The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-04-24
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (11,973 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Labor and Workforce Development Committee met on April 24, 2025, with roll call confirming attendance of Canal, Novick, Green, and Smith, followed by a reading of the standard statement of conduct. The committee first took up an ordinance to add a Fair Wage Policy code for certain city service contracts, addressing a provision removed during a November 2024 code cleanup that had since been described as unintentionally significant; discussion covered how the policy affects contracted workers' wage guarantees, cost-of-living adjustments, and standards, along with a memo from procurement whose rationale for the earlier repeal was discussed as internally inconsistent. No members of the public signed up to testify on this item or during a subsequent general public hearing on labor issues. A motion was made and seconded to refer the ordinance to full council with a "do pass" recommendation; a vote occurred, with outcomes recorded in the vote ledger. Discussion also touched on a workforce and apprenticeship resolution recently approved by full council, city hiring vacancies, police bureau staffing, and personal reflections on labor history and family background. The meeting concluded with a presentation from the Bureau of Human Resources, City Budget Office, and Labor Relations on labor and workforce aspects of the city budget, covering HR program budgets, inflation forecasting methodology, health fund administration, and the status and scheduling of multiple upcoming labor contract negotiations.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
0 Good afternoon. This is the April 24th, 2025 meeting of the labor and workforce development committee. Keelan, will you please call the roll?
1 Canal. Here. Novick. Here. Green. Here. Here. Smith.
2 Here. Ashley, will you please read the statement of conduct?
3 Welcome to the meeting of the labor workforce and development committee to testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at. Agenda workforce development committee or by calling 311. Information on engaging with this committee can be found on this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In in-person testifiers must not before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The chair preserves order. Disruptive conduct such as shouting. Refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or enter interrupting others testimony or committee. Deliberation will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, committee might might take a recess or reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered when testifying and state your name for the record, if your air lobbyist identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls.
4 Thank you.
5 Thank you. Ashley. Good afternoon. Today we will discuss the fair wage policy code ordinance. We will have 20 minutes of public hearing for anyone in the public to share thoughts or concerns related to committee topics. Then we will conclude this meeting with the presentation on the labor and workforce aspects of the city budget. Keelan, could you please read the first item?
6 Item one ad fair wage policy code for certain city services service contracts.
7 Thank you. I'm going to pass the agenda over to councilor Dunphy.
8 Thank you, madam. Thank you. Chair.
9 Colleagues, late last month, we heard a presentation from my amazing joint chief of staff, madeline west, and from yasmin ibarra from seiu regarding the city's fair wage policy. This is a policy that has been on the books for many years. But as part of the code cleanup package that passed on November 20th of 2024, the fair wage policy was was removed. This was at the time thought of as being a redundant policy, but. On further consultation with our our community partners, we really determined that this is actually a really meaningful and substantive policy that should retain, should be retained on our books. At our presentation, we heard specifically from folks who are represented by seiu about the guarantees that this policy makes for our contracted services to ensure that they know that they are going to be receiving certain standards, certain colas, and certain guarantees as part of their employment as a contractee of the city. It is my hope to get a vote of this body today, to advance this policy to the full city council and reinstate this policy before July 1st, to ensure that we are any of our. As we enter our new fiscal year, our contractors have guarantees of what they will be paid and how they will be employed. As part of our work on this, we have reached out to all of the contracting bureaus, all we have spoken to, facilities and procurement and PBOT and parks and everybody who might interact with this. Overwhelmingly. City bureaus have told us very clearly that they didn't know it had been removed. And so they were moving forward as though it was on the books. We do not have an additional presentation today, because we've already heard our presentation and don't want to waste any more time. But yasmeen and madeline are both here. In case there are any questions, I'd like to invite them to the dais if they want to say anything that I have missed. Please introduce yourselves and if I miss anything. They're also available for any follow up questions. But.
10 Yes. Madeline west, joint chief of staff for councilor Dunphy, for the record.
11 Good afternoon. Yasmin ibarra, political director with seiu local 49. Nice to be here with you all.
12 Did I miss anything?
13 No. That explained it very well, I think. I think this ordinance slightly strengthens the policy, insomuch as if there did need to be an exception or an exemption. The mayor's office would come back to council to request that exemption. Also, largely, like you said, no fiscal impact this cycle.
14 Yeah.
15 We updated the terms on here specifically to match. There was a previously outdated dollar amount that was listed on there for what the minimums were. We've strengthened this to modernize some of the language and make sure that it keeps up to date with inflation, and have heard no pushback from anyone within the city about any concerns about this. I think there's maybe one small concern, but I think that everything has, for the most part, agreed that this is a good policy, that we should continue. And as we heard during our presentation last month, this policy is actually influencing the work that other jurisdictions do by the city of Portland taking this leadership role. Other cities have followed and have implemented their own policies. So, colleagues, if anyone has any questions for folks or for me, I'd be happy to answer it. And I would ask that this committee consider moving forward with a vote.
16 Yes, councilor Green.
17 Thank you, madam chair. And thank you, councilor Dunphy, for bringing this forward and sort of championing this. I do have a question for yasmeen. Was this was this something that your members caught last year, or was this on your radar? Did you did you bring this to city council or did we how did that experience work for you guys?
18 Thank you for the question, councilor Green. It was around February when we do some internal lookup at in the city website to see when the forecast will be coming out. And then notice that it was no longer available. So we reached out to council clerk to get more information. And that's when we found out that it had been removed during the update in November of last year.
19 Thank you. And that's helpful. And I just want to highlight that. I think that's an example of the value of these committees, to be honest with you. So you know, councilors are are out here making policy. But we rely upon our labor partners. We rely upon our community members to, to help us identify gaps in our code and allow us to move quickly to fix that. So I want to thank you for, for doing that for, for not just your members, but every worker in the city. This this raises all boats, in my view. And I'm, I'm, I, I feel like I know enough I'm prepared to support this, so I'll just I'll just stop talking.
20 Thank you. Councilor. Canal.
21 Thank you, madam chair. I will have discussion on this afterwards, but I figure it's probably appropriate to just initiate the conversation in such a way. So I will formally move to refer the ordinance at fair wage policy code for certain city service contracts. Add code. Chapter 5.7, document number 2025 178 to council. The full council with a due adopt recommendation.
