The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2026-07-23
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (28,072 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 council's Finance & Governance Committee of the Whole met the morning of July 23, 2026, from 9:33 a.m. to 12:31 p.m. After a chair's update and the City Life Committee's first report, the committee considered reappointing two Prosper Portland board commissioners, with questions spanning the agency's role and independence, a 2025 settlement tied to displacement in the Albina area, the 'Made in Old Town' loan default, Broadway Corridor and Centennial Mills delays, and the potential use of Prosper funds in a Moda Center capital stack; a motion to refer the reappointments to the full council went to a vote recorded in the vote ledger. A Vision Zero update followed, covering fatality and injury data, the concentration of deadly crashes on streets with four or more lanes, the disproportionate share of pedestrian deaths among people experiencing homelessness, and a spike in motorcycle fatalities. The session closed with a presentation on consenting to the transfer of Zenith Energy's fuel-terminal franchise; with 53 people signed up, testimony on both Vision Zero and the franchise transfer was continued to the August 6 meeting so speakers keep their time.
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 Thank you.
1 Test test test test. We see captions.
2 Oh.
3 I hear that's better.
4 Good morning. We will call this meeting of the committee of the whole of the Portland city council to order at 9:33 a.m. On July 23rd, 2026. Rebecca, will you please call the roll?
5 Koyama Lane here.
6 Morillo here.
7 Novick. Here.
8 Clerk.
9 Green here. Zimmerman. Here.
10 Avalos.
11 Dunphy here.
12 Smith. Pirtle-guiney. Ryan.
13 Kanal here.
14 Aye, Morillo Avalos is here. Apologies.
15 Noted. Thank you. Avalos is present.
16 Thanks. I know we have a couple people who are just running a couple minutes behind today. Christopher, you please read the statement of conduct.
17 Welcome to the meeting of the finance and governance committee of the whole. To testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance in the committee agenda at www.Portland.gov/council agenda slash committee dash home or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In person, testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over, the chair preserves order disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered when testifying. State your name for the record. If you're a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifier should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
18 Thank you. We have three items on our agenda today. We have a reappointments of two members of the prosper Portland board of commissioners. We have vision zero updates. We also have an ordinance proposing consent to franchise transfer from zenith energy terminal holdings, llc to isaac springer holdings, llc. We normally do the chair update. I can do it in my remarks and just do it, but it won't be allowed to be put into the record. There was a little mistake in filing, so in order to let me put the written document into the record, I'd ask for unanimous consent to let me add that as a formal agenda item seeing. Okay. Thank you very much. All right. So we have the chair's update today. I've updated all of the the document. This will be posted online shortly for the public. Sorry for the delay on that. It's just a slight update to the the first table that you've seen, which is what's coming up on the agenda, trying to be as transparent as possible while noting, of course, that things do get moved around a little bit. For example, we just got told there will be a proposed ordinance on pinball and pool revenue regulatory program changes. And so trying to make sure there's space and time for that on the agenda. The other thing I wanted to flag is on August 6th, this today, we're going to hear a presentation on vision zero updates. There were a lot of people who wanted to be able to testify on that, in particular, in line with the, the, the last couple weeks and what's occurred in Portland with traffic deaths and injuries. And we were unable to get that on the agenda for this week's meeting after the filing deadline. There's a process, and it just wasn't able to happen. So we'll be putting that public hearing on the agenda for our next meeting, which is in two weeks. So for those who are interested in testifying on that, it is a little bit separated temporarily from today's presentation. We want to make sure that that folks have the opportunity to talk to us about vision zero as well. We'll be picking up our our budget process discussion as well. And you can see a few different touch points along the way there between August 6th, September 3rd, and so on. The other thing that's worth mentioning is that next week would have been a committee of the whole meeting that has been replaced by a full council work session on the moda center term sheet. So we'll pick back up on August 6th as the committee of the whole. Moving on to the second part updated list there, I'm going to be asking councilors if there's anything that's not on this list. Please let me know. And if there's something that you put on here that I could use more detail on, in particular the potential oversight topics, please update me there so we can get that added or changed. And then the other thing is I'm going to be adding a section to this report with updated sorry, with upcoming report backs from the administration. So for example, we set a, we did a resolution last year on that adopted the investment policy for the city. We also amended it to ask the administration to give us some information back on that by August 31st. And just to have that all in one place where we're tracking it, I'm going to add that to this list so you can see what's coming up. There's probably not more than 20 of those at any given time, is my guess. But between budget notes and legislation, they do exist. So if there's anything you know of, please let me or the vice chairs know we can get that in here as well. And that's kind of it for section three. So I will pivot to section four in a moment. But I do see two people in the queue. So if you have questions for me and then I'll pass it to chair of the city life committee, pirtle-guiney. Councilor. Zimmerman and then. Novick.
19 Thank you chair. I noticed that it looks like foreclosed properties have been getting sent to the housing and permitting committee for some reason that historically was going to the finance committee. This committee now is the finance committee, as best I can tell. And so while a foreclosure may, if you don't understand what a foreclosure is, may seem like a housing issue, it is not. It is a financial issue. And so I'd encourage you to argue within the leadership team that they'll start coming back to the finance committee, which is, in my estimation, the best and most appropriate place for them. Thanks.
20 Thanks. Yeah, I'm happy to bring that up and see where it's at and talk to the folks. I believe chair Avalos, her committee had it this last time, so we'll we'll make sure that we're talking with her as well. Councilor. Novick. And then Green.
21 Thank you, mr. Chair. So I was wondering, maybe this is a thing for city life, but I think something we'd all be interested in under oversight. I was wondering if we might have time at some point to do like a span of control session, starting with the 50 odd people that supervise fewer than four people that would fall under the category of one of those budget related things that we should talk about before we get into the next year's budget.
22 Thanks, councilor. Novick. Happy to add that to the list, councilor Green.
23 Yeah, thank you, chair. Kanal. I just jumped in the queue to lend some support to the idea of the foreclosures coming to this committee. I think that we've made an effort to make sure that we have district representation on all of our committees, but I think there was a lot of foreclosure actions that we were considering on Tuesday. And I we're getting into some interesting stuff there. So it really is appropriate for this. So just just another plus one.
24 Thanks. And for either councilors, Green or Zimmerman, there were commercial properties in that list. There were a few. Yeah. Okay. That to me also is a distinction that we should.
25 Misunderstanding of what it is.
26 Okay.
27 It's a finance issue.
28 Thanks. Seeing no one else in the queue, I'll pass it over to chair pirtle-guiney for the committee report.
29 Thank you so much, chair, and thank you for the opportunity for us to provide these reports and make sure that everybody's hearing about the the work of the committees for today. This is the first update from the city life committee. I want to start with a bit of a broader theory overview, and then touch on some of the specifics that the committee is working on as well. So as you all know, city life committee has a very broad portfolio, and I know that there was some concern amongst folks at the dais when committees were first formed that given the broad scope of the work, important issues within our purview might get lost. Sharing that concern, I've tried to set up some of our early meetings to take a broad approach, because I do believe that the purpose of the committee is to think holistically and creatively about the everyday experience of portlanders in our city, and that we can do that best with all of these topics together. I'll take a moment of personal privilege and just say, when I ran for city council, I first started thinking about this work because I was asking questions about the experience my kids would have growing up in Portland. Will they have a safe, clean environment around them? Access to good parks to play in with summer programs, real career prospects in a labor market where everyone who works in our city can afford to live in our city, will they be able to appreciate arts and culture scenes and even want to be here as they get older? And these questions in many ways form the fundamental propositions that this committee is meant to grapple with. So when I started as chair, my team helped to create a visual to break down our work into three distinct buckets. And that visual is up on the screen just so that everybody has the opportunity to see it. And this is how we are focusing our committee work. What is the future of portland's economy? How are we building an economy again where people who work in Portland can afford to live here, creating the jobs of the future, good jobs that will actually expand our economy in the city? Second, how are we building community resilience, and what does that mean for Portland? How do we make sure that each of our distinct communities prepare for, withstand, and recover from disruptions, whether natural disasters, economic downturns, or social challenges? And how are we building that fabric within our community? And finally, what is that everyday experience of people both who live here and who visit here? Two separate and important things, but with lots of areas of overlap. How do we make sure that this is a city with public spaces that people want to visit, a thriving arts scene, strong venues, sports teams that we rally around? How do we make sure this is a place people want to live and a place that people want to visit? So on the first day of committee, we had this very strategic meeting where we invited in more than a dozen of stakeholders at more than a dozen community stakeholders and partners to think through each of these topic areas, and I'm happy to share more information there. Individually. I don't want to take too much time on that today, but that was really meant to help committee members start to frame out what it is that we want to tackle in our work. So this is a lot on the ideas, and I want to get to some of the specifics, which is what I'll hope to report on regularly in these in the upcoming reports as we move through our rotations. As you all know, because you see what comes out of committee and comes to this council, we have had a significant amount of our focus over the last few meetings on what I call the get it, get it done items from the administration, those things that we just kind of technically have to get done to ensure the city keeps working. But we've also made sure to prioritize time in every meeting for some large council items. So the council president's arts tax legislation, work being done to protect tnc drivers council, zimmerman's ev charging station ordinance, and a robust conversation just last week about isds. Looking ahead, there are a couple of large items coming up on our agendas. One of those my team has shared information about. With all of you, we'll be having a discussion about city owned performance venues, including both what the landscape is for our venues, how the p5 transfer, the Portland five venue operation transfer from metro back to the city is going and then looking at the future of our large, our large performing arts venues and the work that's been happening with PSU and advocates for the kellar facility around ensuring that we have a state of the art, large scale performing arts venue in our city moving forward. We also will be having a climate focused session that we'll get information to out to everybody on coming up in about a month and a half, where we'll look at the city's progress in meeting our climate goals and actionable strategies to move us closer to those goals, including work that is being done in our city to decarbonize the industrial sectors of our economy. There's certainly a lot more coming, and I am working with a few folks around some big conversations around economic development, workforce and labor, among others. And importantly, I would love to hear from all of you if there are topics you want to make sure we take on beyond individual legislative items that you're interested in, I'd like to make sure we get those on the agenda now before things fill up too much. And I will look forward to having another update in, what is it, four weeks.
30 With the gap. It will be.
31 A gap of 6 or 8 weeks. Yeah. Perfect. Well, thanks so much for Kanal for the opportunity to share a little bit about what we're doing.
32 Thank you. Chair pirtle-guiney. And credit goes to vice president Clark for the suggestion, but also thank you for raising the bar by having slides here. I see.
33 One.
34 I see councilor Green in the queue, so go for it. Yeah.
35 Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney. I also appreciate the slide I wanted to kind of link. Thanks for mentioning the kind of visioning around the future of the large scale performing arts venues, and just sort of highlighting that flows through your committee. I want to appreciate that your office sent an email a couple days ago saying, heads up, colleagues, councilors, this is going to be a big one. And mark your calendars. Maybe you want to come testify and provide some of that. You know, it is a resolution that will be considered, but in the broad context of the asset management work and the other things, I'm wondering if you've had any thoughts or discussions around the potential to sort of. Link together a joint committee conversation, and maybe it's moot because we have a committee of the whole at this point, but, but maybe sort of saying, okay, there is a sort of prioritization theme in that item that's going to be coming from the mayor's office to your committee. But there's also a big financial aspect to that. And then do you think that's appropriate to kind of spin off as a side conversation before it goes to the full council? I'd be I'd be very interested in that because I think that's something we really need to ground ourselves in. I know that a lot of my constituents are really concerned about that.
36 So I think there's.
37 Three layers to this. And the first is that there has been an ongoing work group of folks from across our performing arts ecosystem around how we continue to have operation of a large performing arts space, right? That 3000 seat space, and what, if any, gaps there are in our performing arts venues, in the community. And the resolution that's coming will absolutely have financial implications, but is at its. At its core, a conversation about what do we do with the recommendations from that work group to ensure that we are. That we have the performing arts venues that we need. So I think that's why that conversation is coming to city life. There will absolutely need to be a conversation about what the city's investment is in any changes. This resolution is just saying, hey, the preview, it's posted. Anybody can look it up. But the resolution is essentially to ensure that we are giving direction to the administration to have conversations with PSU. If that's the direction that we decide to move in, that's the recommendation from the work group. And then also to give us a space to have a conversation about what do we want the next steps to be on keller, because we need to make sure that that work is moving forward simultaneously. So we are not committing any dollars in this resolution. We are saying, yes, we want the conversations to move forward on these paths. I think that's very much a city like conversation. There will be a next step where we will certainly be asked to commit dollars that comes out of those conversations. And while I may ask that we first touch that in city life so that we can have that policy overview, I do think that's very much a conversation that needs to come through this body as the finance body, to talk about what we want to be on the hook for, what the trade offs are between having state of the art performing arts venues and the cost of that, and what other funding mechanisms there might be outside of city dollars. So that's two, separately placing this within the conversations I know that you all are having in councilor Clark's committee about asset management, I think is a really great idea, because we do, I think, want to make sure that one piece of asset management doesn't get so far ahead of the others that we are prioritizing without having a conversation about prioritizing. And I'd love to work with either or both of you about thinking around, thinking about what that might look like.
38 I appreciate that, and I think you've probably heard it in your own conversations with folks who are vested in this. I know that we have in the old arts and economy committee, I know that there was some frustration from like the downtown neighborhood association folks and folks close to the keller for feeling that they didn't really get much of a a place to speak to the public and with the public about this. And so I expect what will happen next week is you'll get some some of those folks to sign up for testimony. I hope that you've got ample space to hear them, recognizing that there's there's, there's a couple layers to what is going to be actually on the docket and that other financial considerations will have to happen. So I'm, I'm committed to, to helping facilitate those conversations in whatever the appropriate committee space is. I think that my I think, councilor Clark, we've had conversations to this end that that are that are sort of making sure that those folks have a space to talk with us. So I don't want.
39 To speak for not only will we have room for public testimony, but the presentation from the administration on the recommendations from the workgroup will be followed by panels, both speaking to the PSU project and speaking to the the the future of keller. And we will have an invited panel of some of those folks who have been advocating for the keller as part of that work.
