The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-09-04
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Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Portland City Council convened on Thursday, September 4, 2025, reconvening after a recess to address the sole remaining agenda item: an informational presentation from the City Auditor's Office covering results from the first half of 2025. Roll call confirmed the body's presence, and no vote was required for this report. The Auditor's Office presented on the roles and structure of the Ombudsman and Audit Services divisions, highlighting the annual ombudsman report, investigations into fire safety concerns at Cherry Blossom Townhomes and disparate private request tow pricing, and monitoring of past recommendations including Portland Permitting and Development's compliance system and Water Bureau returned payment fees. Audit Services presented findings from a performance audit on citywide asset management, noting the city lacks a cohesive asset management strategy amid a growing infrastructure funding gap; figures describing this gap were stated inconsistently across different points in the presentation. The audit schedule for the coming year, along with two hotline investigation reports involving East Portland Neighbors and the Portland International Raceway Trust Fund, were also discussed. Public testimony was invited, though the transcript reflects uncertainty over who had signed up. Extensive council questions followed regarding complaint referral processes, demographic data collection, the council clerk's placement within the Auditor's Office, and long-term budget discipline for infrastructure maintenance. The meeting closed with scheduling reminders for upcoming sessions.
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1 Good afternoon. I am calling back to order this week's Portland city council meeting. It is Thursday, September 4th at 2:01 p.m. Keelan. Could you please call the roll?
2 Good afternoon. Koyama Lane here. Morillo. Here. Novick here. Clark. Here. Green here. Zimmerman. Here. Avalos.
3 Present.
4 Dunphy. Smith. Here. Canal. Ryan here. Pirtle-guiney here.
5 And could we please get our rules of order and decorum? Thank you.
6 Good afternoon. Welcome to the Portland city council. To testify before council in person or virtually, you must first sign up in advance in the council agenda at wwe Portland council agenda. Information on engaging with the council can be found on the council clerk's webpage. Individuals may testify for three minutes unless the presiding officer states otherwise. Your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The presiding officer preserves order. Disruptive conduct such as shouting. Refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up or interrupting others testimony or council deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, council may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, state your name for the record. Your address is not necessary. If you're a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the council clerk calls your name. Thank you.
7 Thank you very much, colleagues. We reconvened today after recessing yesterday because we have one item left on our agenda this week the presentation of the ombudsman and audit services. Results from the first half of this year. And I'll note that while this is a report, this is not a report that council needs to adopt. This is an informational report. So we will have the opportunity today to hear from the auditor's office, ask questions, have a discussion, hear public testimony. But there will not be a vote at the end of the meeting. So and we do have I believe, at least one person signed up to testify. So I think we'll hear the report and then maybe hear from the public before we go into our questions and discussion today. So I would like to invite up our auditor. And are you kicking us off or would you like your audit service director and ombudsman to come up with you?
8 I'd like to invite them to come up with me.
9 Perfect. Thank you all so much for being here today with us. Go right ahead.
10 All right. Good afternoon. Council president pirtle-guiney and vice president Koyama Lane councilors. I'm city auditor simone rede, and I'm pleased to share with you some results from my office from the first half of 2025. The purpose of this presentation is to give you and the public an opportunity to engage with those results in service of my office's mission to ensure an open and accountable city government. Next slide please. So the last time I was here in council chambers was to give you an overview of my office at a work session in March 2025. You heard from leaders in every division of my office, and today you're going to hear from the city ombudsman and my audit services division's director, first city ombudsman jennifer croft, will share highlights from the ombudsman's annual report. Investigations of fire safety concerns at cherry blossom townhomes and disparate charges for private request tows, as well as monitoring outcomes from past investigations. Second, our audit services director, casey jones, is going to share details from the audit that we released in the new form of government that was on asset management. He'll also go over the steps we took to develop the list of audits that we're planning to conduct in the coming year. What's on that list, as well as results from two investigations of tips involving fraud, waste and abuse of city resources. As council president mentioned, presentations like this are really meant to engage you and the public in my office's work. They do not require any action from you. That said, I want to make sure that we get to inform you of the results before you ask questions about them. So I've allotted time at the end of this presentation for us to answer your questions. Next slide. And before we get into the results, I will share just a bit of our office's history. The office of the auditor was established to ensure an open and accountable city government. It's been part of Portland, portland's government, for over 150 years. The elected auditor leads the office, and having an auditor that is directly elected by Portland voters meets the highest independent standards for audit organizations that are set by the us government accountability office. In 2017, Portland voters passed charter reforms that increased the auditor's independence. Specifically, those reforms gave the auditor authority over budget and employment decisions and the ability to set administrative rules as well as obtain independent legal counsel. The office is elected leadership, administrative independence and independent legal counsel allow the office to do its work objectively, without undue influence from city council or management, and that includes the mayor as well as city administrator. And those factors allow the public to trust in our results. Next slide. As a reminder, the office is under control and supervision of the city auditor. It's made up of seven divisions. Today you'll be hearing from two divisions that I oversee the ombudsman and audit services. You engage regularly with our council clerk in these chambers and with elections on lobbying and political consultant regulations. The hearings office carries out your quasi judicial authority with my consent. Operations management provides administrative support across our office. And last but not least, archives and records management helps you meet your public record keeping requirements. We do all of this important work with general fund dollars that make up 0.2% of the city's budget. And with that, I will let city ombudsman jennifer croft share her division's results.
11 Thank you. Good afternoon. Council president, vice president, councilors. My name is jennifer croft. I use she her pronouns, and I'm the city ombudsman. And I am glad to be here today to talk about what we've been up to in the first half of this year. Next slide please. I know you already generally familiar with the role of the ombudsman, but also for the benefit of others who may be listening today. I'll give a quick refresher. To recap. We are an independent, impartial advocate for fairness and good government at the city. We take complaints from anyone who feels the city has harmed them or treated them unfairly. Many of those complaints were able to resolve informally. In other cases, we might conduct investigations to determine if the city has caused harm or unfair or inequitable treatment, either to an individual or on a larger systemic level. We can also launch investigations at our own initiative without a specific complaint, and depending on the outcome of an investigation, we may make recommendations or suggestions to city bureaus. Next slide. The first result I'd like to highlight from the reporting period we're focusing on today, is the release in April of this year of our annual report, which covered calendar year 2020 for in addition to reporting on our yearly statistics, a couple of which I'll touch on shortly. The report also highlights some ways we've tried to improve our own processes. This included the fact that we expanded the type of demographic information we collect on a voluntary basis from people who contact us. In addition to asking about race or ethnicity and zip code, which we were already doing, we began to collect information on housing status, disability status, veteran status, gender and sexual orientation, as well as a question to determine if there's economic vulnerability. And all of these questions are voluntary and rely on the principle of self-identification. As we collect more of this information over time, we'll be able to analyze our data through an intersectional lens and better understand who we're assisting, or maybe more importantly, who we're not hearing from, so that we can target our outreach efforts. We also launched a customer feedback survey to learn about people's experiences when we handle their complaint, and we'll be able to analyze that data also by race or ethnicity. When respondents provide that information. The response rate was low in last year's pilot, but that's pretty typical of this kind of survey. And the feedback. But the feedback we received was generally positive, with three quarters of respondents saying they would recommend our office to others. This year, we've started laying the groundwork to be able to separately do a survey of city staff who we've interacted with when investigating and resolving complaints, so we can learn about their feedback from that side of things as well. We also began, as other parts of the city did, to adapt to the new form of government, not only by tracking complaints by service areas, but also elevating some of our recommendations to deputy city administrators rather than commissioners in charge. In addition, since the beginning of this year, we've brought a few cases to you. Councilors attention. When we were unable to successfully resolve a district constituents issue with the city administration. One of those cases involved a homeowner, an elderly homeowner with a very large lien because of a storage container on her property. Another involved an airbnb owner who had received over $100,000 in city fines without ever having received a warning or previous citations, and