 20% on an annual basis. That's due to two things in about equal proportion. First, because we're in the last year, we are spending down reserves and we are additionally seeing lower collections due primarily to reduced property values. So that will be felt by community partners who received awards to do community priority work for portlanders. The office of arts and culture has different but similar dynamics going on. They're taking the, I should say, children's levy is enterprise funded. It's levy funds entirely. And so there is not an 8% general fund cut there. There is in the office of arts and culture, and it is being taken within the public art program almost exclusively so that it does not affect outgoing grants to partners, something that does affect outgoing grants to partners is that that team is seeing materially reduced revenue from the arts access fund, which is driven by a couple of things, less collection activity that I think can be considered one time, but also lower property values. And as I said, it's material. It's creeping up toward 50% less than anticipated, which means that awards provided later this year will be smaller by that amount. That includes our general operating support partners and arts and arts organizations that get very small awards. So that will be a conversation later this year. Lastly, we go to Portland parks and recreation, which for purposes of budgeting is still integrated with the support services unit. The budget we developed for those two two units together is about $23 million. Smaller. Next year than it is has been this year. That gap is driven by a few things, some of which we have in common with the rest of the city, some of which are specific to this bureau. There this bureau took. I'll go in order. First, we have the 8% cut target for 2526. Like other general fund funded functions. Also, like others, we have significantly increasing costs for personnel and for central services. Like other parts of the service area, we have lower collections coming from reduced property values. And I would say maybe uniquely to this bureau, we have general fund, we have current year general fund cuts between 4 and $5 million that have been backfilled by levy, but that will not be that may not be possible going forward because this was a larger budget development task. I gave this team specific guidance and I asked them to prioritize the following as they prepared options for the administrator and mayor and you basic maintenance and operations, field employee safety, support for the city's livability and economic recovery goals, public private partnerships, volunteerism, and community and constituent engagement. The overall package and administrator jordan's recommended budget includes between 80 and 90 line items. So I will tell you in relatively broad terms, first, what's in there and then what I think it means. It. I will generally track this list. You will see overall reduced programing like the nature day camp, teen nature team, youth conservation crew, which is sweatshirts you probably see at the grocery store in the summer. Citywide sports programs like golden ball and fun runs teen collaborative initiative city run son programs. I know you've heard about smaller, free summer free for all line up summer camps and grants to community partners. You will see reduced overall care and maintenance of parks and trails. That means people like seasonal maintenance workers, who provide help when it's needed, and utility workers who provide help where it's needed. And it includes supplies like plants, grass seed, fertilizer, fencing and play chips. You, I know, have heard about the potential closure of a neighborhood community center. And important note about this is that the hope would be if that reduction moves forward, to keep that facility open under a new operating model, rather than to close it. That's been done successfully by the bureau and other places, and you will see. I'm moving now to the column on the right. There is additionally what has been called a buyback option that would effectively and very simply move money forward in the year so that summer programing isn't interrupted. And it means that deeper cuts are needed later to stay balanced. I'll say briefly, the preschool for all item is something pretty exciting. The parks bureau has recently become a preschool for all provider, which means that they're able to offer expanded programing, potentially to more people. Directors here, if there are questions and that that program pays for it, there is lastly, on this list, a position within urban forestry that is PCEF funded, that is, I think, related to community outreach. We spoke about that a little bit yesterday, and I know that there's much more to come. So what I think this means, what I know it means is 52 fte, many of which are filled and almost $3.5 million that support summer seasonals, which is hundreds of people. There are so many individual cuts, it can be hard to see what it adds up to. But I think intuitively you can feel that it's it is significant and it it begins to reflect a profoundly different parks and recreation system for Portland. And what I think that poses to you is something getting close to an existential question about what you want your parks and recreation system to do, how big you want it to be, what you want it to prioritize. So how big? What shape toward what purpose and funded how. So that's a conversation that you've begun to have in different places and are going to continue to have in different places. We are doing our best to support you moving through those questions, and look forward to continuing to do that so that we can build a roadmap together for a park system that is stable and stably funded, which is what portlanders deserve. So I'll stop there and go to annie von berg. Great.
29 Thank you. Good afternoon, councilors. Thank you so much for your time. For the record, my name is annie von berg. I'm the interim assistant city administrator. Today, I'm going to walk us through the budget recommendations for the city administrator's office at a very high level. Next slide please. The city administrator's office 2526. Priorities reflect a range of programs and centralized services that the office oversees directly, including Portland solutions, the city attorney's office, the office of equity and human rights, the office of government relations, the office of community and civic life, central communications and sustainability. The office's priorities range from ending unsheltered homelessness by opening more night shelters and day centers to help neighbors transition off the streets, along with continued operation of our current alternative shelter sites. Priorities also include taking important steps to deliver on improving city wide systems for public engagement, equity, sustainability, centralized communications. As we look to build a more efficient, streamlined, unified practices and approaches to this work. Priorities for this office also include building strong partnerships with our fellow government agencies and community partners to advance our shared goals. Next slide please. The city administrator's office faces some significant challenges, similar to the ones you've heard from the other areas, which is driven in large part with the city's dependance on one time resources to address critical homelessness and livability. Services administered primarily from the Portland solutions program. Other challenges that we experience and you kind of see it reflected here on this snapshot, is that generally, the bureaus and programs that reside in this office listed here on the chart, are almost entirely sourced from general source general funds, rather, aside from the city attorney's office there, which has half of its fund that comes from interagency funds. This slide shows here the largest share of our office's budgets, Portland solutions, with the budget total of just over $96 million, with the alternative shelter program and the overnight shelter program making up the largest share of that component. Today, we do have skyler knapp, a Portland solutions director, here to answer questions related to Portland solutions. As you all are aware, and you've gotten information recently, this is a really dynamic budget request partnership that we're working with local agencies. So currently in negotiations, information related in the budget here is changing nearly on a day to day basis. So we'll keep you apprized of that. And we're here to answer any questions you have. Next slide please. I want to highlight some notable reductions in our areas which includes both staff and programing cuts. We are looking at elimination of three positions in the city attorney's office. One position eliminated in the office of government relations and two positions in the office of equity and human rights. These reductions are primarily driven by the approach of cutting 8% fixed across these programmatic areas, which was the guidance given by mayor wheeler. We also, from a programmatic perspective, have roughly $478,000 reduction to the civic life budget. What that means is about $300,000 cut to the district coalition offices. And in addition to that, $179,000 reduction to grant funds in the diversity and civic leadership program, or dcl program. In addition to the cuts, we do have some additions in terms of our request and recommendations here, and the additions here is to allow no service level reductions for livability programs, such as the public environment management office or otherwise known as pmo. The impact reduction program, or irp, and the street services coordination center. And also, we've continued to request additional funds to maintain our shelter program. So that is our current shelter programs of eight shelter sites and also the sunderland rv park. And then also that's the overnight shelter program, which is the 1500 overnight shelter beds or day centers and storage facilities. Important to note that work is already underway. The team is making really good progress on that, and we are on track to meet that goal by the end of the calendar year. With the Portland solutions component, we are currently looking roughly a $24 million gap for those existing shelters, night shelters and day centers. The mayor's office Portland solutions teams are working hard to close that gap and making good progress. We can share information on that front too, if you would like, today. And that's in conclusion, what I have for the city administrator's office. I'll pass it over to jonas. Close us out.
30 Thank you. Council. That is the end of our prepared presentation, and I will defer to the council president to navigate us through questions and discussion. Thank you.
31 Thank you all.
32 For the overview. Councilors. Thank you for your patience as we sometimes in council meetings, turn to the chairs of committees to kick us off with things. I want to see if the chair of our finance committee, councilor Zimmerman, has any remarks he'd like to kick us off with.