40 I appreciate that, and I'm going to try to make time to come to your committee and also.
41 As we do for council for district four, have councilor Zimmerman on the committee. So I'm expecting that he'll have some things to share on behalf of those groups as well. Thank you. Great. Thanks.
42 I'll go to councilor Clark next and I'll close this out.
43 Thank you, mr. Chair. I appreciate that privilege. Just to build off of what councilor Green has said that I think I'm hoping that you're open to amendments on the resolution. I think that some of us may be coming in with those, possibly not immediately, but given having been a participant in the ex officio committee and working closely with the downtown neighborhood association, I think you can expect some of that. There's a lot of detail that's not in that resolution. Just I just skimmed it. I haven't looked at it in depth, but it needs it needs work. You probably didn't expect to have this much conversation on this particular issue, but the dollar figure does really bother me. What we're going to be expected to do, and I realize that we have to do this resolution in order for PSU to access the bond money. Sound familiar folks, to access the bond money that the state has set up for them. So I appreciate that. But I, I do think that we need to put a finer point on what's in that resolution and just want to thank. Thank you for the chart. I see that you listed parks and recreation. I think there parks also comes under public works. We've been dealing with parks as well, so we can talk more about that offline later. If there's any kind of complication. Thank you, mr. Chair.
44 If I remember correctly, parks kind of programing and those sides was supposed to come to city life and parks as an asset of the city. And part of the public works portfolio is years. And we'll have to continue navigating that. And I am expecting we'll need to have a lot of discussion on the resolution and even outside of the resolution, what our intent is for the administration to be pursuing around both of the the venue spaces, I'll call them, that are under discussion.
45 Thank you. I'll close this out by just adding on a different topic. I'd love to have a conversation or for have your committee have a conversation about equity and about the future there of the office. I think now that there is a citywide equity officer who I'm excited to have in place, I think having the conversation about everything ranging from the kpis that were in the budget, which I mentioned earlier, but also just kind of how do we integrate that work better where it's less forced into a place of being commentary after the fact and actually helping shape things.
46 That's great. And we had not done as much in that space because we didn't have a director. And I, I appreciate the highlight that now that we do, we can bring that back in in a more meaningful way. Thank you.
47 Thanks.
48 Seeing no one else in the queue that will close out the chair update thanks, everybody, for letting me add that to the agenda, and I'll get the slide as well as the report added to the to the document with the clerk's office. Rebecca, could you please call what is now item two?
49 Thank you for pointing that out. I just want to note that the agenda is in the process of being reordered. So yeah, the remaining items will now be items two, three, and four. Item two reappoint marcelino alvarez and Eric kress to the prosper Portland board of commissioners for terms to expire September 5th, 2029. Document number 2026-224.
50 Thank you and colleagues. This is a report that's being proposed with the request to be forwarded on to the referred on to the full city council from mayor wilson. We have with us cornel west, the executive director of prosper Portland. Gustavo cruz jr, the board chair of prosper Portland, and I believe one of our two candidates for reappointment. But I'll pass it to director wesley or I guess, whoever is going to start.
51 Well, good morning, chair Kanal, vice chairs Koyama Lane and Ryan and members of the committee. Once again, for the record, I am cornel wesley, executive director of prosper Portland. Glad to be joining you again. Next slide. I will provide some introductory remarks about our agency before turning it over to our board chair, gustavo cruz, and one of the mayor's appointees, marcelino alvarez, for their remarks. We hope the majority of the time can then be sent and be spent in discussions with you all. I also note that due to the reappointment deadline approaching, we needed to get this on your schedule soon, and unfortunately, that means we were not able to have commissioner Chris in person with us due to previously scheduled travel. He sends his apologies, and we hope that the conversations you had with him when you considered his reappointment in March are present and still relevant. Next slide. Prosper Portland is the city's economic and urban development agency. Like hundreds of economic and urban urban development authorities around the country, we were established as a separate entity by voters to carry out certain work on behalf of the city government. And we also implement city goals pursuant to Oregon state statute. That being said, we work closely with the mayor and city council to deliver on the city priorities. Our budget has been approved by council since 2007. Council appoints our community leadership committees and every tax increment finance district and subsequent action plan is directly approved by council. I would like to now turn it over to chair cruz for a brief overview of the board.
52 Good morning everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today. Thank you very much for hearing us. Really appreciate your time. For the record, my name is gustavo cruz, and I currently serve as the chair of the prosper Portland board of commissioners. I've been a member of the board since 2015. Prosper Portland is governed by a five member volunteer board who are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the full city council. These volunteers donate three years of their time each term, and some are reappointed to subsequent terms as determined by the mayor. And as we're dealing with today. Next slide please. Dca donnie oliveira couldn't be here this morning. So it's my pleasure to introduce to excuse me, to remind you all of the qualifications of Eric kress, who was recently appointed to fill a seven month board vacancy and to introduce you to marcelino alvarez, one of the mayor's nominees for reappointment to the prosper Portland board, as director wesley stated, due to scheduling issues, commissioner Kress is unable to join us in person, but I know that he appreciated his time with you and appreciated your perspectives and support in this critical time for our city. It's essential that we continue strong, community centered leadership on our board. The mayor believes, as do I, that commissioners kress and alvarez demonstrate the values, the real life experiences, community leadership and volunteer service experience to guide prosper Portland through this pivotal period of our city's future. As a reminder, commissioner Kress is a real estate principal and civic leader. He currently serves as president and founder of udp partners. Excuse me, urban development partners udp and brings nearly two decades of executive leadership in the real estate sector. Eric has built a reputation for managing complex urban mixed use projects that drive economic activity. He's organized seven private equity funds deployed across projects in Oregon and northern california. He has led the acquisition and development and asset management of projects valued at over $500 million, including multiple leed certified developments. As an added bonus, Eric began his career as an engineer. His earlier work included roles in design and research for technology firms such as cypress semiconductor and maple optical systems, as well as the national science foundation's research center for computational fluid dynamics. He holds eight us patents and multiple publications and error correcting code research. Prosper Portland has already benefited from the extraordinary real estate and business development acumen that he brings to this volunteer role. Now, I'd like to spend a moment discussing commissioner Alvarez. It's been my pleasure to work alongside commissioner Alvarez for the last three years. During that time, his perspective and experience have been invaluable, especially through several key moments of agency transition. Commissioner alvarez is the ceo of photon marine, which is building the world's most powerful and intelligent electric outboard motor system tailored to commercial boat fleets. Marcelino began his career in advertising, producing digital campaigns at firms like weiden and kennedy. He later founded uncorked studios, a product design firm that helped companies like nike, intel and adidas bring innovative software and hardware products to the market. Marcelino also serves as a mentor for pi. That's the Portland incubator experiment, and as a member of the board of directors of the freshwater trust, it's my pleasure now to turn it over to commissioner Alvarez, who would also like to share a few words.
53 Thank you. Good morning, chair, vice chair Koyama Lane and Ryan and members of the committee. For the record, my name is marcelino alvarez. Thank you, chair cruz and director wesley for the warm introduction. It's certainly been an eventful few years since my first appointment. Our city has navigated a few transitions. Certainly the director of prosper Portland, as well as this new form of government. As an entrepreneur, I can say that I feel kinship towards each of you as I watch you iterate upon the design of our city, perhaps from version 1.0 to 2.0 to manage. A limited set of resources and the trials and tribulations of that iterative process. If no one has done so yet, allow me to be the first to welcome you to the startup community. This is the world that we live in, and we're now living through a moment that I believe is really going to define the next generation of Portland. It has certainly been a tremendous honor to be a part of it for the last three years, and to have played a small role in all of this. Sitting here in front of you is an extreme privilege. I'm grateful for all the work that you are each doing every single day, to carry our city forward to its next chapter. I thought it would be helpful to perhaps share a little bit more beyond the bio that chair cruz shared about me, and I'd like to preface it with a quote from the 90s band the toadies. I come from the water. I was born to make an republic. I am the son of a cuban and puerto rican father and mother, and I grew up in south florida. I spent most of my free time above, in or around the water. It has played a transformational role in my life. It helped convene my community. It served as a source of inspiration and recreation, and now it is an absolute privilege to call it my professional focus as we try to decarbonize marine. I came to Portland in 2006, so nearly 20 years ago to work in advertising. I had the fortune of working on the nike account and really discovering how important the apparel and outdoor industry is to our region. I left advertising to run a design studio, where we placed human centered design and led with empathy to build technology products that solved real world problems. It was then that our then landlord, brad nelson from beam development, connected me to the Portland development commission. Now, prosper encouraged us to get involved with them, and at the time that felt strange. We were just a six person design studio, and I had no idea what I could offer our city. But he pushed, as brad does, and we got involved first participating in neighborhood initiatives like produce row. I got to judge the city's startup pdx challenge for a number of years, contributed to ecosystem development programs like techtown, pdx, and even traveled as part of a delegation to oakland on a best practices trip where I spent some time with then director branham learning about oakland and some of its trials and tribulations, I had an opportunity to witness the agency's commitment to moving the city forward and build an economy that's both thriving neighborhood by neighborhood. My vision for Portland is putting innovation to work in a way that solves problems through technology, innovation, and human centered design, with a focus on growing businesses. And it will surprise no one that I'm incredibly passionate about the efforts to reimagine our waterfront, which I think could be transformational for a region. Efforts like the albina vision trust, the redevelopment, the Willamette falls trust, and even mlb pdx have the potential to convene community, provide inspiration, recreation and most importantly, drive economic development for decades to come. As a father of three who's now married to a native portlander whom I met in advertising, I'm incredibly proud to call Portland home. And as I enter my 21st year here, it would be an honor and a privilege. Privilege to continue to serve you as a commissioner to the board of Portland. Thank you.
54 Well, thank you again for your time and consideration. That concludes our remarks.
55 Thank you, director wesley. Thank you, chair crews. Thank you to marcelino as well. Colleagues, we have a testimony later. So we're going to start with any clarifying questions or any proposed amendments. And then we'll get into or I guess, floated amendments, and then we'll get into testimony and come back and do discussion. Is there. Sorry, there's nobody in the queue right now. Pause. However many seconds the council president normally tells me to pause and then I have a question. Okay, I'll go first just to make sure we get it out of the way here first. Director wesley, you said when you were talking about Eric kress, that the conversation you hope that the conversations we had in March, when we considered his reappointment are present and still relevant. Yes, sir, I missed something. Were there. I don't remember there.
56 Being his appointment, meaning when he originally came before you. Correct.
57 Okay. Copy. That's all. Awesome. So my question, I guess is, is good in this case because it's it's only for marcelino in this case, because I'm asking about something that occurred last year. You were in office, if I recall correctly, prior to June 5th of last year.
58 Yes. That's correct.
59 On that date, there was a settlement of a lawsuit that was approved by the city council. It was proposed to us. It was from the the some of the people who were displaced in albina during the proposed expansion of legacy emanuel. It was proposed to us as $1 million from prosper Portland and $1 million from the city of Portland. It was amended up to a total of $8.5 million. At the time, we were told that because prosper's board had not weighed in on it yet, we would need to approve it as $7.5 million from the city of Portland and the original $1 million from prosper Portland, but that that conversation would continue through and that it might continue to take until the next budget year, which is the one that budget process, which is the one that finished last month to get prosper, to pay its fair share. That has not happened yet, as far as I'm aware. And I'm wanting to hear why prosper has not ponied up the full $4.25 million, and when we can expect there to be a vote on the remaining $3.25 million from prosper to make whole both the city and the people who were displaced.
60 Councilor. We appreciate that question. The displacement of black portlanders caused real generational harm. Prosper Portland has acknowledged it's its role alongside other institutions as well. However, aedpa two resolved the claims of the 26 individual plaintiffs in that lawsuit specifically. It is also not the full scope of prosper portland's work on displacement, prosper Portland and this city have invested more than 135 million in north northeast Portland over the past decade through affordable housing, home ownership, home repair and community development, including 10 million. And recently, the williams and russell redevelopment supporting black wealth building, the first of its kind from a reparative project. However, investments don't erase displacements harms, which is why the agency continues strengthening community partnerships and reparative development work throughout the city. But in respect to the claim, the the bottom line is prosper's committed share has always been 1 million. The same figure from the original deal. It was never half of the 8.5 million through the city's insurance and claims fund. An accurate recollection will say that on may 30th, 1 million from the city, 1 million from prosper. Portland 2 million total plus non cash terms. Then, to your credit, June 5th an amendment was mentioned and introduced that raised that from 1 million to 7.5 prosper's 1 million obligation was never changed by that amendment, the final approval amendment reads 7.5 from the city and 1 million from prosper and prosper Portland. Now, if we're having a different discussion, or rather, there's a desire for deeper involvement, I would point to our record and what we're also doing throughout the city. But I think at this time, prosper Portland has honored its commitment, and it is still going well beyond that particular investment for those 27 plaintiffs.
61 Thanks. And, director wesley, you weren't in the room when this conversation happened. So I want to respect that, that I don't hold you accountable for any of this because. Yeah, and I'll note that dca oliveira is not here. So if this is referred on, I will probably ask that he is available. And if the administration and the council president can coordinate so that it makes sense with his schedule, so that I can ask this question there because that's the source of this this this interpretation of what the the next step would be, because I asked this question repeatedly on that date of whether or not, and I don't mind putting up to the 7.5 million for the city. That's the dollar amount to us is not my concern. My concern is who caused the harm, putting up an equal share of the money. I'm taking that answer to mean that there is no current plan to discuss this. My vote on this at the council will be dependent on this issue, because I've raised it for well over a year now. So when we when we get to that point, I, I have a pretty significant concern about it. Councilor Dunphy yeah.
62 Thank you. I had a couple questions for mr. Alvarez. So you've been on you've been on the prosper board through a pretty rough patch of portland's economy. And through the transition of this new form of government, which was also rough. What do you think success looks like in this new chapter, this new term that you will be in? What what can we expect from you and how you will influence the outcomes from prosper's board?