22 Second.
23 And I would like to speak to it from discussion if that's okay.
24 Keelan.
25 Oh wait. Yeah.
26 Can we do discussion?
27 Thank you, madam chair. So I just want to thank everybody in particular, councilor Dunphy and team, as well as yasmin and everybody at seiu for finding this. I think, you know, I watched some of the meetings last year. Many of those, including this particular one where there were hundreds of pages of code that was being changed and they were being primarily argued as really cosmetic or administrative fixes. And, and in there, sometimes there's a, a piece of something that was not administrative fixes, which creates a little bit of distrust. And I think from the, from the public as well as frankly, from this dais. So I this is concerning to me, and I'm grateful that it was caught. There's a memo from procurement that relates to this, which sort of confused me. There was a there's an argument here that it was the repeal previously was not that big of a deal. It said that that the code was viewed as repetitive to the standards established by the states Oregon forward program, and that all city contract templates include all of these things automatically. Well, templates can change. But setting that aside, the immediate next paragraph on potential challenges says increased labor costs are a risk. So which is it if we're just doing if adding this back wouldn't change anything, then how would there be increased labor costs? And so and this is the same letter. This is the same, you know, immediate next paragraph here. So that that was concerning to me. And I think it's important that we provide clarity and predictability to our finance staff to predict cost increases in the budget so that the wages we pay contract employees are not based off of the whim of a year or the nerves of an economy. Or and also to, you know, ensure that cost of living is predictable for the employees themselves. And just as one additional note, like many portlanders and people who grew up here, at some point you come to a place where you can't find a job that meets the needs of your rent. I had to move away from Portland personally, because I couldn't find a job that paid me a living wage. A big part of our economy is connected to city employment and city contract work. And as it's been pointed out, it raises all boats. Like kids coming up. Like like I was the workers. This policy will benefit as well as those who work in industries affected by this will benefit from more equitable earnings and a better quality of life. And we should use our public money, and we shouldn't contract that often. But when we do, we need to ensure that people are not forced to rely on social services to make ends meet. So that's my reason for making this motion. Thank you. Thank you.
28 Councilor Green.
29 Thank you, madam chair. I just want to riff off of a point that you raised councilor Kanal, which is really important. I think as we contemplate future actions. In this committee or council at large, which is that in my review of the session where this ordinance was passed that ultimately repealed this section, it was just presented as this is a benign code cleanup. And as you point out, the memo suggests that there was actually some thinking on why this ought to be repealed. And I think that that's, that's that that does raise trust issues for me. So I think, you know, we're charting a path here. I think on this labor issue. But I think we're going to have to do a lot of work, I think, to work through the code changes and make sure that city council is providing the directives that are representative of, of the political preferences of the people who voted for us. You know, this is our mandate, right? And so I just I think that there is a rule for I mean, obviously there's a role for administrative rulemaking. I mean, that's that's for the mayor and the city administrator to sort of provide clarity in the gaps in our code. But this is not something I feel comfortable leaving to that rulemaking authority. And we should just be crystal clear what we mean when we say we support workers. So, yeah.
30 Thank you, councilor Green. I think we all were on the same page because the question that I had prepared for this morning was looking at that exact memo and why the original fair wage policy was repealed in 2024. And it did say that it was repetitive in nature and to the standards established by the state of oregon's forward program. And that was the that was the only question that I had was, is this true? Is this repetitive? Do we have anybody here from human resources?
31 We invited folks, but folks were unavailable. I did.
32 Confer with them, but they don't feel that it is conflicting. They thought it was. The cleanup was intended to be. Yeah. I mean, I do believe that it was done in good faith, but I think that what we've heard from hr and procurement and others is that it's not conflicting with any of the existing policies that this is existing. You know, this is how the procedures are working. And by having this policy on the books, yes, maybe at some policy read, it is covered by the state policies, but it is a good statement of our values to have this on the books and be here. And it doesn't raise any additional complications.
33 I agree, councilor Duffy, so thank you so much for bringing this forward and acknowledging that. I did note that there were several items that were taken off the books and cold in November of 2024, so it would keep us busy for the next year to have a hearing on each of them. But I think it is important, and I think we need to go through some of those. And as today, I appreciate you all bringing this forward, because it does send a message about our values. And that's so important and critical here at the city of Portland. With the new charter change, there's a change in the way that we do business. And so we want to be as transparent as possible. Keelan keelan do we have anyone for public testimony?
34 No one signed up.
35 Wow. This is like it's a slam dunk. It sounds like to me. Okay. Well, seeing that there are no there are no comments from the public, which is always valuable. It's illuminating. It's important and critical. I think we are probably ready to take a motion to, to vote on this.
36 Ready to go.
37 We already have a motion on the floor.
38 We got a motion and was it second seconded.
39 So we can just vote.
40 Can we take a vote?
41 Yeah. It was moved by councilor Kanal and seconded by councilor Novick canal.
42 Yeah, I actually forgot to mention one other thing. I wanted to commend you, councilor Dunphy, and your staff for the most comprehensive community impacts and community involvement impact statement I've ever seen on a council item. And for doing that homework to really understand everyone that's affected by this and to name them. So just wanted to make sure I gave that praise here and save time at the full council. I vote I.
43 Novick I'm glad to hear that the bureau never knew that the policy had been repealed, so no harm done. But the harm is. But the foul is being corrected I.
44 Yeah, when your team approached me to see if I wanted to support this, this was a complete item with a ton of work put into it and thoughtfulness. And I think it's going to be a model as I work on ordinances going forward. I think I'm going to use this as a model for how how we how we pass really good code changes. So I vote I.
45 Big thanks to yasmin for bringing this to my office's attention, and I'm glad we have the trust that you could bring this and that. We took it seriously. And I hope that this demonstrates to not only you, but all of our not only labor partners, but community partners that we are. There's a new day, and if you have a problem and you want it fixed, come to your city councilors. We will address it in a meaningful way. Thank you to madeline for all the for jumping on this, doing amazing research, and thank you to my colleagues for your support and also to councilors Green and Novick for being co-sponsors on this item, and councilor Smith for making sure we get this moved through with urgency, I vote I.