33 Thanks, madam president, and to the team that presented, I appreciate the work that you did, I want to, you know, reemphasize the points that the city administrator said. This is just the beginning of what is eventually to be quite an in-depth conversation for all of us. And in scoping this, I appreciate that you all kept comments at the at the high end, because the committees and the bureaus will dive into the programmatic details in future meetings. But what I'm hoping, colleagues, that we're getting is a sense of the direction that our dca's have instructed their budget development. So I have a couple of questions. Just mike, first, first off, aside from the hold public safety hole, that was the initial guidance. Was there any other type of guidance such as like protect the front line or protect the livability programs in the development of this or even a philosophy that you applied in terms of how this has been developed?
34 Thank you. Counselor. Yes. Those philosophies, as you heard, may have varied a bit from subject area to subject area. And I'll give you an example. Dca shymansky mentioned that there were a significant number of line items proposed by the parks bureau regarding meeting the cut requirement, and I will tell you that one of the things I looked at when we looked at what of those would we actually keep in the recommendation, and which one of those would I not propose if it were me? And I literally went line by line and looked at things that that represented day to day maintenance, keeping bathrooms clean, you know, keeping the grass mowed and those kinds of things. And there were some line items that were in there. And so it varied from place to place. I know you can ask dca meyers about the public safety ones that were proposed at the request of the council. They really tried to preserve the core patrol functions. The core response functions for fire. And they looked at the programs that were ancillary to direct service or sworn officers, if you will, first to try and maintain, if you will service on the street. So it varied a bit from from group to group on what the philosophy was, but a lot of it, I would say it was about trying to keep the experience of portlanders to be as close to the same as we could, I think where we perhaps fell the shortest there was in vibrant communities was in parks. That was the biggest challenge for some of the reasons that sonia mentioned. But and you all have had at least some conversation, and I know we'll have a lot more about the mix between general fund and levy and what that means for the future of parks and parks is perhaps in a unique dynamic regarding trying to figure out how this coming fiscal year fits with the next five. And so that's a dynamic that I think we all need to talk a lot more about. Hope that got at your question a little bit.
35 Yeah. Thank you. And I know we will go deeper. It just helps frame it up. I think a couple other I, I think it's a question for later in terms of you mentioned for civic life that. Cuts in the district coalition grants and what I hope we hear in that we protected, or if we just did it because we didn't want to have a tough conversation with an employee. And so I hope that we can talk about that. I also think that when we go through that, having an understanding from you and from hr for how do we place employees who face a layoff but are are eligible for other placement will help us in that it will be tough to support reductions only of vacancies, because I don't believe that that is truly getting to a core service perspective. I do think it can be helpful, but it's not in and of itself when it comes to the stages of organizational refinement. You know, one of my comments to you is we, as we inked the contract, so to speak, earlier this year, was that we need you to make the hardest of the hard decisions that the next permanent city administrator doesn't have to make. In their first time in Portland. I worry that a 15 month transition plan is. Dragging out city wide suffering for the sake of city wide suffering. And so I would encourage you in further development and further conversations. I really would have to see a very strong reason why a transition plan, you know, we got the. Org chart yesterday. Appreciate that. Why it goes past July 1st and I will. And what I thought was my flexibility was I can see reason to go up to October 1st to one additional quarter. But I'm approaching this budget. As the transition organizational financial savings that we are going to have hard conversations with the community and with the employees and with ourselves. And those conversations are complete on June 30th. And so I'm very cautious with a 15 month transition. And I say that in the with this one last caveat. And then I'll be done. Madam president, I recognize that on the back end of our work, there are things like accounting codes. I recognize that there are ways in which we bring money in, and there's all that kind of stuff. None of that matters. What matters when I'm talking about this is how does the public work with us? How does the employee who comes to work every single day, who is their boss? If on July 1st, we can have an organizational chart and clear, clear phase two transition completed, knowing that some of you may be managing back end work that has some time to get there, I could I could buy off on that, but if it is a stringing out the suffering, using my own term again for the sake of avoiding conversations or allowing continued advocacy on positions or whatever, I'm not sure I would be supportive of that, so it's hard to tell that in the document yet. But that's what I want to offer. Hearing this, this is very helpful. I hope we talk about what we are going to preserve. I hope that we talk about where vacancies are used, but as it relates to core services and then anytime a leader can share why they valued something over another thing is helpful for me as a policymaker. So thank you for your presentations today. And madam president, I'll give it back to you.
36 Thank you counselor. So counselors, as you know, there are some limitations in what we can and can't talk about. I think they're actually relatively narrow, but we have an hour and 20 minutes now to offer comments to ask why this and not that, to say what would happen if and to dig in a little more deeply on the values and guiding principles and priorities that we heard from our deputy city administrators and our city administrator today. With that amount of time, I'm not inclined to start us off with time limits or question limits. But do please be cognizant of the fact that I'm guessing each of us will want to have something to say at some point this afternoon. Counselor Smith, would you like to jump in?
37 Thank you, madam president. Assistant city administrator, how are you? Thank you for your presentation. Just curious, did we use a equity lens when we identified proposed cuts and impacts? Because I'm looking at your your presentation and it looks like civic life. Took the brunt of a lot of cuts. So I'm really at a disadvantage because this report didn't include numbers. It just has words and sentences. And we kind of deal in numbers. And just looking at your proposed cuts to eliminate three positions the city attorney's office, eliminate two positions of equity human rights, eliminate one position in government relations, reduce civic life, district office and operating budget, reduced budget for equipment, training and services in central communications. City administrator and assistant administrator. And then I look at what you're going to add. Just the first line alone I know is $28 million. So I can't even imagine how we're getting $28 million out of this other side. You said you're going to add 1500 night beds. I assume that that is the mayor's wish list for his overnight, which cost 28 million. I don't believe you can get 28 million with all these added up together on the on the left hand side. And so in order for us not to guess and I'm going to and I'm talking to jonas as well. Cfo berry. This report that you all gave us, it was very nice. Right. But it's not helpful and it's not useful. I don't have any numbers to work with. So I don't know how you're getting to this point a from point a to point b and how you're cutting and what you're doing. So for me, I don't want to sit in another budget session with you if you don't give me any numbers, I just can't. You're wasting my time. And until I understand if we have an equity lens, because all of these things on this side, it looks like everything on this side was paid with ARPA money. I'm just guessing on the right hand side. So do you mean that you think that I'm going to cut? If I'm using an equity lens, I'm going to cut civic life. Neighborhood associations, their grants, their small little grants to help pay for somebody's wish list. No, no. That's a problem. So we need to go back and look at that and reexamine how we came to that point, because I can't support anything like that. It's, you know, from where I'm sitting, the other piece is I wanted to find out from cfo berry. What is the total amount of ARPA money that's in our current operating budget?
38 Councilor, thank you for the question. I don't know that amount off the top of my head. We can get that to you. Absolutely. You know, the ARPA money is expiring. So I don't anticipate in next fiscal year that there's any new dollars. It'll be it'll be, you know, carryover things that are continuing, but happy to get that detail to you. Absolutely.
39 So the ARPA money is expected to be used by 2026 by the end of 2026. So the reason ask that question first is I wanted to find out how much do we have in the system for this operating budget and how much leftover ARPA money do we have for 2627? So then I can balance that against what you're asking us to pay for and what you're asking us to take away in the budgets. Because for me, that's the first thing that's going to be cut. How do we deal with existing, ongoing long term programs and bring in all this new stuff that we didn't have any idea how we were going to pay for it? Because if I was on council last year, I wouldn't have voted for it, I can tell you that. So it's really tough for us to make those decisions. I was listening to councilor Zimmerman, and we must have been on the same line, because it's just unconscionable to think that our most vulnerable folks are taking the hit for us, being unrealistic about how we spent our ARPA dollars. I would have spent our ARPA dollars in PBOT. I would have done those infrastructure things that we needed to do to do upkeep in deferred maintenance that we need instead of creating more programs, ongoing long term programs without any idea of how we would pay for it next. And now you're going to ask the most vulnerable people in our whole system to take on that responsibility, and that is wrong. Last question. I had so many questions for you, donnie, and I realized that. The reason why I have so many questions for you is because our cfo and our budget team did not give us an excel spreadsheet, because all my questions are asking you how much is paying for permitting? How much is the $14 million deficit? Is that from general fund or restricted funds? And I and so basically I guess I'm asking for the same thing again. Give us an excel spreadsheet and tell us where this money is coming from. So I don't have to ask all these individual questions. So I will end with this. Donnie, the $14 million that you say you're going to have in deficit over there, is that from general fund or restricted funds?