63 Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for the question. You know, as an entrepreneur, I bring sort of the perspective of a startup. I bring the perspective of having run a small business from beginning to end. And as I think about some of the challenges that we face, you know, I think it starts with livability, affordability, being able to build and grow here. And I think, you know, through the last three years and certainly some of the time that preceded that, I think we've seen real challenges to our ability to grow businesses here in our region. I think for me, success maybe through the lens of the small business owner or entrepreneurs, I'd love to be able to see local homegrown talent take an idea from concept to formation and success, and to be able to recruit and build employees both locally and regionally to come here and for those people to be able to afford to live here and get to work and feel safe along the way, there are times where we see glimmers of that, where we see pieces of that. And I think that, you know, sitting on the board of prosper has afforded me the opportunity to see the very real effects that the prosper team has put into action through, you know, some of the community leadership councils that are part of tif districts to enable those efforts on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. I'd love for us to, you know, be a city that is not, you know, just, you know, a cool place on the west coast, but that people come to because it's the best place on the west coast and not, you know, the least worst of a bunch of other options. And there are glimmers of that every day. And there are certainly challenges to that every day, but I'd love to see it, you know, thrive in a way that, again, starts with small business that can can grow and succeed here and that people can participate and thrive within it.
64 Well, building off of that, you know, Portland is a small business town, right? Nine out of ten employers employ fewer than ten employees. But we're also facing a crisis in our downtown core. And the reality is that 10% small businesses are not going to fill up the office space that is downtown right now. Do you think it is prosper's responsibility to try to attract larger employers to come to Portland, or to try to support existing or new, smaller employers as a core of your mission?
65 Yeah, I mean, you have to do both, right? And I say this as someone who currently has fewer than ten employees, and it's my goal to grow it to greater than ten employees. But it's also my goal to get acquired by someone that's much bigger, that would keep us here and allow us to grow, right? You have to be able to do both. There are not enough small businesses to support the tax structure that we need to support all the social programs that we need. You know, we have been part of economic development trips where we have, you know, led groups to new york to work with ecosystem development partners to, to build out our capacity. And, and I think part of it involves connecting the small businesses here that are on a high growth trajectory with the financial resources and the customer resources that exist in other markets. I build electric motors. I don't have a customer in Oregon. My customers are Washington and california. And that is, you know, because of a lack of policy at a state level. Right. And so I still choose to be in Portland, even if my customer base is elsewhere. And I think that that's going to be true of some of the businesses that you're talking to here. This is an incredible place to live, but you need to get to scale and you need and you need a flywheel in order to achieve that. So I think you need to be able to do both. And it's certainly the role of an economic development agency to both balance out retention because you don't want to, you know, have talent leave while also creating sort of the acquisition and growth paths that are going to be part of a larger economic ecosystem. So you absolutely have to do both, period.
66 Well, you know, one of my kind of worries is that we're with, with such cheap real estate suddenly developing in Portland, because everybody's trying to get this lockdown, I think Portland is equipped for a great next chapter. But what I'm worried about is giant predatory corporations coming in and using their large capital positions to be able to push some of our smaller local businesses out. I'm very worried about, I mean, monopoly power and influencing local folks here. I've said repeatedly, I'm still worried about live nation coming to Portland and forcing out our local independent music venues. How do you see the responsibility of prosper Portland as the economic development agency to to balance that, to try and protect our local businesses in a very intentional way while recognizing, as you said, we need to attract bigger employers anyway. How what should the role of prosper be in protecting our locals?
67 Yeah, I mean, I think of a number of the loans and programs that are run through the office of small business. I think, of the efforts that Mitch daugherty has done for decades, even before joining prosper Portland. You know, those those are grants and programs that are never going to go to a large outside organization. Right. And they help businesses with amounts from $10,000 to $200,000, which move the needle for those businesses. Again, a large company is not ever going to come in and take that. I also think, you know, just the role that prosper had and connecting, you know, a number of businesses that are contemplating Portland to the right real estate, you know, developers and landlords. And this is a this is a region that has a number of people who put, you know, sort of the portfolio of companies that reside in their buildings first over necessarily the unit economics of it and prosper as a facilitator, as a convener, as a connector to those small businesses can help ensure that, you know, a small business or a startup is entering into a one three, five year relationship with someone who's not going to turn them around, flip them out on the street. When you know someone comes in and acquires that building. And then the other part of it is just, you know, the ecosystem development programs, like incubator programs that give those startups and small businesses opportunities to thrive and the resources that are that are part of that. Again, these are resources that aren't available to larger corporations, nor are they going to be a part of it. However, they could be housed within some of those larger corporations and within it. And, you know, we benefited from, you know, we helped co-create a program that autodesk held in their headquarters here. And then many years later, I resided in autodesk's Portland offices, you know, for free leveraged all those incentives, you know, that that a large startup might have when we had no money and were able to, to be part of a, of a bigger ecosystem. And again, I think that as we think about the types of corporations and businesses that we want to be the larger fish in our pond, I think that prosper and others play sort of a role in cultivating the right types of businesses that are going to cultivate, because they might ultimately acquire some of those companies, right. And might help grow them and see them to their next chapter. So I'd say we play a role at both ends of that at the small end, and then at the larger acquisition, make sure you've got the right people here in town. And look, I'll be honest, I share those concerns too. I share it from a, from a, I'm in tech and I, and I worry about tech. And I say that not necessarily to sort of wave this, you know, sort of cudgel of fear of technology, but just making sure we're entering into business with people who are asking the right questions about the technologies that we're building, how they're used and what their impacts are, whether intentional or intentional in the communities that either get pushed out or displaced because of them.
68 Thank you. My last question, which builds, I think, well off of that, is you have we have all been deep in the conversation about the future of the moda center. What do you think should be the prosper portland's role in the redevelopment and the future of moda center?
69 Yeah, I'll answer this a couple of ways. I mean, I think first and foremost, I'm a sports fan, right? I, I came here to work for a sports brand. I've seen the stories that white and kennedy told, you know, on the pitch, on the basketball court, on the baseball field, it would be a travesty if we were to lose our team. And I say this as a person who grew up in south florida, as a marlins fan, I'm not sure if a lot of baseball fans here, but it has been a very painful existence my entire life. We went through various owners from a garbage truck magnate that looked like a tony soprano knockoff to a hedge fund manager, to an art dealer from canada, to derek jeter, who took our marquee player and traded him back to the yankees. I have been through a lot as a sports fan, and. And I would say that. It is really easy to look at the conversations ahead of us and say, this is between us and an owner. And I think the 13 year old in me would ask you to think of all the 13 year olds in the city and think about the passion that they have for their sports teams, the connective tissue that it is for their families, and how we find the balance to, to find, you know, an ability to keep that team here that doesn't necessarily, you know, put us in a place that is going to leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth. And I get that that's not an easy thing to do. All of that being said, there's currently not an issue or an item for consideration of the board. We are here to implement. You know, the mayor and council's decision on this. So if and when something comes up, we'll take it under consideration.
70 Thank you very much.
71 Thank you, council president. We'll go to councilor Green, followed by pirtle-guiney.
72 Thank you so much, chair cruz and director wesley and mr. Alvarez for signing up again to continue to serve. I just have a couple questions and then we'll get into testimony. I might have more later, but I'm going to follow up on what council president had raised around the moda center piece. I know that publicly it's been floated as potentially prosper might contribute some money from the strategic investment fund as part of this capital stack. And, you know, the strategic investment fund has been a topic of conversation at this body over the last year and a half. I've been at the center of a lot of that. But I think what I'm interested in from your position as a commissioner, as someone who who cares about development and incubation, is support of our kind of homegrown economic development projects. The sif is is there to provide opportunities for capital and then also get a return to prosper. And so every capital choice is a choice about opportunity costs. And so how are you going to kind of move when that decision ultimately comes to the board to consider maybe using the sif as part of the moda center capital stack in terms of articulating the trade offs, what are we not going to do with the sif that we would have otherwise done with the sif? And how are we going to evaluate that? I'm curious what your thoughts are at this moment, understanding that there's no item before you yet, but just broadly.
73 Yeah, I understand the question and understand again, there's no no specific issue to respond to. So it's just in a hypothetical, how am I going to look through this decision? Again, I'm going to bring my expertise to bear. As a former small business owner and a current entrepreneur, right? I think for me, understanding like, what are the impacts to, you know, starting first with the potential redevelopment project, like what are the impacts of the small businesses around the moda center? What are the impacts to the employees? What are the business first decisions that are going to affect our community? Because again, there is a large organization, but there are ancillary businesses that are affected by any of the decisions that we need to undertake. The second part of it is, is sort of related to community livability access, right? How, you know, how do the decisions that we make impact, the ability for people to continue to, you know, enjoy these facilities and recreate? And I say this, as you know, father of three kids, it is really expensive to go to a Portland pickles game, right? Like, you know, and this is the, the neighborhood, you know, sort of ball game, right? So how, how do we ensure that the decisions that we're making are such that they're going to provide equitable access to, to communities and people down the line? And yes, every dollar spent is, is an opportunity cost against, you know, a dollar spent elsewhere. But also it is our job to look at, you know, individual requests in the service of that specific request or among others that are alongside it. And it would really depend, I guess, on the timing of it, what what it is, you know, up against at a particular moment in time to understand like, what are the trade offs relative to a specific thing versus the hypothetical of, well, how might we spend this elsewhere? Two, three, five, seven years down the line? So again, I think it would be, I think, helpful. You know, as I think about ways that we can, we as prosper can collaborate more closely with, with council understanding, you know, maybe some of the maybe kind of flipping that on its head, like what are some of the, the polls and considerations that you would like us to, you know, contemplate as part of that, I think would be helpful inputs into our conversation negotiations.
74 I appreciate that. And just to kind of follow that up just a little bit, what during the budget process that Portland city council just went through and also prosper Portland, one of the innovations I was more excited about was kind of a refresh around advanced Portland and some opportunities for the strategic investment fund to, to seize the moment we're in, to provide kind of an opportunity to, to acquire maybe some commercial and or residential properties. I think with the, with the goal of providing both returns to prosper, but also kind of lower that burden, that hurdle rate for some of our commercial tenants in this town. And so I guess as we get into this conversation more, I would ask you to keep in mind that that's a plan that is in place that I think has a lot of promise. And if we're going to make decisions on the sif that are not in line with that vision, I would be concerned. And so I just would want a pretty transparent conversation around what we're going to give up on some of those opportunities.
75 I would welcome an opportunity to learn more. And then certainly I wasn't part of all those conversations. So I would defer to director.
76 Absolutely appreciate that. The other piece I have is you mentioned something about waterfronts, activations and connectedness to the water. That's something I care a lot about. I think there's a lot of folks in this room right now who care about that for a lot of different reasons, but one of the issues that some of my constituents in district four have been grappling with in the south Portland neighborhood association, in the kind of, you know, the area, the newly redeveloped area down by zidell yards and the like, is really wanting access and completion of of a trail system. And I know that that's conversations that folks like roger, if you're listening and others have been pushing on in partnership with prosper Portland. And I think those are small grants and those are small pieces and not part of the bigger picture. But I was piqued in interest that waterfront access and connectedness is a big part of kind of your own story. So I wonder as a as a commissioner, how you might communicate to this council and then my constituents some level of commitment in sort of not waiting another couple decades to, to finish a trail.
77 Sure. Again, I'm not able to make necessarily any commitments, but like I said, I am I'm pro water. If that's if that's a platform and I would welcome an opportunity. I mean, I think certainly as real estate decisions have, you know, come in front of prosper. I have always asked, is there an opportunity to connect this to the water? And I know that, you know, live nation, as an example, was contentious. But one of the things that I asked in that testimony was, are there are there opportunities to connect the docks nearby and the springwater corridor such that someone might be able to get there by water, whether by kayak or personal boat or other form of modality? I live, you know, the springwater corridor runs through my neighborhood, and I'm very familiar with the trail of which you speak. So as a personal portlander, I also would love to see us move forward on waterfront developments and also not necessarily to have decades. You know, part of this, I mean, I think, you know, some of the projects that you mentioned and I've mentioned, you know, have all been in the works for for many decades. And, you know, I would love for it to not be my children's grandchildren that are the ones that get to enjoy it, but that we can see some of the benefits of these programs in our lifetime.
78 So thank you. And, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't also talk about the other part of the north reach of the Willamette river and the future of connectedness between the communities, live in the area around the c I hub, and being able to get access to to the river there that is inherently linked with economic development. And so as a commissioner, I'm curious what you're thinking about over the next few decades. What is what is redevelopment down there look like to you?
79 Sorry I missed which part of it. Sorry.
80 So the north north reach of the Willamette river is everything. Kind of like downriver from our last kind of local bridge. And it speaks to the area that's part of the northwest industrial area. That's just perfectly kind of closed off from folks who want to access the river in a more connected way. And so cities change. Oftentimes, if you do a good job, your economic development gets cleaner and cleaner and cleaner and relies less on dirty, heavy, heavy industry. And so do you have a vision for that?
81 I mean, I would point you to two things. One is not to be self-promoting. I gave a talk a couple years ago just about reimagining our city on the water. And part of it was, you know, connecting to, you know, both the economic development that, you know, kaiser did while building ships in our region and sort of how that transformed it to how we got rid of, you know, a proposed six Lane highway that is now where, you know, tom mccall waterfront park is. So consider me an ally for how we re-imagine that waterfront and access. I, you know, again, would love to see more access, more, you know, more restaurants, more entry points into the water, just a friendlier ecosystem. You know, I'm out on the Willamette testing electric boats multiple times a week. And I can't tell you how many times it's a beautiful sunny day in the river is empty and it breaks my heart. And you go to other places and it's not that case. You know, I will also acknowledge having, you know, at least no pun intended, dip my toes in the water in some of these areas to understand what are some of the restrictions. You know, there are clearly a lot of stakeholders involved at a state federal level for some of these access points. I know that at a state level, department of state lands obviously has purview into some of this would certainly welcome conversations that could allow us to move things more quickly. I look north to the other side of the columbia river and see what Vancouver has done, and I constantly ask myself, well, why not here? And would love to see more of that here, so let us know how we can help.
82 Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
83 Thank you. Councilor. Pirtle-guiney. Then. Novick. Then Ryan.
84 And chair. My questions are more in line with some of these. What are your thoughts questions? Do you want me to wait until after testimony and do just technical questions now, or is this an appropriate time?
85 I mean, if you think it's.
86 Helpful to the potential testifiers to hear hear the topics you might raise, I think it makes sense to bring it forward. Otherwise, I'm happy to call on you first after.