those cases were both in district one. Last point on this slide to make our work more transparent to the public, we launched a data dashboard. On the same day we released the annual report. That dashboard allows viewers to view and filter complaint data from the present going back to 2012, which is when we started using our current case management system. Next slide please. I'd like to highlight just a couple of data points from our annual report. Again, that covered 2024, as shown on this graphic. Our complaint numbers have continued to increase. Does this mean there's more to complain about? I wouldn't necessarily conclude that. It may just reflect that more people know how to find us. So far this year, it also looks like this overall growth trend is continuing. As of the end of June, we'd already logged about 300 complaints about the city. One thing I would mention that's more anecdotal we haven't really run the numbers yet. We have observed a trend that we seem to be hearing from more people who are living on the streets or at shelter sites. So in addition to those approximately 300 complaints about the city that we've gotten in the first half of this year, we also received an approximately equal number of non-city complaints where we referred people to other resources. So all of it keeps our small three person team pretty busy. Next slide please. This slide illustrates the bureaus or offices that received the most complaints in 2024. Which was the top six as the previous year, and is also pretty consistent with the longstanding historical pattern that the bureaus that regulate certain activities and enforce those regulations do tend to generate more complaints. It's worth noting that not all of these complaints involved our direct assistance, for example, because we do generally want to be an office of last resort, we may in some cases ask that a community member first file a grievance directly with the bureau or go through an appeal process. Some common examples of that are referrals to the hearings office for appeals and to the independent police review for complaints about officer conduct. And this bureau information will probably look a little bit different going forward due to the changes in city structure, for example, reflecting that now the functions of what used to be the office of management and finance have now been reorganized. Next slide please. So moving on to other results. In the first half of the year, I'm going to talk about the findings and recommendations we publicly released from two investigations. We don't publish a full report with every investigation. Sometimes we briefly summarize them on our website or feature them on our annual report, but we might publish our more detailed results when we think they will be of public interest, for example, because the issues are systemic or otherwise affect a large number of people. This slide is about an investigation that started in the summer of 2024, when we received a complaint from a homeowner at the cherry blossom townhomes. That's an affordable housing complex in southeast Portland that was constructed by habitat for humanity. We undertook an investigation into concerns they raised about fire safety at the complex and the fire bureau's approval of the building plans. That investigation found that fire poorly documented its decisions during the plans approval process, and sent mixed messages in their communications with homeowners, who subsequently raised fire safety concerns. In addition, we found that residents practice of parking vehicles on a portion of the access road and sidewalks could impede rescue efforts in an emergency. The memo we shared with fire in April 2025 outlined these findings and recommended that the bureau document in writing how it can safely respond to a fire at the complex, and what steps the homeowners association should take to ensure fire truck access. We also recommended that fire hold a community meeting with homeowners to discuss their concerns. In response to our recommendations, fire has offered to hold a community meeting and to make a video to show how they would respond in an emergency at the cherry blossom townhomes, and fire is also taking steps to enforce parking rules at the site. Next slide. Another investigation we completed during the reporting period and which was released in the very beginning of July, focused on what is known as private request tows. These are tows the police can order on behalf of community members whose vehicles are disabled in the right of way, usually because they've broken down or been involved in an accident. The advantage of a private request tow for vehicle owners, as opposed to a hazard tow, is that the police don't need to issue a citation, and there's less paperwork required to retrieve the vehicle. And Portland police officers order thousands of private requests tows every year. We received a complaint from a vehicle owner who paid $1,700 for a tow. That could that would have cost about $500, according to the prices set in the city tow contract. We learned that the contract, which the bureau of transportation manages, does not cover this kind of tow. Most tow companies voluntarily comply with the contract prices anyway, but we found that one did not. While this practice was legal, it exposed vehicle owners who were already in a highly stressful situation to widely disparate rates. Depending on which company responded to the tow request. The owner of the vehicle in this picture paid almost $2,000 to get their car back, three days after it was towed to a location less than three miles from the from the crash. To address this issue, we recommended that the bureau of transportation ensure that community members pay fair, standardized rates, for example by amending the city towing contract to cover all tows initiated by city bureaus. Any city bureau. Fortunately, we've learned that the tow company that was not voluntarily, voluntarily adhering to city contract rates appears to have been begun doing so since our investigation was published. This doesn't ensure that the issue we identified will not recur in future, but PBOT has assured us that they're looking into a more sustainable solution. The towing of vehicles by the city. It's an area that consistently generates complaints to my office, which partially accounts for why PBOT tops the list of bureaus that we looked at earlier, and we will continue to try to identify ways to reduce the harm that towing can cause to vulnerable community members. Currently, we're looking at the issue of towing from private properties, focusing on the impact of towing from apartment complexes on low on renters with low incomes. And before moving on to the next slide, I'd just like to give thanks and credit to my colleague, deputy ombudsman tony Green, who did a lot of hard work on these two investigations. Next slide please. This is my last slide. We strive to continue to monitor the implementation of our recommendations when they are not immediately implemented, accepted and implemented, which they are in most cases in the first half of the year. We shared the results of our monitoring about two sets of recommendations. In the beginning of the year, we published an update on Portland permitting and developments implementation of recommendations we made in a 2020 2021 report that focused on the harmful impacts of the bureau's complaint driven system for enforcing property maintenance requirements. These requirements include different exterior maintenance, nuisance and zoning rules addressing things like uncut grass, fence height or vehicles and unpaved areas, among other issues. Our 2021 report showed how the complaint based enforcement of these rules disproportionately affects portlanders in diverse and gentrifying neighborhoods. The report recommended that the bureau address these disparate impacts and consult with affected communities about reforming the system. At the time, the bureau agreed that the system had caused harm and accepted our recommendations. Unfortunately, they have not yet fully implemented them. Despite adopting some positive changes such as de-prioritizing enforcement of housing violations that are not critical to health and safety at owner occupied properties. They also expanded opportunities to reduce or eliminate liens resulting from compliance cases once those cases are closed. But the robust community engagement process we recommended has not yet happened. And unfortunately, the complaint is complaint driven system that we identified as causing harm remains in place. My office continues to talk to vulnerable homeowners with large liens that stemmed from a neighbor's complaints. When we looked at city data as part of our update, we saw that the total amount of city liens on owner occupied properties remained at the same level. Approximately $11 million that we reported in 2021. The data also shows that liens tend to be larger and more numerous in zip codes with lower value homes, and where certain communities of color live. So the need for further reforms to the system is still on our agenda, and we hope the city can find a better balance between reactive enforcement and proactive support for homeowners who need it. In the update, we also pointed to changes last year to the city's odor code as an example of how a complaint based system can be reformed due to those changes. This now city action is triggered only after a certain number of unique complaints are received from people who actually live near the location. But odor complaints make up only a small percentage of of code enforcement cases. I will leave you with some good news. In March, we reported that the water bureau agreed to implement our recommendations to eliminate returned payment fees and refund customers who had previously been overcharged this fee. This was after our investigation identified several concerns with equity and efficiency related to these fees. We found that returned payment fees disproportionately impact certain socioeconomic groups, and that the water bureau spent more time to collect the fees than the amount it received. The investigation also also revealed that for three years, the water bureau charged customers a higher fee than allowed. Under state law, the water bureau is no longer charging these fees as of this fiscal year, and it credited the accounts of over 800 customers who were previously overcharged. And was also exciting. Is that the revenue division, PBOT and the fire bureau have also ceased charging return payment fees. So as far as we're aware, these fees have been eliminated citywide. This result was ultimately thanks to a single community member who was impacted, who contacted our office and said, this seems wrong. And that's also how the other investigations I talked about today on the cherry blossom townhomes and private request toes got started. So in that spirit, and as a closing note, I'd like to encourage anyone listening today to consider my office a resource if you think the city hasn't treated you fairly. And I encourage council offices and other city staff to continue to refer community members to us when you think we might be able to help. Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your questions. First, I will hand over to casey jones, audit services division director.
