The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-05-13
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (20,670 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Portland City Council's Community and Public Safety Committee met on Tuesday, May 13, 2025, beginning at 2:32 p.m., with roll call, a statement of conduct, and unanimous approval of prior meeting minutes. The bulk of the session was devoted to discussion of the Mayor's proposed budget for the Community and Public Safety service area, with committee members allotted time to ask clarifying questions and outline potential amendments to be formally introduced at the full budget committee. Topics covered included overtime reduction strategies and monthly oversight meetings for police and fire; grant funding timing and intergovernmental revenue fluctuations; a proposed cut and reallocation involving Portland Police Bureau welfare-check response and possible savings; proposed increases to Portland Bureau of Emergency Management staffing, including 24/7 watch capacity, funded potentially through council office budget reductions; funding for a neighborhood district attorney program serving the Rockwood area; a call allocation study examining which responder types should handle certain call categories; Portland Fire and Rescue apparatus replacement funding; body-worn camera program funding; school resource officer costs; and questions about prior spending on protest preparedness. Discussion also touched on staffing levels, succession planning, and organizational structure within the Police Bureau. Some figures presented, such as intergovernmental revenue and specific program allocations, were stated inconsistently across speakers. No votes were taken during this session; the next committee meeting was scheduled for May 27.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
0 Good afternoon everyone.
1 Good afternoon.
2 I call this meeting of the community and public safety committee to order. It is Tuesday, may 13th at 2:32 p.m. Diego, will you please call the roll?
3 Claudia Morillo.
4 Novick here.
5 Novick here. Zimmerman. Here. Smith. Here.
6 Canal here. Christopher, will you please read the statement of conduct?
7 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 in the committee agenda at ed.gov. Council agenda. Slash community and public safety committee. Or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In person, testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item. Individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise. Your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The chair preserves order disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, state your name for the record. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent and virtual testifier should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
8 Thank you, diego and christopher. Colleagues. Today we have two items on our agenda, the first of which is the approval of committee minutes, the second of which is a discussion on the mayor's proposed budget for community and public safety. As a side note, we'll see if we can get that url changed to something shorter. So it's like caps or something in the future, but we'll get there. We imagine that the approval of committee minutes will not take that long, and we'll spend most of our time on the latter conversation. On the mayor's proposed budget for community and public safety, we're intending to take the time to ask questions, as well as to have each councilor Have the opportunity to give comments and potentially offer amendments. This is one of the many times that we have the opportunity to do that, and probably lean over to my colleague, councilor Zimmerman, as chair of the finance committee. If we do anything we're not supposed to do. But yeah, that's that's basically today's agenda in a nutshell. There's not any proposed legislation, just this presentation and discussion.
9 Chair. Can I can I comment on one thing you said? I would encourage folks, if you have amendments, now's a good time. You could discuss them, but they will be considered an actual amendment if you read them at the full budget committee, not if you read them here.
10 Thank you everybody.
11 This is a good information gathering time. Just to clarify that. Thank you. Thanks, chair.
12 Thank you. With that, diego, will you please read the first item.
13 Item one minutes approval committee meeting minutes include the disposition agenda, which documents the actions committees take on each agenda item. The minutes also include the closed caption file, a speaker list, and audio files for each meeting. Minutes are presented for approval once a month for the previous month's meetings.
14 So moved.
15 Great. Well, that makes it easy. Minutes are generally approved by unanimous consent. Without objection, the minutes are approved. Thank you. Diego, will you please read the second item?
16 Item two discussion on the mayor's proposed budget for community and public safety.
17 Great. And so again, we'll use this time and committee to discuss the public safety service area budget in more detail. Although we can also ask questions and raise issues that are related to the broader community and public safety context that are outside of this service area, that that's not what our presenters are here to discuss, though. So just a little clarification there. We can ask any clarifying questions, discuss any potential amendments. If community members, committee members are ready to share. We did have a public safety budget work session on April 16th, prior to the mayor's release of the proposed budget. At that time, we were unable to respond to the mayor's proposal since we hadn't seen it. And our next public safety service area budget work session is on may 28th. After we do the approval process of the budget, we will still have the ability to make small changes to the approved budget between may 21st and the final adoption in June, but today is the primary forum, as well as our next committee meeting, to get any information we need from the psa prior to the may 21st budget approval. We have not requested presentations from the bureaus today. I use the word presenters in error earlier since we have received several budget presentations here already. Instead, we're going to open it up to committee members for initial responses to the mayor's proposed budget for community and public safety and for clarifying questions. However, we do have psa leadership here, budget staff and cbo staff in chambers to answer questions. As a framework for the discussion, I would suggest that we first focus on initial responses and clarifying questions for the service area by office or bureau, beginning with the office of the dca and sort of service area wide questions before moving on into the four bureaus. And then with our remaining time, we can open up the floor to discussion of potential amendments. Co chair, would you like to add anything on this?