46 Smith, I. The ordinance is passed to full council with the recommendation that it be passed.
47 Thank you.
48 So we're going to open up to just an open public hearing on labor issues in general. And I wanted to see if we have anyone in the queue for that.
49 Keelan no one saying that.
50 Wow. I'm starting to feel a certain kind of way. If that's good or bad, that we don't have any any matters to discuss, but I do. I do have an update. I'm going to give my councilors an opportunity to use some of this time. Yesterday, we had an opportunity to put the summer works and apprenticeship item that passed out of this committee to the city, to the full committee, and it was approved. 1111 oh, and I just want to say thank you. Thank you for all of you up here. Who who supported that that resolution, which is going to be so important for many young people who who are trying to be exposed, inspired, trained and given an opportunity to have an opportunity with the city of Portland and also opportunities to participate in pre-apprenticeship programs and ultimately apprenticeship programs where they can actually get their their their journeyman license. And it was the question was asked about the number of opportunities. And I just want to set the record straight. There are approximately in this Portland metro region, 117 projects that people can get work on. Right now. I'm not sure how long all of them will last. Some of them are bigger than others, but it is opportunity that that we have not had in in many years in the city of Portland. And so I'm excited about that. I'm excited about the opportunity of having interns in my office and to seeing interns in in the other councilors offices, and just know that you all can at least get one of those interns. It's going to be a valuable experience for many. We had an opportunity to listen to derek albert, the co-chair of the national organization of black county officials. He explained how he got into county government that led to him getting an undergrad graduate degree and now a business owner, so that those kind of opportunities it it changes the trajectory of a young person's life. I know it changed my trajectory. Me and city administrator jordan, we are probably the only one that that are aware of the ceda program, which was a program. Do you are you familiar with it too?
51 I got to see the job.
52 I had to see the job. I had to see the job too. So there are three of us. We're we're people of a certain age. So we know about the see the job. And it turned into the ARPA money, which is now the whio money that we actually with our dollars, we're going to get our dollars matched by the federal government so that we can afford to pay for more kids. So that is exciting. I'm looking forward to the summer. I'm looking forward to the opportunities that we can expand to underserved youth throughout the city. Now, I want to call on councilor Kanal to see if there's anything that he would like to add to this conversation.
53 Thank you. Madam chair and I had a couple of things I wanted to say, but the first one was exactly that. I wanted to commend you on your leadership around the workforce development and the item that we passed in the full council yesterday. There are two other items that I'd love to see us discuss, but before I mention those, I just wanted to add that that working in in the public service has done a lot for so many families, in particular families of color in this, in this city and in this country, and providing that stability and that and those benefits as well, is often a key part of it. And so getting folks into that through pathways such as the ones you mentioned are, is a really important thing. And I'll also mention that I appreciate the need to look up ceta and all these other things on wikipedia and familiarize myself rapidly with them. But the other two things I'd like to see us discuss at some point, madam chair, is, first, the city of Portland professional workers who have been waiting for years now without a contract and who are certainly trying to get one, and they formed nearly three years ago as a union, so I'd love to see that be a topic for us to, to broach. I don't believe we've gotten really any recent updates on that progress, and I'd love to get more. And so I'd love to see us invite the mayor and human resources labor relations to come in.
54 That protects 17. No.
55 Cp cpi-w.
56 Yeah.
57 Say that in its full.
58 City of Portland professional workers. So a lot of the communications employees, a lot of the equity employees, which is particularly important given the federal context, analysts, coordinators, you know, the folks that tell you when there is a disaster happening as a member of the public are all included in that, among many other job functions. The other thing, and this is something that you've already actually brought up previously, madam chair, in a in a different conversation with our public safety folks is why is it so difficult for us to fill our 80, 90, almost 100 vacancies in the police bureau right now as we are having these conversations around, you know, we've heard from fire that there have pipeline issues with their training center. We know what the concerns are there. But as we're having conversations leading to the budget, and some of the colleagues have brought up many things around police and the staffing and budgeting level, as well as the mayor. We do have 100 vacancies, just about. And I'd love to see. I know this is a priority for you as well. So those are the other things I'd like to see us focus on, and perhaps a little time at one of the future meetings.
59 Thank you. And I think there are also pipeline issues, retirement issues. As I said before, over the next 5 to 10 years, we're going to have a silver tsunami of retirements coming out of all bureaus in, in the city of Portland. And as you know, it takes about 18 months from someone getting into the program, trained up and actually on the street. And, you know, we hired a lot of folks. And then there were a lot of folks who retired. So I think the issue of expanding how many people that the state police can certify, because we all go to the same place and they just have a limited number of spots. The last time I checked, we had if I want to get this right, we had about 2000 applications to for folks who want to be a public safety officers. Do you remember that, councilor Dunphy? I think I remember the police saying that to me, that they have over 2000 applications in the queue. So if they have over 2000 applications in the queue, if the issue is that we just can't get a number through the state police to be trained because they're training the entire state of oregon's police force.
60 We've been told, and I can't recall if it was in this committee or in the public community public safety committee, although there is an overlap of three of us. So maybe we'll all conflate it sometimes that that the dps at the state department of public safety standards and training that the backlog there has been cleared. So I'd love to know from them and I'd love to hear if there is a barrier, how can we help solve it? Because I do think we should be trying to help solve it.
61 I agree, that makes sense. That totally makes sense. And councilor Green.
62 I think.
63 Councilor, councilor Dunphy.
64 Well, thanks. I just wanted to expand on what you were saying about and give you additional thanks and praise for your your workforce resolution yesterday. I you know, there are two really foundational moments that have influenced how I got to where I am. One was, I was I was selected as part of my college degree to be an intern for us. Senator jeff merkley and I signed up for a three month term. I ended up doing six months there. It was unpaid. It was enormously hard. It was trying to do that on top of 20 credits every term. But it directly led to my employment in that office, which led to my next steps of every part of my career and directly led to here internships and opportunities for young people to have real world experience is life changing. And so thank you for being dogged about approaching, you know, making sure that we are intentionally creating those opportunities. And, you know, the second experience I had was as a behavioral specialist in the david douglas school district, trying to reduce crime and gang prevention among extremely at risk youth of color almost exclusively. And how I, I know that I meaningfully impacted the lives of a number of my students, but a number of my students made bad decisions because they simply didn't have a positive adult role model in their life, showing them that they can achieve more and something to keep them busy and engaged and moving positively forward towards their own vision of life. One of my first days on the job in the david douglas school district, a teacher who had been on the job for about ten years, came up to me and said that hope is a privilege most of these kids don't have, and it has stuck with me. And I just thank you for making sure that our, our, our especially out in district one, where we know the majority of people of color now live, that is where we need to be intense about bringing those opportunities. And so thank you for your leadership.