40 Thank you for the question, counselor. That that $14 million represents a forecasted revenue shortfall, meaning the projections we have for next year is that the fees generated through the permit system are going to fall about $14 million short of our current operating costs, so it's not general fund reduction. This is a projected revenue shortfall.
41 And so that would be from the restricted funds because that's what pays for that. And see. So that's very important to the public is not as savvy as you or as cfo berry or as our city administrator. They don't know the difference between restricted and general fund. And you put that number out there and it just confuses folks. Oh, so they have another 14 million among our other 91 million. And the last thing I'll say on this, I really wish y'all would deal with real stuff. Do not make a deficit of $91 million when you have wish lists in that 91 deal with the real money that we have our operating budget from this year to next year, what's our deficit? Not what people want, not what you think you want us to know and to support. Give us the real deal, because it is so confusing. Last thing donnie. You said that you're going to reduce staff for support of programs. You're going to reduce staff in lending and the support staff for lending on the backs of what you're going to do to help disabled folks in our community. Is that, yeah, reducing the loan staff to support for the lending and the lending staff to pay for your your additions that you said that you wanted? I'm not quite sure what that looks like. And maybe I'm getting confused. And the reason why I'm getting confused is because everything is in paragraph form. And so I'm trying to write down really quickly, you know, in your report I'm getting confused about it because I'm not dealing with real numbers. So I will follow back up with you. But can somebody just tell me what is the general fund, what is how much is in the general operating budget? What's the general fund? Because I went to our budget site, it doesn't. There is no place that you can go and double click and find out how much is in. What is the general fund budget.
42 I see dca looking to our budget officer.
43 Yeah, we'll see if we can come up. I'll just acknowledge it is not there. It's difficult to have a simple answer quite honestly, which is which is admittedly frustrating because there are. Components of the general fund that are relevant. I'm trying to think of how to answer this in a way that is remotely satisfactory. There's elements of the general fund that are applicable in sort of different circumstances. And so it's really I'm a little cautious because sometimes that leads to some misleading information. If we talk about the size of the thing in total, that's not necessarily reflective of available amounts or discretionary amounts. And so we're more than happy to start to parse that out. In a way.
44 You're making my point exactly.
45 If you can't sit here and tell me how much is in the general fund, how can you tell me we're short 20 million from the general fund if you don't even know what it is? That part right there, that is the that is one of the single most important things that we need to know is how much is the general fund? And the last question I said this was the last question before, but when are we getting our general fund forecast?
46 Our general fund forecast is prepared by city economist who's housed in the city budget office, who looks at all of the economic factors that feed into that and runs. It, that runs models to.
47 Identify when is that date.
48 It's on the it's on.
49 Our April 28th.
50 April 28th. Yes. Okay. April 28th. That's when we'll know what we're working with. But right now we don't know what we're working with. We just got this pie in the sky. We're taking money from here and don't even know what we got. So anyway, thank you so much for the report. I understand what you're trying to do. You're trying to give us a narrative. You're creating your narrative right now. And for me, that doesn't work for you all to create a narrative. And you're spinning fear into organizations and to departments that may not even get cut. But you're putting that out there, the most egregious cuts first so people can get all worked up. And I don't like it. It's not it's not a good way to do business. Thank you.
51 Do you want us to get to some asks for things that we can get back that would be helpful. And I think I know, I know.
52 I already told them what I need, I need some numbers. I need an excel spreadsheet. That was very clear.
53 We have the budget documents in paper form. I think it might be helpful to get folks those documents electronically for people for whom that's easier as well. And as we get those documents, perhaps some notes as to where we can find some of the things in those documents that you've talked about today with either page numbers or line numbers in a spreadsheet, so that we can track between the two things.
54 I'll simplify it, madam president. So that whole report that you gave us today, if you would just have numbers right here, what you're talking about and then the numbers right here, because I don't know how much you're talking, but I do know this number because I've heard it a lot. This 1500 is going to cost 28 million. I know that one off the top of my head, but I don't know these other ones. If you can go on every page of this report and put the numbers of what you're talking about.
55 Councilor Green.
56 Thank you, madam president, and thank you for the presentation today. Deputy city administrators, a couple of questions here on the slide. Dci barry, there was a proposed change that described. Impacts statements related to proposed taxes and ordinances. I think that's how that language read. Could you say a little bit more about that? I forget the resolution number, but it was cuts on the left hand side. And then there was proposed changes. And it wasn't it wasn't anything programmatic. It was just referring to a resolution, I think, from last year that describes presumably the resources your office would need.
57 Yes. Correct. Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Sorry, I'm tracking your question. Yes. So the reference is in the proposed section. Proposed changes section. This is the one addition within the budget and finance service area council. Previous council in 2024 implemented or passed a resolution that requires that any new revenue generating proposal goes through, that there's resources available to do an impact analysis of that. And those would be proposals that are generated through the city machine or proposals, if they're generated outside of the city through the public, that there's a contributed resource for the city to help assist with providing that additional analysis. And so we have a I believe it's $50,000 is the placeholder we put in there, which we assumed is enough to cover kind of two of those a year. That would require contract contracting with an outside consultant to provide that analysis. Should those requests arise. If they don't arise, that money would remain unspent.
58 Thank you. And colleagues. I would say that this is something that we want to protect because if we want to bring policy changes here and we're required to do a fiscal impact statement, they need to be able to do it in a way that's rigorous and not just based upon opinions. So just putting that out there, do you have it the ready the five year revenue forecast that's related to I'm sorry. Let me let me say it again. Is it possible to sort of speak in broad terms what the city economist has has sort of projected in the current version of vintage, of what we can expect, the trajectory for our general fund revenues to look like over the next couple of years.
59 Yeah, I don't know, off the top of my head. And if ruth or others in the room, including the city economists, do know, that's great. They can come on up. I mean, I would say generally it's moderated growth, you know, that most of that general fund forecast is a combination of property tax and business license tax. And so we're expecting business license tax to be sort of a reasonable, steady kind of consistent growth level and property tax probably another year of challenge. Again, predominantly as we've talked in other forums, that dip in the current year is due to commercial, predominantly commercial properties in the downtown core. And the expectations are that that will continue to be a suppressed property value situation for another year before those resources start to recover. The other comment I'll make for awareness of the council is that the general fund that the calculation of the gap takes into account a five year balancing requirement. And so to the extent that we anticipate reduced revenues in the future, next year, for example, reduced growth and revenues next year, that is factored into the current year's decision making. So to the extent we see that upside growth above what's currently anticipated, in theory that's an opportunity in future budgets. But because we do have that five year balancing policy, that forecasted growth is reflected in the current current forecast growth.
60 I appreciate that. And just, madam president, in the spirit of abiding by the guidance that you and counselor Zimmerman pushed out, I'm trying to create some context here. So near term recent trending stuff and also as well as the forecast. And the reason why I'm asking these kind of questions is I'm trying to get a sense of how temporary this level of. Down in our revenue is relative to, frankly, the balances in our policy reserves or our general fund reserves. And what I know and I know this is a question that makes any good cfo nervous, but there are some areas where if we cut them, we lose the capability and to and to and to spin that back up would be very costly. And if there's a world in which we think it's reasonable to sort of borrow against those revenues, those reserves for this purpose, that seems like something that we should be considering.
61 Yes. Good observation both that it does make the cfo nervous. And it's also a good observation just generally we're absolutely looking at all of those areas. And so I believe we'll see in the mayor's proposed looking to utilize all of those reserves that are reasonably available to the minimum level possible. Just a flip side to that. I'll just mention, to be clear, for the record, the flip side of using those reserves is risk, that we keep those reserves for a reason. We recently experienced a global pandemic, and having reserves on hand to manage through that was a very valuable tool. And so just a great question, certainly open to having more discussion about it, but just acknowledging that we absolutely are looking at those. And there's a trade off for, for not keeping those reserves in the minimum level that's identified.