18 Yeah. Chair I thought that we discussed the possibility of setting aside a certain number of minutes for each councilor to propose their own amendments and ask ask questions.
19 Great. Happy to do it that way. So we'll have roughly 15 minutes for each counselor to do that. I will take the latitude of going last in my capacity presiding, but I'm happy to go in whatever order other folks would like. And that includes your time getting responses. So I'll ask our folks to keep it as brief as you can when you're doing it. So would see a bunch of questions in here already in case the conversation gets a little quiet, but I'd prefer to leave it off. Lead it off with allowing you to ask any questions. Would anyone like to get us started? Please feel free to raise your hand. And we do have a colleague online, so we'll look for that as well. But I will lead off with counselor Zimmerman.
20 Thanks. An interesting approach to a budget presentation nonetheless. Going down the line. Chief de, does this mayor's proposed budget have any proposed cuts to your bureau? No. Bob cozzie does it for your bureau?
21 No. For the record, bob cozzie director of boec. No, there are no cuts.
22 Great.
23 Chief aj jackson, interim fire chief, Portland fire and rescue and no, no cuts.
24 Jordan wiley, deputy director, pbem. And yes, we have cuts.
25 Can you describe those, please?
26 Yeah, there are two fte ones, a planning position, the ones on operations position.
27 Okay. No further questions.
28 Thank you. Councilor councilor Morillo online.
29 Hi everyone. Apologies for not being in person today. I'm not feeling very well, but I appreciate you being here to answer questions. I can't quite see who's in the room. So to anyone who wants to answer this I suppose. Can you explain the $144,419 from the city of Portland for the Multnomah county district attorney access attorney program? Is it detailed in the county budget, or is this in our budget?
30 While they're working on that, just for your knowledge and anyone else who can't see, we do have the chief of police here. We have the boec director here, we have the interim fire chief here, the deputy director of pbem. And we also have nathan lamey, who has forgotten more about the budget in public safety than most of us will ever know.
31 Do you want to touch on that or do you want. I mean, I don't know, I don't know the specific question in terms of what that's what that's directed towards. I can speak about what it does. If you understand what the question was, I missed that.
32 Yeah. Is the court of the question what the interagency agreement is with Multnomah county and what the purpose is behind it?
33 Yeah, I guess I'm asking about how many city of Portland dollars specifically go towards this program. And if we can use those dollars elsewhere, or if the or if the iga is binding.
34 So the program which program are you talking about? We fund a few positions with the da's office. So I'm sorry I don't have that in front of me. Nathan, do you know what the specific program we're talking about? Are we talking about the investigators or.
35 Talking about maps?
36 Maps? I don't know what that acronym stands for. Maps.
37 Oklahoma county district attorney access attorney program.
38 Okay. All right. Thanks.
39 Thanks.
40 Stephanie howard, community safety director for the public safety service area. I have a little more context on this, because the origins of this iga happened during my work for the former mayor. The maps that iga is, I think, always contingent upon adoption of the city's budget in terms of, you know, the binding nature of it. But that funds, I believe, a portion of a da salary serving the rockwood area, which serves east Portland and parts of Gresham, and that those are $144,000, are all city dollars that are allocated to that program for a year for neighborhood da.
41 Okay, that sparks my memory. Thank you. I appreciate for that. Yeah, that's accurate that it goes towards the funding for the neighborhood da that works out of east precinct but also supports rockwood. You know covering we know that that work extends out into Gresham as well. So we think it's a worthwhile investment. And the neighborhood da program in general has developed a has delivered significantly for the benefit of our officers and our community.
42 Okay. And what exactly is the role of a neighborhood da? And were those the same folks that were present at the community free store pdx from the da's office? Because it's my understanding that they're supposed to serve as a type of community bridge community liaison. And I'm just curious if those are the same folks and what their purpose is.
43 I don't know the names of the da's or at the community free store. What I do know that and I know that officer da vasquez has a history of supporting the da program in the precincts. Our position is that they are liaison for us to the district attorney's office and help in largely working with our neighborhood response teams around problem solving issues, leveraging the resources of the district attorney's office, you know, expediting if we have the need for search warrants or arrest warrants or just providing a legal advice on some of our more complex cases. They do a lot in the community. They will attend community meetings and work in that liaison capacity as well. But from a police bureau standpoint, primarily, we rely upon them for their support around the prosecution of cases, investigations, legal counsel, etc.