65 Thank you, I appreciate it. And in addition to that, 40% of the city's children live in district one. And I forgot to make that point yesterday in in our big council meeting. But that is an astounding number. Absolutely. And so we have to be very careful how we approach. Educating and engaging our youth and making sure that it is a positive engagement and that we're doing everything we can do to build the next generation of leaders. And I see councilor Green's hand up councilor Green.
66 Thank you, madam chair. I'm going to pile on the praise. Thanks for your leadership. It is really important that we have champions for workforce development, internship opportunities that are unabashedly about investing in communities that are underserved. We need to lean really hard into that. I think that there's a really rich tradition in the united states, in the civil rights movement, of about calling for a right to a job. This isn't the same thing as a job guarantee, but it moves us closer to that world that I think I would like to see cities like Portland participate in. Just want to share an anecdote. I mean, I come from a labor family. My dad was a pipefitter. My brother is a ü 32 pipe fitter. My cousins were all 290 pipe fitters. And there's a reason for that, because my dad was able to come out here and find work, a good family, wage job, work in the shipyards and then and then he was like, hey, cousins, nephews, come on out and see, see if you can build a life. And they were leaving, I think a part of the world where there was a lot of crime. They were exposed to drug issues and, and that and that's how they got to a better place in life. My brother, when he came back from iraq, suffered from a heroin addiction. It was on the streets, but his union took him back, helped him get clean. And so these are opportunities that we got to we got to provide for our communities, irrespective of your background. And that's, that's I think there's no shortcut for that. So thank you for standing up for that. And I'm going to vote for that every time.
67 Thank you. I think we kind of have a similar background because my grandfather and grandmother came out here from brooklyn, new york, in 1944 to work in the shipyards for the war. And after the war was over, the folks who recruited him and other black workers, they wanted him to go back where they came from, but they stayed. And so as a result of the toughness and the and the courageousness that my grandparents had, that's how we got to, to Oregon with good paying jobs. And that was so, so important. And if we forget about that, I think we will forget about how we can build a middle class. That will be something that we can be proud of. And my mother too, she is a auto worker, retiree. She used to work for general motors in michigan. So I think we all have a labor background that is rich and steeped in tradition and understanding about how important it is to have a living wage, great benefits and opportunity to retire with dignity and respect. And I think we all attempt to make sure that the employees at the city of Portland have those things as well. And I want to go back to last week's marathon city council meeting, where we amended the amount of money percentage that we were working with. And I think that was so crucial. I was I was so pulling for councilor Avalos. She made a great point that we need to take on when, when we have increases, that increase should be put on the city, not on the worker. And I was waiting for her to drop a third amendment that said we are going to pay for the entire thing. I was I would have been with you councilor. And so I already had a amendment on the table, but it just feels good to work with people who have the same values about the important things around labor, health care, young people, and making sure we have a city that works for everybody, not just the fortunate few here. And to be able to have a presence in district one where we have never had a presence is, is exciting to me. I look forward. This is not work to me. We're sometimes here until 10:00, 1030 at night and we're tired. We're exhausted. But it does not seem like real work because we're having a great time doing it and working for the people. So I'm excited. Councilor Novick I see you're in the queue.
68 I just wanted to say that listening to you talk about your family backgrounds, which I can't match except insofar as my dad was from brooklyn. It sort of reminds me that I think that when donald trump says make America great again, it taps into sort of some cultural memories that people have. And he's not appealing to the good cultural memories. But it is true that there was a time when we had an economy where all boats are being lifted from basically 1945 to 1973, and black men's wages were catching up with white men's wages, even though white men's wages were rising. And that's largely because we had 3,035% union density. In fact, in 1973, 40% of black men were in unions. And if we really want to make America great again, then we need to have at least 35% union density and restore the top marginal tax rate to 90%.
69 I see the head of our human resources in the back and she's smiling. Tracy. How are you? No, it just it just makes sense. And what I try to do is present things in a very common sense kind of way that, you know, it's easy enough for a fifth grader to understand because, you know, everybody can understand. If you put in the work, you put the hard work in, you get educated, you get trained. You should be able to have a living wage job to take care of your family, be able to purchase a home, send your kids to college, period. I mean, that should be the norm. But with the rising inflation that we have that's going on and, you know, a lot of barriers for people to be educated and to pay for a college education, sometimes those things get in the way. But we want to make sure that as we talked before, we had, you know, over 855 vacant ftes. Now, mind you, I do have to say that many of those were hard to fill ftes, but we need to let folks know that we are open for business. We have jobs at the city of Portland, and I know that every single government is going to be looking for. People, but I prefer I want our city government to be the government of choice, that we have the best benefits, we have the best training, we have the best tools and incentives for people to not just survive, that we have the best so that they can actually thrive and they want to be here. It is for me. I can come here seven days a week, and we do work almost seven days a week. But this is something that is in in the elected realm. But we have great jobs here. And so thank you, keelan. Since we don't have any more testimony and family history. So I don't know if our 1:00 is here, if they're here yet to present, because I know we had a time certain at 1:00.
70 Yeah, I think they are available if you want to move forward.
71 Yes, I'd like to move forward.
72 Okay. Item three presentation on labor and workforce aspects of the city budget.
73 Thank you. Keelan.
74 Thank you.
75 Good morning.
76 Good morning. Morning.
77 We're joined by folks from the city budget office in the bureau of human resources to discuss labor and workforce aspects of the city budget. We asked for this presentation as a way to prepare for our committee's assessment of the mayor's budget. When he releases it in about two weeks on may 7th. For now, we are relying on initial budget information that bureaus and service areas have prepared and released over the past several weeks. We've asked our presenters to advise us based on their expertise and their experience with city budget process. We will be discussing many different aspects of the budget, including the status of various labor negotiations. We should be careful with those as well. We are. We're going to focus on the budgetary impacts of labor agreements and only the budgetary impacts. Any questions or discussions regarding the nature or the substance of those negotiations must be set aside. In the future. We can explore those topics in executive session with the full council if we if we wish. But for now, we should avoid any discussions of those confidential negotiations. And we have director warren, director levine.