87 Okay. Why don't I ask just one question
88 Now then. And that is, you know, I two questions written down about kind of what is your what is your vision? How do you approach your work? And one was around the work of prosper broadly that I think you you answered. Well, as you were in conversation with president Dunphy, but I'm wondering if you can speak to your thoughts on the role of the prosper board of commissioners in coordination or not, in coordination with the role of city council, as you are tasked with doing some very specific and important economic development work. And as we as a an elected body representing portlanders, take on some economic development strategies ourselves, and how do we make sure that there is some coordination and collaboration there, or should there not be?
89 I 100% should be collaboration. I mean, we are the implementers of the strategy that is set forth. So whether that is advance Portland, whatever comes beyond advance Portland, it is our role to implement that. I think the advantages that we have by, you know, well, I'll say this being independent does not necessarily mean separate. Right. I would say that opportunities for conversation to understand like, what are priorities for each of the councilors? What are priorities for some of your constituents? You know, just encouraging your constituents to attend our board meetings, right? They are publicly held. We listen to testimony from people. So I would welcome more opportunities to connect, you know, on, on a month by month basis so that we can hear the voice of, of your constituents. I think the second part of that is, you know, some of the scope of the projects that we are undertaking, sort of either exceed the term of office for any one of you, or perhaps span multiple terms. And so having some level of consistency across those where we can be carrying those and not necessarily be driven by, you know, electoral cycle, I think is beneficial. It only works if we're all talking. So I think, you know, pragmatically speaking, I would just encourage more dialog versus less and more productive dialog versus just talking in circles, right? Like, how do we, how do we get to the heart of the matter? What are the issues that are driving you and your constituents so that we can make the best use of that as we consider items that get brought to us?
90 Great. Thank you, I appreciate that.
91 Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney. Councilor. Novick. And then Ryan and then we'll go to testimony.
92 I can hold my question till after testimony.
93 Thank you, councilor Novick councilor Ryan.
94 Yeah, thanks. I think this is big picture and would help with the testimony. It's good to see all of you. Thank you. Prosper Portland leadership for being here. Mr. Wesley. Mr. Cruz, first, I will be supporting both you. Mr. Alvarez, thanks for being here. It's been wonderful to listen to you. And also mr. Chris appointments, but this is more for prosper leadership. I want to listen to you share thoughts on how we can learn from recent challenges that we've experienced. Some before you were here, I watched the developer walk. Was it 21 or 22 on the broadway corridor? It was. What year was that? Those years are all blended together, right when the developer walked from the broadway corridor. Is that 22, 21?
95 Yeah, somewhere in there.
96 Okay. We're all saying it's one of those two years. Okay. Got it. And that area is continues to sit shovel ready. That's a good part. And we even have some of the infrastructure all set up. And we all know earlier, a decade earlier, that wouldn't be the story. There would have been major development already taking place there. And all the renderings we voted on when we were excited about it would have all come to fruition. We also have the centennial meals that's experienced so many fits and starts over the years, and it kind of sits there waiting as well. These are projects that prosper is driving, and I just want to hear what we've learned, how city council could be better partners with you, because this is kind of red alert time that we have such activity taking place that just sits there. What? Give me some hope that there will be some development occurring sooner than later. And again, how can we be partners to see this through?
97 Okay, so let's start with the partnership question and that I want to tag on to what our commissioner has already stated. This is an opportunity for us to work closer with council, which is my desire, which is why we've tried to double down on transparency and communication and being more consistent and clear in what we're working on. But I also want to call out the lessons we've learned around some of those deals. Some of those deals are independent of prosper, that some of those things slow down because of economic conditions and they're changing, right? Real estate is where it is today because of economic conditions. And there are a lot of different reasons why we are in this space. But from an organizational standpoint, how can we be more efficient in our in financial stewardship and underwriting? And so we've done a couple of things internally to ensure the product and how we underwrite and review the product improves. Two new recent hires that we've made here is direct evidence and correlation to that. We we're doing some structural reform with development and investment, which is what it was historically known as. Now it is capital access, led by one particular executive and real estate and community development, led by another executive, because what we found is having it embedded in one person diluted them both. And so we have to do a better job in how we underwrite and how we review and what we invest in, but also calling out that prosper is designed to make big swings. We're not a bank. We we invest in projects that are at times speculative in nature, because if the bank wanted it, then prosper wouldn't likely exist. So there is a space that we play in that is unique, but we can also bring more robust tools to make sure that the end goal is still met, even if economic conditions change.
98 Did you want to add anything, chair?
99 No, that's.
100 I think what I'm trying to.
101 Get at is.
102 A decade earlier, this wouldn't have happened.
103 Yes.
104 And I know we can talk about the national conditions, but let's focus on Portland conditions and what is because some of these same projects in some other parts of the country would have been developed by now.
105 Well, I think I hear you and I agree with you to some degree, but I think with respect to broadway corridor, we've seen a pretty dramatic change in capital availability since that project was begun. And I don't think there's any, you know, the the number of folks that are willing to come to Portland and invest dollars from money centers is far different now than it was ten years ago. And when we when we initially embarked on the the post office project, if you will, it was a totally different environment. And I feel like. And I think most people would agree, who've watched the whole thing come along, that the city actually got a very good deal on that property, and I still stand by that. The post office, they needed to move out of downtown. That was the economically rational thing for them to do. And we were able to facilitate that. We were able to buy a sizable piece of downtown real estate that was suddenly available for development, and that would provide a lot of activity and economic development activity and other benefits housing activity for our city. So it was, you know, I think if you look back on it, we've had some bad timing with COVID and capital access, and we had other problems with the site. There are environmental issues with the site and a variety of things that have come along over the years, but I think we will get back to it and we've got development online now. There's things coming up with respect to affordable housing down there, and I think gradually over time it'll come back. I think, you know, I think all of us run a danger of looking at things in a very short term environment. And that's actually one of the benefits of having commissioners on the prosper board that are independent from regular election cycles, that we do see things in a long from a longer view. So, for example, way back when, Dan, you know, I know you're a native portlander, as am I. We saw the transition in Portland from a resource based economy to a totally different economy. You know, we watched the spotted out. We watched the spotted owl issue go by. We saw the the movement of timber timber companies out of Portland. People said the sky was falling. And to. Commissioner council member dunphy's point about cheap real estate and what that does in activity. Well, what did that bring that brought activity amongst restaurateurs and other investors in downtown, which brought Portland along in ten, 15, 20 years later, we had tremendous activity by the 90s that we didn't have in the early 80s, you know, so so we have to take a long view. And I would just say with respect to broadway corridor and with respect to centennial, bill, centennial mills is another a whole nother issue that we could talk about at some length. But but these these projects do take a long time and are subject to a lot of external factors that unfortunately, we don't really have a lot of control over.
106 Yeah, I appreciate that. And I definitely take the long view and we're in partners in this work. Yes. And it is embarrassing sometimes that it's not moving the way it should. And that's on us. That's on you. Like, how can we do that? And I noticed it wasn't lost on me that our investment ranking nationally really tanked after the exit of the developer at that at the broadway corridor. So these dots are all kind of connected. So we have to be working together as a team. And I hope when you're on the board that you all have these really serious board like conversations about vision and culture, restructuring and how to work in a maybe a more bold way with us so we can get some economic development going again because, all right, clearly, I'm more comfortable with development than some of my colleagues, but it's because I like revenue. I want our budget to actually have money in it. Again, I want us to see the revenues coming back to our city. And when business taxes are flat, when property values are going down, that's taking quite a hit on both the county and the city. And that's why we're in our budget conundrum that we're in. So we have to figure out how to be more active with prosper Portland. And we have to be more bold. And I'm expecting the board to really have those serious conversations and, and keep us up to date on that action. Keyboard action. Thanks.
107 Thank you, thank you.
108 Thank you, councilor Ryan. Councilor Clark, is it for before or after?
109 Just a quick question just to build off of councilor Ryan. I'm just curious. I'm really excited about what is happening at broadway corridor. I have been down to look at the infrastructure and walk around. What's the thoughts on the train station?
110 Well, we have recently signed a new lease, and so we are still obviously the land owner that that one is far more complicated because, you know, this is federal and multi-layered, but it is an amazing asset for us. I would love to debrief you in a, in a different setting around what the possibilities are on that site and what are the current conditions and constraints.
111 Let's do that, I appreciate that. Thank you.
112 Thanks. And just a quick question is, would that normally be in city life?
113 Which piece of it the conversation about the future of.
114 Sort of prosperous general activity. But yeah, I guess the future of the train station.
115 Yes.
116 Okay. Thanks. I feel that way about our committee, too. All right. I think that we'll pick back up with councilor Novick after testimony. Rebecca, will you please call testimony? Then we might have questions and discussion with you after as well.
117 Thank you. First.
118 We have jordan lewis, emily h. Skyler cruz, victoria burka. Jordan is online. You can unmute and go ahead. Jordan.
119 Hello? Can you hear me?
120 We can.
121 Awesome. Good morning. Committee of the whole. I'm jordan lewis. I'm a volunteer lobbyist for the Portland democratic socialists of America. I'm using this opportunity to speak on the topic of vision zero, because there was no formal opportunity to testify on it at today's meeting. This was distressing for a lot of community members who recognize just how cheap life is. Human life is when a car is involved. We have exhaustive scientific evidence that driving speeds correlate with traffic injuries and deaths for all road users. We know this leaders choose to do nothing because they enjoy traveling at high speeds through urban environments, and have decided that bodies in the hospital and in the morgue are worth their commute. As a chemist, one of the most fundamental concepts we learn is the ideal gas law. This law states that properties of a gas are proportional to each other. If you take the same quantity of gas and put it into a larger container, the pressure must go down. If you increase the temperature, the pressure must go up. We see a similar phenomenon with traffic safety. We have to slow down cars to save lives, period. To save lives, we must depart from the throughput overall mentality of the 20th century. We must slow cars down by putting things in the road. Traffic lights, tighter curbs, bollards and rocks. We won't get there by making more cute yard signs or doing another press release, or having the police victim blame another chalk outline. We won't get it by taking out another traffic diverter, or doing a stealth repave of Burnside with no transformational project elements, or by watching transit service get cut and say, not my jurisdiction.
122 I'm going to apologize.
123 Here to slow down cars to save lives.
124 I apologize for interrupting, jordan. We do have rules of conduct that say testimony has to be on the matter at hand. I apologize for that. We are going to have testimony on vision zero after the presentation at our next meeting. So I apologize for having to cut you off there. But we do have the rules of conduct, and I'll ask any any future testifiers who may have signed up for this item with the intent of doing that, to refrain and please sign up as soon as we make that testimony available, which I do intend to do and did try to get it on for this this week's agenda as well. It just wasn't able to do it. And I apologize for that as well.
125 I look forward to the next shoe incubator.
126 Thanks. Sorry. Go for it. Rebecca. I don't know who emily.
127 Holly. Skyler. Cruz. Victoria. Burka. Skyler, you can unmute and go ahead online.
128 Hello, everyone. My name is skyler cruz. My pronouns are she her. I'm a resident of district four here in the goose hollow neighborhood. I wanted to speak to prosper about, you know, I think your work is incredibly important. I think we do need to focus on economic development of Portland. And I kind of want to talk about my experience of living on west Burnside for the past, what I think five years at this point. You know, I moved into my building and I was very happy to see several businesses around me, even during COVID, that could supply me with things like pizza and services. And over time, I've just seen a lot of places close. There's a lot of reasons for this. You know, I'm not putting any blame on prosper here, but I would like to just remind everybody that like part of the problem with a lot of the local businesses is how difficult it is to get around. I live right on west Burnside, and I find it very uncomfortable to walk around this neighborhood for a variety of reasons. So I hope that when we look at what is development, we're not just saying, let's give a bunch of money to a shoe manufacturer. Let's look at the broader picture of how we make this place, the city of Portland, not just a place where people drive in and visit, but a place where people live, work and play. I have a car, but I try to avoid using it because I work in Vancouver, Washington, but I prefer to spend my time in Portland, Oregon. I take a tax hit to be able to stay here in Portland because of the city I love. I think it's worth our time to invest in our neighborhoods and our communities. I think since, you know, looking at how we pretty much kind of agreed that the lloyd center is not an economically viable option, we need to move away from sort of this infrastructure of driving people in and having the people who live here have affordable rent, be able to have that extra money to spend in the city. I know a lot of people who live in the city of Portland, who can't really afford to spend at their local businesses. They end up door dashing because they're afraid of things like even tipping. They don't want to have to deal with the the commute time, the travel time, paying for parking becomes difficult. And I think parking is something people should pay for. The problem is housing. We don't have enough money to spend after we spend all of our money on rent. So I hope that we can spend more time thinking about how the people who currently live in Portland can have the extra funds necessary to actually support local businesses. Housing is our number one priority, in my opinion, and spending money on shoe manufacturing companies with bad business models is a waste of our time. I think we should be really prioritizing low income folks who would love to spend money here in Portland, who would love to provide the economic growth, but end up ultimately just giving all their paycheck to their rent until they're unfortunately forced out of their homes and living on the streets. And that causes other problems. You know, if we don't address that problem, first and foremost, everything else crumbles. And we can't do things like have police to take care of it. It doesn't make any sense. So thank you for your time. I hope you do great work in the future. Keep up the good work and I hope to see good things from you in the future. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.
129 Christopher olson, robin bogicevic, anthony resch, jp nash. That concludes testimony.
130 All right. Thank you colleagues. We'll now move into discussion and eventual consideration of the report. Councilor Novick, you're first in the queue.
131 Mr. Alvarez. I just wanted to say that I really appreciated everything you had to say, with one exception to old baseball fans thinking of florida marlins fans as long suffering as a deeply offensive concept, because this is a team that won two world series in its first 11 years of existence. I also have time allowed. I would love to ask you about the prospects for electrification in the marine industry, because that's a really encouraging prospect.
132 Thank you.
133 Thank you. Councilor Novick. I believe there was someone else who had mentioned they had other questions for after. Is it okay? I have a question for council president, which is, you know, I have questions that are going to affect my final vote that are unable to be answered based on, you know, dca oliveira not being able to be here today. I, at the risk of not wanting to pull this off of the consent agenda at the full council, but also not wanting to hold this up here. I just wanted to know if you had preferences on how we handle that.
