The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2026-08-04
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Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Community and Public Safety Committee met on Tuesday, August 4, 2026, with all members present per roll call. The session opened with an update on wildfire response, covering deployments to the Warm Springs Reservation and other tribal lands, donation needs, and Portland Fire and Rescue's mutual aid contributions, including personnel and equipment figures that were stated inconsistently across speakers. The Multnomah County Department of Community Justice then presented an overview of its adult and juvenile services divisions, victim and survivor services, funding structure including Senate Bill 1145, budget constraints, jail capacity coordination, and racial disparities in juvenile detention and adult supervision populations, followed by extended discussion of causes and possible remedies. The committee considered two grant appropriation ordinances from the Oregon Department of Transportation—one for street racing/takeover enforcement and one for expanded traffic enforcement—with discussion of drone use, mobile citation technology, data-driven enforcement, and racial disparities in traffic stop data; votes occurred on both items, with outcomes recorded in the vote ledger. The committee also considered an ordinance on psychedelic health and safety code, including a motion to amend the ordinance by removing provisions establishing a Portland Psychedelic Advisory Commission; votes occurred on the amendment and the underlying ordinance, with outcomes recorded in the vote ledger. The meeting was adjourned after these items were addressed.
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0 Is Loretta supposed to be here? Good morning everyone. It is Tuesday, August 4th, 2026 at 9:30 a.m. And I call this meeting the community and public safety committee. To order for the clerk, please call the roll.
1 Good morning.
2 Morillo.
3 Here. Zimmerman. Here. Smith. Kanal here.
4 Novick here. Okay.
5 Welcome to the meeting of the community and public safety committee. To testify before this committee. In person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at www.Portland.gov/councilor/agene or by calling 301. 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 or 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 when subjected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Thank you.
6 Thank you christopher. So we need to start by acknowledging that today is August 4th, the anniversary of one of the greatest events in history, which because it's on August 4th, 1789, that the representatives of the nobility and the clergy in the national assembly of france rose up to renounce their feudal privileges. And by the end of the night, the national assembly had declared that the feudal system was abolished in its entirety. So I always want to commemorate that fact. The Oregonian reported this week that Oregon has already set a record for the number of acres burned during a fire season, surpassing 2 million. And we still have two months to go. As we're experiencing this week with our air quality wildfires across our state impact not only the communities they are in, but also those hundreds of miles away. Here to discuss the city's response to active wildfires and how we as a community can support those affected, particularly residents of the warm springs reservation are tribal relations manager gerald skelton and Portland fire chief lauren johnson. Please come up. Please proceed.
7 All righty. Good morning. My name is gerald skelton. I'm the tribal government relations manager for the city of Portland and a member of the klamath tribes. Thank you for providing us the opportunity to raise awareness of the current wildfire impacts on tribal lands and possible needs for assistance. Based on my conversations with the emergency management directors at the respective tribes and communication with Portland bureau of emergency management and Portland fire and rescue, this is what we know. Briefly. Members of Portland fire were deployed to the warm springs reservation for structure protection and to the bench fire, according to the northwest coordination center, the fire has burned more than 64,000 acres. Eight homes and five other structures are destroyed as of Thursday. Keep in mind this is in regards to the warm springs reservation. Water. The most water and most and most as as well as hygiene products, clothes and blankets are needed. There is a water conservation order for warm springs because of water tanks are at critical levels. Donation centers are set up throughout the city. I know there's one at bison coffee house. You can donate things there. The easiest way to do that is just get the water and take it there. And they'll make sure it gets gets there directly. Burns paiute tribes are not requesting additional fire protection at this time. Some tribal members are temporarily housed in hotels, and housing assistance may be needed. Air quality due to smoke continues to negatively impact the burns community, and we could say air quality due to smoke will impact all those tribes that we're talking about today, as well as the communities umatilla tribes currently have areas under level level three evacuation zones. However, they are not requesting additional fire protection at this time. Some tribal some tribal members are temporarily housed in hotels or using red cross shelters. Air quality due to smoke continues to negatively impact umatilla communities. Red flag warnings, high winds and high temperatures. In southern Oregon means possible wildfire starts in those areas as well. Oregon tribes in those areas include cow creek, klamath coos and hill tribes tribes. Although not in the state of Oregon, yakima tribes may need wildfire assistance as well. All efforts to date have been in collaboration with the Portland bureau of emergency management and Portland fire and rescue. We will continue to maintain contact with the emergency managers and designated staff of the nine Oregon tribes and regional tribes throughout the wildfire season. Thank you again for affording us the opportunity to raise awareness on the potential needs for assistance amongst the nine Oregon and regional tribes. Your time and consideration are greatly appreciated.
8 Thanks, gerald. Good morning. Chairs and committee members. For the record, my name is lauren johnson and I'm the fire chief for Portland fire and rescue. Thanks for the opportunity to provide an update on Portland fire and rescues wildfire deployments across Oregon, and specifically to fires affecting the warm springs reservation. We currently have eight members actively assigned to wildfire incidents throughout the state. Our participation is managed through the state fire marshal. When emergency declarations are made or when the conflagration act is invoked. This year, we've deployed a total of 37 personnel to assist on fires in multiple regions. Portland fire's overall capacity to support the state's needs remains strong, with 120 trained members across incident management teams, wildland teams, and rapid extrication and medical support. This is called rems teams. It's important for you to know that while we're sending resources out, we continue to prioritize protecting Portland. First, we maintain the same number of of frontline firefighters that we do every other day. And we're able to recover our personnel and apparatus costs because we participate according to preexisting agreements and the laws in both the state and federal systems. Our firefighters and support personnel have been operating on incidents that you've probably heard about. And sisters and warm springs. This includes the butte fire near sisters, where our rems team made of firefighters who specialize in technical rescue, provide advanced rescue capability for the firefighters working in rugged and remote terrain. The bench fire near warm springs has been particularly destructive, burning more than 40,000 acres and destroying homes on the warm springs reservation. In response, Portland fire deployed two incident management team members to support the statewide coordination of fire resources and the Multnomah county strike team ten, which we are a part of, sent fire engines to protect homes on the reservation over several operational periods, the team worked closely with partners to assess community threats, extinguish hot hotspots near residents residences and later provided structure protection in the three rivers community. This season continues to challenge fire agencies statewide. Oregon is experiencing record setting fire activity like councilor, Novick mentioned at the opening, pushing every department to stretch their limits in an effort to provide aid to others. Portland fire and rescue has been central to several of those efforts. For the first time, we've launched the stand alone rems program, which has already proven its value at the fires near sisters. We've. We've also helped pioneer mix county task forces, which brings together partners such as silverton and mount angel with our local resources and. This approach has strengthened our collective capacity to provide resources to jurisdictions in need during periods of heavy fire demand, while still maintaining the protection and capabilities that we need here at home. As another example, a special hefner rig from station 29 was integrated into a columbia county strike team supporting operations across the state. When resource availability is limited for most, if not all, agencies. In short, Portland fire and rescue continues to lead with expertise, adaptability and commitment. I've heard from the state fire marshal about the importance of our partnership, and I'm grateful to have the support of our city to help others during such devastating times. I've heard from mayor wilson that he is also receiving calls thanking Portland for sharing resources. We know that fires don't recognize jurisdictional lines, and I believe strongly that these partnerships are a win win for fnr and the city of Portland. Our members are making a meaningful difference on the fire line and in the communities most affected by this historic wildfire season. Thank you for your support as we continue this critical work, and I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have.
9 Thank you so much, councilor Zimmerman.
10 Thank you.
11 I don't have any questions, but, chair, I think it was smart to add this to the front of it. You know, it's present. And, we often think about the towns and what they're going through. Right. And I appreciate you sharing the experience of the people where these fires are occurring. As a member of the national guard, I've been a part of a task force. I was a task force commander for about 150 firefighters, forest firefighters. At one point, I thought I would share a little bit about what it means, though, in terms of the experience when when our chief talks about portlanders, people from our workforce who have picked up and gone to help, it really exemplifies the, the idea of a go bag, right? You basically get the call and within hours you're expected to be on the road. And so that means that there are families here who's having to figure out how to do the thing that two parents normally do with one parent for a while. And we're really usually not sure if that's going to be soccer practice for a week or four weeks while somebody's away, getting, getting out to school, you show up usually at night to a dark, fairgrounds and you realize that there's probably 20 or 30, lines of, of, of tents. Like when I say tents, I mean the tents you buy at rei, right? People are just laying in tents. You're going to go to the restroom, maybe if you're lucky, in a porta potty while you're deployed, you're maybe going to have a shower trailer with cold water. You might have a stream nearby, but that's kind of what living at fire camp is like. And you get up 2 or 3 hours before the sun gets up and you start moving out because you're pretty far away from the line and you go out and you and you get on the line, you work all day long, and then you come back when it's dark and you do it all over again. And you and you use your little headlamp to find your tent, where you're, where you're sleeping. And, and it's a, it's a remarkable experience. It's very rewarding, but it is, it is a sacrifice for our employees, for the firefighters who do this. And one of the awesomeness about it is when you go look at the parking lot around one of these fairgrounds or wherever people have set up base camp and you'll see firefighting apparatus trucks with names of towns you've never heard of from across the west, right? Small towns all over the place. It's really to the chief johnson's point. It's really remarkable in terms of the way the community shows up. To take care of folks. It doesn't nobody cares about jurisdictional lines at that point. And it's always remarkable to me how the town that's in crisis also shows up, right? There will be signs, there will be meals, will be restaurants with their doors open. Anybody who's functional will be functional at 110% to take care of those who showed up. And so that the volunteerism and the sacrifice of everybody involved is pretty meaningful. And it's also oftentimes in Oregon, I don't know, many people know this. Oftentimes in Oregon, we'll see the state penitentiary will be the folks taking care of the life support on these fire camps, right? So they're cleaning bathrooms that exist or cleaning shower trailers, they're emptying trash. They're making all the meals. Often these are prisoners who are on whatever the right term is work, outside work, etc. So it is just a remarkable thing to see if you've been around a fire camp. And so for those members, chief of your force who have deployed to do this, I respect anybody who has a go bag and anybody who is on the road within hours of the call, that's really important. And I and I acknowledge that that sacrifice, I have only done it once and it was a memorable experience. And I keep that in my mind. So thanks, chair, for putting this forward because, this is a record setting year and it's, it's Portland doesn't always understand or feel that pinch that central and eastern and southern Oregon feel almost every summer. So thank you.
12 Thank you so much. And although it's terrible that these destructive fires are raging, it's heartwarming to know that we are able to help. It's so o councilor Kanal.
13 Yeah. Thank you. And obviously we know that that folks around the region are dealing with a lot. I have friends in spokane who I know are dealing with a lot as well as around the state. And it's, always appreciated to know both how much we do in support, but also that the mutual aid is it's obviously mutual. So when we're in need, I also know that you're dealing with, with a lot locally. I mean, obviously we had the centennial mills fire, over the last day. So that's something where, we are appreciative of the work of, of your members of your, of your staff. And during this time, I'm looking forward to kind of following up on this conversation and I'm curious how often we can sort of, do this where we're able to talk about it maybe before next year's season. Obviously, we don't know what the committees will look like next year, but just wanted to, to kind of flag that it'd be, it'd be great to have that opportunity. I also know that there's, there's need for, going back to the sort of first part of the presentation here, some of our neighbors in reservations are in need of, of water drinking water right now. And so I think, we'll be collecting water at, I'm doing a picnic this, this Sunday, we'll be collecting water there. And I'm sure there's many other opportunities. So if there's anything that you'd like us to boost to help with our neighbors there, please let me know. I'm happy to send it around. Thanks.
14 Thank you.
15 So I'm going to restructure the agenda a bit. We're actually going to start with our guests from Multnomah county department of community justice. Then move on to the two grant items, then to the psychedelic item and conclude with the concealed carry carry ordinance. So first, I want to establish a practice of hearing from our county, our county partners in public safety, because the police and the police fire, they are other public safety aspects of the city. Are part of a system that includes the county. And, I hope to have the county ambulance folks come at some point the day the sheriff. But today I'm honored to have denise pena, director of Multnomah county department of community justice, to talk a bit about their work and the intersection of their work and ours. And we'll have commentary from some city folks about that afterwards. So thank you.
16 Before we oh, sorry.
17 I forgot to ask you to read the. I forgot to ask the clerk to read the first item.
18 I was going to say, can we read both the first item, which is the minutes, and then I can, after we approve that, I can.
19 Yes.
20 The next item.
Procedural episode · turns 21–29
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21 Sorry.
22 Oh, that's just fine. Item number one June 2nd, 2026 to June 16th, 2026. Community and public safety committee meeting minutes.
23 I forget. Do we need to vote on accepting the minutes?
24 So long as there's no objection they can be approved with unanimous consent.
25 I any objection? Okay. Thank you.
26 Perfect. Let's see. Item number two, formally noticed as item number four. Document number 2026-279. Multnomah county department of community justice.
27 One of information.
28 I have no concern with the reordering, but don't we have to do the reordering? Don't we like a need to do some sort of unanimous consent on that.