78 Yeah, welcome.
79 And could you all please introduce yourselves and your colleagues when you begin your presentation? Thank you. Director.
80 Absolutely. Good afternoon, councilor Smith and the rest of the committee. We're excited to be here today to share some additional information with you. For the record, I'm tracy warren, human resources director. With me today I have anne marie kevorkian, mattie, sitting to my right. We have peter.
81 Holtzman.
82 Smith. Economist.
83 And ruth levine, city budget office director.
84 Great. Tracy, I'm really excited today because I don't think I've been in front of the city economist yet. And I've seen you on in the finance committee, but I haven't seen you in person. So it is good to see you here, sir.
85 Thank you. Good to see you too. Councilor. Yeah.
86 So today we're going to go over the bureau of human resources budget and capacity. Then we're going to talk a little bit about planning and costing for labor contracts, cost of living adjustments and health care. And then we'll finish with the planning process changes for labor negotiations to just give you an overview of things that we're working on to improve overall. So we'll start with human resources budget and service capacity. What you have in front of you is a broad overview. Org chart. This is a simplified version, but what it shows you is how the bureau of human resources is organized within the different departments. So you'll see we have a payroll and operations team. We have a health and financial benefits team, occupational health and wellness classification compensation and pay equity. And then under our deputy director's office, we have the workforce recruitment and training team, which also includes people and culture. And then we have our employee and labor relations team. We're going to talk a little bit about the budget for human resources. So what you'll see is what the current fiscal year budget is on the left. And then what you'll see is what the requested budget is as of this moment on the right for the 2526. What what you'll see is that it's broken out into personnel services, internal material and services, and then external material and services. So the personnel services are all of our staffing right to do and run the recruitment program, the training programs, labor and employment. So as well as, you know, any other staffing needs in the different programs that I mentioned in the prior slide. And in the next slide, I'll go over in more detail what's encompassed in those programs and the budget allocated by program. You will see that there's a large amount that is attributed to external materials and services. And so I want to make sure that I provide information regarding that, so that you all have a clear understanding that includes our health insurance costs and the payments to our vendors for claims and all the other things. So that's roughly around 150 million of the dollars are that. Additionally, we have other external materials and services related to health fund that are for health admin, and that's for things that are required to administer the health and benefits and wellness program. We also have about $2.9 million that are for other services. And so the things that those include are, counselor Smith, you'll be aware of this, but summerworks is included in that bucket. Additionally, we have evergreen solutions, who is a contractor performing classification and compensation studies on behalf of the city. Those were things that we negotiated through our collective bargaining agreements and have an obligation to complete and don't have the staffing resources to just pick up that additional workload and completed ourselves. And it tends to be more cost effective for those limited projects to contract out. We're paying, you know, for, oh, gosh, roughly, it's two years worth of a process. We're paying roughly $175,000 to the contractors, which if I were to staff up the team to be able to do that work, we'd be spending double that, if not triple.
87 And that's important to know, because in our other committees in in the transportation and infrastructure, the question came up, is it cheaper for us to contract out some of these services, or could we do it cheaper by having employees? And I know councilor Dunphy and councilor Kanal were were concerned about it. So thank you for bringing that up. And thank you for the great conversation that we had with dca morrissey last week around summerworks. And we did vote on putting it back into human resources. So thank you for wanting to lead that effort.
88 Absolutely. And thank you, councilor, for entrusting it into us. And I look forward to partnering in the future on it. I'm going to go to the next slide to just kind of jump into the details of the program.
89 Director warren councilor Green would like to ask a question.
90 Absolutely.
91 Thank you. Just before you move on from that slide, so that's helpful for you to clarify that the external materials and services categories picking up what what I assume is the entire city's healthcare costs. So that's like is that a pass through through your your sort of budget bureau. Category?
92 We administer the health fund. And then we also each of the bureaus pay into the health fund for their employees health benefits at the 95% rate plus the admin fee.
93 So then and maybe this is a question for our budget folks. So if I'm looking at other bureaus and I'm looking at the ems category, should I expect to see, would I expect to see similar line items that are billed to health care costs in that? Or would it be like internal materials to services to build back? Do you understand the nature of my question? Let me ask it.
94 Okay. And it is a bit confusing. So yes, the bureaus pay that as a benefits line item. So each employee generates a benefits line that is for their health benefit costs and that money that those bureaus pay gets sent to the health fund. And the health fund just happens to be budgeted in bhr. So the it's so you see that it's one of those expenses you see twice in the budget. You see it as an expense from bureaus that gets sent to the health fund, and then you see it from the health fund to actually pay out benefits as external materials and services.
95 It appears. It's personnel.
96 Yeah. It's personnel. Sorry. So the benefits line is in personnel major object, not in external materials and services.
97 Okay. Thank you. Yeah, that's that's helpful. Thanks.
98 Okay.
99 Next slide. So this is a breakdown of the different programs within human resources and the current cost associated with it as well as the requested costs for the upcoming fiscal year. A couple of things I'd like to draw your attention to is that we have we have invested more recently in our payroll and operations program for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons are that we've had an increased workload for those two teams. That also crosses over to our bureau of technology services, who has folks that are responsible for helping us to configure and maintain our system, that we manage our personnel data in. And so one of the things that has occurred over the years is that we have had significant change within our organization, which has required lots of new configuration or changing configuration, and not the capacity to really keep up with that work. So one of the things that we did in this last fiscal year is we invested in additional contracting services to train the folks who are doing the work to ensure that they are doing it well. We engaged in an audit process so that we could make sure that our systems for paying taxes and paying our employees is operating in the way that it should, and that we have the appropriate controls in place. We also have been looking to enhance the training for our teams, as well as catch up on the configuration backlog that we are asking or will be asking city council to consider a request that continues that investment, so that we are able to ensure that that service is happening well for our city employees, specifically around payroll and then the employee central project. So I'm just highlighting that because you will see it as you move through the process.