134 You know.
135 The consent agenda is for when we have broad consent because we have done the work, we have heard testimony, we have debated the merits and don't need to debate it. Again, we didn't get the full presentation today because there's questions to be asked. So I would have no problem putting this on the regular agenda.
136 Okay. I'll try.
137 To ask if the two members can come up. I'll try to ask enough questions to get to what I'm getting at here. The first question is actually for the chair cruise. And the second question is for the prospective appointee. But I'll let while you're coming up, I'll let councilor Koyama Lane go first, if you're okay with that.
138 To my questions first.
139 Yeah, go for it.
140 Thank you. Chair, we're aware all aware of the challenges related to prosper, specifically in old town. That's played out really publicly in the press, although it is important to know what what has happened and where things are at. It makes me also think about oversight and the role that prosper plays in that. And I'm just wondering if, you know, given the challenges, the failure of made in old town, other related real estate and business investment in that area, what's prosper's vision for where we go next and how does oversight play a role?
141 So the in reference to old town, we're not going to hide the fact that the loan didn't perform the way we had hoped. But I will also call out that prosper prospers tools exist precisely to fund higher risk, higher impact projects that again, conventional lenders won't touch. And that means some will fail. I think the relevant question is whether prosper ever takes a loss. It's whether the agency responds with discipline when one occurs. And here's what happened. This board acted immediately. They did not provide any additional inducement. There was no additional renegotiating of favorable terms and unanimously, unanimously voted to reclaim the collateral through a deed in lieu of foreclosure, rather than absorb further losses that protected the public's position as a secured lender and not a grantor. And so they exercised their accountability with the tools available to them. Now, there is also a structural issue here that is worthy of calling out how did we get there? Which is why I called out the structural reforms in my previous comments. It was embedded in one particular department which diluted both these two new leaders will prevent these style of deals from occurring in the future, and I have full faith in that.
142 Yeah, I could just elaborate. Maybe executive director wesley did a great job, I think, of explaining the some of the details, but big picture wise, I would just note that prosper our role is not to be a commercial bank. That's the background that I come from. I was a commercial lender. I'm now a corporate lawyer. I represent banks and financial institutions. The deals that commercial banks do are completely different from what prosper does. Occasionally we will have a deal that a lender would look at, but oftentimes we're driven by community requirements and what the folks in the community want and what are people in industry doing, and how do we activating a neighborhood that needs activation? There's sort of there's subtle drivers of some of these projects that are difficult to, to work into an roi calculation. And this was one of them made in old town was, was backed by the old town chinatown community. It was heavily pushed by the sneaker and apparel industry. There were there was a lot of industry momentum behind this. And I will say that, you know, a lot of the deliberation that goes on at prosper, you know, a bit of it happens behind the scenes, just as it does at city council. We have to be careful about quorum requirements, but we do talk about things and we do go back and forth with staff quite a bit on our deals, and this was one that actually consumed quite a bit of time. And there were other things that I think the the board would have preferred to have in the maiden old town deal that we didn't actually get. But at the end of the day, there were enough, there were enough public policy reasons and investment reasons and activation reasons, if you will, that that that encouraged us to make the loan. It was not it was obviously not something that one of my clients would have done. So in any event, we we as executive director wesley mentioned, I think we've dealt with it well from a workout standpoint. And I think we're we move on to the next project. So and I think there's good news in the sense that we have the building back. You know, prosper knows that building. Well, we used to be in that building. So so we know that it's of good quality and that there will eventually be uses for that that will provide a good return. So I hope that helps.
143 Thank you for speaking to that. And as a longtime public school teacher, I know there's always room for growth and reiterating and learning lessons. And I know when I, you know, I'm knocking doors and talking to constituents, the public really wants to feel like they can trust that funds are going to be managed well, and there is oversight. So thank you for speaking to this. Are you able to share some high level lessons learned or things that will be different going forward based on that experience?
144 Absolutely. What I can tell you is when I first got here, that was one of the things that dropped right in my lap as the new executive director. And so immediately I audited every programmatic Lane within the prosper, every grant, every loan, every policy and procedure has been audited. I've commissioned two independent studies to reimagine how we chart our new policies and procedures and guardrails, and underwriting guidelines for moving, moving forward. So we have gone through robust structural change, and it will be reflected in the products that come out of prosper moving forward.
145 Thank you and appreciate as you're sharing about the need to activate certain neighborhoods that need activation. And when I think about that, I think about who's included in that conversation. I hear with this specific project that the old town chinatown community was supporting this. But what I, I know about that area and some of that history. Well, I know that a lot of people actually don't know that all of that area of old town was called nihonmachi at one point was japantown before world war two. And I know that there are communities, community organizations down there, like the japanese American museum of Oregon, that is really important. The the china Portland chinatown museum and gardens. And I know that there's been question if, if those folks are at the table and are also considered part of that community and heard and I'm wondering if you can speak to how it's decided which groups are brought in, because it's really important to think about which groups are representing historic and present day communities when we're trying to activate those neighborhoods.
146 Well, our cultural institutions are extremely important to us. They are economic drivers for our city. They drive tourism. People come in town just to see lan su, and so our door is always open. I have been extremely loud about my view, my personal view and my economic experience with cultural institutions. As tourism drivers in real time. We were working with lansing right now on on a project. Hopefully that will reinvigorate old town if it comes to fruition and prosper. Portland stands ready to play its role.
147 That's so great to hear, and I would love to personally invite you to come to the japanese American museum of Oregon with me if you'd like to.
148 I would love that.
149 Okay, great. We will set that up. Thanks so much.
150 Thank you. If I could also add, you know, prosper has been heavily involved in promoting those projects over the years. So, so so we're on that side of it too. We also we've also been involved in lots of other economic activity down there. I'm thinking off the top of my head, the hoxton hotel project prosper was involved when that was originally spearheaded by the nato family, and then was later sold to the hoxton group, which is actually based in london. And so we've we've had there have been a lot of iterations over many years with those projects. And, you know, unfortunately, as I was describing with respect to broadway corridor, it takes a long time, but we're very sensitive to that. You know, looking back over many years, you can see how the makeup of businesses down there has changed dramatically. I'd like to see some of those businesses come back. The fact that that there basically aren't any chinese restaurants left anymore, you know, there aren't any small shops left anymore. It's to me that's a tragedy, and I'd like to see more of that come back. And there's a lot of communication and connection between prosper and the old town neighborhood. Excuse me, old town chinatown neighborhood association. And there's been turnover in that group lately. I won't elaborate, but we're working on it. So thank you for hearing me out.
151 Thank you. This opened up a lot of questions for me, but I'm going to I think I'm hearing that we need to have a broader conversation about prosper. So I'm just going to ask the ones that relate to the reappointment here. So the first question for chair crews, how are our agenda set? Do board members all play a part in that? Does that come from the director? Does it come from you?
152 The director? Well, staff and the director typically put together a first draft of the agenda. They circulate it. There's usually a kind of a pre briefing, call or meeting between me and the staff who've developed the agenda to kind of run through it and talk about things that we might include or not include, sometimes specific commissioners might have some issue that they have asked to be raised on an upcoming meeting. So there can be input there too. Okay. But again, we're always worried about public meetings laws. So usually those are just those meetings are just me and executive director wesley and maybe a couple of other folks.
153 Okay.
154 So my question then for marcelino and specifically for marcelino is would you be willing to ask that there be a discussion of that settlement at a prosper board meeting in public?
155 Again, I think executive director wesley set it up in such a way that kind of established the history of it. I think if there was a pressing conversation, obviously it seems to be a clear point of of discussion. If we if there is a I guess if there is standing for prosper to take that on. And we're saying that's input coming from counsel, I'm happy to recommend that as a discussion point, I can't commit to any sort of action or, you know, changing necessarily the basis for it. But if you're saying, hey, we think that prosper needs to discuss this as input from the city. I mean, this is what we're saying, right? That we're, we're here to collaborate and listen. We're saying it's an issue. Let's, let's have a conversation. But again, that doesn't change whether or not prosper has standing on it. So if the input is, we'd love to talk about it and create a forum for it. I'm happy to make that recommendation.
156 Thank you.
157 Counselor Green.
158 Thank you. Councilor. Koyama Lane kind of touched on some stuff with the maiden old town that I. I think it was an important conversation and it's been a bailiwick of mine. It's in my district, so I won't repeat a lot of that. There's one element to it, though, I want to connect back to this is relevant for for you, commissioner is under the charter prospers our urban renewal. Well, we don't call it that anymore, but our economic development and our sort of tif district management entity, and we've delegated that to prosper. But it's always conditioned upon council approved plans and action plans. That's that's chapter 25 of the charter. And so for old town, that was the old town action plan. And I think what I'd like some assurance with just to kind of close the loop a little bit on this conversation is there is the underwriting part of that conversation, and we've talked about that, but there's also the sort of is the investment consistent with the adopted plans of council and the old town action plan had significant outlays or sort of intention for investing in cultural institutions and kind of the building up of a cultural district. And it does point to sort of like grounding that in community. I think community is ill, ill defined, and maybe lacks a little bit of definition there. And so I think when you have a board that gets taken over by interests who are principals in the party to transaction, that's something I always want the board at prosper to be looking at carefully. It's like, does the old town community association represent the community more broadly, or is it representing the commercial interests of those who have the majority votes on the board? And that's going to be true for all of our tif districts. That's going to be true for all of our neighborhood associations. And so that's an important piece of this kind of like soft oversight question that we need to be engaging on. We recently had a briefing from metro on the polling numbers on the next housing bond, and it's not looking good. And when you ask respondents why they're not going to open their wallets up again, they say there's been a lack of oversight and transparency on public funds. And so I think that's probably directed at the jurisdictions city of Portland, you know, all the city governments. But I but but people are reading stories about maiden old town during all all of that. And so prosper portland's balance sheet matters too. When we think about that public confidence and transparency. And so before we move on from this episode of maiden old town, I really need to understand, I really need to know that we are looking closely at what does it mean to have good governance around the connectedness between our action plan, on the one hand, and who's speaking for community on the other? And I think councilor Koyama Lane kind of hit on that there. And I just I wanted to connect it back as a councilor for this district. I don't know if you have a response for that.
159 I'm happy.
160 Sure. I mean, I think at a high level, obviously I don't have a sense of who's on the board of the neighborhood association for for old town specifically, or the background and context. But I think through the lens of what we saw at the prosper Portland board, you know, there were a number of members from community, from industry, from the neighborhood that, you know, did pledge to support in terms of the program. You know, I think executive director wesley talked about some of the lessons from, you know, the prosper perspective and how we look at programs like this in the future from a governance perspective. And I think that's, that's an important part of it. You know, I think, again, through the lens of an entrepreneur and as someone you know who is in, you know, obviously the risky business of starting companies, you know, there are, you know, 70% of companies that that will fail, right? And I think anytime that we present our company to an investor, we have to present, you know, a set of due diligence documents. I think when we're on the receiving end of that, end of that, on the prosper side, we're kind of asking we are asking the same questions that, you know, through the lens of investment and, you know, we have to take what is presented in front of us and do the research on top of that to come to an equitable decision. And sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we get it wrong. I think to your point, maybe this is more of a personal point for me to, to kind of take and carry on forward, just understanding whether or not the voices that are being heard at a particular testimony are necessarily representative of the community writ large. And again, I think perhaps that's an invitation for more connections with counsel, where as agenda items are coming up and there are, you know, issues that perhaps or agenda items that are, you know, important to the communities or will have impact on the communities working with their offices to make sure that the right voices are there at the table and just making sure, you know, if you have the bead on who those should be, that we're inviting them to participate for either public testimony or even just meeting with the prosper board ahead of ahead of a vote.
161 I appreciate that invitation.
162 Thank you.
163 Thank you. Seeing that the queue is exhausted, we need a we would need a motion to refer this item to council. Full council.
164 So move or second.
165 I'll take the motion from vice chair Ryan, a second from councilor Clark. Is there any further discussion? Seeing none. Rebecca, will you please call the roll?
166 Calling the role in 2026-224 Koyama Lane. I Morillo. I Novick. I clerk.
167 Thank you for your willingness to serve.
168 I mean. I Zimmerman. I Avalos. I Dunphy. I Smith absent pirtle-guiney. I Ryan. I Kanal.
169 Thanks for stepping up. Looking forward to talking about this at council I.
170 And the motion is approved with 11 I one vote. The report document number 2026-224 is referred to city council with the recommendation it be accepted.
171 Thank you. Thank you.
172 Colleagues.
173 We're going to take a ten minute break for before we come back and do vision zero. And I just wanted to mention also for those who signed up to testify for zenith, we're not shortening testimony. Anyone who doesn't, we don't get to today. We will pick up at the next meeting. So you will get your three minutes. I just wanted to be clear about that. Thanks. We'll be back at 1121.
174 All right. We're gonna bring it back. It appears our committee room has gotten very lively. We'll be resuming the meeting. I'm about to do a clap once if you can hear me thing, but I'm not going to get there. All right. We're gonna pick back up with item three. And we will, which is. Sorry. Rebecca, would you please call item three?
175 Item three, vision zero updates. Document number 2026-262.
176 Thank you. And I'm going to pass it. I'm not sure if I should be passing it to who first, but I think to vice chair Koyama Lane to introduce the item and then to dana dickman.
177 Thank you chair. It will be no surprise to anyone that I'm looking forward to this discussion about vision zero today. Dana dickman, our city wide vision zero lead, is here to talk with us about what she and many of the city employees often call hard work and hard work. As a reminder, in September 2025, we unanimously recommitted to vision zero, which aims to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries. Our commitment on this council backs up the work that city staff and community have been doing, and reaffirms that we have a lot more to do because of that commitment. Vision zero is truly a city wide initiative impacting all districts in Portland. We ask for this briefing to come before the committee of the whole, so every councilor has an opportunity to ask questions and get information at the same time. Like many of our constituents, I've personally seen and felt the impacts of deaths in district three very directly in my own neighborhood and community. This includes a beloved community elder, a neighborhood librarian. Each life lost matters and each person lost is a neighbor. These preventable deaths leave huge holes in our communities, and I would like to honor them with a moment of silence. The numbers this year are not going in the direction that we want in specific areas and districts, even while overall rates are trending downward, the numbers are always more dire in marginalized communities, communities of color, low income neighborhoods. This is not okay. Reaching and sustaining zero traffic deaths and serious injuries will require significant investment and changes to our streets and our communities. I want to genuinely thank every single one of my colleagues here for their support on our vision zero goals, and I want to continue to underscore the need for ongoing collaboration, as requested by my colleagues. The presentation we're about to hear will touch on trends in all districts, because this touches all of us. So please help me welcome our citywide vision zero lead, dana dickman. She's going to talk about the city's work to further develop a citywide approach to eliminating traffic deaths, and to share some current crash information to get us on the same page for future budget and policy decisions. And with that, I will pass it over to dana dickman. Thank you for being here.