12 Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is casey jones. I use he him pronouns and I serve as the audit services director. As auditor rede noted, I'll be presenting results of a performance audit on asset management, an overview of our audit schedule, and the results of two hotline reports. Next slide. This is a quick refresher on audit services work. Our division conducts performance audits of city programs, manages a contract with an outside accounting firm for the city's annual financial audit, and administers the city's hotline for tips of fraud, waste and abuse. We also monitor and report on the status of audit recommendations through our audit impact report and our recommendation dashboard. We're finalizing our current audit impact report and plan to release it in early October. Next slide. First, our asset management audit. So in April we released a performance audit on asset management. And I'd like to start with a little bit of background. So the city owns assets that allow it to deliver services to the public. We refer to this picture in the slide as our richard scarry graphic, a reference to the the busy town shown in his children's books. It shows that the city's assets include roads, street lights, parks and natural areas, water and sewer systems, buildings, vehicles, equipment, technology and more. So, according to 2023 estimates, assets owned by portland's major infrastructure bureaus were worth over $74 billion. Portlanders rely on the city to manage these assets so that they can provide safe, reliable and equitable services in a cost effective manner. Much of portland's infrastructure was built in the mid 20th century, and is now near or beyond the end of its useful life. Next slide. So for years the city has underinvested in routine and preventative maintenance of its aging assets. This underinvestment has created a backlog of costly and increasingly urgent needs that the city does not have the funding to meet. The city's infrastructure crisis has been well documented over two decades, but nevertheless continues to grow. As early as 2002, deteriorating infrastructure was reported as a top strategic priority for Portland city council. In 2007, the city estimated that its annual infrastructure funding gap was $112 million, and in 2024, the gap had ballooned to over $1 billion, as shown here. Without proper maintenance, there's a risk that deteriorating or failing assets will result in disrupted, delayed or discontinued city services. In some cases, deteriorating infrastructure may lead to serious liability or livability, safety and economic challenges. Infrastructure failures like broken sewer lines, closed parks or community centers and damaged roads may have more severe impacts on portland's low income residents and historically underserved communities. In addition, the city's underinvestment in infrastructure we benefit from today transfers those costs to future generations. This is known as intergenerational equity. When we started this audit, we learned about and met with the citywide asset managers group known as camg. Camg is made up of asset managers, planners, budget experts and related staff from across the city. Camg has been reporting on the city's infrastructure needs and challenges since the early 2000. Their December 2022 report identified challenges with asset management and made shorter and long term recommendations for improving asset management capacity within bureau citywide and identifying and prioritizing funding to meet the city's most pressing infrastructure needs. We want to take a minute to thank camg for their time, expertise and assistance throughout the audit process and for their efforts to improve asset management across the city. Next slide. So in light of cmg's work, the goal for our audit was not to duplicate their work, but rather to focus on what has gotten in the way of improving the city's approach to asset management. We research best practices for asset management and identified structures and strategies municipalities should have in place to manage assets responsibly. Our audit examined whether the city has an asset citywide asset management strategy, including an asset management governance structure to help guide and improve its infrastructure planning and decision making. An asset management strategy is a high level, comprehensive action plan that explains how infrastructure across the city should be planned and managed over time to achieve citywide goals. Such a strategy would help ensure that the city makes transparent, coordinated decisions about infrastructure that align with community needs and continually improves the asset management system. Next slide. So our overall finding is probably not a surprise to anyone. We found that the city has not adopted citywide asset management strategy. Without such a strategy, the city has has not had the governance structure, decision making processes and long term approach. It needs to begin to address its infrastructure funding gap. The commission form of government was a significant cause of the finding. Under the decentralized form of government, management of city assets was largely up to each infrastructure owning bureau. No one was really in charge of taking a city wide view of asset management, or responsible for creating a citywide asset management strategy. Several employees also shared that the city's infrastructure funding gap and gaps in asset management maturity require so much funding that it is too overwhelming to address. So. So leaders have instead tended to ignore the problems, developing an asset management strategy that includes a long term roadmap for improving the asset management system over time, would help set the city on a path to address its most pressing needs. Next slide. Overall, our audit highlighted that a strategic and coordinated city wide approach to asset management is needed to address portland's growing infrastructure crisis, and that the city's transition to a new form of government provides an ideal opportunity to develop this approach. Our audit recommended that as the city builds and refines its new form of government, it should dedicate time and resources to creating the infrastructure for infrastructure. Specifically, we recommended that the city administrator or designee develop a citywide asset management strategy that outlines an asset management governance structure, citywide infrastructure and decision making processes, and a long term approach for meeting portland's infrastructure funding and asset management capacity needs. We also recommended that the asset management strategy includes steps designed to promote buy in from city leadership and the public, such as by requiring the city administrator or designee to either present the strategy and regular updates on its implementation to council at public meetings, and or make the strategy available to the public, such as on a citywide asset management web page. In the official response, the city administrator generally agreed with the audit findings and recommendations with some clarifications, and will direct city staff to develop an asset management strategy. I'd like to note that city council earlier this month unanimously passed a resolution citing our audit and directing the city administrator to submit a citywide asset management strategy to council by September 30th, 2026. Next slide. The next item I'd like to speak about is the annual audit schedule, which we released in June. We developed the audit schedule by collecting ideas for potential audits all year long. We have an online forum where the public can suggest topics. Auditors may identify potential topics while conducting audits, and we also engaged with you all and other city leaders to understand what issues are important to you and your constituents. We shared a list of topics under consideration with the public and community groups, through a survey and a focus group to understand which programs and services they would most like to see audited, and whether there are areas where community members are able to contribute their experiences to an audit. We met as an audit team to discuss the potential topics and analyze them based on a variety of risk categories. The list of topics for the next fiscal year was then finalized based on these risk scores, considering coverage across service areas and our team's capacity. Next slide. So here are the 11 projects on the audit schedule five underway and six we have not yet begun. I'll run through the ongoing projects and let you know where they are in our process. So the parks fiscal management audit is in the reporting phase right now, and we're planning for a mid-october release. The climate, justice and arts education and access fund projects are wrapping up field work and developing their findings. 911 and emergency communications is wrapping up its planning phase, and we'll share their fieldwork objectives soon. Community safety division's efforts to reduce and prevent gun violence has just started, and you should have received a notice about that earlier this month. New projects we have not yet begun are at the right, and we will notify you when they begin, as we have on these past projects. Next slide. And the last item I have are results of two hotline investigations. So audit services also oversees the fraud hotline. Three of our performance auditors also serve as hotline investigators looking into tips of fraud, waste or abuse in city programs. We take tips from city employees and members of the public. So far this year, we've released two public reports stemming from investigations conducted by our hotline team. So in January, we released a report on waste and inefficiency in civic life's response to a grantees noncompliance. In this case, east Portland neighbors, or epn, a nonprofit organization providing financial services and serving as the fiscal sponsor for some neighborhood associations, became financially insolvent. Civic life said that it had ended its relationship with epn after it identified financial issues with epn, while civic life ended its relationship, other bureaus in the city still had grant grant agreements with epn, and concerns about epn's financial issues appeared to be ongoing. Civic life had an agreement with epn whereby epn purchased a liability insurance for city run district coalition offices. When epn was unable to pay civic life directly paid insurance brokers in excess of the agreement with epn and let the agreement expire, rather than using available remedies to terminate the agreement for cause. Civic life's response to this noncompliance was wasteful and inefficient because it spent more money than intended, did not follow city policy, and did not pursue potential remedies that could have addressed issues. At this time, other city programs were conducting business with epn, the city's lack of a formal process to remove vendors and communicate grantee noncompliance issues across the city is inefficient. We recommended improvements to the grants administration policy that could address this issue in the future. And then in March, we released a report on the city's failure to award grants from the Portland international raceway north Portland trust fund. The city is required to award small grants from the fund each year to benefit neighborhoods impacted by the raceway. We found that it had not done so since 2020 and that this constituted inefficiency and waste. This fund operates through coordination of two bureaus. Parks collects the fees from races to fund the program, and which is administered by civic life. Our investigation found that parks had paused the grant program at the beginning of the pandemic, and never restarted it. The fund contains over $282,000 from fees collected and interest. The report recommends awarding grants from the fund and updating the policy governing the fund, to help ensure that grants are awarded from the fund as intended. So now I'll pass the presentation back to auditor rede and I look forward to your questions.