62 Thank you. And please intervene if I'm taking too much time. So I have done some work in my office to get up to speed on the last five years via the aquifers. I forget it's annual consolidated financial anyway. It's their it's their statement of cash flows that are audited. Right. And one of the areas that I saw in terms of there's two areas that I think in terms of that accounting, that gaap accounting that had large growth both in dollar terms and ftes, at least in relative terms, was a line item called the legislative slash admin slash support services line item. That had a pretty substantial growth, I think, in terms of general fund requirements. Over that five years, there was a 97% increase in general fund requirements for that line item. I will say also, during that same period of time, there was a reduction in other fund balances used to fund that line item. And so I just and I know there was growth in ftes as well. So I'm wondering, you know, as we have this discussion of like, you know, chopping from the top to use some language, I heard yesterday, a span of control, efficiency stuff, how much of that growth was sort of interboro kind of accounting, or is it just was it really a growth in our supervisor middle management ranks? Does that make does that make sense?
63 Yeah, it's a great question. The answer is I don't know. And I'd love to explore that further. I'll just say anecdotally a couple of things. One, I know that we're working on the span of control analysis in dca. Morrissey can talk a little bit more about the status of that if you if you'd like. The other thing just for awareness is some some of those reflect shifts in the organization that are not reflective of changes in functionality. Right. So changes in the way things are allocated and the audit for example. And just the last point I'll make about that is that I'm not grokking to what specifically that line item includes, but happy to talk more about it. But the way it's described, I would not attribute that specifically to upper level management. That category, as you described it, is very, very expansive and likely includes lots and lots of different kind of flavors of positions and tasks. So just but but happy to explore more. It's a great question.
64 Yeah. And it's just really a question for information gathering.
65 Yeah. Appreciate it. Thank you.
66 Mr. Berry. I did see staff behind you stand up with that question. I don't know if we want additional answers. Okay.
67 Thank you. I mean sorry.
68 Go ahead and introduce yourself.
69 For the record, ruth levine, I just a couple of quick things to clarify. Just we do have a general fund forecast on online on our website. So I will send the link to make sure everybody has it. It's it comes out. It came out in February. It will be updated in April. But typically the April update is very small because it just accounts for tax data that comes in in April, essentially. But the April date should be fairly small on the aqua category. I would really encourage everybody. The acfr is a valuable resource for accounting purposes. If you want to understand what's actually going on in the budget, I would really encourage you to use budget documents as much as possible. The legislative admin incorporates what we call funds and debt management, which is stuff that includes like passthroughs that are like debt proceeds and the like. That category doesn't really mean anything really, so I would so no, it doesn't represent actual growth.
70 That is helpful. Thank you. When we look at fte changes or when we consider ftes in the aquifers, is that just city staff ftes or does it also pick up sort of like what an ft equivalent would be for a consultant or contractor.
71 Just city staff.
72 Okay, great. I'm going to get to the point. I'm going to cut out a bunch of questions here. I just want to flag here that I'm very interested. I'm encouraged to see that you're looking at ems exterior materials and services as reductions in the total. As I've calculated it in the total. So general fund reduction for the 26, I see about $37 million in ems. There's also $94 million in personnel. And so I just one of the things I'm going to be looking for as we go forward is, are there are there consultants that we are paying right now, or are we planning to pay in the next year that we could end that contract in terms of the force of that contract that would preserve city staff? Because that's my preference. I understand sometimes consultants interact in ways that interweave between different types of programs and projects. And so it may be difficult, but my preference would be to sort of look there first, and I'm just going to cede the rest of my time. Thank you.
73 I'm not sure you have additional time left, but we will take we will take back this negative time. Councilor councilor Kanal.
74 Thank you, madam president.
75 I want to just flag I see somebody from our attorney's office sitting here. If we start to walk too close to the line of what we can't talk about or ask yet, can you please just shoot us some dagger eyes so that we can come back in line?
76 Council president heidi brown, for the record, I'd be happy to do so. And I'm here in case there's questions about the oversight system. Thank you.
77 Go right ahead, counselor.
78 Yeah. So just quick introductory thing for everyone. Please come to the district two town hall. We haven't had ours yet. Ours is tomorrow, 6 p.m, pcc cascade. I also want to recognize how many staff are in the room. Thanks for making time and being a part of this. And labor partners as well. We have 7000 employees, many of whom are also our residents and your dependent in many of you on council decisions to know if you have a job on July 1st, I, I can't. I wish I could give you certainty or reassurance today, but what I can tell you is that's something that many of us up here know and are keeping in mind as we go through this. And I've been in your shoes, especially that that dreaded tag of affected employee. And I've done it twice. I empathize, and I want you to know it's a part of my thinking on every part of this process. Administrator jordan, so your news release on February 28th shows a $23 million decrease to Portland parks and recreation. If the dashboards 2.95 million for this year's police budget, and the slide decks $3.17 million for the police budget is correct, you're showing a roughly comparable increase of $22 million to police. In parallel, the mayor asked for an updated projection where only fire and not police would take a 5% cut. I'll come back to that in a moment. And I'm trying to understand who made the decision to move 22 to $23 million? From parks to police it crosses two service areas. So I want to understand if this was a dca level decision or if it was from the administrator, mayor, etc. Dca shymansky noted that her service area drives community safety, cultural resilience, and a strong, stable economy and I agree. She also talked about it as close to an existential question for parks. So given that I want to know who do I direct my questions to on this? Who is the champion for defunding the parks?
79 The decision to take cuts in the recommendation that you're referring to on February the 28th, that decision was mine.
80 And but this is not just a cut. This is a move of 22 to 23 million.
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81 From defacto. That's correct.
82 And so that that's so I should direct my follow ups to you on that okay. Thank you. I will do that after we hear from my constituents tomorrow. I have heard from the other three. I was at parts of all of those. So thank you. So I'll start with the ones that might involve heidi and keep those two together there. That's $317 million listed as as police. 5% of that is $15.8 million on the slide where we broke out. And this is a new slide. I hadn't seen it where we broke out the operations service area. It says $2.1 million. So that appears at first glance, to be a pretty significant violation of the charter provision for 5% going to the oversight system. Can you speak to that?
83 Yeah, I can speak to that. So the oversight system to meet the charter provision 2-1004, which reads funding for the board shall be proportional to be no less than 5% of the police bureau's annual operational budget. You're correct. The 5% is five 15.825 million. That is made up of three components. So one is the office of community based police accountability at 2.1 million. That is what we are projecting based on the timeline for the hiring of the director, the hiring of all the staff, the limited duration employee that we have right now. And so that is the 2.1. We also then account for the ipr. So as part of that oversight. So that is 3.47 million. And then the sub. We have a sub fund. So that is a sub fund for 10.255 million which will be available. It is sitting there when the board is up and running. That's that's rolling over year to year.
84 So the sub fund makes sense to me. No concern there. Ipr is not part of the board. And it says funding for the board will be proportional in the charter. So is the proposal here for ipr to be subsidiary to.
85 What the president. And I'm very sorry to interrupt you. I need to issue a point of order here and suggest that you highlight this as an area of concern versus a by line item for what we're getting into in as our guidance said prior to the mayor's budget, we are advising you, please don't discuss a line item budget. So I want to be supportive of where you're going. I would say a method right now might be to flag that this is unclear, and you're going to need to hear more about it in the more specific time frame, if that's helpful. But we ventured quite close there and I want to. Point of order. Thank you.
86 I've been watching our attorney. Thank you, counselor, and I see you sitting up here.
87 I can move on. I got other questions. But the concern I have is that I want to follow charter 2-1004, which was, as we've all heard a million times, approved by 82% of voters in November 2020. Moving on. My understanding is that the request. I don't want to do this again. So let me let me talk about the big picture.