178 There we go. Now I see the Green light. For the record. Good morning councilors. My name is dana dickman. I'm the vision zero policy manager for the city. Thank you so much for having me here today. I'm really excited to have this conversation. There's no specific decisions or actions that I need you to take today, but this is really setting the stage for shared information, shared understanding, for discussions that we're going to continue to have in the future, and for opportunities for you all to reach out to me and our colleagues across the city to understand more about the policies and the budget decisions that you're making. I really want to be a resource in that frame. I just want to remind everyone that my role is now focused citywide to be a technical liaison and lead to help guide the city towards zero deaths. I work with our city administrator, our dca's directors and staff within the bureaus to help us figure out what implementation looks like for vision zero and safe systems. And in that role, I'm also a resource to all of you. So again, this is an open discussion for you all to get more information and to think about the places that you might want us. And when I say us, that's broadly myself and folks working across all the service areas to come back and talk to you about vision zero work, there are staff here today from PBOT, from the police bureau, from bts, and agency partners, including Multnomah county public health, that will can support our discussion. If there are questions that are very specific to their work, we can call them up and bring them in as part of the discussion. I also just want to acknowledge and thank the tireless and dedicated community members who are true, ongoing partners in this work today, I know that Oregon walks and families for safe streets are here, and I just want to continue to lift up that those community members are so important. I heard during the previous piece that there are more folks that want to engage and talk about vision zero, and I just want to acknowledge that dedication. So our agenda today is really an update on last fall's resolution. We haven't had a chance to kind of come back and talk about the work that's ongoing. A lot of that is sort of largely unseen, but happening. Share what's called the safe systems pyramid, which is really helping to ground us in those connections to a public health approach. Have some current data, some district data, and then kind of some make some of those connections from that data to that multidisciplinary approach. Councilor Koyama Lane already went over this a little bit, but I want to just remind everyone what was in that resolution. There was that recommitment to the work of eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries, the direction to really have cross bureau collaboration and to implement strategies to reduce traffic, violence and fatalities, and a specific direction to establish a vision zero task force and to update our action plan with a city wide focus, meaning that we would have actions across all the service areas. There's also a specific reference to more reporting and accountability. So that is part of the reason why I'm here today to make sure that we are having this ongoing dialog about the work. So we'll first talk about the task force. We have established a group internally to work again across all the service areas. We began meeting this last April. And the task force is essentially two different bodies working together. We have an executive leadership group, which is comprised of deputy city administrators, directors from key bureaus and chiefs or their designees from police and fire. That's about 14 people. And then we also have the technical team, which includes subject matter experts from across all the service areas and leads folks that are really deeply involved in implementing the work in their various disciplines. So that comprises about 40 people really working to focus on vision zero across the city. The work that we're focusing on this year is developing that shared citywide action plan, understanding the work across teams. One of the most amazing things that I've found when we're getting together in this groups is how eager people are to more deeply understand each other's work and to support each other. We have sort of a long history of keeping our blinders on and working on the thing that we work on, and it's been really inspiring to see folks just get, you know, pretty jazzed about collaborating to eliminate traffic fatalities. The last piece is just identifying those areas where we can really leverage each other's skills, data, and the investments that are happening across the city for this shared goal. The work of the action plan is it's really just a beginning, but we are we have started that work. This graphic that you're seeing is really just a high level timeline for a year long process, where we are going to be developing a prioritized work plan across the bureaus that move us towards zero fatalities. We know that a one year timeline is fairly ambitious for something that we're trying to create collaboration across the whole city, but we're moving towards that in order to create a framework for allocating staff resources, supporting annual budget discussions, and providing clarity to the public about the work that we are doing. So I frame that up because I want to lift up that it will be an iterative process. We're looking at a five year plan 2027 through 2031, but there will be iterative actions within there, things we're working on the first year that will then build in in the subsequent years. I will just reference the schedule. A couple of things. We are already in, you know, July, August. So we're working into this sort of gap analysis phase where we're looking at where do we want to be and where are the gaps in the work that we're doing. As you move through that schedule, you can expect to be hearing back either through committee or through council, what some of the drafts of those actions are coming out. And around April or may. That's when we're looking to come back with a draft plan and share that. So not too long from now, really looking at an updated action plan, but you can expect to be getting more updates throughout the process. And, and to that point, I'm going to talk a little bit more about the reporting. You all have been getting weekly updates on year to date crash data. Sometimes I don't send them weekly. If there has not been a fatal crash, I send them biweekly. That's in part because I
179 I want to preserve everyone's brains, including my own, and not necessarily focus on that every week unless we need to. Also, on a monthly basis, you're getting the year to date update, which is also a public facing document in the city administrator's report. And starting next month, there's going to be a resolution update memo in the city administrator's report quarterly. So just a short memo that's going to update on all the different things happening with the action plan, the test, the task force. So you'll have access to that information. And also the public will have access to that information. We'd also like to add district briefings on alternate months starting in September and October. And that can be either things that I know that you having more information would be helpful, or I can work with you and your chiefs to understand what the district might need more information about. And then when timely committee briefings on on policy and program issues. I know this sounds like a lot, but you're already engaging with vision zero issues every day, and this is an opportunity to make sure that you're getting the right information and have the ability to act in a really proactive manner on these issues. But we're thinking about that. There are new opportunities through those district briefings, and I'm always willing to work with our bureau partners to come and bring more information to committee meetings. I want to touch on a couple of key amendments from the resolution as well. There was deep concern amongst council members about the overrepresentation of folks experiencing homelessness in our community and our fatal crashes. It's a deep concern of everyone who works on this, of our partners at public health. In early winter of this year, we worked with our partners to essentially scope a deeper analysis of risk factors for people experiencing houselessness. We're kind of working through that, looking at the findings and developing recommendations, and we hope to have a report that will come back to you in the fall that can then inform actions and next steps in our action plan. Another piece that was brought up and lifted up in that conversation was the desire to have meaningful public engagement in the analysis, in the in the action plan. But a big kind of sticking point was around informing communities of the new action plan, making sure that people understood what work was coming, what changes. Were coming, and how it might impact and engage in their neighborhoods. That is something that is really important to all of us that work on this. I really want to underscore that we already have a lot of information from community. We are fortunate to have been working on this for ten years. We have information that comes through projects, through programs, through 311. We know a lot about what people want to see in their communities in terms of safety. So I'll just sort of say that before I jump into the piece of we requested specific funds through outreach internally, through a response to the budget amendments last year and through the budget this year. We're all very well aware of our fiscally constrained situation. So we do not have those specific funds for outreach. We also asked for external funds for grant funding from the state. They limited those funds, and those funds are also not available this year. So as we're working as a broader city team to work on community outreach, what I am doing is working to look at existing events, places where people are already out in community and connecting with those opportunities to talk about vision zero. An example this summer is a typically, transportation wouldn't have a big presence at national night out, but we are connecting on vision zero with our public safety partners and talking about it. That is a place where community members are already going to be gathering. There's already organizing behind it, and we're going to use those opportunities to get out in community, even though we don't have resources specifically for outreach on this vision zero plan. I'm going to pivot. That's kind of the end of the update on the resolution. Again, we're going to have time after where you can ask more questions, dig deeper. I'm also happy to come back and dig a little bit deeper into information. We're going to talk about the safe systems pyramid, which is a framework that further connects the work of of transportation safety to a prevention and proactive approach through public health. Vision zero policies are rooted in safe system principles. You've all seen this graphic before. This is looking at the layers, protective layers in a system that we are using to create that ability to avoid crashes or reduce severity should they occur. I'll reiterate some of the basic principles. Deaths and serious injuries are preventive. I'm sorry are unacceptable. Safety is proactive and grounded in prevention. Humans are vulnerable. People are going to make mistakes in the system. Responsibility is shared and redundancy is crucial. Again, these are things that you've heard before, but I want to kind of ground us in that as we talk about kind of public health practice, public health practice. I'm going to read this slide. Just bear with me. It's founded on the idea that health problems are preventable when addressed at the population level, and that we should focus on preventing and controlling risk factors while promoting protective factors when possible. So think about how we are moving to that population impact frame as we think about traffic safety. Many road interventions are effective at the individual level but require individual effort to have the intended effect. Think about seat belts or other mechanisms that require an individual action to to to have that effect. This can result in decreasing population health impact. So improving road safety in the in the aggregate as we're shifting is really about prioritizing effectiveness of the intervention itself as well as the public health impact. So let's take a look at this graphic. What this is showing is a series of measures, series of things that we can do to impact traffic safety and where you need more of that increased individual effort for it to be effective, and where it's going to have more of an increased population impact. So at the bottom of the period period, we have a like a big chunk through socioeconomic factors. Socioeconomic factors are things like affordable housing. Areas designed to have access to transit, zoning reform, big picture pieces that are connected to people's income, social determinants of health, ways in which people are accessing their community at the next level. It's built environment. So this is what we typically think of. These are street design changes can be roundabouts, can be road reorganizations, raised crosswalks, different interventions on the street that really change the built environment. Then we're moving up into latent safety measures, signal timing, speed, safety cameras, active measures. And at this level, you're starting to have more of that need to have individual action. So looking at signs officer enforcement. And then at the top we have driver education programs and and campaigns. I want to be clear that I'm not saying we don't need to do all of these things. We do, but that we're going to have more of that population or more impact at those population levels. Those investments take longer, they're more expensive. And I'll also add that they may be something that creates more pushback in community. When we're talking about changes to housing, land use, built environment, those are going to be changes that are going to be felt by community members. And so we are talking about investment both financially and politically, in those population impact layers of the pyramid. Again, I want to be really clear that I'm not saying that we can't we're going to accept bad behavior and that we don't expect people to be decent, to be decent, and we don't need to have education and active measures. But relying on individuals is not the most effective investment strategy or prevention strategy to get us the safety outcomes. We're going to leave this here, but we'll come back to it. We'll come back to it today, and I'm going to continue to come back to it. As we talk about kind of policy and budget and how we think about the city wide approach to vision zero. Now we're going to push into some data. I know that a lot of you were asked what you wanted to hear today. Folks definitely said they wanted to understand what was happening with current data, and then have a little bit about district information as well. I know we don't have a ton of time, so I'm not diving super deep into the data, but if there is something that you want to dive into, again, we can do that follow up. I think all of you know that this is actually one off by one. We are at 25 fatalities this year. I prepped the data before we had a fatal crash on Sunday night. That's worse than last year in July, but it's still noticeably better than the previous four years. You can see as you're looking at this data, we did have a significantly better last year, last year, but we are still doing better than we had in the previous four years. This graphic represents kind of a change in that in that four year data by mode. And overall, we're still trending 12% down from that four year average. So we're still seeing a decrease. We're still seeing a decrease in pedestrian deaths, which is great to see a significant drop in our vehicle crash deaths. But you can see that big orange line in the in the center. We have a huge spike with motorcycle fatalities. This year. We're up 67%, 11 of our 25 fatalities have involved people on motorcycles. There's some trends we're seeing not just this year, but previous years. Definitely some driver behavior with people turning in front of motorcycles, but also on the part of the motorcycle operators, excessive speed impairment, Lane splitting, passing on the right behaviors that are very dangerous when you're riding a motorcycle. When we see trends like this, there's not a lot that we can do to pivot really quickly, but there are some things that we can do. Ppb and PBOT have now partnered twice on news releases to again raise awareness of this spike. In April, when we saw multiple motorcycle crashes, there was a news release and some press. And then also this week, you may have seen the press on Tuesday, just again, reminding folks how vulnerable people are on motorcycles and how powerful they are really trying to get those messages out. So when we see something like this, we can't shift super fast, but we can be talking about it in community and really acknowledging these challenges. This graphic is an extended period of data, and I just wanted to share it because what it shows us is that significant spike kind of for all modes during the COVID periods. This is a rolling average over 12 months. But you can see we're starting to trend down. We're still far too high. 39 people last year is still far too many, but we're getting down more to that baseline that we were before. We saw that really significant spike during the COVID years. So that gives me a lot of hope that we can press in and reduce that that number further. I'm going to get us into some district data. Now, this is just a high level map that's a little bit different than what you've seen before. This is a five year data set. I'll remind everyone that we are when we're looking at serious injuries and fatal crashes, we're relying on data from the state. 2024 is the most is the last year that we have complete data of serious injury and fatal. That's why we have it only through 2024. This graphic represents a a more detailed view, concentration of serious injuries and and deadly crashes. So this is looking at segmented segments across the city where we have repeat crashes on roadways in the city. The information on the side, oh, I should mention, and you probably are all realizing this, you all have versions of these in your packets. So high resolution versions that you can look at, you can look at in more detail, and they have a little bit more information than what is on the slides as well.