13 Thank you. Director jones. At this time, I want to acknowledge ombudsman croft and director jones for their direction of this work and for the results that they've delivered in this first half of 2025, the auditor's office and the city and portlanders are very fortunate to have such competent professionals in these roles. And we welcome your questions about anything we've shared today.
14 Thank you so much. And auditor rede, thank you as well for directing this work. I appreciate the shared credit with your team, but want to make sure that your direction and this is recognized to many of the concerns that were highlighted today, are things that shouldn't have happened, that we shouldn't have had to deal with. And it's so important that portlanders know that they can rely on your team to make sure that we are doing everything we can to hold the city accountable to doing the best work possible for community members. We do have at least one person signed up for public testimony, so I hate to ask you all to take a quick step back and then come back up to the table. But I'd like to make sure that we hear from members of the public first, and then we'll get to councilor Questions. We already have a number of folks waiting to ask questions. Let's hear from folks who have signed up to testify.
15 We have. You go. Flores signed up to testify. You go. Flores. Okay, I believe that's it. Yeah.
16 Okay, well, I apologize. Let's have you all come right back up. We should have called first. And, councilor Avalos, would you like to start off questions?
17 All right. Hello. Thank you so much to the auditor's office for your incredible work. Your diligent work, really to ensure that accountability and transparency are a pillar of our city's work, I appreciate that. I especially want to acknowledge the ombudsman report on the cherry blossom townhomes. That was that investigation was really helpful. My staff was working directly with the residents who were impacted, and your work gave them a stronger voice, and that helped us advocate more effectively for their safety and their stability. So I want to thank you for that. I have a couple of questions. My first one is, just from your perspective, what can council do to better support residents who are navigating these kinds of challenges challenges within city bureaus? I think I preface that by saying, you know, now that we've got this representative form of government, we're getting a lot of folks coming to us with, you know, issues that of course, we're directing them across the city. But I guess I just want to understand how we can better partner with your office to ensure this transparency we all desire.
18 I would invite ombudsman croft to respond to that. We do appreciate your partnership and referrals to our office. When there are things within our scope that we can address, and I think she can clarify that further.
19 Yeah. So yeah, absolutely. I we also appreciate those referrals. I know that that has been happening, I think and there are certainly times when, you know, we may be able to see that someone is approaching council offices and our office at the same time. We don't always have that visibility if it's, you know, so we might reach out to council offices just to coordinate, avoid duplication of effort. Sometimes we might refer people to counsel offices, if that seems potentially like a better fit. If we know it's something maybe that councilors are particularly interested in, we often recommend council testimony. If people are raising more of a policy concern rather than something that the city has done to them. Specifically, I think where our office can bring particular added value is probably with more, with cases of community members coming with issues that are not so straightforward, that can't just be, you know, where it's not necessarily just connecting them with the bureau, but where there would need to be more inquiry and investigation. And that is something we have that capacity to do. So I would encourage those cases that look more complex or not so not so straightforward that those can be good candidates to pass on to us.
20 Yeah. And I think that builds on what my second question is, and also just this notion that I believe constituents are coming to us for kind of the advocacy side of it. Right. And the accountability, the follow through side of it. So when the city doesn't adopt your recommendations, what does your office do to keep the issue from being dropped? Like how does that follow through work on your end?
21 Yeah. So we well, as you know, we don't have enforcement authority. So it's really more, you know, trying to draw attention to the issues to promote accountability in, in other ways. Like I mentioned today, we do try to continue to monitor and just keep, you know, raising the issues. Sometimes we do that in the form of this kind of update report. Like I mentioned, sometimes it's a little bit more informal. Staying in touch with the bureau. To, you know, I would say in in a lot of cases, particularly with individual cases, just by their nature, recommendations we made, we make often are need to be in are more immediately implemented. So there isn't always a need for follow up. It tends to be more with the systemic issues where we might need to follow up longer term. And I think, you know, how we how we do that and how often depends somewhat on on the substance of it.
22 Thank you. And lastly, you all mentioned that you've started collecting more demographic information. So I'm curious what trends you're noticing and if there's anything, especially for east Portland communities in those trends, I'd be interested to know.
23 I don't I think it's probably a little bit early, because last year was the first year we started collecting that more expansive demographic information. So it's probably a little bit early to come to any. Yeah. To draw any conclusions yet about patterns. I think that will be more interesting probably to look at in a year or two. I think one of the things that was interesting, and we included this in the annual report almost, we have a question asking if people are on a limited fixed income or receive government benefits, or otherwise have difficulty paying monthly expenses, and we and then we classify that as sort of economic, economic vulnerability. And it was almost half of our people who contacted us answered yes to that question I think was interesting. Otherwise things like gender, it was pretty evenly split. But yeah, definitely happy to report back in future about that.
24 Thank you.
25 Thank you councilor, councilor Clark.
26 Thank you, madam president. Thank you for this presentation today. Really appreciate it. Enlightening. I think your work is absolutely vital and I appreciate all you do. I'm regret that past councils have not always paid close attention to what you've done, and implemented some of your recommendations. I regularly refer to your audits when I'm out and about, but you can rest assured I think that this council has taken your asset management audit very, very seriously. We've passed a resolution, we've passed a budget note. We put resources into follow up, and we've actually added on to it. We've requested a asset management finance plan to get at the very issue that others may have skirted. So we would like to perhaps invite you back to hear the results of that if you're interested. When when that report comes back to us in a year from now, and then three months later, we'll have a finance plan to discuss how we're going to address that. I also just wanted to express my appreciation for your solicitation of our ideas. I found that to be a great conversation and briefing with you. So thank you so much.
27 Thank you, councilor, councilor Smith.
28 Thank you, madam president. Thank you all for coming today to give us the results of the report. One of the things that I noticed was that there's 27% of your complaints are transportation driven. Could you tell me which kinds of transportation complaints you're having?
29 I mean, it can really be about anything the bureau does. I think where we where we do tend to see a concentration, it tends to be around towing vehicles. That's why that's and that's been a consistent pattern over the years. And that's why towing is is an issue where we've done some more in-depth work and plan to continue looking at it, but we also get, yeah, it can be about parking tickets. We did a last year, an investigation into regulation, enforcement of regulations around tour busses. Yeah, we get complaints about potholes and other road conditions and bicyclists issues. So yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, those are not all cases we would look into. Sometimes it would be referring to another process, you know, people who want to report about abandoned vehicles in their neighborhoods. So it really runs the gamut.
30 So, you know, where I was going with this because I was wondering if you're getting concerns or complaints around sidewalks, particularly in east Portland and in district four. I know that we passed a bill that would help to increase the number of sidewalks in in Portland and district one and district four. So I was just curious if any of those transportation kinds of complaints had anything to do with folks not having sidewalks. I'm always trying to promote cip. And thank you for for acknowledging the asset management. I sit on the transportation committee with chair Clark and and thanks to her leadership, we did get that done the request and we passed it. It's not out yet, but I know that we're going to be working with the city administrator to make sure that we try to identify how we can decrease some of those, you know, keep up some of those assets. So thank you so much. And the other issue that I, that I found really kind of troubling is that the, the grant funds, I wanted to find out if those grant funds through the, the raceway, if giving out those grant funds were statutory, if it was in code that we have to give out those funds. You said there was 282,000.
31 Yes. So my understanding is that, you know, as I said, it is a situation where parks collects the funds because of the raceway is under parks. And then civic life was administering the grants project. Both of them had capacity issues and then it it ceased during COVID and nobody was putting the effort in to start it back up. So my understanding is that I think it was all going to be consolidated under parks, and then that that would restart the process.
32 Thank you. And I do think that in civic life, we do need to do some better oversight over epm because I'm not understanding how we that epm is still in that they're still doing services in one area of our neighborhood associations and they're not in others. So I'm not understanding what that looks like. And lastly, I see some opportunity with the $11 million worth of liens. So those liens that are the same, $11 million that we saw back in 2021, do we ever put interest payments on those liens, or do you, because these are owner occupied homes that have liens on them, correct?
33 Yes. That 11 million is we well, we looked at the data where the property address and the homeowner address that were listed were the same as a way to try to identify owner occupied properties. Yes.