29 So long as nobody. Yes, you can do it by unanimous consent.
30 Okay.
31 Do we have unanimous consent? Yeah. Sorry. Okay. All right, director pena, please proceed.
32 Good morning. Thank you. Good morning. Councilors. My name is denise pena. I am the director of the department of community justice, and I use she and her pronouns. And I am joined this morning by our leadership team, who will be introducing themselves a little bit later in the presentation. Thank you to councilor, Novick and the entire community of public safety committee for inviting me here today. We are honored to share the work of our department and also elevate the ways that we are partnering and collaborating with the city of Portland in support of public safety. D.o.j. Is committed to our role as a key part of the greater Portland metro region's public safety system, providing supervision and services to justice involved youth, adults, families, crime victims and survivors. As the greater Portland metro region looks to revitalize and spur economic growth, public safety is an integral part of laying the groundwork for this revitalization, and we are firmly committed to this. Our role is one of the lesser known roles in the criminal justice system, but it is critical piece that supports behavior change, excuse me, contributing to safer, safer communities. And I'm looking forward to sharing a bit more of the how we do this work with you all this morning. We're going to start with an overview of our department, core services and funding before going into a more detailed overview work of our three divisions. And we'll conclude with a focus on collaboration with the city of Portland and broader public safety system coordination. And some of our partners are in the room with us today, and we're happy they're here, and we are happy to take questions throughout the end. But we do have some side, some some time set aside at the end as well. Dcjs vision is community safety. Through positive change, we aim to enhance community safety and reduce criminal activity by holding youth and adults accountable in a fair and just manner, assisting them to develop skills necessary for success and effectively utilizing public resources. And we have a core belief that people can change. We accomplish this by offering supervision and services to justice involved youth, adults, families, and crime survivors. Our efforts rely on a very close partnership with public safety entities, including the sheriff's office, the district attorney's office, the courts, Portland police and the office of violence prevention, as well as several key community partners. In the last year, our dedicated staff of over 400 supported more than 10,000 justice involved individuals. And as you see here, this included over 7000 justice involved adults on either probation or post-prison supervision, over 1000 cases for justice involved youth, including youth diverted from the criminal justice system. Youth admitted and supported in our juvenile detention facility in northeast Portland and on probation or pre adjudication status, and over 2400 victims of crime during the post adjudication phase, the department has core mandates that were required to deliver on, based on Oregon revised statutes or s in times of financial constraint at the state and county level like we're in now, we have to focus on how best we maintain these core services while maintaining committed to our community values, community corrections. Structure. Structure vary county by county. Here in Multnomah county, both adult and juvenile services are housed under one community justice umbrella. Our three divisions deliver on these mandates. The adult services division manages supervision, sanctions and services for adults on probation and post-prison supervision. Our juvenile services division manages pre adjudication and probation supervision and juvenile detention for justice involved youth, and our director's office provides state mandated victim and survivor notification and services post-conviction and they are also where our department departmental infrastructure and policy alignment are housed. And you're going to hear from our three division directors on this work directly. Our total operating budget is nearly $116 million. This funds 413 full time equivalent, or fte positions that support client services. That ranges from reentry support to behavioral health and treatment programs and community program. And d.o.j. Has two main sources of funding. Our Multnomah county general fund accounts for approximately 71% of our funding. As the city was finalizing their budget this summer, so was the county. With d.o.j. Having to make difficult reductions amounting approximately to 5% from our previous fiscal year. State funding is our second largest funding source in adult services. Adult supervision, known as community corrections state grant in aid or senate bill 1145. We also have funding from the state for treatment courts that we have for mental health and substance abuse disorders that we participate in. And we also have our Multnomah county justice reinvestment program that aims to reduce the reliance on prison usage by providing intensive community supervision for those eligible eligible individuals. Excuse me, in our juvenile services, this supports the tension diversion and gang transition services through our jcp or juvenile crime prevention plan with the Oregon youth authority and the Oregon department of education. And we also have a family resolution services team. D.o.j. Works within a network of criminal justice systems partner, and it is only through our strong partnership and collaboration that we can deliver on our vision of community safety through positive change. And this specifically includes a partnership with the district attorney's office on victim and survivor services at the approach of sentencing, working with the Multnomah county sheriff's office to manage jail capacity in line with our community corrections plan and providing 24 over seven response when individuals on supervision come into contact with police, enabling parole officers to address potential violations. Kyla and I, to my left, serve as members of the local public safety coordinating council alongside councilor Novick. D.o.j. Also contributes to the goals of the homeless respond action plan through housing and treatment programs provided for adults and youth on supervision and defection planning and implementation. We also coordinate and receive guidance from state agencies as well. The department of corrections, or doc, oversees our community corrections plan and corresponding requirements for sb 1145 funds. The parole board and the courts serve as the supervisory authority that determined conditions of supervision and sanctions. We also work with the courts through our treatment courts program and the Oregon youth authority, or oia, manages the juvenile crime prevention plan for basic and diversion services and gang transition funds and their facilities receive youth that transition out of our juvenile detention facility post adjudication when confinement is ordered. And now I'm going to hand it over to tierra hubbard, who is our adult services division director, to cover the work of her division.
33 Good morning councilors. For the record, I am tierra hubbard, director of adult services division, or asd, and I use she her pronouns. Thank you for the invitation to share more about our work and collaboration with the city. The adult services division is Multnomah county's community corrections provider. We provide probation and post-prison supervision, sanctions and services for justice involved adults. Post-conviction. We operate out of five locations four within the Portland city limits. We're at the mead downtown at fifth and Washington, and we house numerous specialty units, including our stabilization and readiness program, which I'll cover in more detail. We're also at east campus and Gresham are two of our other main supervision locations. We also have staff at the courthouse to support intake, post sentencing, and also with the justice center to provide custody and release services. This is a map of where adult services clients are located. The highest concentration is indicated with the darker purple with concentrations across northwest, southwest, and east Portland. The orange markers are asds anchor buildings where the majority of our supervision units are located. In the next year, the county is moving forward with our expansion at the east campus to better align our services where our clients live. The black markers noted are asd satellite offices. Asd supervises over 7000 adults annually, sentenced to probation, parole and post-prison supervision. At any point throughout the year. We have approximately 4500 individuals on active supervision, with our over 100 parole and probation officers referred to as pos. In the upper right of this slide, you can see the ethnic breakdown of individuals on supervision, with over 60% identified as white, nearly 24% as black african American, and 9% as hispanic. The disproportionality of this, based on Multnomah county demographics, also shown here, underlies why we emphasize culturally responsive services to meet the diverse needs of our clients. Some additional data about our population is reflected in the next two pie charts. In the second row of the over 7000 adults on supervision annually, 79% of asds clients were on for felony supervision, and over 50% were on supervision for a crime that was committed against another person. You can see the risk level is determined through the public safety checklist, known as the psc, completed by our pos, with over 75% of our clients at high or medium risk to reoffend. This drives case management practices as outlined in Oregon administrative rule. I'll now walk through how our clients come onto supervision with d.o.j. Post-conviction. We are funded by the state to supervise all felonies, drug enforcement, misdemeanors, sex abuse and domestic violence, assault and domestic violence, menacing crimes. In addition, dcj through our county general fund dollars also supervises over 500 individuals on supervision for non state funded misdemeanors. All clients on supervision come to asd with specific supervision conditions based on the supervisory authority process, which then drives sorry based on supervisory authority. These are reviewed during the intake and assessment process which then drives our responsive case planning. This includes identifying the criminogenic needs most likely to reduce the risk to reoffend pos then introduce skills such as decision making and problem solving, as well as referrals to treatment. This slide shows the path of an individual assigned to supervision within asd. Our intake unit will review and connect clients with the transition services unit for access to basic needs that can include housing support, health and community services, telephone access or bus tickets. Clients are assigned to specialized caseloads, including our african American latino unit, domestic violence, sex crimes, gang unit, mental health, women and family services, and our treatment courts that ensures culturally responsive and specialized supervision and services. Our pos complete a needs assessment that drives the responsive case planning, and that is the core of our community supervision. Our community corrections intergovernmental agreement with the department of corrections governs this work, including supervision, sanctions and services. Supervision is the main component of this work as outlined here. This means we have to meet the minimum contact standards in the office, in the field and develop case plans to address based on their risk level, which is determined through assessments completed at intake. We address criminogenic needs such as antisocial behavior, pro-criminal attitudes, lack of employment or substance abuse, and responsivity needs such as gender, culture, mental health and cognition as outlined on the screen. All of this work is essential to support public safety by changing behaviors. In line with this pos recommend sanctions when conditions of release are violated based on Oregon administrative rules, Oregon revised statute and the requirements of the releasing authority with interventions also outlined on the screen. Pios also integrate connections to services based on criminogenic need, which impacts their risk to recidivate. Multnomah county has has historically supported expanded access to housing and employment services as funding is available, with significant recent decreases due to budget constraints. But the key services required by ors include cognitive behavioral services, substance use disorder, mental health treatment, and domestic violence, and sex offense treatment. I'd like to highlight one of our specialty units and services that is specifically aimed to support clients with behavioral health needs, our mental health unit and stabilization and readiness program that are located in the meade building in downtown Portland. Our mental health unit supervises nearly 450 adults annually, and that includes participants in mental health treatment. Court community supervision is focused on addressing risk, need, and responsivity for client success. So I'd also like to share an example of our responsivity work that most effectively reaches the needs of individuals assigned to the mental health unit. This is known as the stabilization and readiness program, often referred to as sarp. Sarp plays a crucial role in connecting clients with acute mental health challenges and housing instability with supervision and services in a day center format, helping to keep the streets of downtown Portland safer during business hours. This program was established during the pandemic, when dcjs saw a need where clients were so acute that providers were not able to work with them each year. This program supports over 280 of the 450 clients from our mental health specialty unit, and response to their identified needs. To give you more context about the clients served by sarp, nearly 70% of clients using sarp are on high or medium risk supervision, and nearly 62% have committed a person to person crime. Clients who've engaged with sarp show more positive outcomes. Engaging with supervision with 28% entering into treatment, and our absorption rates have decreased by over 50%. This means clients are engaging with services, working through their supervision towards positive change. I'm now going to hand it over to doctor kyla armstrong romero, our juvenile services division director, to cover the work of that division.
34 Good morning counselors. For the record my name is doctor kyla armstrong romero. I'm the director of the juvenile services division, also known as jsd with the department of community justice. And my pronouns are she and her. Thank you for having us here today to share the vital work our team carries out every day across Multnomah county. Our vision is rooted in community safety and opportunity for young people and their families. Our division operates a comprehensive spectrum of youth focused services. This includes juvenile detention, operations, diversion and informal intervention pathways, restorative practices, pre adjudication support and community based post adjudication supervision at the donald long juvenile detention facility, we fulfill our mandate to provide secure short term detention for youth arrested in Multnomah county. Detention is reserved for individuals identified as a public safety risk or a risk to reoffend, ensuring safety for the community while youth navigate the pre adjudication legal process. Finally, operating out of the Multnomah county courthouse, we have our family resolution services team. They provide civil court support. We deliver domestic relations, mediation, parent orientation and guidance for families navigating complex domestic disputes and court processes. On the map in front of you, you can see where justice impacted youth on supervision are located throughout Multnomah county and the Portland metro region. With a heavier concentration of youth on the east side. The orange marker on the map indicates the location of the juvenile justice complex and the detention facility in northeast Portland. Here's a high level snapshot of who we serve at jcsd across our division. Over the last reporting year, jcsd supported over 1000 cases involving youth aged 12 to 21. Most recently, we've had an 11 year old broken down across our units. That includes over 180 youth admitted into our detention facility. Over 250 cases supported through pre adjudication. Over 180 youth diverted from formal processing and over 400 youth receiving community supervision on probation, outside youth supervision. Our family resolution services supported nearly 2500 parents navigating domestic relations, and our team has processed over 450 juvenile expungements. I want to pause on the second row because it reflects the serious nature of the cases before us. Over 67% of the youth on our probation caseload are assessed at high or medium risk to reoffend on the juvenile crime prevention scale, which is a validated risk assessment. Furthermore, over 42% of our cases involve serious felony allegations. In a climate where we are seeing high risk youth behavior and the devastating impacts of community gun violence, our response requires robust oversight and meaningful accountability to ensure public safety and enforce compliance. Jcsd utilizes tools, including community monitoring seven days a week, as well as electronic monitoring. Every youth on pre or post adjudication supervision is held to a structured, responsive case plan designed to maintain boundaries while addressing the root behaviors, driving high risk actions and to ensure victim safety. Looking at demographic data, nearly 35% of youth served identify as black or african American, and over 22% identify as hispanic. As you compare this to Multnomah county's overall demographics, the dramatic overrepresentation of black and african American youth in our system remains a stark reality that we cannot ignore. Unlike upstream prevention efforts are mandated. Services operate downstream at the point where severe harm or risk has already occurred. Our goal is to provide meaningful off ramps that stop the cycle of violence through responsive supervision and systemic reform. Our programs are designed to provide off ramps from overall community justice involvement and integrate culturally responsive approaches, while simultaneously seeking systematic approaches and reform. Building on denise's point about the local public safety coordinating council, I chair one of its active subcommittees, the juvenile justice steering committee, where we bring key partners together to strengthen our county's juvenile justice system. We recently received a presentation from the city of Portland cease fire team, and we remain fully committed to aligning our goals, sharpening response to violence, and enhancing joint leadership with our city partners. This slide outlines our structural workflow and services that jsd built around targeted oversight, structured accountability, and youth development. Regardless of how youth enter the system through detention or police referral allegations are triaged based on level and severity. Low level offenses are directed toward early intervention, diversion, or informal processing, while serious and violent allegations move directly into formal court proceedings. Community supervision services encompass pre adjudication, diversion and informal supervision units. These teams work directly with youth and families to navigate the legal process, conduct validated risk and needs assessments, and enforce compliance while linking youth to community support and community interventions. When a youth is adjudicated and placed on probation, our juvenile court counselors are jccs provide intensive post adjudication, supervision, jccs monitor court ordered probation conditions, ensure compliance and track progress to address complex risks and maintain community safety. Our jccs operate in specialty units with dedicated training to supervise specific high risk populations. As part of this work, our staff participate in collaborative meetings with the city of Portland to align resources, share relevant insights, and ensure we are providing comprehensive supervision for youth spanning both detention and community supervision. Our restorative practices team combines active accountability with skill building. This team also facilitates restorative justice processes that hold youth accountable directly to harmed parties and the community, such as the partnership with lutheran community services that you heard about in June. We also have our juvenile detention services that I will provide more detail on. The juvenile detention facility is one of 11 youth detention facilities in the state of Oregon. It is structurally and programmatically designed as a short term facility to hold youth while they move through the juvenile court proceedings, as shown here, as shown in an earlier slide. I'm sorry. During our last reporting year, there were 182 admissions to juvenile detention facility. Our facility serves youth brought into detention by local law enforcement within Multnomah county, many of which are facilitated by the Portland police bureau. Each youth brought into detention is reviewed using a validated detention screening instrument that assesses public safety risk score, as well as the risk for failure to appear at court appearances to determine whether a youth should be detained or released to a parent or guardian while they await the adjudication process. Our detention facility prioritizes evidence based practices to provide developmentally appropriate and trauma informed care. Based on our current fiscal year 2027 budget allocation, our facility is staffed for a total of total capacity of 36 beds, which are allocated as 29 beds for Multnomah county youth and seven beds reserved for other required holds. In addition to Multnomah county, youth were legally required to hold youth under the interstate compact. The Oregon juvenile department directors association urged a mutual aid agreements out of state. Runaways and Oregon youth authority sanctioned youth. I want to provide a little bit of context on our juvenile detention population, length of stay and allegation trends that impact our resource needs and response. These graphs illustrate a significant shift in our detention population for Multnomah county youth over the last five years. On the left, you see the population delineated by allegation type. Since fiscal year 23, we've seen a steady influx of sb 1008 cases, which keep serious violent measure 11 allegations in juvenile court, rather than them being automatically waived to adult court. The severity of the allegations are resulting in an increased length of length of stay, which is shown on the chart on the right. I mentioned that our detention facility is intended for short term confinement. However, today we are seeing an unprecedented increase in youth held for over 500 days. Approximately 25% of our average daily population falls into this category. In the last six months, we've reached this capacity several times, and the county board of commissioners adopted a resolution on July 2nd that governs our release procedures in the event of a population emergency that mirrors the sheriff's jail capacity management plan, I wanted to highlight the allegations and length of stay to underline that our system is under strain. Not only are we supporting youth and families through complex justice proceedings, but we're also responding to increasing mental health needs of youth amidst significant resource constraints. I will now hand the floor over to our deputy director, suzanne brown mcbride, to review the work of the director's office.