180 Mr. Chair.
181 What constitutes a serious crash?
182 It's usually someone usually includes bicycle and pedestrian crashes, but it's some sort of not. It could it doesn't always include life altering injury, but something that requires transporting or something that requires medical attention. So if. You are in a vehicle crash and you have some aches and pains and you never reported it, that would not be included in this, even though there might be an injury. So the information that's included on this slide is really just compiling that deadly crash data. Again, we have almost 70% of our fatal crashes involve impairment and that's impairment of all people involved in the crash. That could be driver that could be the pedestrian or bicyclist. And about 40% it's we know it's the driver. We have a significant number of hit and run crashes that we don't know the impairment of the driver. So I share that because we know that it's a significant contributing factor. But the data isn't always 100% clear. In 49% of our fatal crashes, speed was noted to play a role. So in almost 50%, we know that it was excessive speeds or something contributing to the crash. I flagged this because this wouldn't be noted as a contributing factor to the crash. If you're driving on a street that's 40mph, posted at 40mph and you were going 40, but we'll talk a little bit later about speed. And we heard in some testimony that when we're operating at those speeds, it is a contributing factor to the crash, but it doesn't get counted as that in kind of our fatal crash data, 56% of our fatal crashes were on streets with four or more lanes. Again, I flagged this because it's such a clear street design issue. And for pedestrians, that number rises to almost 60%. Now we're going to jump a little bit more into the district data. One of the reasons I wanted to share this is because it's pretty interesting that we have a lot of similarities across the districts. We see that pedestrians are represented at about 1,516%. There are some differences in percentages, but those those modal trends are consistent across the city. We see higher numbers in district one. Overall, I know that we didn't have that last year, but that's that's that was last year was sort of inconsistent with the ongoing five and ten year trends. And then we see district two and district three being fairly similar often, and district four being kind of the lowest for overall traffic fatalities and serious injuries. This is a cropped in view of just district one. I want to call out sort of the high density of multi-lane streets and intersections with those high crash concentrations. You can see it's like virtually all of the east west corridors are some of the streets that are having those high risk factors and those repeated crashes with injury and fatalities. I don't think this is a surprise to anyone, but I can list multiple corridors like on both the north south and east west, where we can expect to see serious injuries and fatalities. In district two, you can see a little bit more spread, but the couple of things that I really want to call out is we continue to have issues with the areas with industrial land uses and our freight corridors. Again, no surprise to the district two counselors that we can we continue to see a lot of fatalities on columbia boulevard, on lombard, on marine drive. One of the unique things that your district experiences, though, is a preponderance of street racing and sideshow activity, and that has contributed to fatal crashes. And certainly in injuries. So again, like you see that there are these trends across the city, but each one of the districts is facing slightly unique problems around traffic safety and traffic violence. In district three, again, we have those high volume multimodal streets. We have state owned corridors. Powell boulevard is consistently in our top three for fatalities. When we look at five and ten year data. And then a kind of a unique thing about the district is we have multiple schools directly on high crash streets. We have cleveland and kellogg directly on powell, and we have vestal and mcdaniel directly on 82nd. And those are a vulnerable population. And it really brings together that nexus of wanting to care for our most vulnerable. And like those issues around high crash wide streets, that's something that's a bit unique to district three. While I'm talking about that, though, I'll just sort of bring up that, you know, the corridors, the crashes don't care anything about the districts. 82nd is a really good example of where multiple districts intersect that particular street. It's a high crash corridor. We have a number of challenging intersections. I'm thinking of holgate and mclaughlin. That is both district three and district four. So when I'm sharing the data with you this way, because it's easier for you to understand and how you're thinking about the work that you're doing in your district. But we're we're not necessarily thinking about that way. We're looking at the corridors, we're looking at how they're intersecting with each other all the time. And then in district four, you can see those concentrations in the the dense sections of downtown. But then you're also seeing like there isn't a lot of there aren't a lot of corridors, but what there are are those multi-lane streets with little friction and high speeds. And when I say that, I'm talking about barber boulevard, Beaverton, hillsdale highway, they have lower density land use. They function a little bit more like a highway. And those are some some of the highest crash areas in district four, those larger streets, those places where you're seeing a lot of volume and not a lot of cues for people to look for multimodal use and to slow down. Now, I'm going to jump a little bit into something that's bringing together the data, the citywide work, and what we learned about the safe systems pyramid. I know you've all seen this graphic before, but it's really important, again, to ground ourselves in that information, that risk of death and serious injury rises dramatically as speeds go up. When we're talking about population level impact, when we're talking about the work we need to do that that piece of slowing speeds in the city is truly fundamental and needs to be part of the ongoing conversation. In the five years between 2020 to 2024, 555 people were killed or seriously injured in crashes where speed was a primary factor. That's a lot of people in a five year period that were impacted by high speeds in the city. If we think about that in this public health frame, speed is acting as essentially a pathogen in our environment that can impact severity or incidence of a crash. We really want to hone in on that risk factor and try to address it in our prevention framework. This graphic that you're now seeing is data over a longer period of time. And what this is, is speed related deaths and serious injury data by time of day and day of week. And what you'll notice is that you can see that the red, the, the higher number of crashes are really spreading towards those darkness hours. Again, this is something you've all heard before. We have more crashes, particularly pedestrian crashes at night. But what I'm seeing there is that is places where we have the least congestion in the city as well. So that means that speeds are able to go up, people are able to travel faster, and that's leading to more serious and fatal crashes. I'll just note that last piece on the bottom of the slide. 68% of traffic deaths and serious injuries with pedestrians occurred from dusk to dawn. We have the increase in speed and a lessened ability to actually see people and interact out on the street. So you've got kind of the double whammy of increased speed with less knowledge and less ability to react to it. This data essentially shows highway speeds on non-highway streets. So what you're looking at the the dots that you're looking at are representing areas where we have count data or not count data, but speeds data, five year data that is telling us where we have 85th percentile, or 85% of the people traveling on roads where they're exceeding 40mph. And if we're going back, that acknowledgment that if you're going 40mph, you're outside of vehicle, you're basically 80% likely to have a fatal incident. We have places all over the city where people are traveling significantly over that. And many of these we I think most of you know, we don't have a lot of places with 50 and 60 mile per hour speed limits. These are places where folks are traveling ten, 15, 20mph over the speed limit on a regular basis. So we're going to expect to see fatal and serious crashes in these locations. This is a graphic that takes the data that you've been looking at in all of those district pieces, and just highlights where we have streets with four or more lanes. Again, not a lot of surprises here, but I want to hone in on the fact that this is only 4% of the streets in the city, and that's where we're having that 56% of fatal crashes is just on 4% of of the streets. So that combination of the ability to speed challenges with crossing challenges, with turning movements, that multi-lane environment, those are the places where we're seeing the most safety risks. We're going to go back to our safe systems pyramid and talk through the ways in which we're doing work currently, and things that we want to dig in on more to kind of address this issue. So at the top of that pyramid, I know that many of you weren't here, but most of you were in the city. You'll remember our 2020 campaign really trying to get people to recognize slower speeds on local streets were very important. We've had the struck campaign and other speed focused campaign work. We also have officer enforcement. Our traffic division focuses on the high crash network, really does a lot of work looking at those places where we have consistent history of crashes, really focusing the limited resources we have on the places where we think we can have the most impact. We have a speed safety camera program we're working on rest and read on signals. You've heard a little bit about that. That's essentially having signals on main corridors. Stay in a red focus for in the evening hours between 10 p.m. And say, 6 a.m. So that people aren't seeing a Green all the way down the corridors. I bring that one up because it's an opportunity to use existing infrastructure to help us figure out how to slow speeds and address these safety issues. We also do have road reorganization, center medians, things like trees in the curb zone. We're about to have a significant investment in climate that could also be connected to vision zero. Thousands of trees could be used to create vertical enclosure, a different environment that can help us to deal with this issue of speed on our streets. And then in that, socioeconomic factors, the work that we have done as a city to focus on main street development with pedestrian streets and access to transit, that actually does help us in this work around speed. So it's like making those connections and continuing to understand how there is this through line between all of these different pieces that we're doing in order to address the specific issue. That's all the information that I have for you today. But I have a couple of requests, and then we'll get into the discussion. The first one is just to reach out and ask questions. When you get those weekly and bi weekly crash notes. If you want to know more about the crash, I can connect you with the crash investigators. If you just want to understand more about what's happening in your districts, please do use that as an opportunity to get more information, because we do not have a lot of resources to do outreach. I'm asking all of you to share summer and fall opportunities when you will be out in community and can share vision zero information. Myself or other staff from the bureaus could, could join and could have just an opportunity to engage around vision zero. So please do share if that feels like a good opportunity with work that you're already going to be doing, and then contact us early for data and information when conflicts arise and implementation of projects or policies. I am a resource. The folks in the technical folks in the bureaus are amazing and ready to help support you in policy and budgeting discussions, so please contact us early so we can get that information to you. And with that, I just want to turn it back over to you. Thank you so much.
183 Thank you, dana, appreciate it. And thank you to councilor Koyama Lane vice chair, Koyama Lane, as well. Colleagues, we have a limited amount of time for this item before we get to the next. So I'm going to ask two questions. Just process wise, are you able to come back to us when we do the testimony on this as well?
184 Oh, absolutely.
185 Okay. And then we we'll probably talk about continuing as opposed to closing the item then as a result of it. So I'm going to take myself out of the queue. I'll ask if, if we can keep this going for about eight more minutes. And then yeah. So I'll go to clerk then Green. And if we can just try to keep it as brief as you can.
186 Thank you, mr. Chair. I'll try to be real quick. And you don't have to answer this today. Dana, thank you so much for all the data and information. It's very helpful. I understand that vision zero is really a national program, and I was wondering if maybe you can come back with some comparative analysis, how we stack up against other comparable cities, what's going on nationwide. And you know, what are we doing, right? What are we doing wrong compared to what other cities have done? You don't have to do that today. I think that would be helpful for us. I also would like to hear more about what our plans are for more of the, what you call the reader boards and some of those higher things that are higher on the hierarchy and more speed cameras, how we can get more speed cameras. I know they've been really effective in district four on Beaverton, hillsdale highway, and I'd like to hear also, maybe you can bring in somebody from the traffic division to talk a little bit about their resources, how they deploy their resource resources. I think they have very limited resources to deploy where they're focused. You mentioned the high crash corridors, but there's also the speed racing issue that I'd like to hear more about. I think that's really dangerous, and it's happening in probably all of our districts. I can hear them at night. It is through my bedroom window on the Sellwood bridge and, and just other other deterrents. You know, we can't control human behavior. I know that when I've been involved in some of these actions that we've done in our district, it's amazing the distracted drivers putting on their makeup, brushing their teeth, whatever on their phone. Unbelievable. Anyway, if you could come back with some of those, I'd be really appreciative.
187 We have a couple of folks from the traffic division here with us. I feel like that is a a larger conversation to have, but if you want to hear just about how they deploy their current traffic resources, we.
188 Don't know. Do we have time for that or should we?
189 I'm I'm happy to have them come back and do more of our presentation on their work to. There's a lot there.
190 I would like to hear from the traffic division. Maybe next time you come back.
191 Great. And I do have a colleague here, michael espinosa, that's taking detailed notes so that I will have all the things that you're asking for.
192 Thanks. Thanks, dana.
193 Thanks. Councilor Green and Ryan, thanks.
194 And I'm being mindful of time here. I'm going to tease some questions up or some themes that maybe when we have more time at the next, when we carry this over, we can get into more detail. But I really appreciate the work and the dedication to the, to the data. It's, it's not lost on me that west Burnside in my district is one of the big high crash corridors. It's also one of the, one of the corridors that has like maybe some of the narrowest sidewalks proportional to the, to the vehicle volume that happens through there. And then we're also going to pursue a repaving project right now that doesn't address some of the lower tiered investments that we would do to address the the threat of pedestrians deaths there. And I'd like to hear a little bit more from dc Elana paul and the city administrator next time when we have more time, why why we're proceeding on a paving project like this, what is the decision process that has led us down that road? We also know that we've recommitted as a council to take vision zero seriously, and you can't do your job if we don't have the partnership with the rest of the city administration and organization to say, let's sequence these things in a way that makes sense, because if we just do a paving project without considering those other aspects, we're we're probably not going to come back to it anytime soon. And that's just the fact of the matter and the reality. And so I'm, I'm really curious to see where that's coming from, because it's not coming from the adopted plans, because if it were, it wouldn't happen this way. So I guess, and I'm also really worried that most recently, very recently we were scrapping or shelving plans to do bike Lane enhancements on alder. And that seems to be a sort of theme where it's like there's, there's, there's a narrow set of feedback that pushes back against a thing that's really rooted in our plans, that is designed to address pedestrian safety. And then I don't know if it's a few councilors or it's the mayor or someone who says, don't worry, I got it. We'll roll this back. That is not vision zero. And so I know that you can only do so much here because your your role is I mean, you're not a deputy city administrator. You're not the city administrator. But and I know that we're on the clock here, but these are really pressing issues for the community. And, and they're in my district. So just invite a conversation around this and we'd like to know more.
195 Thank you. Councilor Green, this is dc for dc for public works. We are taking notes on all the different issues that you brought up. And we're happy to follow up with the next presentation or an email to council.
196 Thank you.
197 Thanks. And we'll we'll probably not have a chance to get too deep into this today, but I am going to continue the item on. I'll just say I want to make sure that all four of the folks in the queue have a chance to get questions on the record that we can revisit going forward. So I'll go councilor Ryan, and then Koyama Lane.
198 Thank you, chair. Thank you, dana dickman, for showing up and giving a thorough update when reviewing the data from 21 to 24, two things continue to stick out very clearly to me. Our homeless population, which makes up 2% of the population, represents 49% of the pedestrian deaths. And so I want to dig into that a little bit more. So sad. I'm focusing on this population and getting to the bottom of these challenges and being bold to actually improve services so that that things can improve will always be my north star. And with that in mind, I'm going to pivot to our meeting that we had in March, a little over four months ago, I was able to finally receive information that I asked for several years ago about the data coming from the coroner's office on who tracks the level of methamphetamines, aka fentanyl and meth in the bloodstream of those pedestrians who perished on our streets from traffic accidents. And as you recall, the data was it was lagging mostly due to what was I told not being a budget priority. And so I think it went dated back to 2122. And the number of those revealing that methamphetamines were in their bloodstream was quite high. Do you recall that percentage? I recall 82% to 84%.
199 That's right. Yeah. That it was in the high 80s.
200 Yeah, it was in the high 80s. Yeah. So that was startling. And so I think when I, when I listen to you talk about the safe system pyramid, what are we doing with this information and what's the action plan to get to the bottom of the fact that of those people who are perishing on our streets, according to the data from the coroner, quite scientific and accurate. It's in the 80% that have methamphetamines in their bloodstream. That's sad. Like, what are we doing with that information? It took me three years to even get an answer, right.