34 And and what you said was you said that communities of color and underserved homeowners, they make up a majority of this $11 million for the most part. And so if if they're getting interest payments, put on this annually and they're not paying it off, I think we're putting we're disparaging a group of people who have been historically marginalized and people who are not going to be able to pay those liens. And so there is an opportunity, and I was thinking about it in my head of how can we help those? We just did system development charges and to the tune of $200 million, we just waived those charges in in lieu of getting more affordable housing. I don't see any good in keeping this $11 million on a group of homeowners, marginalized homeowners that are not going to pay this and to have this stress on them. And if they do decide to sell their sell their homes, they're going to have so many thousands of dollars worth of liens on their homes, it's not going to be worth anything. So I want to talk to the city manager about this and see if there's some opportunities that we might be able to reduce those liens on those owner occupied housing units, because it just seems to me that it's just, you know, we should not have our our market rate developers being the only ones to take advantage of city monies to be able to waive things. I think there are for the good of if they haven't changed in four years and they haven't paid these liens off, it's obviously because they can't afford to pay for it. And if it's just going to continue and continue, we're really causing some some hardships on homeowners who are already minimizing marginalized. I just wanted to put that out there to you, and thank you for reaching out to our staffs and getting information on possible issues that you can that you can actually audit. I appreciate the work that you've done, and thank you very much.
35 Thank you, councilor Councilor Kanal.
36 Thank you, madam president. Thank you all for being here on a rare day with natural lighting. I think it's fitting that we have the sunshine in here today with the auditor's office. I also appreciate you highlighting the work that you do on and the shoestring budget that your office has, because that makes the thoroughness and professionalism of the work even more impressive. I was really happy to see the increased percentage in the number of complaints that were able to be investigated this year, and just big picture, I think it's it's clear that you, as the third branch, help us make better policy and the other two branches. So thank you to to everyone in your office. I wanted to highlight the five recommendations you made, including three that that were sort of a practice that doesn't exist in every other city of using individual complaints and investigations to spur broader systemic investigations. The water bureau payment fee, payment return fee, the tour bus on permitted tour bus operations, and the predatory towing practices, as well as the the broader towing issue and the disparity for the PBOT and police issue and the asset management, of course. And finally, I'm a raceway affected resident. So the work of mitigating raceway effects affects my neighbors and I directly. So so thank you for that. I do have two questions for the audit division. And if there's time later I might come back for ombuds questions. I was excited to see. Your topic list includes Portland solutions, boec, a gun violence reduction efforts, pbem and pbs's body worn cameras. And my questions are on the last two. Of course, my office is happy to provide any info we can provide on any of those if it's helpful, but related to pbem your audits, discuss how to make work more efficient, equitable, and effective. Is the staffing of pbem relative to the needs and the emergency management standards a topic of your audit without prejudging it? Is it theoretically possible that a recommendation could include council making a change to the budget and or position authority?
37 So with with that project, I think we would start pretty, pretty wide, which could include like looking at the entire mission vision. It would obviously include notifying all of you when we start getting feedback from you on on things that you're you have concerns about in the area. So yeah, we're happy to to take ideas when that is initiated. So that will start pretty broad. So and then through our planning and scoping process we would identify a specific objective to focus in on.
38 Great thanks. And I think your your answer may be similar to the second one. Your audits named police's body worn cameras. That's how it's listed. But parts of the policy relate to other parts of the city. Org chart, whether it's the dca's office, you know, as it relates to communications around it, release, deletion of accidental footage or independent police review it because it says the word police's body worn cameras. Is the audit going to only focus on the PPB portion of it, or will it be broader than that as well?
39 I think usually we pick a kind of primary responsibility area to identify in the in the the description. So it would would start there. And then similarly, if folks say, hey, a real issue here is the way we coordinate with this other body or that sort of thing, or the. The, the record keeping part of it or that sort of thing. Then we would, we would adjust, you know, on our arts audit, I think we've issued 3 or 4 job start letters as different dca's and stuff like that have gotten pulled into it. The official response always comes from the city administrator level and is sometimes delegated to the dca level. So those folks are engaged at the beginning of the audit. No matter where we are.
40 Great. I'll get out of the queue now and then. If there's time, I'll ask the ombuds questions. Thank you.
41 Thank you. Councilor councilor Koyama Lane.
42 Thank you.
43 Council president. Thank you for all of this and for your hard work, especially the information around citywide asset management strategy. I believe that this council and many are aware of this. And actually, anytime I hear those words, citywide asset management strategy, three faces pop into my mind. Councilor Clark. Director maddie sutter and project manager tate white. I think that's a sign that we're talking about it a lot. There is a focus on this. I see that the city administrator responded and agrees with the audit recommendation. I read their response at the end. And since you are also here, mr. Jordan, if you'd like to weigh in also on your response, I'd love to hear. I just want to see if there are any thoughts that you all want to share to their response. Anything that you want to highlight, anything that stood out to either of you.
44 I was enthusiastic about the auditor's office taking this on and appreciate their work. I think it's one of the most important issues the city faces in the next 20 years. And and it will be that long a journey. And so the council's interest through the resolution, through budget notes, through your discussions, through your giving of resources to make progress on this is all indication that this is one of the most important things we need to be working on. So and again, appreciate the collaboration with the auditor's office in in getting this going. So.
45 It was an incredibly, I think, unique audit. You know, we are often looking for topics where we feel like we can add value. And throughout that planning and scoping process, we're trying to figure out, hey, what objective should we focus on? Or what questions should we ask that that hasn't been asked? So in this area, folks at city administrator jordan's level and folks at the council level had an awareness of this issue, but it was big, scary, you know, pretty intimidating. So our our challenge was what work could we do to point folks in the right direction, say, these are the first steps to tackling this, this important issue. And the the agreement, the the work that has already started, I think, in bringing folks together through kpmg and through council's action, is is one of the quicker responses that we've seen to to audit work, especially something that could seem by its name pretty inside government, not like kind of directly impacting folks, but really, really has a major impact on portlanders now and in the future.
46 Thank you for confirming. That is what I gleaned. And it seems kind of like the best case scenario that there were concerns around this. You all wrote a report, the city administrator, and that team is saying, yes, we do need to work on that, and here's how we want to do it. And you have a council that's supportive, really looking forward to continued collaboration on this.
47 Thank you. Councilor, councilor Green.
48 Thank you, madam president. And thank you, madam auditor and your team for bringing this forward. Today. I'll echo what councilor Kanal had. He was like sort of showering some praise earlier and I think that's warranted. You guys really punch above your resources and I really appreciate the work that you guys do. There's one thing in particular you did last year that I really appreciate, and I really hope that we take seriously, and you called it out was the was the identifying the tour bus regulation piece and are the areas where we've we've we've not done a great job as a city to ensure that folks are not only complying with our own codes, but that there's a level playing field there. And we've got some constituents that operate in our district who've been disadvantaged because of that lack of uniform application. So as we we look forward into the next year, I hope that we take the lessons of that report from last year and figure out how to do right by those those two operators who've been here a long time and actually playing by the rules. The other thing I want to I actually do have a question, though, about the the audit report, there's that billion dollar number. And, you know, if you look at the graph, it's sort of it sort of balloons after the 2019 data point. I mean, I would imagine that's mostly driven by inflation expectations. Is that correct?
49 A little by that. And in my memory, I think we explain in the background of the report how if you let something go longer, it takes even more like an exponential numbers to be able to get it back to working condition or salvageable. So it's it's both inflation and neglect that.
50 And that makes sense to me. And so as we look forward into this kind of period of study, we've got we've got some really great people working on it, not only using the iso standards that that really help us do good work in this space, but recognizing those qualitative breaks between different types of assets, assets that actually move us across that threshold because it is discontinuous. But the other piece that I think when you think about deferred maintenance, you typically like an asset, has a useful life. Right. And are we counting deferred maintenance through the term of that useful life, or are we saying that we're assuming that we roll forward the asset and restart it? Does my question kind of make sense to you?