35 Good morning counselors. I'm suzanne brown mcbride. I'm dcjs deputy director, and I use she her pronouns. I'll present a very brief overview of the work that dcjs director's office for you today. Our office provides critical infrastructure to both adult and juvenile services division, as well as direct client support through our victim and survivor services unit. And that's what I'll be focusing on here today within the director's office, our victim and survivor services unit supports crime victims and survivors harmed by justice involved individuals on supervision with dc that is, post adjudication. They provide three key services for victims informing of rights, providing notifications of critical stages in the justice process, both of which are constitutionally mandated here in Oregon, and additional advocacy to help victims and survivors understand their rights and options, and identify supportive resources and support them in navigating the complex post-conviction system, the team informed over 3800 victims in the last reporting year of their rights, with nearly 2500 of those victims opting in to receive notifications, and over 1000 of those victims were supported with additional advocacy that can include things like safety planning and connection to additional resources. We continue to leverage technical advancements as we improve this work. For example, a new online platform called case companion was launched in this last year to help victims of crime understand the rights and stay informed about the justice process in Multnomah county. This platform is designed for victims. Pre and post adjudication enables a better handoff between our colleagues in the district attorney's office and dcj. Once cases are adjudicated, our advocates also participate in multidisciplinary forums such as the domestic violence enhanced response team, or divert, as well as the restorative justice work through lutheran community service contract implemented with our juvenile services division that kyla mentioned earlier. I'll hand it back to denise to cover more about our collaboration with the city and public safety coordination.
36 Thank you suzanne, we've covered the core of our work and collaboration and collaboration with the city of Portland is woven through everything we do, from early youth prevention with ovp and active field enforcement with the Portland police bureau. And I'll highlight a few areas of collaboration, specifically, one of our most basic but essential functions. Our essential areas that we rely on is a strong partnership with PPB is on law enforcement coordination. This involves not only our ability to access police reports, but we also have staff that connect law enforcement to a supervising officer 24 over seven. This allows us to interrupt and intervene, and it is also critical to enforce probation violations. And without this, we cannot conduct our work. Gun violence and community safety are challenges that do not stop at jurisdictional lines. Over the last several years, d.o.j. Has strengthened partnerships with the city to focus on coordination and responses within city of Portland entities. On the adult side, our probation officers work directly alongside the Portland police bureau's focused intervention team that aims to reduce gun violence in real time. During the recent summer cool down mission, our appeals were able to provide support and contributed to multiple firearm seizures and identifying robbery suspects, leading to swift arrest. Unfortunately, with budget constraints, our ability to authorize overtime for these type of missions is increasingly limited, but we're appreciative the pos are able to flex schedules to support missions such as these. We have a dedicated poa that covers a sex trafficking caseload, and he works and coordinates closely with pbz human trafficking unit. D.o.j. Also participates alongside PPB and other criminal justice partners on the multidisciplinary divert to respond to high lethality domestic violence cases that suzanne referenced. Both of our adult and juvenile staff are actively engaged with the community and participate in Portland events. Whether it's our jccs presence at the wear orange event in June and partnering with ovp during youth violence prevention week to speak directly to students across Portland public schools or our police presence during high profile gun violence or homicide trials and at community celebrations like go to the hood and the mississippi street fair. We are partners in supporting a safe environment for all. In that light, we're happy to participate in the safe and the safe blocks program, national night out and join the event at director park last Friday. These are great opportunities to connect with our local public safety partners and community members to share our vision of community safety through positive change. And as you can see, our collaboration is constant, dynamic, and we are deeply appreciative of our partners with ovp team and PPB command staff. Before we close, I'll briefly discuss impacts across the public safety system. D.o.j. Sits at the end of the public safety continuum after arrests, prosecution and adjudication has taken place. This means that the work of the Portland police, the Multnomah county district attorney's office and the courts directly impacts the level of service and corresponding workload that will be required from d.o.j. As conditions change and charges increase, so do the requirements for our staff. The length of time that dc engages with justice involved individuals and crime victims through juvenile pre adjudication, support and juvenile and adult community supervision is the longest in the criminal justice continuum, ranging from 90 days to three years. And we even have some limited cases that have lifetime supervision. We are seeing increased needs for our core legally mandated services. We do not have the corresponding increase in resources to fund and staff the services required. Instead, we see our resources continue to decrease. Housing and shelter is another area that has historically been able to allocate resources to respond to the housing needs of our clients on supervision. However, these resources are increasingly being reduced and that are compounded by reductions across the county and the city. For example, in fy 25, we reduced almost $2 million in housing contracts specifically designated for our clients as a result of reductions in our senate bill 1145 funding. To respond to these dynamics in a time of constraint, collaboration is needed more than ever, and we are happy to be here today. In advance of this collaboration, we are happy to take any questions or hear your feedback on how we can further strengthen this partnership. Thank you for your time.
37 Thank you, councilor Morillo.
38 Thank you so much. Thanks for this presentation. It was really helpful to hear about all the things that you're working on. I was curious on the slide about the delong facility. Is there any information with disaggregated data around which, like demographics are being held longer or, is there any difference at all that you've seen? Is that publicly available?
39 We can absolutely provide the council with more data. We've provided that to our subcommittee, our juvenile justice steering committee. And so we can definitely we have that data available.
40 Yeah, I'd be very curious to see that because I, I suspect that we are seeing youth of color, black youth being held a lot longer in those spaces than others. And, I'm just curious, like what is being worked on to address that? I'm assuming there's a disparity. My staffer recently went to a juvenile detention facility and did a tour and had those discussions. And obviously a lot of what we heard back was that a lot of the folks that are being held there, it's also largely crimes of poverty and things like that. So I would just like to know more details on that. Do you know off the top of your head, if there is a disparity, even if you don't have specific numbers.
41 There is a disparity. And I had the pleasure of being the person who co-facilitated that tour with your staff.
42 Oh, wonderful.
43 The opportunity to speak with them at length. And so I can say certainly there is a disparity.
44 Okay. Is there anything that we as the city can do to sort of help address that from a policy or funding perspective?
45 I think that, you know, with the conversations that are currently happening with youth and gun violence and, especially the last weekend, having more conversations about targeted interventions. And one of the things that is impacting our system, more than ever is the number of kids in detention. So we have a lot of kids in detention who are waiting much longer for their cases to be heard and or waiver process. So we have kids who have more significant cases who are pending waiver, although since sb 1008 passed in 2020, there have been zero kids in Multnomah county that have been successfully waived to adult court. However, going through the process takes a long time. So notably last year we had a kid who was there for over 920 days waiting for their case to to move through the court system. And so I it's, it's tough. We've had to piece together things for kids because we are truly meant to be a short term detention center. And so we don't have funding for like college level courses, things like that. We're only required to do kind of the basic k through 12 education. And so trying to figure out when we have kids who graduate. Last year, we had six kids graduate while in detention, which is we think, great, yay. However, the fact that they're there long enough and some of them came in with eighth grade reading levels and then completed, that's quite significant. So I think having more conversations, more targeted partnerships, especially with the city. We have really great partnerships with ovp and ceasefire team. And so just continuing to strategize about the community interventions and targeted interventions that can help. I think that that's the long winded answer.
46 Could actually.
47 Not long winded at all. I think very oh, sorry. Feel free to jump in.
48 No apologies. I just wanted to answer like there's, there's sort of like two levels of compounding pressures going on here, right? It's what kyla was just talking about in terms of how are we getting kids through the detention facility itself quickly. You know, the average length of stay for kids in the facility is somewhere around 30 days. And so when you're thinking about that in comparison to kids who are there for 500 days or 900 days, we don't have the programing or the staffing to be able to really meet the needs of the kids while they're there. So I think the policy question is really, what are we doing to get kids through the facility as quickly as possible? And that has to do with the prosecuting prosecutorial challenges, judicial challenges that we're talking about. But then as the kids are there recognizing that these are more and more serious crimes that are taking longer to adjudicate, are we effectively supporting them in that context and able to provide them with the kinds of programing that will help keep them out and be successful once they ultimately do leave the facility? So I think that those are sort of like the compounding pressures that we're feeling, particularly in detention.
49 The other point I would add is that to your earlier question, in terms of who is currently in detention, essentially, we are kind of the receiver of those that get either remanded or, being held prejudice. And so that is happening more at the court level with between the courts, the d.a. And the defense attorney in terms of making the decision of who is the one who are the youth that are actually held or not held. And so at that point, you know, we just get the court orders and we ensure that the youth are being held safely and, and secure in our facility.
50 Gotcha. So would you say that this da is pushing to hold these youth, in this detention facility longer? Because obviously we have a defense attorney crisis. We definitely don't have enough people there representing. So our entire court system is extremely slow. But is, does that play a role in that? And how has the da stepped in to sort of, address these concerns? Because it does seem like a lot of these youth are being confined without due process for if, you know, 500 days more than a year, that's basically a sentence.
51 I would say that we have seen there is a period of time where the district attorney's office had a backlog of cases specific to the juvenile courts. And so there was a change in the, the juvenile deputy da. And with that change in December of 2025, we noticed many more cases kind of moving more quickly through the system. And most recently yesterday, I was attending a preliminary hearing in court and I heard feedback that we are seeing cases move quicker, throughout, the process. And I think that there's compounding issues, if you will, of the crisis, the shortage of public defenders. I think there's also a shortage of evaluators. So when you waive kids to when you're trying to waive kids to adult court, there's only a certain number of evaluators in the state that can fully evaluate youth. And so, that's part of what has taken so long. So I wouldn't say it's one issue over another. I will say that there is more of a penchant to hold youth now, who have firearm related charges. And we are seeing that, especially if it's their second firearm related charge or third, there's less likelihood for them to be released out in the community. And that's, that's what we're, we're seeing more of.
52 Gotcha. Okay. Sounds like, we have a loss of manpower within the whole criminal justice system overall that's slowing things down. And a lot of folks needed to, to support in that space. So, thank you for your time.
53 Appreciate it.
54 Thank you.
55 I put myself in the queue to ask about the availability of mental health treatment. I mean, I would hope that most people in your system are eligible for medicaid and theoretically are eligible then for, for treatment. But I'm just curious if you highlighted the importance of mental health treatment and just curious about the availability and any problems with availability.
56 I think on the adult side, many of them are eligible for medicaid. There's never enough mental health treatment providers available at the time that someone needs them. We ourselves do not provide mental health treatment that's outside the scope of our work. But we connect with multiple partners who provide that. Oftentimes there's a wait, for our clients really trying to get the sun and the moon and the stars to align, to get the medicaid insurance going to get them at the time that they're reporting and they're ready to engage in treatment, whether that be mental health treatment or substance use disorder treatment or any sort of cognitive behavioral. It's certainly easier when we have residential beds available when we have outpatient or outpatient services readily available. Wait lists don't work great for our population. We would definitely benefit from more mental health treatment access, specifically, residential options.
57 And how would that happen? Would that be a matter of more state resources being dedicated, more county resources? I mean, who, is there? I don't even know. I mean, does the county health department have a mental health unit that you engage with, or is it mostly through medicaid in the state?
58 Yes, through the county mental health services as well as nonprofits as well as for profits, medical providers, anywhere that we can get folks in. When we were talking about our, our population, our stabilization program, many of those individuals are so acute, they are not able to engage in mental health treatment because they're not stabilized. That's why we developed that program. They're unhoused. They're unfed, they're unmedicated. And they're also on supervision for person crimes against people. So their behavior is also can be volatile. So that's really where we step in is we work with them on managing some of those criminal behaviors to get them stabilized enough as well, as well as those humanitarian needs, food safety stabilization, so that we can get them able to engage with some of our mental health treatment partners.
59 And I would also add is that is a program that, we received ARPA dollars several years ago, and we created this program specifically to address the needs that was being unmet for our clients. This program had several years of one time only funding. We were able to get it with ongoing general fund last year. But again, as our resources, whether it's cuts at the county or the state level, are reduced, and we have to prioritize the core mandated services, which for adult is supervision. In theory, that is a program that could become that could be at risk because it does not fulfill the the, the supervision piece of it. But we know it provides the skills and stability that our clients require, especially our most vulnerable clients, to be successful on supervision.
60 I would also say that there's been an enormous amount of discussion at the county level about, can you be more efficient? Can you try to sort of harmonize services? And we absolutely look for every opportunity to do that. At the same time, though, you know, when we talk to our community service providers or some of the other folks that provide these services, our clients do tend to sort of slip to the back of the line. They tend to be the less desirable clients to serve, either because they are dysregulated or because people have concerns about safety threats. That's part of the reason why d.o.j. Originally got into the business of funding housing independently, was to try to make sure that we had a pool of resources available specifically for our clients as those resources have started to dry up, and as the lines for services have gotten longer and longer, sort of, you know, you're always trying to sort of struggle with all of the folks that need services and how to triage them. And so I think the challenge for our supervising officers and community partners is how to get our folks into the door and served when there are so many other folks who are also have need.
61 Thank you.
62 Thank you, councilor Kanal.
63 Thank you. I. Have three questions about slide 12 on the adult side. And then I might have a couple on slide 16 as well, but I'll start with slide 12. The first one is, is just for follow up. Is there a disaggregated data on basically, do you have the demographics for each of the crime classes, each of the crime types, each of the risk levels.
64 I don't have those available. Those are certainly information we can get. The crime types. It's a little harder to look at that because oftentimes people are on for multiple different types of crimes. They they receive one risk score based on the public safety checklist, but they may be on probation post-prison supervision, they may be on for theft and assault. So typically what we do when we look at crime types is we look at the most serious. So putting it within the two buckets of person or sort of non person, that's information that we could compile.
65 Okay.
66 That makes sense in the context. I mean, I know we talked in the juvenile sense on disparity. I mean would you looking at this there is a disparity right?
67 Yes, yes.
68 And you're, you're saying that based off of just the 23.9% compared to the 6.4, the 60 compared to the 77, right?
69 Correct.
70 Okay. Why? I know there was a discussion of some of the impacts of that when we did this slide. Why is that a disparity here? Is it because of the front end of how you're receiving these folks?