88 Tell us about big picture values. If there's questions about what values were used to come up with these recommendations, like you asked of mr. Jordan, I think those are all safe areas of conversation.
89 Yeah. I want to push back on the idea. That was an answer to a question on that about what is core in public safety? We're having a panel next week at the community and public safety committee with labor partners, which include not only firefighters and police officers and dispatchers, of course, but also ask me protect those types of unions as well that provide that that represent jail id, tax records clerks, accountants, procurement analysts and the grant seeking staff who bring in money to a service area that doesn't really have cost recovery built in. So the idea that that's not core is concerning to me. And so as I went through this, there's that's that's one of the two big concerns I have with the public safety way that it's described. And I just wanted to flag that as a big picture thing. We need records tax in the police bureau to respond to the overwhelming number of public records requests they get.
90 I don't disagree with you, councilor. I think next week that would be a really appropriate discussion between you and the chief. If the chief is going to be there regarding core service and what's necessary. So I think.
91 That's labor.
92 Absolutely. Well, of course, but I think it's absolutely an appropriate discussion to have.
93 Okay. I think I'm directing it to you because of the previous question on the moving, but also because I'm sure you're going to be in close communication with the mayor on his proposal.
94 Yeah. And my previous I hope my previous answer didn't imply that those other services would be shut down.
95 Sure.
96 I think it's about.
97 Prioritizing and balancing those services. Absolutely I agree.
98 Okay, thanks. And then the other thing I wanted to can we pull up the slides one more time. There's a specific slide I wanted to point to it. Slide. Sorry. 21. Sorry. So it says add under proposed changes and additions. It says add funding for legal and accountability requirements for body worn cameras and focused intervention team oversight. I'm not going to ask about the specific line item here, but I do want to note that it implies, and I also want to note I'm supportive of focused intervention team oversight. On the left side, it says reductions in Portland committee on community-engaged policing. And there is a factual error that I brought up in February on this, which is that that we have no legal requirement as a city to do one of those things, the one that's being labeled as protected legally. And we have settlement agreement requirements that I quoted the specific paragraphs 141 to 144 on two have a pccep and that's the one taking the cut. So this is not my way of talking about the line items, but my way of saying there's some fact checking that needs to get done here. And I brought this up five weeks ago so that we wouldn't have to do this here. But there is a legal requirement under federal law to do one of these things, and that's the one getting cut. There is no legal requirement. It doesn't even exist in city law to do that oversight right now. And again, I support having that group, but it's being labeled as accountability requirements. And so I want to encourage you to fact check this and get that updated. And then my last question, because that's the only one I think I can get into, is can someone clarify to me in this, the previous slide within the $31 million, that's the office of the public safety dca. How much of that is for things like office of violence prevention ceasefire? What's the portion of it that is the community safety and what's the portion of it that is overhead for the actual office of the dc?
99 I would defer to dc meyers. He's on.
100 Thank you. Mike and councilor Kanal, I might ask elizabeth perez to bring up the appropriate staff to answer the question. I will say that the office of violence prevention right now, ceasefire is about $6.1 million worth of grant funding, community investment and personnel costs. Office of prevention, I think, is an additional 1.2 a million in office of prevention. But I'd have to really dig into the exact numbers so that you could have a truthful statement. Elizabeth, would you be able to comment with nathan on how that breaks down?
101 Mr. Meyers, you have a staff person coming up right now to provide some additional commentary.
102 Hi. For the record, I am nathan leamy. I manage the budget, strategy and performance team for the office of the dca, and I put down my laptop and it died. So let me see if I can bring it back up to get those numbers for you. About here we go plugged in with somebody else. The. Split by cost center for the office of the dca has around almost alive again. There we go. So it has for Portland street response. It's about 8 million of that 20 million within pdx. So almost half then within what we have for ovp and ceasefire is another 4 million. Then what we have for the business services unit is around 5 million.
103 Okay. So I guess just to clarifying, can you explain for people.
104 Yeah. So the split the public safety service area, we have four bureaus fire police boec and pbem. And then there is another financial unit called rp within our financial system, which is the office of the dca. That includes both programs within enterprise services. So that is the business services functions, communications team equity as well as the community safety programs that exist as of ceasefire and Portland street response. Okay.
105 And then my other question is to clarify how how are we increasing? I'm seeing a $1 million cut to pbem from last year's 9.5 to this year's 8.5. While on the next slide, it's talking about increasing capacity for emergency early emergency alerts and warning system. How what else is getting cut beyond the 1 million to offset, or how is that? What's the.
106 Councilor Kanal that will clearly fall?
107 I'm saying it. Yeah.
108 I appreciate that you look this way.
109 Yeah. As soon as I started, I guess. Let me just end by.
110 No councilor I appreciate you bringing up the topic. And that gives us an indication that we need to look at those things. So I realize we can't get into it.
111 Okay, I guess I'll close by saying.
112 I appreciate the concern.
113 I guess I'll close by saying, I know nathan and elizabeth's team can lead. All of you know this the public safety budget better than anybody and are very capable of it. And I'm going to cosign councilor Smith's request for the most detail that you think will never read in a spreadsheet, because we will. And I do have a lot of concerns about this and would encourage that we're as we make tweaks to the rest of this. And going forward, I think this one, you may need to start over on it. And I hate to do that. This this one was pretty frustrating to go through because of the lack of detail.
114 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Novick, would you like to take a try at staying within the lines?
115 I think I can. First of all, counselor Smith, I think I can tell you why the staff did not provide an excel spreadsheet. As we learned this morning, councilor Morillo is about to outlaw excel spreadsheets, and I think that staff is just getting ahead of that by weaning themselves off them early. Mr. Jordan, I have a very broad and simplistic question for you because I'm not a fancy phd economist. I'm just a simple caveman lawyer. I, like. Councilor Smith, was somewhat frustrated by this document because I'll tell you how I reacted and how I've been describing your document at the end of February. What I've been telling people is, I like what mike did here, he said, here's a list of horrific cuts, mostly to parks. And in order to balance the budget, we'd have to recommend things that are so horrific I don't want to recommend them so you guys figure out the rest of it, which I thought was appropriate. So I didn't expect another budget briefing before the mayor's proposals came out. When I saw this document, I assumed it would say, here's some of the other horrific cuts we're going to have to make. But actually, I don't really see anything very horrific here. With with all due respect to the Portland committee and community engaged policing, if all we're going to have to do to get the additional 40 or 50 million is cut, things like that, I'm not that scared. So I'd like you to tell, if you had to choose one of the following things to say to us, which would it be? A break out the champagne. We've actually figured out we can balance the rest of the budget by doing nothing more scary than cutting the committee on community engaged policing, or b. Oh, no. When the mayor's proposal comes out, you're going to see some other horrific things, I guarantee it.
116 It's probably both of the above. No. I'm kidding, I'm on the record with the media. When that February 28th document came out saying that the general fund has really three big decisions that have to be made, or three big issues that have to be accounted for. You have what are potentially existential issues with parks? Those are interrelated with the council having to make a decision about a levy that would probably need to be on the ballot in November, and then if it failed, potentially again in may, to be able to think about what parks look like in the following years. So that's one, two, we certainly have the potential for challenging cuts to public safety, because the other big rock in the in the general fund and third, to councilor Smith's point, the city has made some choices over the last five years that have created a number of programs which are serving the most vulnerable in our city. And those programs were predominantly started up with one time money, ARPA money cares money. And income business income tax money that came in above projection for three years. And that's no longer the case with the business income tax money. And we certainly know that we don't have any more federal money. So the big rocks are homelessness and livability services, public safety and parks. You can tap around in the other spots of the general fund, but they won't be worth tapping on at the scale we're talking about. So those are the challenges that I actually tried to frame in the 28 document. Didn't do it very well, except at a very conceptual level. I appreciate the council's desire for line items and numbers, and you're going to get them and they won't be pretty. I think when the mayor's proposal comes out, it is going to be a real challenge. I think we would be closer to b than a for your choices.