201 As I said earlier, one of the things that we're doing is doing that cross analysis, digging into some of that data and comparing it to other risk factors, things that we understand from the crash data and combining it with that information from the medical examiner that the city doesn't typically have access to. So we are trying to look at those risk factors to determine what some next steps should be. We're kind of in the middle of it right now, but as I said, we hope to bring a report back this fall where we're going to have some findings and just a deeper understanding of kind of the multiple risk factors. We know that just exposure is one of the risk factors. If you are out on the streets 24 hours a day, you have more exposure to traffic and to traffic violence. So we know that that's part of it. But this is a deeper dive to understand it in a more complete way. And we'll bring that information back to you.
202 Yeah.
203 The impact of our drug crisis is is very sad. And Portland, Multnomah county behavioral health has really failed to focus on this. And I think that I had a daylight it here in this meeting. I've been very patient and persistent to try to get to the bottom of it because I care. Right. And I think that unless we start doing better cross-referencing with public health, when it relates to vision zero and bringing in more of a like swat team analysis to really get to the bottom of this, I think we're going to continue to see high numbers and we can't mask it with with other things, because that's a significant number and an impact. And I'll end there, but I want to make sure that that was daylighted because I had the privilege of getting that information finally, after waiting a few years, and I wanted to make sure other people understood the severity and the challenge we're dealing with here.
204 Right. Thank you.
205 Thanks. With the permission of those still in the queue, I'd like to continue this on to next to next week. I'm sorry, next meeting, which is in two weeks to make sure we have the chance to have the presentation on the next item.
206 Today I have a.
207 Very short yes or no question that is kind of timely.
208 Okay, I'll let each of you go through it. Councilor. Koyama Lane. Then. Morillo. Then pirtle-guiney.
209 All right. Real quick, piggybacking on councilor Greene's questions and comments about what has come up from advocates respect to the Burnside repaving project, I'm wondering if there's an opportunity for PBOT to conduct safety analysis analyzes before there are projects on high crash corridors. That was one question, and the other one is wanting to hear a little bit more about how vision zero and safe systems connect specifically to neighborhood greenways and areas near schools, and I will leave my other questions for now.
210 Thanks. Councilor. Morillo.
211 Thank you. I'll be very brief. For one thing, I don't want to leave us on a note, especially for folks here in the audience, that the people who are getting hit by cars are in any way at fault, regardless of whether they have used drugs or not, because it is the vehicle that is killing people, not the person. And the reality is that a few years ago, houseless advocates didn't advise us on what would happen if we were doing more sweeps, moving people around. And the reality is that puts people who are unhoused in more danger of being hit by cars because they don't have their regular pathways cleared that they have established and are familiar with. Secondly, my question actually is about how these budget cuts are going to impact your team, specifically around doing community outreach and engagement for vision zero. And I just wanted to know what council can do to support you moving forward. When we get the chance to hear from you again. Thank you all for being here.
212 Thanks.
213 Councilor.
214 Pirtle-guiney.
215 Thank you. Chair, has the vision zero team been engaged at all in ensuring that when I-5 is closed later this year, and we have people who are used to traveling on a freeway, on neighborhood streets, worried about getting to work on time navigating neighborhoods in north Portland, have you been engaged at all on what tools you might be able to help provide to keep our neighbors safe during that period of time?
216 I have not, but I believe that PBOT has.
217 No.
218 Pbot is engaged. I'm wondering if we're looking to our vision zero tools to help, and if not, if we can make sure that that happens.
219 Good morning. Millicent williams, director of Portland bureau of transportation. The PBOT team has established an internal tiger team to address the very things that have been mentioned. And so one of the folks that is on the list for us to engage is dana and our vision zero team members within the bureau. So, yes, that is going to be happening more. Transparently, but it is a priority for us.
220 Thank you.
221 So we're going to continue this item to two weeks from now. We will have testimony. Again, my apologies to those who wanted to testify for us not getting that on the schedule as we're cycling out to our next folks, I'll just put into the ether that I would like a data point on not just how many streets are high or wide, but what's the vehicle miles traveled on each that weighting. That is the most important way for me to assess. With that said, we'll continue this on. If we could get item four please. Called while our zenith transfer folks come up to present.
222 Item four. Consent to franchise transfer from zenith energy terminals holdings, llc to isuzu springer holdings, llc. Amend, excuse me, amend ordinance 188554 document number 2026-263.
223 And I'm sure everyone here has probably deduced by now. We were told that this presentation is about 15 minutes, so we are going to go those 15 minutes, hear the presentation, and then there's probably not going to be time to testify. I did want to tell everyone that everyone who is currently registered will receive an updated meeting link the next time that this is called, which will almost certainly be August 6th. Yeah, August 6th, the Thursday morning on that date and testimony sign up remains open for this item. We'll be continuing it at the end of the meeting. So I just wanted to flag all of that. But we will hear the presentation today and then pick up with clarifying questions and all of that next time. And with that, sorry, I'm going to introduce Eric engstrom, the director of bts and our franchise utility program manager, andrew speer. Thanks for being here.
224 Thank you, counselors, again. For the record, my name is Eric engstrom, director of planning and sustainability. Andrew speer, franchise utility manager. We're here today to talk about the request to transfer utility franchise from zenith energy to isuzu springer holdings. Andrews pulling up the presentation. As I speak. I'm going to cover a couple of things in my brief presentation. First, we'll talk about what a franchise is and a little bit of background on the proposal. Will secondly, just remind you what else is happening in this space surrounding the critical energy infrastructure hub. Third, we'll talk about what what we're allowed to consider with the transfer of this type. And then finally talk about what we found in our research of the material we were given. Next slide please. So just to remind you, a franchise is a contract between the city, city and another entity. In most cases, a utility provider that allows the entity to install or maintain or operate assets in the city's right of way. And the picture on the right side of the slide here just illustrates the types of things you might see be subject to franchise agreements. Very often it's pipes and other infrastructure under the street, sometimes wires, sometimes wireless facilities. A franchisee pays the city a compensation for access to the right of way. And we have three different types. Some payers pay pay per foot, others pay as a percentage of their gross revenues and others pay per site. For example, wireless facilities, franchise agreements are adopted by council via ordinance, as are transfers. As we're here to talk about today, negotiations of those agreements tend to be multi-year processes. And just a reminder, the city has moved away from negotiating new franchise agreements and is now operating with a more standardized right of way code model that applies a more uniform set of requirements to right away users rather than individually negotiating franchises. But this what we're considering today is one of our legacy agreements that predates that new approach, and our current franchise users will eventually transition to that new system as their agreements expire. Franchise agreements can vary in length from five years to 30 years. And you correct me if I get this wrong, but I believe this one expires in 2037, correct? Yes. Next slide please. So this particular franchise is related to a pipe that's operated under northwest front avenue. The picture on the slide, you can see the area of the zenith facility. And the area that we've marked in red is the portion of the right of way that the pipe in question crosses under zenith, pays an annual payment to the city to use the right of way. I believe that's roughly. Last year's payment was roughly $48,000 for reference. The facilities in this case, again, are pipes that transport liquid fuel products under front avenue. Next slide. Franchise agreements generally have a section in them that governs how a franchise can be transferred from one owner to another. This happens periodically, and I believe it's actually happened before with this particular franchise. The terms also usually identify the specific review criteria for that transfer. In this agreement, section eight outlines the specific process for transfer, and it allows the city to review the transfer in terms of technical, legal and financial capacity of the of the company requesting to take over the franchise. These are the lenses that staff are allowed to review the request. And that's what informed our questions that we asked of of isq when this application was received. Next slide. So I want to just take a quick step back and remind you that there's other work happening related to the the critical energy infrastructure hub. As you're probably all aware, we have some other pending policy proposals coming to council this fall, notably title 33 and comprehensive plan policy updates to further limit expansion of existing bulk fuel terminals. And then there's a corresponding title 17 proposal to require terminals to reduce their storage capacity by 2036 by 20%. So just want to take note of that other activity. The next step for those projects is slated for the fall, when we intend to bring findings and proposals to this body, the council that is, is there any legal connection between the franchise transfer and that sci hub project? No, the transfer we're discussing today is a is a business agreement between a seller and a purchaser where the city can verify that the purchaser has the technical and legal and financial ability to take on those duties. The sci hub projects are code changes, and they don't address the specific facilities in the right of way or franchises in general. So while we have that ongoing work to regulate bulk liquid fuel facilities, those are on a separate track from this particular transfer. And whoever the future owner of the franchise may be, the franchisee will be subject to those future codes at any time. That policy might become effective, and today's decision has no impact on that or the decision you'll eventually make on this action. Next slide. So returning to the question of this transfer per section eight of the franchise agreement, staff staff evaluated the information provided by istc using the lenses of technical, legal and financial. So the technical refers to whether the company has the technical background to safely operate the facility in question. Next slide. The legal lens refers to whether the company has a legal understanding and experience with local, state and federal laws to ensure compliance with those laws as they operate the facility. Next slide. The financial lens refers to whether the company has the financial backing to ensure long term stability of those operations. Next slide. I want to just briefly before we talk about our findings, I want to just talk a bit about the structure of the company. This slide depicts the corporate structure of hq springer holdings, which is owned under another company. And as you can see on the slide, there's kind of a chain of ownership that goes up to I squared capital advisors. And this is relevant to some of the analysis we did. Next slide. So I'll talk about the staff findings regarding the technical capabilities. We found that the company does own similar facilities in other jurisdictions. We also. And so we concluded that the company sorry. And we concluded that the company has a plan to staff the facility with employees who are experts in operating this type of facility and to ensure safe operations. Next slide. Regarding the legal expertise, we found that istc will retain local counsel and ensure compliance with which has expertise in ensuring compliance with local and state laws. Istc also stated that they will be hiring in-house counsel to manage the federal regulatory components of the facility. Next slide to the financial capabilities. As a holding company, istc has significant financial backing to ensure long term stability of operations. The business structure of the parent company also provides additional stability regarding the payment of franchise fees. Next slide. Sorry, I lost my place here. Under the franchise agreement, the city has certain obligations to how we look at the transfer. As I mentioned earlier, we're focused on the things I mentioned above the legal, technical and financial qualifications and any conditions we may attach to that should be tied to those particular issues. So we must review those criteria stated in the agreement. And the agreement also mentions that we can't unreasonably delay the transfer. This happens through an ordinance. As I mentioned earlier. Next slide. So before I conclude, I just want to remind you what's in scope and out of scope. In this decision, the city can verify and inquire about the qualifications that I mentioned above under section eight of the agreement that I talked about. And we can condition the transfer based on those criteria. We can't otherwise renegotiate the franchise or change the basic terms of the franchise agreement through this action. Next slide. I'll just conclude with that. Based on our review of the criteria in section eight of the agreement. Again the technical, legal and financial, we believe istc has sufficient qualifications to operate the facility to the satisfaction of this criterion. Therefore, staff has recommended that you adopt the ordinance to transfer the agreement from zenith to istc and will, of course, remain in the room as you hear testimony to answer questions when you get to it.
225 Thank you both for being here, and thanks for the presentation. Rebecca, how many people have signed up to testify so far?
226 53.
227 Okay. So obviously we're not going to get through that today in a meeting that's scheduled to end in three minutes. Does anyone have any any brief technical questions? You can also you also have this chance at the next meeting.
228 Mr. Chairman, I only only questions are outside the scope of the franchise agreement and which legal, technical, financial. So I would hope that the people who are in line to testify understand what our. What kind of questions you can actually ask that are inside the scope of the franchise agreement.
229 Yeah. You know, we're going.
230 To be posting if we can get your slides, as well as a link to the timestamped video of this meeting to the item, so that people who are preparing to testify can see the presentation, both the video and the slides, and obviously the, the body of the ordinance as well. And then hopefully that will help with them. Yeah. Council president.
231 Thank you. I just have a quick, quick question. It seems like this is sort of a buy, right. Almost an action that that we have to counsel as a as a body approve a, a franchise transfer. Why is this a legislative action then? If it's if it's a, it feels like it's almost an administrative action.
232 I believe it's by charter that that franchise agreements and transfers have to be an ordinance.
233 But just to be clear, I mean, you know, in theory, there are consequences if we as legislators take our legislative power and say yay or nay, we are somehow violating parts of this. Is that my my misunderstanding? I mean, it seems like we are required to approve this. Is that wrong?
234 You always have a choice. Okay. And I would maybe look to the city attorney to elaborate, I.
235 Nancy thornton, deputy city attorney. You're not required to approve it. You're required to consider it.
236 Thank you.
237 Thanks.
238 All right. So we're going.
239 To continue this item after councilor Pirtle-guiney question. And then and actually last after her. It will continue it. But go for it.
240 I just want to dig a little more on the way that you worded that. We don't have to approve it. We have to consider it. But I think council president was getting at an important piece by saying, is this similar to a buy right item? Maybe it's not precisely that. Can we amend it? Or is this really an up or down vote, given the legal limitations in what we look at?
241 The the legal limitations are you what you can do is you can, you know, look at the the legal, technical and financial qualifications. And if in looking at what's in the record, you don't think that that's sufficient, you can condition it. You know, you don't or you could find that they don't meet the qualifications, but you would have to have evidence, you know, articulable evidence that they don't meet one of those criteria.
242 Thank you.
243 Thank you, councilor. So with that, we're going to continue the item to the next meeting, which will be Thursday, August 6th at 9:30 a.m. Colleagues, in about a minute, we're going to adjourn. I just wanted to take a moment to observe, and thank you all for bearing with us as we fill up our agendas and see whether or not the requested timelines of items lines up with the allocated time on agenda lines up with the actual time spent. I think prosper obviously requires some conversation, as do all of these. So on an unrelated note, but just since we have the floor, I wanted to take the opportunity to share support for friends in the midwest. We're in the twin cities. People are remembering speaker of the house melissa hortman and her husband, mark hortman, whose murderer was sentenced in court today. And to. The people in madison, wisconsin, were on the same street where police killed tony robinson. In 2015. Corey ruiz was killed by police yesterday. My thoughts are with everyone affected by gun violence, regardless of who caused it, and I appreciate the opportunity to take a few seconds today. Our next meeting is Thursday, August 6th at 9:30 a.m. It is 12:31 p.m. And this meeting of the committee of the whole is adjourned. Thank you.