71 Much like juvenile services, we don't get to our, our, our clients are not voluntarily choosing us and we don't voluntarily choose them. We get whoever the courts or the parole board sends to us. So those who are sentenced to supervision become our clients. So it's really decisions that are made at the the one of denise's slides was talking about the continuum. So decisions that are made at the beginning of the of the process in criminal justice result in who gets supervision, who ends up getting sent to prison versus who gets a downward departure, optional probation. The length of time that they're convicted for, but we get whoever is sent to us. And then that's why we sort of emphasize what we do once we receive people through intake, is we get to control what types of services we offer, which is where we emphasize providing culturally responsive, gender responsive, specialized services to sort of meet the needs of the individual. A lot of that is actually outlined in Oregon administrative rule following risk principles, which is really to focus your service on those at highest risk of re-offending. Public safety is best met through community supervision, through doing behavior change. Behavior is hard to change. I've spent my whole life trying to change various behaviors. How often I work out how much cheesecake I eat. Behavior is hard to change for individuals that are not stabilized, have family dynamics, who don't have housing, who have, cognitive issues. They're facing even more barriers to behavior change. So we sort of need to be able to meet people where they're at, focusing our resources on those most likely to reoffend, and then removing barriers so that they are able to change behaviors and not commit more crimes.
72 Thank you for that. And the takeaway to the direct part of that was to address disparities. We need to be looking at the front door effectively. So I appreciate that. I wanted to switch gears to to slide 16. I think just trying to understand, I mean, looking at putting a 12 year old in that picture, the slide on the bottom right. I think we're a couple slides forward from there. It's marked slide 16 on, on mine, but, that, that, makes me question the need for this structure and for, I should say, the use of this structure at all. And whether or not behavior change for a 12 year old is best achieved through this. I understand that that's not the scope of, of the decisions of anybody up here. So I just wanted to take the opportunity to mention that, and I think there's, a lot of data that's been coming out about, what actually achieves and what doesn't achieve, some of the goals of reduced recidivism and things like that. I also wanted to ask about the victims and survivor services work. My understanding is there's been a bit of a scaling back, over time due to funding. Can, can someone speak to that a little bit in terms of.
73 Sure. Yeah, yeah.
74 And so over the last budget process, we did eliminate one of the positions in our victim and survivor services team. So we still do have a team of folks that are providing services. The initial, I believe, outcome indicator that we gave the county is that, you know, upwards of 98% of the victims and survivors that reach out to us. We're getting back to them within a day. Right? So this isn't a crisis intervention service. It's a, you know, people wanting to understand sort of like what the next steps of the process are due to those reductions, we will see a diminished, not necessarily ability to complete the task because it will get done, but it will take longer to do it. And we are feeling stress and strain on those services. We continue to try to make every dollar stretch. And I think, you know, just like everybody else at d.o.j. Are trying to get the work done. But, but there is going to be probably more extended times for us to be able to help provide some of those services.
75 Do you have a model for what you expect that 98% number to move towards?
76 We were positing 90%, but it is sort of an unprecedented reduction. And so we're going to have to evaluate that over the year.
77 How one out of how many how many you said you're losing one staffer, is.
78 It one out of their nine fte that were on the. So it's down to eight.
79 Okay.
80 Okay. Yeah. You know, I think my my interest in this is around. We don't really do a lot for crime victims. We, meaning American society, government broadly and not, not speaking here. And I think that's a, a problem that both exists that we haven't solved, but also sometimes we talk around it. A lot of what we do on both the city and county side on what we call restorative practices, restorative justice generally involves restoration to the victim. And a lot of the time, it is a way of describing something that maybe in other place would describe as, deferment or diversion. So I think that there are I have an interest there and I'd like to follow up with you on that, but I'll leave it at that for now. Thank you.
81 Chair, this is a table, a table full of every one of us. We're victim advocates in prior life. So we appreciate that. Absolutely. And I would also say that our victim and survivor services really works actively with our restorative practices programs and our restorative justice programs. Like that's one absolute avenue, but it'd be great to continue talking about that.
82 And I hope you don't have to, as a profession, work with duct tape all the time. I think that work deserves to be funded. And I hope the county commission reconsiders that.
83 Actually councilor Kanal, if I, if I may add to that, I agree with you in terms of there could be much more to be done for crime victims, either pre or post adjudication. I do want to highlight the uniqueness of this service and this team in the post-conviction setting. I started the unit 12 years ago and prior to that there was nothing there was no victim advocate. There was no staff or personnel directly dedicated to one ensure that we were complying with victims rights, post-conviction and also to be able, navigate the post-conviction world, which for a victim or a survivor is probably the least known and even more complicated in terms of what they can actually expect, how this all works and who they need to connect with. And so we have seen, unfortunately, some of our other community corrections partners around the state lose their teams because of budget cuts, because similarly, when they have to focus on core mandated services, we get paid by the state to supervise adults on post-prison supervision and probation. We do not get paid by the state to help support victims of crime and to ensure that their rights are being enforced. So that is 100% funded by the county. And so, but when we have to look at the totality of services, we did have to make the decision to reduce one fte in that unit because it was vacant. We still could continue the services. We could still continue our compliance with our statutory or obligated notifications. But we're running into a lot of tension between what is mandated, what we have to do as resources still dim. But the example I would give is that our neighbors in Washington county last year, as a result of their 1145 funding reductions, eliminated their entire victim services program. And they had a very robust program that actually focused on counseling for victims, primarily victims of domestic violence. And so unfortunately, we are seeing it. And so I say that not to diminish the impacts and what more we could do if we had more. But I just want to actually highlight and uplift that. What we do here in Multnomah county is pretty unique. When you look at it in the post-conviction setting.
84 Councilor Smith.
85 Thank you. Thank you. Chair. I want to thank you for bringing this, presentation to all of us and to the public. I don't think that people really understand the, the disparities, particularly in youth that are happening. I had the honor of being a county commissioner, and it is not surprising these numbers. I've seen them. The juvenile numbers there are about six times the number of, black folks who are in this community, about 5.7%. And it also mirrors what happens at the higher level in our in our jail system. They are, continue to be a high disparity rate among black men in our, in our jail system. And I was thinking,
86 Now, are any of you all a part of lipstick? See what? This. This is still the same issue. It's just a different day and a different year. When I was at Multnomah county. I sponsored a, an amendment that passed for a year to increase the number of housing dollars that were, that were there. Because when youth go back into the same environment that they came from, they're going to get similar outcomes. And so I wanted to make sure that at least they had an opportunity to go and live outside of the community in which they were having and experiencing many of their difficulties. And the reason why I asked you about lipstick is because I think this level of disparity, it, it should signal that there is a call for a deeper investigation into the pathway of detention. It suggests to me that factors such as socioeconomic disparities, differences in policing practices and school practices of black youth, and or potential biases at the various decision points. Who's arrested, who's detained, who's screened and who's sentenced to the many years that black youth and black men are sentenced to? These are the things that are contributing to the unequal outcomes of what you see at the donald e long and what you see in our prison system. It's not just one thing. It's it's an entire ecosystem of our, of, of, of our different public agencies that have contact with youth. And I don't think we talk enough about it. And I think that is something that needs to be addressed in leipzig. I think they need to talk about those things because it's easy to say that the police are policing black neighborhoods more than they're policing white neighborhoods or underserved neighborhoods, but no one is talking about those folks. When you talk about the da's office, who are they charging? What sentences are the judges giving to black youth? So they're the ones there's there's there's a disconnect, and there's always a finger pointing at at a police. But we have to go into the entire system and see where those disparities are coming from and why black youth are being spared in this fashion and not other youth. I, I just want to say that I appreciate the work that you do, and I know that you're understaffed and you don't have enough resources to do those things that you need to do to be successful. But I would like to, I'm going to get on the, on the agenda at leipzig because I want to talk about some of those things that we can do collectively together. Even through like cease fire. They're doing a lot of good work in this area. And so I want to make sure if that's, if that's what we need to do, and I'm trying to alert the city administrator, so that we, in our next budget cycle, we can do some things that might change the game because just like my councilors talked about, we're talking about mental health services that they don't get. Those are all things that happen in Multnomah county. But I think we need to talk about the entire system. And since I haven't been privy to those conversations and what that looks like, I'd like to be able to, to put that on the desk of leipzig, since everybody is around that table and talk about how can we partner better? I just had a conversation with a guy last night who works at donald e long, and he was attacked. He got put on, not probation, but he, he is on medical leave because a 13 year old attacked him and it messed his arm up and, and all sorts of things back is messed up. And this is behind a 13 year old who had amazing strength and, he was trying to be helpful. And it's not to the kids. He can't help who he is. He, he obviously needs additional mental health services. And I was told that he's not getting the services that he needs inside. And you all talked about that. You don't do that. And so now I just thought that you did. So go ahead.
87 Councilor Smith, thank you so much for your comments. And I, I know exactly the situation that you're you're talking about. I didn't offer what we do in detention as it relates to mental health services. And we do a robust amount of things. We partner with corrections health. But what I will tell you is that in some cases that we, the kids that we have currently, some of them don't need to be in detention. They need acute psychiatric inpatient care. And we have we have kids who've been denied for such. And so our facility is not equipped to provide psychiatric mental health care for kids. Right. And so a 13 year old and honestly, we have, like I mentioned before, an 11 year old. And so when you have these kids, the kids at that age are not the problem. They have many of them have been victims themselves. And it's the situation that we're in is very unique, I think. Yeah, I think that there does we do have to have a conversation about the resources that do exist in the community. We talk about why and the kids who succeed when they go to camp tillamook, or they are sent away from Portland. Yeah, they succeed because they're taken out of the environment, but then they're brought back. And when they're brought right back into the environment, they're more susceptible to fall into the behaviors that led them to away in the first place. And I will say that the lack of independent living, some kids may not need to go back home to parents or guardians. Some kids that may not be the environment for them. And the lack of true independent living supports and resources in Multnomah county, in the state of Oregon, period. There there are none. There are virtually none that focus on independent living skills. They will give you some skills, teach you how to write a resume or do your laundry. But long term solutions, we don't have them. And that's what's needed.
88 Yeah. And so I'm glad you know, this incident happened yesterday. So I was just minding my own business, going to get some dinner and it came to my lap. Councilor this is what happened to me. And we started talking about that. But I'd heard about this kid, over the last couple of months as well. And I was, not happy to see him. And, and this, this hand brace and, and all of that. Because he truly, truly thought he was making some inroads with the kid and, was really upset, not necessarily about for himself, but he wanted to make sure that the kid was, being cared for and that he had all the resources necessary. And he said, we don't, I have referred him before to, chairwoman jessica vega peterson because of the mental health aspect of it. And, I hope the kid can get some really good help going forward because this is, this is this is serious. And, and in summary, I think that the data reflects, a substantial inequality in outcomes for black youth within the juvenile justice system, indicating that they are disproportionately impacted by confinement relative to their peers and in general population. And I know this particular kid is in, he's in lockdown for like 7 to 9 hours. That's what I heard. And that doesn't help.
89 Not at all. And coming in and the youth has been here since April. And when you're there on a charge and then you assault staff or other people, then you're likely to pick up more charges. Exactly. And so it's like a never ending cycle. And our system is just not set up for that.
90 Well thank you. If there's anything else that I can do, I am going to have my staff look at the schedule to see if I can actually get on there and see if there are some things, and I'll check back in with our folks and stephanie howard to see if there's some things that we can do. That that might help to increase the number of resources that we have. But I think we can do a little bit better with a lot more coordination. Thank you so much.
91 I know we're running way behind, but this is an important conversation. Counselors, everyone.
92 Aye, Morillo. So thank you. Director. Great to see you. I'm glad my colleagues spent a lot of time on the youth side of it. I've been to a, I've been to your facilities. I've met a lot of pretty remarkable youth, right? Really tough circumstances. And when you go just past the surface, you also get some pretty remarkable, reintegration stories or behavioral reset stories that I just think are important. So I'm not going to spend time today on youth because so many of my other colleagues, I do want to bring it back more on the adult side. So, director pena, can we can you tell us a little bit more again about I think I got this right, senate bill 1145 funding and what that means for your organization and for the I think the county jail as well.
93 Yes. Actually, I'm going to ask tiara to speak about the 1145 funding.
94 Yeah.
95 So in community corrections used to be state. State ran in 1996, senate bill 1145 was passed, and that allowed for local counties to be able to have their own community corrections. And so all but two counties, community corrections is locally controlled, which means that is ran by the county to meet the needs of their population. We are still we have to adhere to the state department of corrections, Oregon administrative rules, our intergovernmental agreement. We receive funding from the department of corrections to provide supervision, sanctions and services based on our forecasted population. That's why I mentioned what cases are funded by the state and which ones aren't. So the state covers felonies, drug enforcement misdemeanors, two specific domestic.
96 Violence covers. You mean they fund.
97 They fund it.
98 Yes. They fund. And and then a sex sex abuse, three misdemeanor. Any other misdemeanors are not funded by the state. So they are not covered under the senate bill.
99 1140.
100 Pause.
101 You right there, director.
102 So the way I want to make sure I'm interpreting this is so you're a convicted felon. You leave the state pen and now you're on parole, probation, and we're asking Multnomah county to do the job that the state is saying this person is now allowed to go be on parole. Is that the right term?
103 Post-prison supervision?
104 Most of.
105 That's the nice way to say it. Okay, so now what? We're going to do it at a local level. And I the reason I'm highlighting this is the county taking on what is a state decision that that person is reintegrating into the community.
106 Correct. Okay. So please keep going.
107 Yes. They get they get sentenced to time in prison and then they receive a post-prison reentry amount of years afterwards. The state does fund us for that post-prison reentry time frame, one year to three years, depending on the crime of conviction, length of time that they were they served in prison.
108 Great.
109 So the we are funded based on risk, which is why we reference it. Often we receive greater funding from the state for individuals that are at a higher risk to recidivate, because we need to focus more resources on those who pose the highest risk, less for those who pose a lower risk with the idea that we shouldn't be involving ourselves more than necessary. And those who pose a low risk, we need to get them referred to community treatment resources and sort of move them through the system as quickly and with as much of a touch. So the senate bill 1145 funds very basic services. It pays for a parole and probation officers, a handful of managers, some of our records technicians. It's unable to fund programs like saap, some of the more specialized programing. That is where county general fund allows us to do more in Multnomah county than many of our other partner community corrections agencies throughout the state, because they don't receive additional county general fund dollars.