100 Director warren, I have a quick question. Yes. Is all of our human resources centralized in your office?
101 So that's a good question. All of the primary hr functions are centralized in in the bureau of human resources. We do have services that are complementary to hr that are happening within bureaus. An example of that is like timekeeping or leave administration for protected leaves, like family medical leave or ADA requests. Right. So we have folks that are in bureaus who are providing those services.
102 And do they report to you or do they report to the particular bureau?
103 They do not report to me. They currently report to the particular bureau. And we tend to offer support and advice on how to do those processes within compliance of the law. And then we share information out. That is something, as council may be aware, that we are working on through an enterprise wide realignment of services.
104 Okay. Councilor Kanal.
105 Yes, I have two questions.
106 So one relates to earlier you mentioned that health insurance and claims as part of the yellow portion of that bar, is that only the claims related to health insurance, or are other claims also included in the external materials and services.
107 Other claims are not included in the external material and services. I assume when you say that you're speaking to, if we were to settle some type of disagreement or had some type of claim against the city that we settled, typically those are paid through the bureau who is involved in whatever claim is taking place. So that is not reflective of that. That's related to health insurance claims. So we collect all the money and then we pay directly for the services that employees seek for our self-funded plan.
108 Okay.
109 And then my second question is you said that you're investing in additional contracting services to keep up with the personnel data transition and all that. It was a little unclear to me, and I'm curious why that wouldn't just be a city employee.
110 Yeah. So we have, over the years, increased our collective bargaining agreements and done a number of really unique and different things to support employees. And the result of that is that we need to program them in our system so that they can be realized. And, you know, over the last, I don't know, three years specifically, as we were in the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic, we had a huge increase in those types of things that we were doing, which required lots of configuration while we were simultaneously reorganizing our structure as well as. Doing other regular, ongoing project needs change and laws, whatnot. We basically had, I don't know, like a queue of about 70 ish or so items that needed to be configured in the system, and the only way for us to get through that initial backlog was to have people come in and help us catch up so that we could get to a place where our staff that were resourced to cover it could maintain it.
111 So why not have limited duration staff do that?
112 Because there's quite a bit of challenges one finding the talent in the in the community that can provide the services that's willing to do it on a limited term basis. Right. The other piece is that you have a ramp up period that can take quite a while to recruit, train, get folks up to speed to step in and do that work. And we were really working on a tight timeline to try to get ourselves to a place where we were providing the things that we committed to with our labor partners and our employees. So it was really about time and capacity and just the skills needed to do the job.
113 Thank you.
114 Councilor duffy.
115 Yeah, just very briefly.
116 Director warren, related to payroll services and timekeeping, is it true that parts of the city are still doing paper time tracking, that we're using physical time cards? That's correct. Is that on its way out? Are we fixing that, or is that going to be a lingering relic of the 19th century?
117 It is something that we would like to focus on. So we will be as we're working through the realignment process, we will be looking at all of our business processes and figuring out how we can do them better.
118 Great, great.
119 You know, I it took until 20, took until a global pandemic for the permitting bureau to move to a digital system. If you need a extra guidance from council to how to advance that properly into the 21st century, I'd be happy to help work with you all, but I'm glad the processes are otherwise going underway.
120 Absolutely. Thank you.
121 For hearing our services. Thank you, director warren.
122 Next slide. So now I want to talk a little bit about a recent accomplishment. So, you know, we've developed a series of trainings for managers and supervisors so that they have the tools that they need to support their teams. It is module based. So I believe there's six modules that talk about the various aspects in which a manager should have awareness and be able to support their employees through. An example of that is performance management. We've also completed the city's workforce demographics dashboard to inform decisions related to the current diversity of the city's workforce. So we went through a huge process. It was called the workforce census survey, where we resurveyed all of our employees and collected updated data that was more reflective of how our employees self-identify, so that we could have data that was representative of our workforce to make better decisions. As we're working through many of our processes. Additionally, we implemented new systems and process staff plans and policies following the state's new paid leave laws. So, for example, Oregon paid leave required the city of Portland and specifically the bureau of human resources, to work on a whole new process and staff and resource that to ensure that we were able to assist employees in that process. We finalized three labor agreements. You you all will be familiar with the afscme and dc2 contracts that recently came to you. That is a recent accomplishment. Additionally, we worked in partnership with the lmc and the ppa to health care rates for the fiscal year 2526. And again, that was something that recently came to you all as well. I want to talk a little bit about our current focus. So our current focus has really been to prioritize any legally required and contract driven work. When I talk about contract driven work, I'm talking about collective bargaining agreements, things that we've agreed to with our labor partners and that we need to ensure are happening across the city. And when they're not happening across the city, we need to be able to be responsive so that we can course correct and ensure that employees and managers have the support that they need. As I discussed, we're working on supporting payroll benefits, investigations and labor compliance. Those are kind of core functions across human resources that we're engaged in all the time. We've seen increased needs and support in all of these areas. And then additionally, we're just responding to issues as they arise because the team is staffed in the way that it is. And we've had, you know, continuing years of cuts within the bureau of human resources. We really have not had capacity to take a step back and think about how we do our work proactively. So we're really doing a lot of crisis managemen. As things come up. We are also, you know, working to improve process as we go along, when we can create capacity. And I have a very dedicated team who wants to see things happen better. And so they're really engaged in trying to find time to make it work. But with more capacity we could do more of it. Strategic and proactive initiatives may be delayed. I think that's kind of one of the things I'd like council to be aware of is that, you know, human resources is often tasked with the responsibility to help lift a lot of these large initiatives and changes that are happening with our workforce. And when we do that, that sometimes means that we have to reprioritize what we're doing, and some things will be delayed so that we can focus on the other. All right. I'm going to turn it over to peter to talk about planning and costing for labor contracts.