117 Thank you. I just want to say that this this document at first reads sort of muddled that. So I think that might be why councilor Smith was a little frustrated and I was too, although I would have been ecstatic to learn that we it turned out that the Portland committee on community-engaged policing did cost $50 million. Thank you.
118 Appreciate it counselor.
119 It's a councilor.
120 Thousand. Thousand. And I think. Councilor calling out other councilors.
121 We're not calling folks out. I want to make sure everybody has time for their questions. Councilor Clark.
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122 Thank you, madam chair. I just have a few general comments. I was really glad to see asset management highlighted. I'm kind of a broken record on that, so I was very glad to see it. And I look forward to getting a work plan. I want to echo what councilor Zimmerman said about what drives your choices. And for me, one of the prisms would be, how does this bring back the downtown? How does this affect the downtown? I don't have a crystal ball about the future, the next five years, but I really fear that we'll go into a recession. I'm not really optimistic about the next five years. I think we may have a down period, particularly with happening at the federal level. We really haven't talked about what those impacts might be. So what I wanted to offer up is maybe it's not relevant right at this moment, but in the future, I think we need to start looking at different models of service delivery. And by that I mean increased use of our people assets. The people in our neighborhood associations, our cbos, our nonprofits, the people people want to engage. And I certainly heard that at our budget session last night. Whether it's parks maintenance or it's community centers or whatever it is, I think that there's a desire to do that, but it has to be in an organized fashion. But new models, new partnerships. And I've also mentioned, and I know donna paul has already heard this from me, how what can we offload? What assets can we offload? What programs can we offload? What other partnerships can we find to do that. And I will just something very specific is I would ask, why is the city of Portland running a transit line when we have a transit agency that probably should be doing that? And is that something that we can offload and save money on? But there are other partners out there, maybe the plazas, but just generally I'm just thinking, what can we dispose of and what can what can we find a partner for or someone else to manage? So thank you for giving me the opportunity to say that I appreciate your time.
123 Councilor Ryan.
124 Good afternoon. I think what I first of all, I understand that we didn't get line items, but I appreciated all the comments earlier that this, I think, becomes challenging for us to receive the incomplete budget at the end of February. And then the next version of a narrative of the incomplete budget. So we're up here doing the best we can. This is the mayor's budget. The mayor's budget will come out on the fifth. You all work for the mayor. So we're the community legislators trying to figure out what we're eventually going to receive. Is that what's happening here? All right, so you stated a narrative place. I get that, but I think what's missing for me is vision. And what is the real problem? We're trying to solve. The real problem in our city right now is we have a revenue problem because portlanders, especially our higher earners that provide more revenue, that have businesses, have been closing down and leaving the city and moving to other counties surrounding us. So say that. I'll say it, and I hope that we understand. And everything we should be doing is trying to build a city that stops the bleeding, and then we start having revenue in the future. There's no other way to get revenue any better than having robust business licenses coming in again, having property taxes come in again. So our partners at the county aren't suffering. This is what's currently going on. So I'm missing the vision that says, here are the ways for us to stop the bleeding and to keep portlanders in the city of Portland. And when I go to porches and you've all been on those same porches, what you hear is a mother saying, I'm tired of going to the parks after getting my three kids bundled up, and then the restrooms closed, the elderly person that says, I'm tired of living near a max stop, but I don't feel safe to write it. You're tired of hearing the business owner that says, this is my third broken window in three months, and one more broken window, and I have to close my business. That's what's going on in the city of Portland right now. It's not. It's just like. Except that. So how are we going to build a budget that's appropriate to that? So I'll just say, I hope that we still have a vision that keeps economic development, that keeps public safety, that keeps livability and homelessness and housing as our priorities, which you mentioned. But how are we going to get creative to do that? And I think I'm missing that conversation. It still feels like we're in silos and we're doing some trading on ftes, and that doesn't make sense to me. And when we start to do the streamlining that we hear about, but we can't talk about how many ftes that might be, that confuses me. So I hope that we start to get to a place where we start talking about. I agreed with councilor Zimmerman at the very beginning, which seemed like hours ago, that this conversation has lacked. It's a slow walk right now to do that hard work, and we can't keep slowing it down. We have to get efficient. So far, the charter reform that the voters passed has made our government more expensive. If you look at it by a line item, that's true. And so now how can we take the government transition. So it actually gives us the efficiencies that I heard promised when people were voting yes on the charter. Okay. That was my little speech for today. Now I'm going to get to a couple of questions. I couldn't figure out the repair grants. If they were taken out. They were. They diminished. Please tell me.
125 No thanks for the question, councilor. So the repair grants.
126 Were to be equal. I got to call a point of order here, councilor Ryan.
127 So I can't ask questions like that.
128 I believe we can ask if they were taken out, because that is in the actual documents that the service area has brought forward. We can't ask about changes to that. Is that accurate?
129 If you wouldn't mind, I can read the.
130 I just.
131 Got a thumbs up.
132 I don't have much time. Let's just keep going. Will you give me a feedback on that later? We'll talk. Okay. Because again, people are leaving because their windows get broken because they can't afford insurance anymore. So they have to pay it out of their pocket. That's what real portlanders out there that are providing revenue so that we all have jobs are saying to us, when I hear things about optimizing, see where that goes scenario. So you have procurements. Been a fascinating issue since I've been in office four and a half years. And same with hr. What you kept hearing about in the silos of the bureaus is they kept building shadow systems for procurement, for hr, for communication, for equity. You name all the centralized systems. The shadow systems kept getting built because they weren't getting the efficiency of service. They thought from central, that's a real problem. That's a real opportunity to get to the bottom of to get to some of this streamlining that we're looking at. I hope to hear that when there's a real budget announced on may 5th, maybe I'll just do it like that. Say what I hope to see and not make you answer line item questions. Is that okay? Councilor zimmermann? Thank you. Okay. Okay. Where did that go? I guess what I'll do right now is just say that that's an example of where what I'm missing right now, I'm missing a vision from the mayor's vision on this budget, from all of you. And I'm missing what hard work you're doing to streamline services at this time. And I hope to hear what those priorities are and how small businesses and families that are trying to hang in there, they're really trying to hang in there with the city of Portland, but a lot of them are at the end of their rope, and we've got to provide services that stop that bleeding. And that's what I'm going to focus on in this year's budget as a community legislator. And I hope to see some of that, those values that I think are responsive to portlanders in the budget that we're about ready to approve, we're going to have to do hard things. I feel bad for anyone in the city that's an fte that's concerned. Of course, we all have hearts up here, and that's painful. Yet we have to look outward at the people who live in Portland that are tired of calls not being picked up, of services not being followed through upon. And if we don't improve our customer service to the city of Portland, we will continue to see revenue leaving our city. Thanks.
133 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Dunphy.
134 Awesome. I'm going to try and be as brief as possible. I have a few guiding principles that I didn't really hear today that I'm hoping I'm sure exists within the broader context, but I just want to say them out loud also so the mayor can hear this. I would love to see specifically a call out for what kind of transfers we are doing of money to other governments. I know we transfer millions of dollars to, for example, the Multnomah county da's office. We transfer millions of dollars to prosper Portland, which is technically a separate government. I'm interested to know where those dollars are going, how many others are, and I would sure like them to be higher up on the list for cuts. Before we think about cutting core services. Similarly, and this is primarily, I think, an issue in the utilities specifically, but the dynamic between employees and contractors. But I also know that that exists in other bureaus as well. But whether there are opportunities for cost savings by hiring somebody rather than contracting it out and figuring out what that looks like, I know it's all complicated, but I'd sure like to know I. I'm desperate to make sure we are applying a lens where we are prioritizing represented and frontline employees, and calling out how we are looking at that with regard to job position cuts versus supervisors and managers. I'm really excited about the effort to centralize a lot of our services. As some of my colleagues have said, specifically the old form of government, everybody, everybody wanted one of the, you know, things for themselves. Everybody wanted their own equity officer. Everybody wanted their own procurement officer. It's a new day. We have a new service delivery model. I'd like to see how that's called out in the budget. As we are thinking about broad cuts, I'm specifically thinking about parks. But broadly, I really want to make sure we're avoiding a one size fits all approach. East Portland has one community center, we have one large park, and we have one community park facility with leach botanical gardens. If we are cutting equally across the system, east Portland will feel it worse. I'm deeply sympathetic to folks who want to see the saint john's community center saved, but fairly you know, in fairness, north northeast Portland have five community centers. We have one east of 82nd. I'm. I really hope that there is some process by which we are actually capturing the idea of outcomes and metrics and who we are serving, rather than looking at what makes sense on a piece of paper. To say this is a self-contained program that is easy to cut from a budget exercise. I really want to know who are we serving and why. I really desperately care about the what happens to 10 to 18 year olds from the hours of 2:00 to 8:00? I care less about the senior swim lessons at 6 a.m. As an example, that we need to make sure that we're understanding who and why are we serving? And that's it. That's everything on my list. Thank you.