51 Yeah, I think that that would be probably a meaty question. We got we got the number from them. But I think a more coordinated approach on how that life cycle is, is governed and looking for opportunities to say, hey, we got a bunch of similar types of trucks across bureaus, all kind of sunsetting at the same time. Should we do a big, big purchase, you know, that sort of thing or, you know, similar situation to maybe the school district is in right now where it's like, hey, we are expanding capacities at a couple high schools at the same time, we are kind of seeing lower enrollment. Is there a realignment? We can make? A lot of those decisions weren't being made at a citywide level.
52 So and that's exactly right. And so I think when we're putting our kind of asset management hats on as we do this work, thinking about the different kind of scenarios of futures that we might chart down as a city, because the line that you see in the report is it really is taking as given the status quo and saying, what do we need to invest in to validate that status quo? But we've had conversations about reducing, you know, street mileage, doing like superblocks around the city, thinking about redevelopment as an opportunity to change our built environment that actually removes those ongoing liabilities in some sense. Well, probably also creating new ones. So I really hope that we kind of explore that as we think through the study that we passed recently. So thanks for the the engagement on on the on the nerdier aspects of that. But no, just keep up the good work. And, you know, I do think you have a council who wants to take action on the and also a city administrator wants to take action on the results of these, these findings. So thanks.
53 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Novick.
54 Yes I have a question that's kind of similar to one councilor Smith asked. I was surprised initially to see that there was a significant number of complaints to the ombudsman about the office of management and finance, and at first I was wondering, are people calling to say that reckless city policies are putting a bond rating at risk? But then it occurred to me that probably 95% of them are about the arts tax. So I just wanted to ask if that's true.
55 I well, I wouldn't say 95% that that would include complaints about revenue, which can include arts tax complaints. But previously the we were also technically the office of impact reduction was also technically under office of management and finance. So complaints about, you know, people, you know, losing their property during a camp sweep, those were kind of complaints. We were also counting under omf and I and some other functions as well that yeah, just that's how it was structured. So yeah, some portion of that is, is revenue. I would say generally we actually haven't don't get as many arts tax complaints as I think we might have gotten in past years. So I don't know.
56 That's good to hear. Thanks.
57 Anything further counselor?
58 No, counselor.
59 Ryan, I don't believe you've had an opportunity to speak yet.
60 Thanks.
61 Thank you, madam president. Thank you, madam auditor and team, it's good to see you. I want to start with a story, and it's a thanks as well. When I was put in office in 2020, shortly after the famous permitting audit came out in early 2021, and what was kind of startling about it, it was almost the same. You could look at the 110 years prior or 15 years prior and the one before that, and they all said the same thing. So I had to then figure out why there wasn't action or why the action after that had failed. And it was really clear that it's a longer journey than most elected officials want to go through. We live in a politically charged seasonality of elections, and sometimes it's difficult to take on things that are going to take some time because it's culture change, work, system change work. And I know my political advisor said, why are you taking on such big picture system things? And so I just give you that to say that it was startling to see that there was no action, but I also was it was shocking to not see that there was any accountability after those would come out. Anyway. I think that that needs to be a more transparent dialog going forward. I am happy to say that we stuck with it. In fact, this yesterday we were able to pass concrete work that people can now understand and feel. But it took four years to get there because of how much dismantling and culture change work had to go into it. I do recall in the first meeting, it looked like all the other action in the past was focused on one bureau, when in fact I was awake enough to say, but there's like 7 or 8 bureaus involved, why haven't they been involved? It's like, well, because the commissioner Over that bureau just kind of owned it. So the good news is we worked as a team, and commissioner Mapps had most of those bureaus. So I asked them to be the co-chair and then insisted on the other offices to be in all the meetings. We couldn't have more than two electeds in a meeting, of course. So I just want to thank, working with your office to give me a blueprint of what the problem was, because it was really thorough in your analysis, and then we were able to build data sets that were actually now frequent. And so I'm happy to report that that was one of the first things we did, instead of waiting every 10 to 15 years to hear how bad it is, what if we actually had continuous data that was upgraded at least quarterly? And so it's those kind of boring things that don't really get a lot of people excited to vote for you, that you have to work on to sometimes get something moving. So I hope as a culture, we really do take the work seriously, but we also add more elements of accountability to when someone decides to take that on. And now it's different because we can do that with a city administrator and working with the ca, of course. And I just hope that I tell that story to say that it's only as good as it is what you do with it. So you guys job is to basically state objectively the problem, and then our job is to care about that and then actually take time to build a better system. So that problem starts to go away. So I don't think we've utilized what comes out of the auditor's office as much as we should. But I also don't think there's enough communication about how to do that. And more and, and more accountability about these reports came in. City administrator, what are we doing with them? And so I think instead of admiring the problems every 2 or 3 years and you all get to say, this is the problem, what is the communication dialog that will take place with the administration and then with the council's accountability to move that forward? So thanks for listening to that story. This is a little uncomfortable and I probably should have asked it offline, but I just have to ask because I'm asking for a friend. So now that we have a new form of government and we have like say, a city clerk pretending that they're not here right now, some people would think, why is that not in council operations? And why is that still in the auditor's office? So let's have a transparent dialog about that question that everyone seems to be murmuring about.
62 I'd be happy to engage in that. So our office, as you know, is is led by an independently elected, elected official. And we we exist to make sure that the city of Portland remains open and accountable. I think there's value in having our council clerk as part of the auditor's office so that, you know, the transparency opportunity that the public have to engage with you is never compromised by anyone's agenda that has a vote on this council. I do not have a vote on council. So I think that is the added value of of keeping that function in the auditor's office.
63 Okay. I'll try to keep thinking about that. I, I'm not in the role as council president. So you have more insight in this and I'm not putting you on the spot at all. I just think that there's a tension on this point that we have to continue to figure out, and it has nothing to do with the skill sets of anyone that's in this room right now, especially the council clerk. It's more that because we have a new form of government, perhaps there is some some loosening of some of those definitions and some of those org charts that relate to how we serve these operations as well. So I get the independent part, and I appreciate that. I haven't always experienced independence from your office, but I do understand what you're saying. We have a big vote coming up this fall. The parks and rec is going to be on the ballot basically for the levy. And there's an audit coming out, isn't there, on parks and rec, on recreation specifically. So my point is, when will that information come out? And as an elected official, I feel it's my responsibility to make sure that voters have as much information as possible as they're asked to make a bigger investment in parks and recreation. And so I wouldn't want us to be in a pickle where a vote happens. And then three months later, an auditor's report comes out that would make some people have buyer's remorse.
64 Yeah, thank you for that. We do aim to be timely and relevant in delivering our results. The audit of parks fiscal management is one of our forthcoming reports, and I know that city administrator michael jordan is aware of the timeline there and ready to provide a timely response to that audit.
65 Yeah, we're looking for a mid October release. We are in the process of one of the steps we take is taking our draft report and citing each line in the report back to the evidence that we gathered, and then having an independent member of our team verify that that is sufficient evidence. We are doing that right now. We will then share the draft report with the city administrator and parks leadership. We have a meeting on the calendar in early October to go through that. You all will get a copy when the report is embargoed to the media, so you will get it in advance of public release a couple days before.
66 And I heard you say mid October. Yeah. So I when I hear that October 15th.
67 Ish, that's what we're aiming for right now. Yeah.
68 Ballots go out around.
69 There you go.
70 I just wanted to make sure we had that moment. I have a few other questions and I'm going to pick one that I think could be quick. So I've had people report to me, this is for the ombudsman that they've had complaints that have gone to you and they respectfully have listened to your response, which is it wasn't under your purview. So you moved them to hr. Could you just give us a sense of the criteria when something's not in your purview and when you decide to make a decision, you make the decision that it should go to human resources.
71 Yeah. So we do have discretion over how to handle complaints. City code outlines a number of reasons why we might decline to investigate a complaint, which can include, you know, that there's another process available. Maybe it's premature for investigation. Maybe the person has waited too long. Maybe we just don't. It's something we maybe just don't have the resources to investigate. So with hr, I think there are a few scenarios maybe where there might be those referrals to hr. One would be if it's a city employee and it's really more of a workplace personnel issue, we.