123 Excellent. For the record. Peter holtzman, city economist. Yes, sir. No worries. So one of the questions is what is included in the base budgets at the beginning of the budget cycle and for the general fund, the current practice, based on the financial policy, is that the current appropriation, appropriation level or cal targets include forecasted inflation. So cost of living adjustments, external materials and services, inflation, internal materials, services inflation, purge rate increases, debt schedules and base health rate inflation based on the aon report, but it does not include any policy decisions beyond status quo unless otherwise specified by council. So council always has the authority to, you know, at any time, make a policy decision or an indication of one, but it's not included until there's authority there. And the rationale is by including it, it could actually influence the policy outcome. And so there's kind of a wall between the forecast and the policy side. Next slide. So these are the recent. So just to back up a step all you've seen the total costings for a lot of these. Labor bargaining agreements and health benefits increases. What happens is each hit it hits each fund differently. And so you've seen the total costing. But for the general fund that's a slice. And the portion that is general fund discretionary is or what proportion of employees in a specific bargaining unit is. It varies from bureau to bureau. And so we adjust bureaus budgets based on the amount of gfd funding appropriate for that bargaining unit. And so for afscme, just again, for perspective, both afscme and dc2, they are largely non-general fund employees. The majority of the employees for both these funds are non-general fund. And so the total impact between those two is a bit over 1.5 million for fiscal year 2526. And then the respective health benefit changes are seen. They're below. The total of all of these is a little bit over $3.3 million in ongoing. Given the timing since this was ratified after base budgets were uploaded, this is not going to impact the forecast number. So the forecast number is not going to change as a result of this. They're just going to show up as decision packages. In the mayor's proposed budget approved. So on and so forth. So as opposed to, you know, saying there's 20, $23 million gap, assuming no change from February, the gap is going to stay the same. It's just there's another expense that has to be paid for. And we can go to the next slide. And then I just also wanted to highlight all of the non-general fund impacts. And each fund and bureau plans differently and has slightly different processes, mostly as a result of just, you know, a public works bureau is a very different thing and has very different constraints on its funding than a general fund bureau. And so I just wanted one show, put this in front of you, and then to highlight the fact that they don't face necessarily the same trade offs as the general fund. And I'll turn it back over to anne marie.
124 Hi, everyone. Anne marie, labor relations.
125 Warren councilor Greene has a question.
126 Thank you. This is questions actually for peter. So the inflation forecast so the costing work that you guys do. So I understand you know the contracts for these labor unions are going to probably be the guide for how you you do that. Cost escalation on the labor side. But I'm curious what what's your method for inflation forecasting. Do you what index do you use.
127 Or so to clarify for the labor bargaining like prior contracts are not utilized because that is again a council decision. And so there's no forecast of future labor bargaining agreement settlement costs included. So first of all, for methodology, it's largely for external materials and services and internal material services. It's a weighted average of moody's forecasts of like the specific subcategories for cost of living adjustment, which is tied to cpi west for size, class a cities, urban wage earners. That is a little bit more specific. It's you. I'll look at the federal reserve forecast and it closely tracks with, you know, the national cpi. Except the major difference being housing and how that interacts with it. The other the other thing I will highlight, and because the two largest cost escalators for the general fund are cola and then pers rates increases which happen every biennium. And we've seen some very large pers increases. And we're likely to again in fiscal year 2728. As for a technical reason, but I just assume a 5% increase on rates, which has unfortunately come true or close to it.
128 Yeah. Sorry. Can I clarify one thing, just based on what you said at the beginning for the labor, the way peter does the costing for the labor contracts, when council ratifies a contract, we reflect the escalation based on what is agreed to in the contract separately from from cola. So obviously cola is in there because it's generally agreed to in the contract. But then also we forecast the year by year increases due to a specific contract. What peter said about we don't forecast when the contract ends. We don't assume anything going forward about what's going to happen, because to the point about about the, you know, not trying to influence the outcome. So that that that's the distinction we do we forecast the each year amount and that becomes ongoing. And then any marginal increase above that in the next contract has to wait until council ratifies the contract.
129 That's helpful. Thank you.
130 Okay, on to the next piece. So again ann marie kevorkian madison. With labor relations, I serve frequently as the lead negotiator. I've had the opportunity to be the lead or support the bargaining process for every labor contract since 2019, when I joined bhr. And bargaining is a bit of a team sport and also a little bit like herding cats. And so as we move through each process, we learn that there are ways that we can improve the process. And so the team is very committed to improving the labor planning process. As of now, you know, we have started to reevaluate our process with earlier phases of bargaining. You know, there's preparation that occurs months before we ever even receive a demand to bargain things like, you know, coordinating what classifications are in each of these collective bargaining agreements and how we might start to gather information about market analysis or gather information in preparation for market analysis, defining who might be on our bargaining teams. From the city's perspective, working with the labor partners to understand what their interests might be. There's the during the bargaining phase, which is obviously very interactive and spans many, many months. And then our post bargaining phase is the implementation phase. And frankly, that's probably the area where we see the most frustration and the greatest opportunity for us to make improvements. Implementation is complicated. There are thousands of city employees and, you know, timekeeping and payroll updates that need to occur, configuration changes in sap, and just a baseline understanding of how changes are made. In addition to the phases component, you know, we want to be focused on data information. Particularly we have moved to a more interest based bargaining approach when it's appropriate. And we have agreement with the union to take that stance. The interest based bargaining process is incredibly transparent, and it requires us to share data openly very early in the process and very often. And we build tools together so that we understand how we're moving through those processes. Additionally, you know, we want to work with our city budget office. We want to work with bureau finance managers on budget alignment. You know, peter obviously just spoke to the fact that there's not a compensation set aside necessarily for upcoming bargaining, but depending on the type of bargaining that we're engaged in, it's very important for us to have a baseline guidance for us to use as part of the negotiations so we understand what what is council open to supporting in order for us to close a contract leadership engagement incredibly important to us. We want to make sure that we're providing regular updates to the oh, hang on, my computer wants to restart. I'll do that. Okay. Leadership engagement. Yeah. We want to make sure that we're providing regular updates to executive teams and council throughout the entire negotiations process. We have a robust team of managers that represent the bureaus, where employees are centered as part of, you know, in the classifications of the bargaining units that were connecting with. So we have some tools that we like to, you know, prepare and share with all of you. And again, with the other executive teams across the city so that everyone is well informed. And then lastly, of course, strategic communication, the way that we communicate out about our bargaining process has changed dramatically since I joined this team in 2019. I think, again, it lends to a much more transparent process, gives everyone a better idea of how we're moving through. And I think also states our commitment or shows our commitment to a great labor relations, great relationship with our labor partners, which is, of course, the fundamental backbone of the work that we do. To give you an idea of what we have ahead of us currently, we are in bargaining today, in fact, with afscme for the auditor's office. We're also engaged in a contract negotiation with afscme for the independent police review. Protect 17 is due to begin negotiating. We'll actually start meeting in may for some interest based bargaining training. Not listed here is the new boec 911 dispatcher supervisor contract that will be coming on board. And then in 2026, we have police association for the sworn police officers fhfa's contract, Portland firefighters contract for the community health responders and nurses. And then liuna laborers. Local 43 has three contracts opening next year. The Portland city laborers contract, the recreation contract, and then their seasonal maintenance workers contract. And a little further down the line in 2027, we have our three primary public safety or two of our primary public safety. So Portland firefighters association and then the dispatch for Portland police association 901 and then the Portland police commanding officers association. What we don't have in here listed is cp, which is also in negotiations occurring today. And I'm sure we'll have a few other small things that will come up as as we move in the future. And I think that's that's it. Happy to take questions.