110 I was at.
111 The county. We generally understood it, and I'm going to ask you if this remains true. We generally understood it, though, that the state funding for 1145 funding never kept up with the requirement that you all have to perform those duties. Is that still an accurate statement?
112 Yes.
113 That is still an accurate statement.
114 So if I were to trend line from, let's say 1998, so two years after it was enacted to now, I'd probably see a d, c, j budget that goes steeper than an 1145 budget. If I were to look at that 30 years of that, meaning that the state requires you, this is the epitome of an unfunded mandate, right? It's just a partially funded mandate at this point.
115 Correct.
116 That's how we're approaching this role that we have.
117 Yes. Okay.
118 Last long session, we brought forth the like cost per day that it cost to run community corrections. And it was 1880 per day is what it cost $18.80 that it cost to have someone on community supervision statewide. That's the average. We are not funded at 1818 per day. I think we came through getting funded at under 16, like 15 and some change. So we do a cost study every six years, which informs the state how much it costs to do this work. And what it costs is 1818 per day. That's not what we're funded at. So we're, we're running on cost of living to do this work from multiple years back. There haven't been increases.
119 Thanks.
120 The other thing I would add to that is that even though the cost study is mandated to fund to the cost study as funding is not. So that is why we have historically continue to be underfunded, even based on their own cost study of how much it costs to do the work at the local jurisdiction.
121 So Multnomah county taxpayers, they pay their state taxes, which funds the state penitentiary and that system. They pay their state taxes, that is, in theory supposed to fund 1145, and then they pay their property taxes to Multnomah county. Multnomah county has had to do is band aid the state 1145 funding with additional Multnomah county taxes to not let the hole get bigger. Right. So I'm painting a little bit of an illustration here now, director pena, a couple of years ago, you and I had a conversation and I and I, we talked about the availability of jail beds for your officers to use as I'll use layman's colloquial, just like the the backstop, right. Somebody out on probation, parole and probation supervision, whatever the right word is, they need some time. And that practice has changed significantly in the past decade based on availability of beds. Meaning there was a time maybe when an officer could refer somebody or send somebody back to jail here locally, locally in the Multnomah county jail, as a behavioral correctional kind of moment for a certain amount of time because they violated something as the jail bed squeeze has squeezed the whole system. That has also affected how your officers are able to use that. Like most last step, I guess, is that still an accurate statement? Can we talk a little bit? I don't know what the right terms of what this is called. I'm just remembering this conversation in one of our visits and what its impact is on how you work with supervised persons.
122 Yes.
123 And so we do get $1,145 can be applied towards jail beds. And historically, when we received our 1145 funding, it was a split between dcj for the probation piece for the sheriff's office, for the confinement piece, where we do essentially pay for a certain amount of beds allotted for our clients. And then lipstick actually gets a small percentage of 1145 funding as well. So two things in terms of a change of practice. So I would even say even pre the pandemic, we started looking in our own kind of research in terms of what changes long term behavior like tyra was talking about. And we know that jail does not do that. It is certainly a confinement model. There are folks that do need to be removed from the community when there is an imminent public or community or victim safety risk. But we walked away from putting people in jail for technical violations, for not reporting for drug use where there wasn't any other kind of harm to it. And so I think internally we made that shift that we were going to preserve jail beds for those that are again, posing that imminent public safety concern. And that does couple, though, with the fact that jail is expensive. And that is a resource that we want to preserve for more of our higher risk, a change that we did in fy 27, is that we actually did a swap with the sheriff. So now she is receiving what historically she would get from 1145. So dcj gave our county general funds to the sheriff, and now we are receiving the entirety of the 1145 funding, with the exception of the 2% to lipstick. And this is for a couple of reasons, it's better aligns with community corrections plan. We still do have the number of beds that are allotted for our clients, whether they're serving a jail sanction or whether they are serving a revocation that's going to happen here locally. So, but unfortunately, what that does do for d c, j is that it does make us more susceptible, susceptible. If there are additional 1145 cuts, then it would be d, c, j needing to absorb all of that reduction. And that's not going to be 4535 split like we have historically done. I hope that answers.
124 The question.
125 Very helpful. I mean, it's it's challenging because you're asking you're asking Multnomah county, asking Portland to go along with you on this idea that, you know, maybe in your words, I think the less impactful, like you violated drug use. Et cetera. Et cetera. And yet since 2020, right, my district, certainly representing downtown old town, we are constantly facing the person who has more charges than we know what to do with. And a whole lot of people who get told there's nothing that can be done. But then you find out that they're on probation, they're on parole, they violate a thing, and no one has ever put that backstop to them because we've applied a different standard or a different perspective. And while I think I used to probably fall in this category too, of thinking like drug use is a personal, you know, it's a personal assault to your own body, but it's, we've learned in these last six years that definitely has a much deeper community impact, particularly the way it has concentrated in this, I'll say this new era of drug use. And it's hard to hear about a person who's on probation, continues to make violations, and then isn't held accountable in any way that the public sees as meaningful. And so is this the right approach? What are the types of things that these these folks who are kind of on their own, they're being supervised, but they continue to have the, I'll say, low level stuff that has larger impacts eventually or leads to larger impacts. How do we work with those kind of clients? Because that's what the community talks about right now of seeing like, no solution.
126 If I just councilor I need to interrupt. We are. I really appreciate the fact that my colleagues are really interested in dcjs work, but we're way behind schedule, and I'd like to have a bit of a reaction from the city folks interact with d, c j so, director pena, could you try giving a a short answer to the councilors? You know, very large question.
127 I will do my best. And I actually realized that I did not answer a question that you asked earlier in terms of current jail capacity issues. So we do we are a part of when the jail hits, you know, the capacity issues at yellow alert where we look at the population that are serving a local sanction for us, and then we determine which of those individuals can be released early. Again, probably pre-pandemic, we could probably contribute a lot to be a relief out for the jail. That is no longer the case because again, if a client is currently in custody, it is because they are there for a community or victim safety issue. And so we will not be releasing folks early or recommending that we reduce a sanction in order to help the jail population. To your point, councilman, about the accountability piece, we do hold folks accountable. There are different varies of interventions that we can apply. There are non-custodial custodial sections, sanctions, I'm sorry, such as community service. But to your point, you're right. That is not something that is typically visible to the community or really see the impacts. And we are more than happy to follow up with you or the council on more specifics about what sanctions may or may not look like.
128 Last piece. Do you know how many out of the 36 counties in Oregon? How many have have a similar approach? Is this a metro thing? Only this is a Multnomah county thing only, or 36 out of 36 counties are now kind of doing that. That the same.
129 Way it depends on jail bed capacity. Each county is pretty unique. I previously worked in jackson county for most of my career, and there wasn't a day that went by. There were forced releases weren't part of my experience.
130 Sorry, I don't mean the matrixing. I meant the, not using jail for the.
131 Outcome specifically informs those decisions that each agency is having to make. How they determine who gets put into jail. Evidence based practices inform that we should not be using incarceration for technical violations. We have in Multnomah county, one of our three top priorities is engaging people into treatment. And so we've been doing incredibly targeted efforts to make sure that our pos are engaging people into treatment. If substance use is going untreated, it's going to exhibit itself in behaviors. Those behaviors are going to result in new crimes. Those new crimes are not technical violations. And so working with them along the way, we want to get ahead of the new crimes occurring. And so we are trying our hardest to get folks connected into treatment. Refusal to do so escalates the responses to that violation, but really connecting people to the services they need is how we can prevent the crimes from happening.
132 Thank you for coming over here.
133 Thank you so much. I'd like, there's chief hughes or director howard to come up or whoever they would like to designate to just talk briefly from the city's perspective about the collaboration with dcj.
134 Thank you so much, councilors. For the record, my name is stephanie howard. I'm the director of community safety here for the city of Portland. And deputy chief hughes is joining me. I can be very brief. I think, you know, much of the information that you shared or that was shared today is information that we are continually discussing with our partners. We are meeting regularly. We are I think this will be probably our third meeting this week. And as incidents arise, we're continually looking at how we can maximize resources, not duplicate efforts, make sure that we're identifying gaps and using whatever tools we have available to try to provide support to the folks that are within their purview, and also those that are sort of on the fringes of that.
135 Thank you, councilor, for having me up today. My name is brian hughes. I'm the deputy chief for the Portland police bureau. I just want to thank director pena and her team. She and I are now at yet another table together. Her team is constantly in the same spaces that we are at. I interact with director pena at the lipstick meetings at, the deflection, executive policy team. And, just a year ago, came across one of her parole and probation officers at a national night out party. So while they were there at director's park last week, that's not new for them. They're constantly out in the community and interacting with us and supporting us. And I just appreciate the work. And, I would also like to highlight when director pena said that their team comes in at the end, while that's true, they're not out looking for people to supervise. I would like to highlight that the people that they do supervise oftentimes, it's not well captured the amount of crime that doesn't happen as a result of their engagement with those people. So that's an important highlight. And while they do come at the end, I would say that they also come at the beginning in preventing people from continuing on, criminal past. So thank you.
136 Thank you. And I want to say I was talking to a national criminal justice researcher a couple of weeks ago who said, well, of course I know about Multnomah county dcjs innovative and effective practices. I mean, this is a organization that has been at the forefront of, you know, evidence based practices. And I really appreciate, director pena, you and your team coming here today. And thank you, chief hughes, director howard, I'm going to take a ten minute break and then I hope we can get through the legislative items like a buzz saw. Hopefully we can get through the two grant allocations quickly. And I think that we're able to simplify the psychedelic issue. And then I think that we'll have presentations on proposed amendments on the concealed carry issue. I don't think that we'll get to a vote today, but I hope we can hear from the presenters on the proposed amendments. So we will recess until 1121.
137 All right. This being the community and.
138 Public safety committee is back in session. Could the clerk please read the next item? Item three was item two, the street racing takeover grant award.
139 Item three, document number 2026-277. Appropriate grant award of $207,411 for speed racing street takeover.
140 Thank you. Please proceed.
141 Good morning. I think it's still morning. I'm here on behalf of the grants management division. Stepping in for sheila craig. My name is carrie austin. Let me. Figure out. Thank you. Does that work? Yep. Great. Anything else I need to do there? Okay, great. So we're looking at an ordinance to budget appropriation for grant award for speed racing, street takeover for $207,411. Hopefully my screen will work. Nope. There we go. This ordinance amends the budget to appropriate grant funds awarded by the state of oregon's transportation safety office into the grants fund the grant application with sap I'd pl276 was submitted on February 5th of this year. Oregon department of transportation notified the city of a speed racing street takeover grant award to the city in the amount of $207,411.35. The grant period runs from, seven, eight, 26 through 930, 26. This grant does require matching funds. The police bureau is providing those funds via straight time and associated benefits using the, excuse me, the general fund in the amount of $50,000. And as always, this grant is intended to supplement, not replace existing city revenues. So just a little bit of an overview on what this grant funds, were looking at addressing the prevalence of speed racing and street takeover through, PPB overtime missions to combat planned and ad hoc street racing slash takeover events, which traditionally involve hundreds, if not thousands of people, have led to severe injuries and deaths to bystanders and participants and routinely block important access points for first responders. Also covers coverage for responding officer overtime and associated benefits, and provides funding for the police bureau to purchase supplies and equipment such as deployable cameras to increase the effectiveness of responding officers attempts to break up existing and prevent potential street racing takeover events, and to prosecute those responsible for violating traffic law to conduct those events. That is the end of my presentation. We do have a couple folks here from PPB. If there are any specific questions or I'm happy to answer other questions about the grant award itself.
142 Thank you. Councilor Kanal.
143 Thank you. Let me ask about the portion of this that's not related to, personnel, but to technology specifically. There's, there's a drone component here. So I guess let me start with the big question, which is bigger picture question, which is, data driven traffic enforcement. And if we can get a more information on, on what that exactly means in this context.
144 Yeah, I'm going to call on we've got captain burley and lieutenant moore who have joined me and can answer some of those questions with more detail.
145 And then I guess the the question that you might be able to answer or might be theirs is, you mentioned prevent, you said, breakup existing and prevent potential street racing takeover events. And I know that there are restrictions on drone usage that have been approved by council. I think there's an open question as to how they're being used. But I wanted to ask about how, how prevention is going to occur in, in the context of that, the technology usage.
146 Great questions.
147 Thanks for being here.
148 Yeah. Good morning everyone. Chris burley I'm the captain for north precinct. I appreciate your question. Councilor Kanal. So the prevention piece is by presence. And it's also, as you said, the data driven piece and, finding information through open source media, to learn when an event might happen. We're finding that that's extremely difficult. Fortunate for us, we believe that this grant will allow us the ability, with the complexity of trying to figure out when the events are going to occur or when sometimes they say they're going to occur and they don't. It gives us that flexibility to have the presence and be able to go out and do traffic enforcement as it relates to these street takeover events, which we believe deters actions like this happening, down the road. You mentioned the unmanned aerial support units or uas, at this time based on the, the current budget, we have no intention of purchasing equipment. We're planning on using the monies that were given to towards staffing. However, we are following the standard operating procedure, which was approved by the prior city council and which is available on our website. Talking about the drone program. Again, in that we are following the directive and using drones after, criminal behavior has been, observed or is believed to be occurring.
149 Yeah. Thanks for that. Maybe in the context of this grant, because I know there's also the next legislative item. There's a little bit more specifics on it for this grant. It talks about deployable cameras. Again to what that, I mean, that might refer to existing equipment. So that that's helpful to know. But also is that referring to drones or did I make a leap there?
150 I yeah, yeah. Greg moore lieutenant.
151 Out of north. So.
152 No, it's not, it's not referring to drones or drone cameras. It's referring to cameras like gopro cameras that would be used during for collection of evidence.
153 Okay. Again, we have no intention of purchasing cameras, as part of this grant.
154 Okay.
155 I'll follow up on that because I feel like you have dash cams and body cams.
156 So we don't have dash cams though, okay.
157 In that. Okay, great. As we get into, the time period is the other question I had. This is backdated by a month. So, just wanted to understand what all the funds be spent by September 30th is. Are we going to be coming back as a, it's a relatively short grant period. So I'm just curious.
158 On that. It's a short grant period. And what typically would happen in that case is that if the funds aren't expended, there would be, an extension to the, to the contract to be able to spend those down. But that's something that, we would address as needed.
159 Okay. Thank you very much.
160 I actually had the same question. Would council, how did the extension work? Would you just be able to, would the council have to approve an extension? What would happen?
161 That's typically an administrative action. And so that's something that's executed by the city administrator.
162 Okay. Thank you. Seeing no one else in the queue, could I have a motion to refer this item to full council? The recommendation that we passed.