135 Thank you councilor. I believe the next person in the queue who has not had an opportunity yet to speak is vice president Koyama Lane.
136 Hi everyone. So I want to acknowledge that even without a big budget gap that like this one we have, this would still be really messy. Figuring this out, I also know we will get through it. We're going to get to the other side of it and next year we'll go smoother. We'll have a longer runway. I think we'll be able to do community engagement earlier on. I appreciate the opportunities to engage. I genuinely appreciate the mayor meeting with all of us and hearing our perspectives. I also know that we are the legislative branch. We're also supposed to be doing constituent services, letting you know what we hear from constituents I'm interested in what kind of budget can we pass that allows us on July 1st to do our jobs as a as the legislative branch? Where can there be flexibility so we can decide through legislation some of these priorities? Also, I know that it's coming. It's no one's fault that we don't have this yet, but we just don't have a citywide mission vision strategic plan yet. We have a lot of those for all the different bureaus. That's to come. I believe we will get that. I think that will help us in future budget cycles. In the meantime, what I'm asking to be a tool that we continue to look back at and we use our our city's core values. So I think a lot of time has gone into making those. I want to I want us to be naming them more. I want us to be using them as a tool when we're making some of these decisions, when we're looking at questions about programing for kids, let's run it through these lenses of anti-racism, equity, transparency, communication, collaboration and fiscal responsibility. So I might get annoying because that's what I'm going to keep asking about is how how are these how is this decision or these cuts in line with or not in line with our core values, and also just really uplift them as a tool to help us in making decisions?
137 Counselors, there are a few people who I believe we haven't heard from who aren't in the queue. Does anybody else wish to speak? Before we move on to second chances? We have 25 minutes left. Okay, counselor Zimmerman, you want me to skip over you? Okay, counselor. And as we go through these second rounds, I'm going to ask you each to try to keep it to about five minutes so everyone can get that second chance.
138 Yeah. Thank you. I want to start over because now I understand a little bit better that that maybe the questions approach is, is not ideal. But but we're really giving values here. So I want to start by saying I appreciate the administrator's document from February 27th. It was going from nothing to something which our 28th. My frustration had been that it didn't iterate, even though this is an iterative process from then until now, the date on the title slide for the original draft of this proposal still says February 27th on it. And that was 33 days ago, and exactly 33 days from now, the mayor will release his proposal and then we'll be in a mad sprint. I think we have 11 days to propose amendments after that. So I want to cosign councilor Smith's point that getting information is vital, but getting it now in a timely manner. Time and information are the two ways we'll be able to exercise our to do our jobs. Because council is not ideally, ideally, we're not a rubber stamp and we're not being asked to be. We're the final approval of the budget. So big picture values. I would like to see a broad vision of public safety and no reductions to it and frankly, expanding it, community centers or public safety to so our public safety support specialists, telecommunicators, park rangers, chats, medical staff and so much more that I don't have time to list. A second thing is following the law. If voters voted for something I don't want to, we don't have to discuss it. We don't have to debate it. We don't have to complain about just do it. It's a pretty basic thing. A third thing that I'd like to lay out is to get out of the scarcity mindset. I totally empathize with councilor Dunphy's point about d1 has one community center, and if that was on the chopping block, I'd be fighting like hell to keep it too. And yes, there are five. But if you look at saint john's, we need to protect that too, because we actually do have the money here to do it. And then to be more transparent about this, because and I want to close with this, we are not in a $92 million deficit. We have a ask for $28 million that has never been discussed by this council as a whole as to whether or not we want to devote our funding to it, where I'm hoping to hear from the mayor how his requests for external funding are going for that proposal. I know that he's been really working hard on it, and I don't know the answer at the moment, but that's a part of what we're talking about when we say 92. So is this one time funding that's expiring? I think it's in the ballpark of 40 million that we're talking about here. So you take that out. That's $68 million out. We're now talking about a $24 million deficit, which, if you may recall, is what we were hearing about earlier. And so separating that out is really helpful because it's when we're talking about making a structural deficit hole, we are talking about cuts we have to make when we're talking about backfilling for Portland solutions with $40 million there. We're talking about that at the expense of something else. And it's a it's a priority question, right? It may be the right priority, but I think let's being a little bit more transparent about that in the numbers will be very helpful because I agree. And I really I want to end by saying I appreciate administrator jordan, your framing around which are the questions that are actually going to matter $47,000 for pccep is not going to make a difference either way. But when we're talking about the millions that are in those three big buckets, and I agree with councilor Ryan's priority of what's going to make us a city that grows and gets better at this. And councilor Green's point that we shouldn't be doing this next year, and that ideally we're making decisions that make us not have to do this next year. But I really appreciate that framing of those three big buckets, because that's that is where this is at. And there's certainly it's not one versus the other only it's within that what do we do. But those are the values that I'll be bringing to it throughout. And as part of that data, I would also just add getting clarity on which is one time and which isn't clarity on what's general fund and what isn't, clarity on what's passed through and what isn't for the contractors. And ideally, an understanding of the proportion. When we do talk about staff reductions, the proportion of management level staff, and I'd separate that ground level manager for personal reasons as well as general, the managers who who do things in addition to managing. They have direct project based work, is a slightly different category than a manager. Three who might be more managing of people. So I just want to get those sort of asks out there so that it's able to be possible to, to evaluate this better in the future. Thank you, madam president.
139 Thank you, councilor. Councilor Ryan.
140 Oh yeah. Real quick, just on a couple other things that I would expect when you all come back on may 5th with the mayor's budget that you're working on with the mayor, is I don't want to have the last minute staff scramble. So I want to hear what the strategy is with PCEF. And I know that we made decisions last year, but it was all a last minute scrambling. And I hope that that becomes really crisp and clear on may 5th. I hope that we look at the parks budget with nature and trees as a part of that. I think everyone knows that. That's my opinion there. I'm confused about Portland solutions. I'm just confused. I, I can't understand if we just kept moving people into that and that's why it's growing. I can't I don't know what's going on with Portland solutions. It's kind of like we yeah, I know I was there, but trust me, it all took off pretty quickly last year. It was like sf and so suddenly, like Portland solutions was a thing. People were wearing sweatshirts and it was like, you know, this new branded part of the city. And I think it was just taking in some of the services. We did, like impact reduction, like the safe rest villages. And we already had really competent people up there. So how many more people were added on the top of Portland solutions? And you'll always hear me say, I think we're a little top heavy. It's not, you know, it's not just the dcas. I think you're all working on that really clearly. But even in some of these, what parts of the enterprise using your word, what is the what is the flow there? And so in addition to line items that we'll see on may 5th, I'm actually really attached to org charts because it's people that do the work. So be great to get beyond the big picture one. Thank you. That was helpful. And that was one of the big I'd say that's the big add since the last time we had this conversation a month ago. So I look forward to that. So that's that's what I want to see. Pcf Portland solution and some org charts. Thanks.
141 Thank you. Councilor, councilor Smith.
142 Thank you, madam president. So it wasn't lost on me. I forget who said it that there was an addition of 12 new security guards. Who who gave us that report? There?