131 Thank you. Councilor Kanal.
132 Thank you. I have three questions.
133 And if you could go back to slide 14, please. So the first question is a clarification. When you say executive team and council and specifically referring to council here, are you referring to all 12 of us or are you referring to a subset thereof?
134 We're referring to all of council. This this is part of the process we engage you all with through executive sessions. When we talk about our labor negotiation strategies and understand your priorities associated with it.
135 Thanks.
136 Second question relates to kind of your explanation of this slide. There was a lot of conversation here about the economic items, but there's also a lot of things that are non-economic in nature. And you know, we're going to be asked to vote on contracts that could dictate whether or not we're the sort of employer that forces people to come back downtown, or the sort of employer that that takes into account people's child care needs and their other, you know, family balance and how they live their lives. Right. And those are not things that were exactly covered here. So I wanted to just curious if you could speak to that and, and how the non-economic side gets talked about professional standards is another part of that.
137 Yeah, that's a great question. You're right. Most a great portion of our contract negotiations lands around day to day contract language that doesn't have an economic impact but has a very real impact to employees and also to the operations of bureaus. And so in executive sessions that we had with your predecessors, we did have open conversations about interests from counsel on how what what types of things would be supported by council. You know, there are obviously challenges associated with that. Each bureau and service area, of course, has different operational needs, and they don't always align with each other. Example some employees are always performing their work in person. They have different needs than employees who may have opportunities to do hybrid or remote work. And so the challenge is, you know, finding the balance and also making sure that as we, you know, understand council priorities, we have a way that we can bring that into the overall fold to take a holistic approach in terms of professional standards. I'm sure we'll have lots of conversations about that. As ppa moves forward into their negotiations. I don't think we have a process determined yet on how we'll start to discuss those. That's still very preliminary and so open to hearing feedback when we get to that point.
138 And professional standards certainly covers others. Obviously you're talking about ipr as well, but but also all the other types of employees as well. I don't want to limit it there. My third question is not about this slide. And it's when can we expect the next update in terms of a date on the cfpb contract? I am going to just preface that I'm personally very frustrated to not have heard anything about this for a while, and I know that that cfpb is communicating their frustration to at least one council office, probably more.
139 Thank you. I appreciate that. Councilor Kanal. We have reached out for an executive session. I'm actually interested in just having a standing executive session scheduled every month with the council so that we can provide updates at a regular cadence. So as soon as I get an understanding on when that can occur, we are happy to provide an update to you all.
140 Yeah, I.
141 Think that's a great idea. I'm happy to hear the info on this specific one, but I think the regular ones and ongoing an ongoing schedule is a really great idea, as long as it's not during our normal council times of, you know, Wednesday and Thursday afternoon. I know we've had a lot of limitation there. So as long as we can work around that and not use up our public meeting time for things that we don't need to schedule for the public, like an executive session. But that concludes my questions. Thank you.
142 Okay. Councilor Dunphy.
143 Thank you.
144 I will first of all, I'll just second that. I would love to have a standing meeting, but also if we could make sure it's not the Thursday after, you know, Thursday morning after a Wednesday night council. That'd be great to slide 15. You know, I when I came in the building, I heard that there were 13 contracts or labor contracts to be negotiated over the next multiple years. I'm seeing I think you said I mean, I'm seeing nine on here, and I think you said there are another two. So like 11 contracts to be negotiated in the next 26 months. Do you have adequate I mean, first of all, I'm, I'm, I'm glad for you for the job security, but do you have the adequate resources and will you have adequate do you believe you will have adequate resources following this budget cycle to be able to adequately meet that need? That's an enormous amount of work.
145 In the next.
146 So we have recently realigned a resource when it became vacant to the labor relations team to add capacity. And, you know, to just be very open and direct. No, I don't think we do have the amount of resources to provide proactive support related to labor relations. We are definitely frequently scrambling to make sure that things happen when they're supposed to happen. And it would be great at some point to get to a place where we can be planful and we can support in a way that everyone feels good about.
147 Yeah.
148 I, you know, these these negotiations are so touchy sometimes and sometimes emotionally charged. And I also know that there is a human tendency to ascribe to malice what is sometimes just ascribed to just the human condition of being real busy and having too many things to do at once. I think this committee would be, you know, very we're interested in the outcome. And so therefore we're interested in the process. And I'm I will be keeping that in mind as we are looking at the budget this coming cycle. So thank you.
149 Thank you, councilor Dunphy.
150 Do we have any more questions? Thank you.
151 Thank you all. Thank you. Have a good day. Yes.
152 Committee members, as I was looking down, it looks like we are about 40 minutes early. Do you have any other issues that we should talk about or discuss before we actually get? We're going to get a general fund. Forecast next week on the 28th. Councilor Green. I used to work with a colleague at the bonneville power administration that would always say, without fail, nobody ever complained about any meeting early, so I, I wouldn't be sad about it. I'm kind of hungry.
153 I think they will.
154 Probably give us a chance to eat today. Well, keelan, I'd like to adjourn our meeting. Thank you.
155 Good job.