72 Think a lot of ours are connected to city employees because they're the city employees are out there doing services for, you know, our our residents and people who, you know, engage with Portland. So a lot of the complaints, I'm sure, in that category, I just I think what I hear is that they prefer your office, of course, because I think you have a skilled set of stewardship that that goes back to constituents. And I think hr is more internal. And so the people that maybe made the complaint feel like they don't know what the outcome is, whereas when it stays with the ombudsman, it has more of a transparent 360. And so what's that communication like with hr to ensure that that 360 type dialog could take place?
73 Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the exact circumstances in the case you're referring to, but I think when we might refer a when we might involve hr in something a member of the public has referred, it would tend to be if it's a complaint about employee conduct, because we don't hr is really set up to do with this, you know, together with the supervisor of the employee set up to do that sort of personnel investigation. We don't, you know, we can't discipline anyone.
74 Employee conduct doesn't stay with the ombudsman. That goes directly to hr.
75 Not necessarily. I mean, I think we there are cases also where we refer it to the supervisor and lupine hr. And we, we would ask them to look into it and including being in touch with the complainant to get their side of things and to keep us informed of any outcomes. That's kind of our standard. Okay.
76 I'll reflect more on that. This is something I've heard over the last few years now and then. So I just wanted to have this opportunity to ask that question. I still am not clear about the criteria, but I have a little better understanding based on this conversation. Okay. Thank you.
77 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Smith, did you have additional questions?
78 Yes, I forgot to ask the question. Thank you, madam president. Just curious. You said you're. And I saw the numbers too, that you've increased the number of complaints that you have. How do people find out about you right now? How are they? Where are you marketing your your services?
79 Yeah, we try to use different opportunities to get the word out most. Well, actually I was just looking at the sort of data most people say other when we ask kind of give a list of options. But I would say just, you know, search engine people say that they've, they've googled how to file a complaint about the city. They end up with us. 311 is is a source of pretty regular referrals. Sometimes we usually we get sometimes when we're in the media, that kind of raises awareness that we're out there. We do outreach events. We've done some social media advertising. So yeah, just trying to always open to new ways to try to get the word out.
80 That's it. Thank you. Excellent.
81 Thank you.
82 Thank you councilor, councilor Canal.
83 Thank you, madam president. I'll shift over. And I think my questions might relate to some degree to the previous questions from my colleagues here as it relates to the the increase in the number of complaints. That seems to, to me, at least in reading it, to be a reflection of increased awareness of the work that you do. I can't imagine that we only have 600 something complaints about city work over the course of the year, so I think we're still probably capturing some of that in this and in other places. I also just wanted to say I really appreciate the work on the survey, both on the internal and the external side of it. My question, I guess the first one is, is related to complaints in the context of PBOT, but outside the context of towing. Have you been hearing much about things like street restriction changes like the diverters on northwest everett, or about street plaza changes either proposed or being done by PBOT? Like for example, the division of 31st street plaza removal. Are those do you get complaints about those things which kind of may tread the line between policy and whether or not there may have been an allegation of doing some work without an authorization?
84 So I think we have got yes, we have gotten some complaints about concerns about those types of issues, I think. We our focus is really more about complaints helping in cases where the city is really directly done something to harm some someone as opposed to. You know, the city has done something that someone thinks they should do another way. You know, some some, you know, thing they don't agree with. Yeah, they do those some, those types of situations. I think do get into the category of more complex policy questions where, you know, the city is weighing a lot of different considerations, and it's not necessarily a fairness issue per se, which is really our lens, you know, is the city, has the city been unfair to someone, harm to them? It depends. I think maybe what, what the focus of someone's complaint is. But I would say generally when we. Have gotten that type of concern where it's more like, well, the city is making this change and I don't agree that we would. I mean, council communications is often a place we refer people in those kinds of situations.
85 Sure. And I can see there being a policy element as well as a direct harm being caused by putting cars on a road that was otherwise bicycle only in terms of the risk of, of injury or worse. So it's straddling the line there. And a related question where there's a kind of a unique additional option, what kinds of complaints I saw the second highest percentage were about police. There is the they're both internal affairs there. And you talked about when you would direct things to the bureau themselves, but when was when would it be appropriate to come to your office as opposed to independent police review or I.
86 Yeah. So usually where we would refer people to ipr would be if it's a complaint about officer, the conduct of an individual officer, since that's really their, you know, what they're set up to look at. So we have looked into sometimes, you know, some other complaints that have some police aspect or police involvement. I think a good example is report we put out it was 2023 about how the police had handled the certification for u visas for undocumented victims of crime. And yeah, sometimes there I mean, sometimes the police may be one of the bureaus, like in a towing complaint, you know, maybe the police did the tow. So there might, that might, there might be some aspect we would look into that wouldn't necessarily be about the, the conduct of an individual officer. I would say, I don't know, off the top of my head, I would say a lot of complaints about the police. We do end up referring to ipr, but yeah, there are certain other types of issues that can come up that we might look into.
87 So would something like because you mentioned u visas, something like the, the choice or the way in which extreme risk protection orders are used or not by the police bureau or for example, the drone charging being moved to the east precinct as opposed to mobile around the city. Are those the sorts of things that you might see or those more policy? I think maybe the first one might be less of a policy concern, the second more. But I figured I'd ask.
88 What was the first issue? Can you repeat it?
89 The use or the one of the things our colleague online has talked about is, is how we use extreme risk protection orders less here. It's more of a county issue too, but less than a lot of other parts of the state. So I wanted to that's something we hear about. Maybe you haven't heard about it, in which case.
90 I don't think we've heard about it. I'm not really familiar with the issue.
91 Right.
92 Okay.
93 I'd love to add, though, councilor, that when it comes to those matters that are more broad, that's a practice that I have is listening to council communications. When you all have your meetings and reading in the news, when issues like livability that you're highlighting with some of those street level changes are highlighting, and then those topics get considered just along other ideas from you and city leadership for our annual audit schedule. Great, great.
94 That makes sense. So that concludes my questions. I'll just note I'm excited if we do eventually have a conversation around the council clerk's office to to be a part of that. And I have a lot of faith in the in the the current structure, even if we might be able to have a good structure in other way. I have a lot of faith in the current structure because of the independence I've seen, both in the old form and the new form of government, and not just keelan who's fantastic, but the whole office. So thanks.
95 Thank you, councilor, councilor Zimmermann, thanks.
96 Appreciate you bringing anything forward. My conversations with you have always been really pleasant, and I and I like the direction you're taking things. So thank you for coming forward. I think oftentimes in a world where we talk about complaints, we have some way of either elevating the fact that a complaint exists means there's a problem, which I would say is not the case, or we have a deep misunderstanding of the type of complaints that are appropriate for an ombudsman's office versus our offices, for instance. Right. You highlighted some of the areas where I'm going to use the term findings, but but where you where you got involved. But I'm curious in terms of the number of complaints that maybe come into an ombudsman's office versus the number that actually are one pursued and then two found to be substantial, substantiated. We have a thing in the army. There's the hurt feelings card, and hurt feelings card is great, but that's not something that really seems like is an ombudsman's office purpose. And it doesn't mean anything went wrong. It's just like somebody irritated with how things went. But your office has a different charge. And I'm curious in terms of the number that come in versus and ballpark, right, in terms of how do you how do you how do you think that is? And does the public and the and even the elected representatives, do we have a good understanding for the type of complaint that actually gets your time and attention?
97 Yeah. Well, I, I mean, that is something we track how many complaints we decline to investigate or take action on how many we investigate and how many we may do some other type of intervention, which is more facilitation, you know, elevating the issue, kind of trying to expedite things, maybe giving someone some assistance with a process or connecting them with other resources. So if you look, I mean, I think, I think it's been a pretty consistent trend that it's about half maybe sometimes even a little bit more than half of complaints are technically declined, which doesn't mean we're just selling someone. No, we can't help you. Goodbye. But we're we're generally trying to suggest, you know, where they can direct their concern.
98 Meaning that they perfectly. Perfectly appropriate thing to bring up, but maybe in a different venue, maybe a counselor's office or the mayor's office or the director of it. But but probably not in the purview of of your office is kind of what that means when you say that.