163 So move.
164 Then move by councilor Kanal. Seconded by councilor Smith. The clerk. Please call the roll.
165 Sure. For document number 2026-277. Morillo. I Zimmerman. I Smith.
166 I.
167 Kanal I.
168 Novick I.
169 With five eyes. The motion to refer the ordinance, with the recommendation it be passed, has passed.
170 Thank you. Please read the next item.
171 The next item. I currently item number four previously labeled as item number three. Document number 2026-278. Appropriate grant award of 103,600 and sorry. $103,069 for expanded traffic enforcement.
172 Hello again. For the record, again, my name is carrie. I'm with grants management division. And, looking at another budget appropriation for grant award. This one regarding grant award for expanded traffic enforcement for 103,006, $103,069. I had the same problem. Let's see. So this ordinance amends the budget to appropriate grant funds awarded by the state of oregon's transportation safety office into the grants fund. This grant application with sap I'd pl277, which was submitted on February 5th of this year. The Oregon department of transportation notified the city of an expanded traffic enforcement grant award to the city in the amount of $103,069. The grant period is from seven, 1426 to 9 3026. This grant does require matching funds. Ppb Portland police bureau is providing those funds using their general fund in the amount of $25,768, and the grant is intended to supplement, not replace, existing city revenues. I just a little background on the grant fund. This seeks to increase the efficiency of traffic crash investigations and to expand patrol based traffic enforcement through officer training, time associated benefits in mobile citation and drone use, mobile citation printers and associated supplies, crash investigation drones and dedicated crash investigation. Computer increased efficiency and investigations will improve the speed and accuracy of scene documentation, reduce roadway closure durations, and strengthen downstream case preparation for traffic incidents. The expansion of patrol based traffic enforcement will streamline citation issue issuance during enforcement stops. The removal of paper based processes is intended to reduce stop duration, improve officer and driver safety, and increase the feasibility of proactive enforcement during routine patrol. This will also streamline data collection and analysis to guide future enforcement resource deployments. That is the end of my presentation. I'm happy to answer questions about the award. And we also have sergeant petrov online to answer any questions about the activities, if there are any.
173 Kanal.
174 Thank you. So first question is just the same. The grant periods short, same idea as last.
175 Exactly the same situation. Yes.
176 Okay. The other question I had just on your slide, you talk about mobile citation and drone use. I just want to understand mobile applies here to drone as well. It's not just mobile citation and drone use. It's mobile citation and mobile drone use. Is that correct. Way to interpret that.
177 First. I'll call on sergeant petrov to answer that.
178 The higher bullet point there. The first one.
179 Good morning. Apologies. I have a summer flu. I'm sergeant christopher petrov of the Portland police bureau, the traffic division. And the two are actually independent. All of our uas systems are, commonly referred to. Drones are used for, photogrammetry, which is just crime scene, processing to document for mapping and whatnot. The mobile citation stuff is completely separate. What we have is a, a handheld. Our phones have a application system on them, and that allows us to electronically fill out citations, which then links to a mobile printer. And then we can print off citations. And the two are completely separate. So the, the mobile application is strictly for the printers to make the citation process much more efficient. And then the drone use is just for crash investigations, or unless we supplement another investigative unit for mapping just for crime scene purposes only.
180 Okay. Thanks. I, I'm a little confused by that, that that all makes sense to me. I'm a little confused by there's a lot of conversation here about, increasing or I should say expanding patrol based traffic enforcement. And so I'm, how does, how do these two things connect? When we're talking about primarily stops through, are these two different completely two different parts of it? How do the, how does the drones after us is after the fact relate to patrol traffic enforcement in the moment?
181 The grant is helping us purchase equipment. One one of the portions of the grant will purchase mobile printers. The traffic division does what we call a build a cop program. So we take officers from patrol and we, help rotate them through the traffic division. So we expand their abilities to do traffic enforcement, dui enforcement, dui detection, and crash investigations. So that way the printers will be used by these officers that are more inclined towards traffic enforcement to expand because our traffic enforcement numbers are limited with motor patrol car officer positions. So the broader we can get through enhanced training for border patrol officers to be interested in doing detection and traffic enforcement is where the mobile printers come in.
182 Okay.
183 And drones. Sorry.
184 Go ahead.
185 Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there.
186 Oh that's okay. And then I was the other portion of it. Another part of the equipment will be for uas systems to help us be able to broaden our ability to process crime scenes faster. So we'll have, more uas platforms to fly during a crash, especially on the more comprehensive ones where we have multiple fatalities. Or maybe we assist, the forensic evidence division or homicide and major crime scene of sorts like that. Okay. The drones are not used for traffic enforcement, any, any fashion whatsoever.
187 Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. I think that addresses the portion of my questions that relate to uas. So I'll focus on the training, the, mobile citation printers, etc. Can you thank you. Can you give some context to the data driven? What, what exactly do you mean by data driven traffic enforcement in the context of this grant or more broadly?
188 The data driven comes from multiple sources using, you know, high crash corridors, crash data, the places where fatal crashes and trauma injury crashes are taking place the most. So when we talk about data driven enforcement, we're using historical data to use to enforce traffic laws for future crashes. I guess is how I'd like to look at is we're trying to take the resources, the data that we have available so we can focus the limited resources we have in the areas where we are seeing trends of crashes going up or fatal crashes going up, like currently this year for 2026, we're working on trying to slow down motorcyclists because we've had a tremendous increase in motorcycle fatalities. So that's how we're trying to use the data to drive our traffic enforcement and focus on the areas where the the most damage and the most harm is occurring.
189 Thanks for that, sergeant. Does that also include the, injury collision data that has historically been collected in the context of stops?
190 Yes. Well, I guess what I'm not understanding what you mean there.
191 In the stops data report that pb puts out quarterly. And I guess the annual one has the benchmarking. There's a data collection related to injury collision where it measures the number of people who are involved in injury collisions and then has demographics on that group of people. And I'm curious if that is a input that you mentioned in the context of how data driven works.
192 Yeah. If we find an intersection, hypothetically speaking, we could use, second main downtown. If we had an uptick in traffic crashes there, we would focus on moving our resources there to try and slow cars down. Or if it was impairment based, trying to figure out where, how to
193 Reduce the impairment crashes and making stops to just reduce the overall harm that's happening at those intersections from traffic crashes.
194 Okay. Kind of related. But switching gears a little bit, the grant documents mention improving efficiency and accuracy in traffic stops, but nowhere do they mention improvements in equity. And so I'm curious if there is a parallel plan for what PPB is doing to ensure black and brown portlanders are not subject to continued to be subject to disproportionate traffic stops? And that's also based on the grant evaluation plan.
195 Yes, the traffic division does not focus on stopping people outside of what they actually see. That's being done in a motor vehicle or another vehicle, even like a bicyclist. Our intent is to find the vehicles that are traveling at the higher paces, or are navigating the roads in a dangerous manner, and then we stop the vehicle, like the actual driver of the car is who we contact, but it's based on our perception of what the vehicle is doing. So our intent is to never stop anyone based on, skin color or, any particular demographic. We're just focused on traffic safety, and we contact members of the community of all races and ethnicities. And, and our primary focus is just keeping everybody else safe.
196 Yeah, I appreciate that. And I'm not intending to to make a comment on intent here. I can speak to the impact, looking at the, looking at the stops data. So there are disparities, right now, and I'm curious as to how increasing and expanding this work, which is disparate, does not either perpetuate or expand that disparity and the harm caused by it.
197 I don't have a good answer for you in relation to the traffic division. I know there is. It's a complicated topic when it comes to traffic stops and what police do, whether in Portland or around the nation. But all I can say is that when we're making stops and it's in relation to the traffic division, we're not working towards any particular goal other than traffic safety. And I, I don't know the numbers. I and I can work on those to show that I don't believe the traffic division stop data would lead you to believe that we are stopping anyone. Disparately we're just working on stopping impaired drivers and speeders and people running red lights to keep everybody else safe.
198 Okay, I appreciate that. That's that that's a little concerning to me in the context of, expansion. And I want to just be clear, I'm citing my sources here. This is from pbs's own stops data reports, specifically the annual reports available at Portland.gov/police/open hyphen data slash stops, hyphen data. You know, I'm going to give a couple lists of numbers here. This is the year the percentage of drivers that traffic division stopped who are black and the percentage of the population. So, 2012 8.0% stops for black portlanders population not noted in the report, but census data shows is just shy of 6%, 2013, 7.8% stops of black portlanders population. Not noted in this report yet, but was just shy of 6% from census data starting in 2014. That is noted, it's 8.2% to 5.7% 2015 8.9 to 5.7 2016 8.8 to 6.1 2017 10.9 to 6.1 2018 10.6. It continues just inching up to where it's now. 15.4% of traffic division stops in the 2025 report, and 5.8% of the population that is black. And so there are limitations of the census, which I think the report notes, notably undercounting of people of color complication with specific racial group tracking such as middle eastern. That doesn't explain the size of the disparity nor the concerning trend line. What concerns me is that the report notes an overrepresentation of native American and indigenous drivers often, but doesn't acknowledge the disparity in other groups, including black drivers, on a regular basis because of the use of the injury collection. Sorry injury collision benchmark previously known as injury, accident. And that's concerning to me. When we talk about data and how we use it here, because after the first year of this report, 2012, which didn't have benchmarking in 2013, it was added because of the pretty clear disparity, which was much smaller in 2012 than it is now. Because it it pbb reports argue we should not compare the two numbers that I just compared the percentage of portlanders of a given racial group and the percentage of people of that racial group who are stopped by police and instead say we should compare it to injury accident data. And so I, I have more on this and I'm going to get into it, but I'm curious about the degree to which that is being reevaluated in the context of determining where to allocate and how to allocate police resources. And again, all of this, I don't know how long anyone's been here or in their current role at PPB, but my, anticipation, my assumption is that this, these practices, both in terms of how resources are deployed and how things are benchmarked, probably predates everybody who's in the role that they're in now. Ranging from yourself, sergeant, to up to the leadership. I know it predates everybody in the, chief's office now, so I'm not trying to ascribe an intent here, but to say, here's a problem that you've inherited at some point and can we fix it? So I guess the the question I'm asking right here is, do we have is there a plan to evaluate what data is used and how it is interpreted in the context of traffic enforcement? And by the way, I should note, patrol enforcement has greater, disparities than the traffic division itself. So everything I just said is actually a greater level when you go outside of the traffic division, which is both, I think a, a good thing for the traffic division and, indicative of the concern about expanding to where more parts of the bureau are involved in traffic stops on a regular basis, which is something we just talked about in the context of mobile printers. So could you speak to that at all in terms of what's being changed or what's being looked at?
199 To put it simply, we are not changing how we come at traffic enforcement because we focus on where the crashes are and the severity of the crashes. However, it doesn't mean we're opposed to changing. I guess what I would have to figure out is if we create a change, how do we be comprehensive in reducing disparate treatment that you're referring to or disparate stops? But also combating traffic crashes where we have lots of injuries, fatals. And just overall harm to the general public is what I would like to figure out, because I believe the crash data itself is super important to focus our efforts on slowing people down. And if, if that in some way is coming across as disparate, that is extremely unfortunate. But the, as I'll always say, our goal and I've been with traffic, just so you understand, I've been with the traffic division, since 2012, and I've been with the Portland police bureau about 22.5 years. So I do have some historical knowledge where a lot of this did come from, I would agree does predate me. But in that same breath, the, the statistics usually help direct us where we want to go when it involves crash and who's dying.
200 I know there are others in the queue, so I'll come back in.
201 Okay.
202 Councilor Morillo.
203 Thank you so much. Yeah, I, I had some questions along the same vein as what councilor Kanal was talking about. So I just wanted to clarify from this slide, when you're talking about doing, you know, increasing this space, are you talking about more staffing? Are you talking about increasing cameras? It's sort of unclear from that slide. What we're really talking about here.
204 We're not increasing cameras. If you're talking about are you referring to photo enforcement cameras? Or.
205 Yeah.
206 Surveillance cameras. I happen to be the photo enforcement manager. So yeah, there is a plan to increase traffic enforcement camera photo enforcement cameras throughout the city. But as in regards to camera systems for traffic stops, no, outside of the body worn cameras that we use, we don't we don't use any kind of camera system. And there's no plans on expanding any type of camera surveillance or anything in relation to traffic enforcement.
207 Gotcha. Okay. And first of all, I want to say thank you for answering all our questions while you're not feeling well today. I appreciate you. I think it would be really helpful to have a breakdown of what exactly we're buying with these dollars. Because it's a little bit unclear to me from this presentation, what exactly we're purchasing. And, you know, I'm also wondering if there is going to be a privacy impact analysis we have or assessment. I can't remember what it stands for exactly, but we do have the data privacy office now at the city of Portland. We are actively establishing it as we speak. And I think that, I'm going to be really pushing for in the coming months, both for, you know, this item, the last item that anytime the city is bringing in new technology, I have questions, or just increasing surveillance and storing that data, right? Whether it's with a camera or with a person who's just actively engaged in tracking that on their own. How is that information being stored? What is it going to be used for in other contexts? These are the types of things that I would want to know through a privacy impact assessment that would go through the data privacy office. And there's also questions for me about, the vendor, the deployment of these technologies. So are we going to be, expanding the existing uses of this technology or are we getting new ones? And I really firmly believe moving forward that as a council, we need to make sure that the privacy impact assessment happens long before we are deploying or purchasing new tech. It doesn't there's a chicken or egg situation here. And we have to have that assessment beforehand. So, are there any plans to do that before this moves forward?
208 Currently are the uas platforms that we use are the only ones that are authorized to use. I, I would not say it's new technology, it's just current technology that we have. And we don't use them for surveillance of whatsoever in the traffic division. These are strictly for crime scene management and documentation. So if, if any public, any citizen in the city of Portland is impacted by this, like if a car crash happens and it goes out of private property, we actually have to get consent from the property owner for us to fly over their property. So we're in no way trying to collect data that's not in a public space. So we can only use it over private property and record their property where something has occurred. If we get their permission. Outside of that, a lot of our, uas systems are done for fly thrus, which are at a low level. We do aerial scanning and the drone only follows a mapped out portion for the crash scene. And it's recording that. And then it's all just internal police bureau data. I mean, people could obviously make public records requests, but in general, the data that we're using is just for the crime scene. And we do not use the platforms for any other purpose.
209 Gotcha. And I definitely understand, you know, that there's not the intent to collect that data, but sometimes the reason that we have those privacy impact assessments beforehand is because that data collection may be recurring regardless. And so I think it's really important for us to do it beforehand. But what I'm hearing from you is that you're saying that there's not there are no new applications as of as of right now for new vendors.