143 Hi, councilor Smith. So I was saying the funding proposed is to provide security services to the 12 councilors and the auditor. So it's existing security, but it's just a different way in which it will be funded.
144 And you're trying to take it out of our budgets.
145 No. So this would be ongoing general fund that would not be coming from your budgets.
146 Okay. In addition to what we have right now. Correct. And so when you say each of us will get a security person, so you're saying I'm going to have a person addition.
147 So it would be a pool. So that's how we currently operate. We have six ep and I the agents. We have a few in the room today. That pool would continue and we would have stability and make sure that they would be working on advanced planning on dependent on need for each councilor. And so right now, what has happened for the last few years is that we have had disparate amounts of funding in various different buckets, and it has been challenging to plan for the future related to security. So what we're proposing is an ongoing general fund allocation that would secure that funding up front. And then those six pooled agents that we currently have would work with you all dependent on need.
148 So you would add six more?
149 No, it would be the existing six.
150 So you said 12.
151 Know what I said is that the security agents would be providing services to the 12 councilors and the auditor's office.
152 Yeah, I guess I just don't understand how much more money are we going to pay, because right now we are paying a security out of our out of our budget.
153 Yes. So you currently pay for a security reserve. And so each council budget, all of your budgets have a funding component related to that. With the new funding allocation, we would have conversations about potentially not having that reserve paid any more because we would be receiving it through the general fund. So it's just a different structure in the way we would do the funding allocation.
154 Okay, okay. Thank you. Thank you.
155 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Smith I apologize, councilor Green.
156 Thank you, madam president, for a future meeting. I just have a question that probably needs a little thinking, and I'm curious to know the impact. I. I'll just be direct. North macadam tif district is still open and there are still some resources there. I don't know if it can be closed. I don't know if we've any outstanding obligations, but if it were to be closed, I'm curious to know what the impact on the general fund return would be.
157 We'll get that answer back to you, councilor. Thanks for the question.
158 Thanks.
159 Councilor Zimmerman.
160 Thank you, madam president. So a couple of things I themes that I'm seeing, and I certainly would echo these just a larger as we go into the bigger conversations. And once we see the release budget, the ability to go deeper into any bucket that looks sizable is going to be important. I think that in all of the municipal budgeting that I've ever done, this might be the most difficult to interpret based on the way it is set up. So wherever we can go in more detail, I think will be welcomed from me. And from what I've heard, at least from a good portion of my colleagues. There was a comment just made about org charts, and I cannot, I cannot, I cannot underline that anymore. And plus it up with fte. In reviewing the doorstop document that I received, I will say it is very, very hard to place ftes toward. I'm going to use the word program offers, but I mean sections within your bodies of work because we are using those terms a little bit differently. But I am used to and I will be operating on an expectation of within a division, they're going to accomplish many lines of business. I consider a line of business a program offer. I would like to know in the org chart what and it goes along with span of control what fte are assigned accordingly. That will be helpful as we go forward. So org charts with fte should come off the page. I should not have to hunt for it. And then lastly I will just or two things. I would just encourage everybody that as we get into bureau, office etcetera, what lines of business are we going to be in and what lines of business are we no longer going to be in? Because if you cannot answer that, and the answer is we're just going to do all of our lines of business a little more poorly. That will help me understand the philosophy from which you developed the document. And I am looking for lines of business that we're going to do at high quality and lines of business that we're going to say are no longer part of our business because we don't do things poorly. That's where I'm coming from. And then I would just encourage anybody who's going to appear in front of committees, anybody who's going to appear in front of this body in the future. Please take a look at the questions, the comments, the value statements that were said, because I think most everything for you to be successful when you come in front of us has been stated here so that we can get to the meat of decision packages instead of the interpretation of documents. And I hope that that everybody it is worth the homework. It is worth the homework. So to my colleagues, it was risky to have this session prior to the mayor's proposed budget. In my career, I have never done one of those, and I still think it was important given the size, the breadth of what we are undertaking. I recognize it has not met the needs of everybody, but I think it got us at least a few steps closer in the process. Prior to the may 7th release. And so from that perspective, it didn't meet your needs always, but I hope it was at least valuable in a few steps. Anytime you can get a head start, it's good because cheating is important. So please communicate through your committees what you need from them before they come to you. Because I think the bulk of so many of these detailed conversations will happen there. That's all I have. Madam president, thanks for everything.
161 I councilor Morillo.
162 Thank you. I'll be pretty brief about this. I think most of my values are pretty clear and consistent for the most part, so you shouldn't be too surprised. I just think overall for the budget, I definitely am interested in seeing how much money we are giving to other governments, including, you know, other agencies like the district attorney's office, seeing if those funds that we are allocating are actually being used in the ways that they were intended. I also really want us to have an expansive view of public safety in the ways that councilors Dunphy, canal, and a few others have spoken about. When we have sat in these budget listening sessions, I think I was prepared to make some really harsh cuts to the rex aspect of the parks bureaus. And now that I have sat through these budget listening sessions, and I've heard from parents and families about how crucial these services are for them, that this isn't just recreation, that this is actually life saving, that these are places where kids sometimes that's the only meal that they get that I know. When I worked as an anti-hunger policy advocate, we would often see kids or teenagers who, if they didn't have access to these resources and these programs, the alternative is that they go and join a gang. So I think that these programs are violence prevention, and I'm really interested in looking at some of those core services that the city provides and making sure that we keep those intact as much as possible. And those are some of the values that I'll be looking at this, this whole budget through. Thank you.
163 Thank you, councilors, and thank you to all of our dca's, our aca, and our city administrator. The information is coming out in bits and pieces and that is hard. We do all have the budget documents in paper form. We will get them sent out electronically. My staff is going to resend out city org charts which were sent to all of you about a month ago, and you should be receiving, while we're sitting here, a link to all of the decision packages that each of our bureaus and service areas have put together, which should be coming, I believe, from ruth levine. That will be in your inboxes as well. My hope is that with all of that information in one place, or at least to you in one afternoon, through a few different emails, that you should be able to see most of the numbers and charts that you're looking for, so that as we move forward, we can have again for the next month, limited conversations on specifics, but more informed questions on what it is that we're looking for. I see one one moment.
164 Yes. Thank you, council president. I just wanted to flag I think you all know this, but for folks that are that might be watching all of those documents that you just referred to, the hard copy documents that you've been provided, all of those are posted on the cbo website. It's a little tricky. They're very large pdf files. So it's multiple documents that if you scroll down, but those are already posted publicly available and were posted with the with the city administrator's recommendations on February 28th. There's been some confusion about availability of those details. So I just want to be clear for folks that are watching online that that information is also publicly available for folks that are not sitting in this room.
165 Thank you. I appreciate you flagging where everybody can find it. In terms of next steps, counselors, we do have another conversation like this, but more in depth with the public safety service area. Before the mayor's budget comes out, we'll have to be careful about how we ask questions there. I do still think it's important in order to have enough time to do all of our work, to keep that meeting on our calendars, we will see the mayor's proposed budget document on may 5th, and then we'll have a conversation with the mayor in a hearing on may 7th. That's why you've heard both of those two dates thrown around. That will give you two days, two days to digest what we see before we have the mayor sitting before us giving the presentation on the release to us. Finally, I know that we've heard some asks about philosophy, and I would just say to the folks at the table across from us as we meet with all of you to give your service area presentations. And as you work with your bureaus, who will be bringing presentations forward to the committee, please help us see that thread, because I do think that in the information you shared with us today, there are bits and pieces of a philosophy for how you approach this. And the more we can understand that philosophy and tie it to the numbers, the more we can understand whether that's a philosophy that council can get behind and more easily support the budget packages that you have put forward, and the budget proposal that the mayor will bring forward, or whether those are philosophies that we have some concerns in disagreement with, so that we can air that as soon as possible and all get on the same page. Thank you all for bearing with us. I know it's been a long day, and I believe with that I am going to close our work session five minutes early. Thank you all.