99 Like it.
100 Can mean maybe go over here and talk to them about it. It's not about being treated unfairly in a system that was designed to be fair. It's that they dislike something that we do.
101 Well, that's, I would say, one group of complaints. Other times it's maybe a it's a legitimate concern, but they haven't used another available process yet. Since we do try to be an office of last resort, we might say, look, you first got you know, what you really need to do is file a claim. You need to go to the hearings office. You need to, you know, file a complaint with with ipr or it's just, you know, referring someone, you know, to contest a parking ticket. This is how you how you do that. And then there and then. Yeah. So it's a lot of those. And then there may be other reasons, you know, it may just be bringing up an issue that didn't. It's more of a third party complaint. It's not really affecting the person personally. So and then and then there's the the number of complaints that we investigate is actually a fairly small percentage. It's usually around 10 to 15%. And then in between are these complaints where we're doing some other type of informal resolution.
102 Yeah. So I appreciate that. I'm glad you were able to highlight it. I think it's just one of those one, I think the informal resolution is a great approach that that can be taken on. And and it's usually very customer service oriented in terms of like working through the, the nature of what comes in. But it also with 10% to 15% being. Substantiated. It it draws a picture I think about the role. The role of the ombudsman office is so sacred in terms of that, that last check of fairness, that last resort of like something has truly gone wrong in the system, but also that the presence of a complaint does not, in and of itself say anything. The nature of a bunch of complaints coming in to me doesn't seem like an important metric, but a bunch of complaints being substantiated in a certain area, a certain topic. That would be an indicator for me as a policy maker of like, we have a problem, but I just I say that having been around a number of of them and sometimes the questions that get asked, it seems like I never love it when people think of an office as the complaint department. It is, it is not. And I just want to highlight those differences. And I find where you do find where you have findings that are very important for us to take note of. And that's the true indicator. Moving to the audit side of it, I just I've learned from some really good mentors and some bosses have always read the audit reports. So appreciate it. I echo councilor Clark's words that she mentioned earlier about the topics that we were interested in. I just thought that was just a great approach. It was actually one of the first I've ever had that experience. So thank you for that and looking forward to kind of building this together and learning what what your team is finding for us and, and to your to your deputy auditor. Madam auditor, I've appreciated the customer service. Like as we all got in here and figured out our places and our roles and the new stuff that we have to navigate. That's been a helpful conversation in terms of doing the right thing and crossing t's and dotting I's. So thanks to the team.
103 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Ryan, you had additional comments.
104 Yeah, I'll go twice. Some of my colleagues. So I would reflecting on the earlier conversation about the practice today because at one time it would be the commissioner in charge would be in responsible for overseeing the implementation. And this is probably why we're not voting on this today. So now we have a new form of government. And so it's all under the sea. Jordan in the mayor's office is what I think. But I think what I need to hear, perhaps more than anyone, is how this process now works. So how do we know when you got our input on what we'd like to see audited? When you make the decisions on what will be audited, how will we track where they go, and therefore we can provide one of our roles, which is oversight. And I know you could weigh into jordan. Jordan, I just want to understand how this now works, like where the accountability is.
105 Well, the buck stops here. No thank you, councilor. You know, the independence of the audit office and the auditor is an incredibly important thing for credibility of the work. But to make the work really useful, it's a collaboration. And and I have been incredibly gratified at the relationship we've had. But over time, the audit office, once an audit is issued, the audit office comes back annually, is annually or bi, it's annually, and reports on the progress against the recommendations. And so I, I don't want to put words in the auditor's mouth, but I think the auditor and I know my office would be prepared to work with council any way you would like, whether it's through committees or it's with the full body at making sure those updates are are seen and raised up. And and that's the way we all work together to make sure we make progress on those things. So that's my response. I'd certainly defer to the auditor.
106 Yeah, I was going to say that I think in in the old form of government, our follow up work was met kind of with no dedicated audience. So for the last couple of years we have worked on.
107 Some of that was because of the rotation of.
108 Yes, absolutely. And the kind of one responsible party that you spoke to, that sort of thing. So permitting specifically, I think we issued a standalone follow up report, said this momentous move, but that, you know, that didn't get a lot of traction or attention. We are and have been.
109 Didn't get it, didn't get attention where who didn't give it attention. I'm just curious.
110 I the media.
111 Well, the media doesn't of course they don't go oh good job city. You you actually improve something. I mean that's just not how the media works. But I think all of us up here are well aware of that. But I just had to make sure that's what you're saying.
112 Yeah. Yeah. So we have looked for for different ways to report that, that follow up work. So that now takes the form of an audit impact report. It's going to come out in early October. We're aiming for October 1st. That will be where all the annual kind of follow ups on recommendations for stuff that has come out in the last five years since I think that we've seen that as like an invaluable resource for, I think everybody sitting up here today, whether it's on the executive side or legislative side, these these are the things that we've highlighted in the last five years and whether or not there's progress being made on them.
113 As we keep trying to figure out our role clarity, I think it will be really important that we keep building this and be very transparent about how we actually have the checks and balance with how we follow through on audit reports. I just wanted to circle back on the asset management strategy. I'm so thrilled that we have people who are focused on it. It's a lot easier to talk about and to be clear about in a policy, but boy, the action is more challenging. And I'll give some examples. In my experience in the budget process, you see a lot of that go away. When we had discipline, both about how much we should have in our rainy day account, if you will, and then how much we're going to start investing in deferred maintenance. But when it's budget season and constituents are really wanting their projects to be funded in the short term immediately, I haven't met too many people in elected offices that don't respond to that. And so I don't think I think the the example that it was all the old form of government. I think we shall see. I don't I just have to be honest, I did not experience that in the budget process that we just went through. So I think we have to be really candid about how difficult that is to do, and that when you're doing long term work, again, it's not sexy for your next election campaign. And so how is it that we actually stay focused on building up a deferred maintenance support and how we also have a real rainy day account? And so if we make that a goal from this council, then we can all be accountable to each other. But I just think it's a little deck chair moving around thinking something was the the the reason why something occurred. And I'm just a little skeptical on that based on my lived experience.
114 Yeah, I think some of the the governance and responsibility and yeah, long, long term vision is where those those things will play out. I think councilor Clark and I had talked before about like some somebody kind of taking responsibility for it. And there were a lot of reasons why, in the old form of government that responsibility moved around. Or it was it was not. Yeah, super focused on long term.
115 Right. It's a theory that sounds good until your program's impacted by the cut. And so that's just a reality. And I think we're we're paid and elected to have leadership lens and make those tough decisions. But it's a lot easier to say in the initial phase than it is to implement when you're in the budget process. So I just had to make sure I landed that comment based on what I've experienced in the last five years. Thanks.
116 Thank you councilor. Colleagues. I've not seen anybody else with additional questions. Auditor rede do you have any closing remarks you'd like to make?
117 I do have one more slide and one more statement to make. I just wanted to share for anyone watching. You all know this that our offices are located here in city hall. That is also where you'll find the council clerk, our city elections division and our operations management division. You can reach us by email, phone or the website listed here. I want to thank you all for your time and interest, and also for your efforts to keep our reports off the shelf and encourage action that addresses the issues that we've identified in our investigations and audits. So thank you.
118 Thank you so much. Thank you for being here, all three of you, and for answering a whole litany of questions today. I hope that part of what you're seeing is that this is a council that's very interested in this work and sees it as a an important piece of the work the city does, and that we try to do to make sure that portlanders are getting the services that they need and deserve from our city. Thank you very much, colleagues. As a reminder, we will not have a council meeting next week, but we do have an executive session and we will start weekly meetings at the end of the month, with our evening meeting the week after that, and then a special meeting that I know some of you have responded to a request for scheduling on for September 24th. If you have not yet signed on for that special meeting and are able to, I think we do need 1 or 2 more people to sign up.
119 Are you looking.
120 At me? No, I'm not looking at you particularly. I was just looking down, down, down the row. But if you'd like to, that would be fantastic. Thank you, councilor Ryan. With that, I will close our meeting. Thank you all and have a good afternoon.