210 No, what we're purchasing is just the actual equipment. We're not we don't use an, I guess a vendor, like for the photo enforcement program, we had to go out and outsource and get a company to come in. These are just the actual uas platforms that we fly on the scene. So we buy the equipment, we keep the equipment, we maintain the equipment, it's all logged, and all the uas systems that are assigned to traffic are in an inventory assigned to us. And so any transfer change of hands or any of that stuff with the uas systems is all documented, but we're not using, I guess again, we're not using new technology. We're just trying to, maintain our current technology and add to it a little bit so we can manage more complex crime scenes easier. That's where our efficiency comes in. If, if we, for an example, if we had a crash, which has occurred, unfortunately off of, say, the, morrison bridge where the car exits the roadway from the bridge and lands down below. Those are very complex and very difficult scenes to just use our faro scanner, which is a 3d scanner that does the mapping. So now we have the ability to use the uas system. So we could, use one on top and one below and split our crime scenes up and actually make it so we can open up the bridges and the roads faster and remove the vehicles that are damaged. And that's how we're using our uas systems.
211 Gotcha. Yeah, I think I think I'm beating a dead horse a little bit. I would say that the purchasing of any new equipment, even if it's old equipment, means that we're expanding the data collection that we're doing, which means that we do need to have, a privacy impact assessment regardless. And so, you know, it, what you're describing to me does sort of sound like a new application of the existing technology. And I am not anti-technology, I think it can be used for great things. I just want to make sure that we start getting into the habit at the city of now that we have this new data privacy office that councilor, Novick and I cosponsored, that we are going to be actually using it and getting these impact assessments before moving forward with new technology purchases and expansion. But I really appreciate the background and I think I am again, just beating a dead horse here. So, just know that moving forward as these things come to the committee and to council as a whole, they're the types of questions that I will continue to ask. Thank you.
212 Thank you. And I was not insinuating that we should not have a privacy impact statement if I came across that way. I'm just saying no.
213 No, not at all. Thank you.
214 Councilor Zimmerman.
215 Thank you. I know we've delved pretty far into the policy side of this. Getting back to just the 103,000 and I'm sorry, can you say your name again? I'm not sure.
216 Hari.
217 Hari. Hi, carrie. I'm looking at the document as it was posted and it's I'm looking at this budget impact chart here. It has some numbers, but it has no other information. Can you help us understand? I think councilor Morillo alluded to it. What is it actually paying for in this? Do we know anything?
218 Those numbers refer to different you know, it might refer to personnel. I don't have it in front of me, so I can't look at it specifically, but it might refer to, you know, that it pays for personnel or that it pays for equipment. Just the different things that we spend on when we do our ledgers. What we could do is get you an accounting of what specifically the budget will be.
219 Are you I'm sorry, are you police bureau? Are you?
220 No, I'm in grants management.
221 Grants office. So, I'm using this as an example, but, mr. Administrator, this document is not a helpful document because I think I would want that. Right. But I would want that in this. And, this ain't my first government, but this is my first one where this continues to happen. And no one will submit a document for budget impacts that actually just says what it is that's being funded. And so I've said this now more times to the budget office than I can count. And yet this is the standard that they continue to put forward. And the reason I'm upset about that is that it allows us to spend 30 or 40 minutes on $103,000, because we don't actually know what we're talking about. And your central budget office is now putting, I think, other bureaus, our grants folks, others who are kind of in the in the sights of council because we don't have the information we need. But this is because this is the product they get from our budget office. So I am highlighting some disappointment because of how much this keeps happening. And this is a symptom of a much bigger problem. So this is not a you thing. I'm going to support this 100%. I do appreciate the questions I'm keeping in mind. This is $103,000. But sometimes the lack of information allows us to not understand and spend a lot of time on some of the things, because I have a feeling I know what these all are. To your point, some personnel, some equipment. And unfortunately the document doesn't have that. Thank you.
222 Thank you, councilor Zimmerman. I put myself in the queue because, I'd like to get through this and get to the psychedelics issue and councilor Kanal, I know you put yourself back in the queue. My impression is that you are planning to vote no because you have some big questions about traffic enforcement in general that you need to have answered before you voted. Yes. So if that's true, I'd like you to quickly ask whatever other questions you have.
223 Councilor. Novick, I appreciate that. I will say that this could be the agenda, could be reordered to get something higher up. I obviously have interest in making sure we discuss psychedelics as well, but I think that this particular area of pb's work has benefited from a lack of scrutiny over well over a decade now, due to the racial disparities in traffic stops that have been brought up primarily in the Portland committee on community engaged policing. And really only there. So, you know, coming off if you'd like, but I have a lot of questions that I want to get through. I got through my first half and I'm going to do the rest here. The 2000s.
224 I kind of think that, we can arrange for a session about disparities in traffic stops and how they make sure that we've got all the relevant, police brass here. I chief hugues, you're still here, I think. I actually think that at a minimum I perhaps, possibly we should ask chief hugues rather than sergeant petrov to answer big policy questions.
225 That is very fair. And I whichever person in say broadly, I welcome it. I have made requests in the past that the data piece of this be handled by enterprise services as well. So that is not in-house. But I appreciate you being here, chief hughes.
226 Thank you, councilor Kanal, for the question there regarding, what you're going to ask some questions, but I'd like to flag. First of all, my name is brian hughes, deputy chief, Portland police bureau. I do I do agree with councilor Novick. I think this warrants more attention and probably in a separate setting. We are aware of the data that you have mentioned regarding stops data. And as you said, the chief's office has you know, we're all relatively new in our positions up here, but acknowledge that the disparities do exist and warrant additional exploration as to why. So I want to give time for that to be properly explained, to bring the relevant stakeholders here, to be able to more thoroughly answer your questions.
227 That's fair. I think the challenge that I have is I'm being asked to expand something without knowing that. And so I was not intending to vote no on this. My intent was to ask that we have equity added in to the evaluation piece, and to ask for that to be added before we're asked to vote on it at all. Because as I mentioned, the evaluation component of this grant from the documents refers to efficiency and accuracy, which are also valid goals and should not be supplanted in any way. Those should remain, but also add equity because I think the challenge here is free money is good. I think that's that's fair. Obviously not free in the sense of you applied for it and earned it. I don't mean to imply otherwise, but money that is not coming from the city budget, that use that is paid to cover costs of the city is good. But I want to make sure that we're not expanding something without, at a minimum evaluating it, on the core values of the city in addition to, understanding the nature of this particular area of work. And obviously I voted for the other grant. I'm not, I have questions there. I don't have a concern about that grant. But for this particular one, I think it's worth asking for a pause to ensure that those documents and that evaluation process includes an equity component before being asked to expand it. And so that's why it doesn't make sense to me to, just vote this through without having that conversation. Is that something that can be added to the evaluation process, the grant evaluation plan, specifically.
228 In putting forward an application or in accepting the award or which stage are you referring to?
229 Not the application because that's already happened, but the, acceptance of the award since we're discussing that now, but also after the award is accepted, right?
230 I mean, I would say that the award agreement, you know, goes through attorney's office scrutiny for those sort of elements, and it is signed by the city administrator.
231 Okay.
232 I see a city administrator.
233 There is an equity component of it, but I'm just emailing latricia, our chief equity officer, to see how she can get more engaged in kind of these conversations as well. So we'll work on that process because I understand exactly what you're saying and the comments that you're making. So we'll most definitely look into it and follow up with you on that process.
234 Yeah, and I appreciate that. The thing I wanted to mention, you know, in the report, which talks about the annual report, which mentions not only traffic division stops, but, but patrol stops, in a traffic context and also focus intervention team stops. Basically all stops are in that report. There used to be another benchmark, which was also not census data. And it was called the crime victimization benchmark to pedestrian stops. And I think this got added in 2013, 2014 back then as well. And you'll notice there's a, there's a fairly long, area in all these reports that explains why pbb feels that's the appropriate benchmark to use. But in 2025 report, it offers a stunning and I use that word with very high praise to pbb, a stunning reversal of this practice, because that practice had been criticized just as roundly as the injury collision benchmark for the traffic division. The second benchmark is no longer being used. And the report quotes, you know, for the 2025 annual report, all driver stops, regardless of the operational unit, were benchmarked against the injury collision benchmark, end quote. So I, I want to bring that up to highlight that pb has listened on that one, has reevaluated it and has chosen not to use that benchmark anymore. The thing that is being used now for all the other non traffic division stops is now the same as this one. And I think this one also needs that evaluation. And so I want to first thank the pb even though it's outside the scope of this grant for the change on the crime victimization benchmark. But also rethink strongly the or ask for the rethinking of using injury collision data as a way of justifying, again, not applying, ascribing intent here, but impact, justifying a higher level of stops for black portlanders. And I'll note there are other disparities which are acknowledged, including the indigenous, stops data by the way, historically, but that's, that's what I'm effectively asking for in the context of this.
235 Okay.
236 Councilor Kanal, I think that we should schedule some time in this committee to talk about the issue of disparities in traffic stops. But we should.
237 Fund the disparities.
238 Well, I, I, I don't think that $103,000 grant, is, is, you know, where, not the entire hierarchy is here to discuss the policy issues is the appropriate time to have this big, big policy discussion. I mean, you shared it. I appreciate you sharing it. And I want to get a broader discussion on the agenda. But I don't think that we're going to resolve your issues, today on this issue. And I think that we should, I want to hear from. Councilor. Morillo. But I would like to move to a vote on this narrow issue, scheduled future time on the general issue of disparities in traffic stops, and hopefully get to the next item on the agenda. Councilor. Morillo.
239 Thank you, chair. Novick. I, I have to say, I think this is a very backwards because it doesn't really matter that the grant award is small. The reality is that this is an expansion of an area of surveillance that has had really detrimental impacts to black and brown portlanders. So the idea that this is a scheduling issue as far as how we schedule these meetings and what is put on the agenda, we spent over an hour talking about a county program that we don't even have direct influence or oversight over. And we spent a bunch of time talking about that. This is something that we have direct responsibility to that can impact the lives of portlanders very heavily. So I agree with what councilor Kanal is saying, and I would love to work with our new, equity director to talk about when the data privacy office is also consulted because policy and funding go hand in hand. They are never separate. They are always intricately intertwined. And so it doesn't make sense to me to fund something before we know the policy impacts of it. So I am curious, does this particular grant have to move through today, or is this something that can be discussed at the next council meeting's agenda? Because I don't think it's fair that we should continue to rush certain portions of the agenda, that people have strong questions about, that we directly impact, while also taking a very long time to talk about things. We don't really have direct oversight over.
240 Councilor Smith.
241 That's not answering my question. Can we hold off the the vote for this grant?
242 I carry is is there an urgency in accepting the grant?
243 Are you asking me?
244 Yes.
245 Oh, sorry, I didn't realize.
246 Can I.
247 I'll defer to my colleague ben.
248 My name is, for the record, ben Smith, and I'm a grant analyst with the grants management division. And PPB is one of the bureaus in my portfolio. There is a bit of an urgency. So this the grant period is ends on September 30th. We've, we've mentioned that there is the possibility of extension, what that will look like, what the possibility of that or what the actual, potential of that. I'm not quite sure because this is a pass through from ODOT, from nhtsa. And in order to get an extension, it may look like a carryover. It may look like we have to reapply for a new grant. There isn't a guarantee because they would have to get approval to spend their funds in the next federal fiscal year from nhtsa and working in federal grants right now. It says the national highway transportation safety administration, will could take months. We may not know. And so if, the sooner this is appropriated, the better.
249 So it has to be done before September 30th. You said, is there another caps meeting before September 30th.
250 There is, I, I, I think that we should take some real time in a future meeting to talk about the broader issue. And in response to your previous comment. Councilor. Morillo. If I had been told that this $100,000 grant item was going to be used as a forum for much broader discussion than I would have scheduled more time for it, I was not aware that this was going to be the subject of much broader discussion until about half an hour ago. So I frankly would like to move ahead, vote on this, have the larger discussion later. And I'm going to ask councilor Smith to ask whatever questions she has to ask.
251 Thank you. I do agree with you. Councilor. Novick. I think we need to vote on this. This money comes from the feds that is passed through through ODOT, that we need to do this before the next fiscal year for the federal side. And this is a bigger conversation. It's not a caps conversation. This is a policy conversation, a budget overall. This is something that needs to come through the committee of the whole. Councilor Kanal. We don't have the, the time or the resources to, to nitpick this process. It's already in process and it is actually going to do something to help streamline the data that we have. And I'll be supporting, pushing this through right now. Councilor. Novick.
252 Thank you, councilor Councilor Kanal.
253 Yeah, just I want.
254 To point out in the last item that the one that, the county item that the councilor Aye, Morillo mentioned. And by the way, I agree with councilor Maria's other questions about this item as well. We talked about disparities there and the, the grounds for determining a disparity was comparison to the census data. So I think it's really important that we observe that that standard is common. And the fact that we are not even acknowledging that a problem exists while simultaneously being asked to expand it by, I understand $100,000 is not a big amount. I don't want to expand something that's a problem by a dollar. If we are not able to have the conversation about how to make it not a problem. And I think that's a fair thing because at some, I mean, we're going to be voting on this. It's going to be our stance on whether or not to accept this money, which also means whether or not to do this work that is funded by the grant. And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it. It just means that we should evaluate whether to do it.
255 I understand your position, I. Can I have a motion to move this item to full council with the recommendation to be accepted.
256 So moved.
257 Do I have a second?
258 Second.
259 The clerk. Please call the roll.
260 All right. Morillo.
261 No.
262 Zimmerman. I Smith. I Kanal. No Novick.
263 I,
264 With three eyes and two nose. The motion to refer the document. Sorry to refer the ordinance document number 2026-278 to city council with a recommendation. It be passed, has passed.
265 Thank you. Could you call the next item?
266 Item number five, shown on the agenda as item number six. Document number 2026-186. And psychedelic health and safety code and create the Portland psychedelic advisory commission ad code, chapter 14 b .140.
267 Please proceed.
268 Good morning, chair Novick, members of the committee, thank you for having us here this morning. I am courtney moran here on behalf of the Portland psychedelic society action fund. I believe our sponsors or their staff are on their way up here, but I will just get started. Thank you for the opportunity to continue this discussion today. We've really appreciated the collaboration and the efforts made by our sponsors and members of the committee, and also the county health department since the last hearing, to address some of the questions that came up during the last hearing regarding the creation of the advisory commission, would you like me to pause, devin, so you can.
269 Take it away?
270 So while we had hoped to advance the ordinance with the creation of an advisory body as originally introduced, our board understands that the committee has not yet been able to agree on amendments for language on the commission. As such, we understand that councilor Kanal amendment will likely get brought forward again this morning. And we are, as a board supportive because we do not want the concerns around the commission to prevent the de-prioritization ordinance from passing out of committee to the full council today. And as such, we will respectfully ask for your yes votes on the de-prioritization ordinance to move to the full council. Thank you.
271 Thank you. Councilor Kanal do you want to move your amendment?
272 Sure.
273 If there's a right time there. Yeah. I, first off, thank you for being here as well, devin, as well. I see you, I formally move amendment Kanal one, just to speak to what it does. The amendment removes directive b in the underlying ordinance. It makes an amendment to subsection 14, b .140.010 c, which is new code being added in. Exhibit a that just references the creation of the advisory body, and then it removes exhibit b in its entirety, which has information specific to that. And I would ask for a second.
274 Second. Counselor Zimmerman.
275 Can you I mean, this has been going on a while. I'm starting to lose the thread a little bit. Like what was the you made some arguments about why the advisory board and the advisory body. I thought that maybe you were going to say what they would advise on would change, like harm reduction. I agree it's really not a city role, but, maybe they would advise on enforcement practices. So can you articulate why you want to get rid of this body? Because I, I'm not sure I'm supportive of this change yet.
276 Well, my understanding was the intent of the proponents was for this body to, among other things, provide essentially public health advice to advise people on the appropriate use of psychedelics. And I was concerned about potential liability for the city. If there was a city body that was giving advice on that. I was concerned about our capacity to even figure out who the right people were to be on this body. And I'm concerned, it seemed to me that this is a public health issue that I would have expected the county to take on. So I was simply uneasy about the idea of having a city advisory body on, on psychedelics, given that it's something that we'd have much expertise in, I actually was willing to continue the conversation and see if some of my concerns can be addressed. And I did not tell the, the proponents that I was just that I was insisting on stripping this out. But since the proponents are comfortable with moving forward with just the deprioritization and putting a pause on the advisory body, I was willing to accept that suggestion.
277 Councilor Kanal anything else?
278 Yeah, I appreciate.
279 Courtney, being clear about what the relative priorities are. And I think that the idea of doing the, the primary purpose of city legislation now and not delaying on that while we figure out what might be possibly a good way to do an advisory body is, is one of the big reasons why this isn't a wholesale, write a rewrite of exhibit exhibit b, but is instead a removal, everything that that councilor Novick said. As someone who staffed five different bodies, related to police, I can't speak for psa, but I don't know that we need another advisory body to advise the Portland police bureau at this moment. I only advise five of them. There are many others that I didn't directly work with, but had the sort of knowledge of. And then the last thing I'd say is, I think that without that comprehensive conversation, I don't like the idea of not being fully developed enough where we're asking volunteers to step into something that is going to be, outside of the scope of the city, meaning that their advice would not be able to be heeded by the city. And I can tell you from talking to volunteers, I tried to do exit interviews as people left. That's something that was concerning to me is the idea that I'm here, I'm talking about it, I care about this issue and I'm putting in free time as a volunteer without the ability to be successful. So those are all the reasons I will say that for, for me, I would be, very open to the conversation about what to do. It just doesn't have to be through this particular legislative item. And I do want to commit again, to having that conversation, separate from this.
280 And then from the proponents perspective or sponsors perspective, the reason that you all wanted an advisory panel or advisory body to the city of Portland, would you mind restating that?
281 My name is max kellerman. I'm the executive director of the Portland psychedelic society. Can you please repeat the question stated?
282 They're asking us to cut out a thing you like. I'd like to know why you like.
283 It.
284 Why we liked it. Because this is a very fast moving, field of research and study right now. The impacts on policy and communities is real. And so bringing experts together to help advise legislators, bureaucracy, would be advisable. And that's what we want to bring to the table of what's already happening in the field already in our city and our state and beyond. To bring it to the table of the city, the county, and the state.
285 Okay. I think last time I highlighted some challenges here, which is I don't see the county public health department promoting, right? This is this balance between harm reduction and promotion. And I've said on the record many times in terms of this aspect of the county's public health, I don't think they have a great record. The. It gives me a little bit of pause in. The. I don't know the right word is. But we, we decriminalize this thing that will then be available with a void of information about it. I don't know. I didn't know that this was being developed. So I, I am reacting a little bit just since late last night, frankly. So I, I'm going to actually just hold my comments. I'd like to see where others questions go. Thanks, councilor.
286 Can I add just a few comments here? I just want to clarify. We are not decriminalizing. It's just a de-prioritization, for law enforcement. So that is not something that the city can do that has to be done at the state level. And that's not what the ordinance does. The other piece is that the advisory body was never intended to promote use. It was to have a group of experts available to the city to provide evidence based information, as the police need it for any sort of implementation or for guidance or for the council as they want to develop future policies. So there's never any intent to encourage use. It's really just to provide that evidence based information and have a group of experts available to all of you, to the mayor's office, to the city, to our our police bureau. I think.
287 That thank you. You said it so much better than I. I think the point there was something attractive in the original ordinance, which was a de-prioritization. Thank you for correcting me. De-prioritization. And how to implement that, meaning law enforcement knows what drugs are. They know how to enforce drugs. I know what a nail is if I'm a hammer, but if I need to do something a little different, I might need to be advised on on the other tools. And so there was an aspect of that that was attractive to me that now taking this out puts us into a little bit of a decision advisory void space. So I think that's what I'm probably wrestling with. So I appreciate that. Again, I'm going to kind of listen to the rest of the conversation on the, on.
288 I think that's a very fair comment back. And I just want to also say that the advisory body was not necessarily to advise the police on their implementation, but more to serve as a reference for the police in their own implementation of the ordinance. If they needed access to information or experts or some other type of resources that they would have a group to go to that has been vetted for their access.
289 Thank you for that.
290 Yeah, I think the.
291 Two things that were brought up, last time and not yet on this one is, is one, the responsibility level of jurisdictions, meaning a lot of this is about, I mean, as we just heard advising the, the county and the state, but once again, the, the them, not those two jurisdictions not taking on this work means that us with our limited tax, taxing authority would be asked to take on a job that would be better done at another jurisdiction, in my opinion. I do see a merit in the idea that I can't remember who brought it up a couple of weeks ago about seeing if we could work together like Multnomah youth commission type of thing. But that's not something we can do unilaterally through an exhibit here. The exhibit b is not in my amendment because my amendment just removes it. So for for reference, it's not in there, but you can see the file if you go to the, the page for just this proposed ordinance. And, you know, first thing is, is harm reduction research and recommend evidence based harm reduction approaches. Second thing is study the use of natural psychedelics in alleviating alcohol or opioid dependency and other addictions. Third thing is the strategic plan for benchmarks for city consideration about natural psychedelics being used safely. It also includes the low priority for law enforcement. So two and a half of the first three are sort of outside the scope. And as you continue down it, a lot of it is things that I actually very much support. And I think it's great to do, but a lot of it is outside the scope of what the city does in terms of the, I think councilor Zimmerman's point about, advisory deficit, I think that it may be worth considering how to ask for. I mean, there is a behavioral health unit advisory committee that has some, interest and has discussed this at PPB, not to the degree of the expertise that that something like this would would be seeking to do. But I do think that there are places for entry into that space that don't necessarily require a new body. Yeah. Thank you.
292 Thank you, councilor. Seeing no one else in the queue. Bless you. Could the clerk call the roll on this amendment?
Procedural episode · turns 293–301
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293 Sure. Kanal.
294 On the amendment.
295 I Morillo. Apologize.
296 I sorry.
297 Oh, apologies. I called you out of order.
298 Oh. That's okay. Because I think it's what's needed to make sure the broader policy passes. I.
299 Zimmerman.
300 No.
301 Smith.
302 No.
303 Novick.
304 I with three eyes and two nays. The motion to amend the directive in the ordinance and subsection and remove subsections a out of exhibit a and exhibit b has passed.
305 Any discussion on the underlying ordinance. Councilor Kanal.
306 Yeah. Now that that has passed, and thank you, colleagues, for the support for that. This ordinance is a great thing and I'm very glad to the sponsors for putting it forward. I think as I read through the code, it's pretty clear and it aligns with some of the other, things we've heard from not only the police bureau, but broadly the administration about sort of how we should prioritize our efforts with limited, resources and a need for, for ordering of priorities. I think that the, the statement in the ordinance language that, that particularly talked to me was about the effectiveness of law enforcement prioritization. I think we've had this conversation in 15 different ways in the, in the council, but, defining low priority as having quote, I think this is a quote, little or no measurable negative impact on the health, safety and welfare of the public. But also stating that that, enforcement of this will generally get addressed, if at all, after higher priority crimes is clear that we're not completely stepping away from this, but just having a, a clear measurement and order of, of operations and a priority. So I'm very supportive of this. I appreciate the work of the sponsors in developing it in the first place, as well as the advocates. I know some of the others are not just at the table I see in the back as well. So thank you.
307 Councilor Smith.
308 Thank you. Thank you, councilor Novick. I asked this question in committee on June 2nd, and I asked it again on June, July 7th. And I have yet to get a clear answer. If this is already a low priority for PPB, what is the purpose of putting in an ordinance if PPB decides to make it a high priority at any point, then they can do that. Even if we pass this ordinance, it is up to PPB at their discretion to determine and prioritize based on the need of the community. So I will ask the question again if it is already a low priority for police, why are we putting this forward?
309 I'm happy to share. Go ahead.
310 Nathan?
311 Yeah, please. Thank you for asking the questions. And those two committees, you also asked it in a meeting that we had with you, and all three times we've answered it. We've also sent an faq that answered this question. So to offer it again, there's a public policy best practice, which is that when a social norm or a practice of a bureau, whether it's police or the bureau of sustainability, is doing something that is out of alignment with a directive or a law, it's to change things, to reflect the reality. There's a principle in city planning, which is if somebody keeps walking across a path that has no paver or no pathway, it's not to try to get people to stay on the path if it's not actually efficient or what people need is to put the path down. So there is a thing that's a little bit, effervescent. It's a little bit difficult to explain. The word that we use in all of our answers is to ensure that everyone has the same psychological safety when, dealing with these nontoxic non-addictive plants and fungi. And so the limited research that we have shows that there's roughly some number of tens of thousands of portlanders who have experienced these, what we call medicines, mushrooms. They look like vines. This is the kind of thing that the commission could help detail and show photos of. I'm not sure if people know what ayahuasca looks like, and so just. That's the purpose of the commission. In the absence of it, we will still put up our own resources. We will still try to help educate folks so that people do not have to spend money. They don't have to try to find, you know, forgiveness to their parents or whatever. So that's it's a little bit challenging. It's not a bumper sticker, but enshrining in a, in a, in a, in law or a directive what is already a practice. And to help ensure that they're going, you know, limited resources, they're going after things that they want to focus on is part of it. And then psychological safety being shared by everybody. So it's not just folks who, feel comfortable breaking the law, can find the healing. So.
312 And I'd also like to.
313 I understand that and the psychological safety, I don't think you can legislate that because if we could have, I would have gotten some legislation to give me some psychological safety. When my black son goes out at night to go party, to make sure that he comes home safe and that he's not shot by someone or the police. So I don't know that this is the same thing. I still think that if we are already not giving this a high priority and no one has lost their life, or there are no physical things that have happened to people who are using these psychedelics. I'm still not understanding why we have to put this into code, because they can change their mind at any time to make something a priority, and we can't do anything about that. I don't have the ability to prioritize what the police, what they put into, you know, what, what, where they spend their time or their energy or their priorities. So I'm still not understanding. The answer is to give people psychological, comfortability.
314 Safety, safety.
315 You do, you do have the ability that is the job is to help inform directives and support law enforcement. So I don't.
316 Know.
317 I do.
318 Agree, I.
319 Don't know how to explain.
320 Not doing something different.
321 Nathan. If they're doing something different from what they're saying, if they're saying, oh, we're not making this a priority, but yet they're targeting folks who are using this, then I can say, oh yeah, you say it's, it's, it's a low priority, but you keep, you know, putting folks in, you know, in harm by, by enforcing it at a greater rate than you say that you're, you're, you're prioritizing it. So if that was the case, then, then I would be like, yeah, we need to put something in code to protect folks. But they're not, they're, they're not bothering anybody.
322 I hear your point. In 2017, when there was a renewed force to a renewed push to move people out of the country, even if they were here legally, we renewed our and I worked on this policy. We renewed our our sanctuary city law. And the pushback from some was, why do this? It's not a problem yet. I don't know how to explain that other than that is a well traveled policy and cultural phenomenon where we change laws to.
323 Reflect a cultural norm.
324 Over at the county, me and chair kafoury, we sponsored that in the past because we wanted to give people the sense that that we would not be coming for them because there was a direct threat coming from the federal government. And I don't see a direct threat coming from the city police in regards to this. That's all I'm saying. I look, you may have your votes for it and it's fine. I'm just saying, I don't see that there's been direct threats to this group of people from city police.
325 Doing anything.
326 Different from what they've said they were doing.
327 Totally agree. And it's not really about them. It's the people that we talk to, which is a ton of people who are living in the 56th anniversary of the drug war. And that is the thing that they can't detach between certain bureaus and agencies. They don't know what the acronym is. And so it is, if you talk to a person in this space, I think you'll I think you'll be happy with what you hear because nothing you're saying is off. But but it is different than the experience, the people on the ground that we're talking.
328 We need we need to wrap this up. We're over time. We need to let the clerk's office go councilor Kanal quickly.
329 Yeah.
330 I find it.
331 I thank you for the answer. I think there's a broader conversation that we need to have later about what our role is. If PPB decides this is a quote, if PPB decides to make it a high priority at any point, then they can do that. Even if we pass this ordinance, it's up to PPB, end quote. I think implies that either PPB will be breaking the law, or that the legislative body of the city is an advisory group. I think neither of those is true. And so I think we should put this forward and understand that we have a legislative role as a city. Thanks.
332 City council. Okay. Seeing no one else in the queue, do we have a motion to, send the underlying ordinance to full council, the recommendation to be adopted? Did we already have that moved? What?
333 So moved.
334 Okay, councilor Morillo moves councilor Kanal seconds. Could the clerk please call the roll?
335 Sure. For document number 2026-186 Morillo. I Zimmerman. Aye, Morillo Smith.
336 No.
337 Kanal.
338 Thanks to the sponsors I.
339 Novick I,
340 With a vote of four eyes and one nay, the motion to refer the ordinance as amended, document number 2026-186 to city council with a recommendation. It be passed, has passed.
341 Thank you. And thank you. With that, this meeting of the committee on community and public safety is adjourned.
342 Thank you.