44 Okay, stephanie, are you able to send my office language on that agreement that we have with the da's office and what it's actually supposed to do, and any studies that show the efficacy and how well it's functioning.
45 Happy to send the idea to you. And I can work to get get the background information on that and connect you with the right folks at the da's office for any more specific questions. Yeah, happy to do that.
46 Thank you.
47 Thank you stephanie.
48 Thank you. And I also neglected to mention that dc meyers is available online as well. Sorry to not mention you there earlier there dca we'll go over to councilor Smith next.
49 Thank you co-chair. Good afternoon. I want to talk about a couple of things on page 15 of the mayor's proposed budget. There's a budget note titled overtime reduction strategies for police and fire. The note states that monthly oversight meetings this year helped ensure more disciplined budget management this fiscal year. Can you tell us of the specific strategies, practices, or ideas that come out of those monthly oversight meetings? Additionally, the note says that the dca for public safety is directed to continue the monthly committee meetings to reinforce accountability and support timely course corrections. And could you also elaborate on that? And will the dca continue the monthly oversight meetings even after he's gone? And what tools will the dca have available to reinforce that accountability? And I guess councilor.
50 Yes. Councilor, I can start with that answer and maybe ask nathan lamey to chime in for some details. So yes, we are. We do have a budget note around monitoring overtime and time use in fire and police. We every month operate off an accounting period. We have a meeting internally within the business services area includes all of deputies and we monitor overtime, staff time, hours of overtime with each bureau. So not just fire and police, but all other employees that use overtime. We watch every hour of overtime worked and we kind of watch the trends. If it's up and down, if we are trending up, we talk about opportunities on how to control the overtime in the public sector. Overtime is your leading cost driver, your personnel costs are the highest amount of the cost, and overtime is most likely the most challenging part that would lead to overspend. So we call that an accounting period report. We actually just had a meeting just prior to this where we gave the presentation to all the other deputy city administrators within public safety. Nathan, can you talk about the details behind that report and how your team works on that? To be prepared for our briefing of not only the mayor's office, but the governance committee?
51 Yeah, happy to do so. So as councilor Smith mentioned, there's a budget note that this refers to from this current year that I've shared up on the screen, the sort of highlighting the key components. This is responding to concerns from the prior council last year that the public safety bureaus weren't remaining within budget, with overtime being one of the main drivers. So the bureaus were directed to start having these monthly meetings that included the leadership of the bureaus, as well as the city budget office director. Since then, we've sort of expanded them to include the mayor's office as well. These meetings take place monthly. The typically, the monthly agenda goes through a sort of detailed overview of changes in personnel by bureau, then talks about what what the spending is been year to date for that accounting period, as well as projections that our budget staff has made for where we look to be at the end of the year. These vary from month to month. You know, sometimes we may have learned new things from sort of back end from the financial side, or there may have been changes in behavior or new incidents that have taken place. So those projections have varied from month to month, but they've really sort of spurred good dialog across the leadership of the bureaus to make sure that there's an understanding of their own budgets, that leadership understands their budget and that they understand one another's budget. It's been a great opportunity for sort of cross learning. Typically after that, we then talk about overtime, specifically doing a sort of deep dive about what the long term trends are in overtime by bureau, as well as changes in staffing. And then each month we go into a deep dive topic where we talk in more detail about maybe a specific issue like internal materials and services and our interagency agreements across the city, or what grants are and how those have been changing over time and issues and sort of fears that we have there. So it's been an effective tool for us internally to be able to sort of work through increased understanding of the budget as a whole, to be setting those goals on a monthly basis for the police bureau in particular, for the past couple of months, we've been setting pay period by pay period targets in order to evaluate whether those are working. It has been driving down overtime for the bureau. It's helped sort of provide that cross education, and it's just highlighting larger, longer term issues that oftentimes don't get attention because they don't come up on a day to day basis, but need to have that awareness.
52 Thank you. And dca meyers. I'm looking at your requested budget for 20 2526 and comparing that to what was revised for 2425. And it looks like $9 million more you received in 2425. And I'm trying to figure out what exactly where exactly did you did that funding come from in the grants fund? Because it's never disaggregated. And we have a grants fund, as you know, we're all grants are put into this big pot of money. It's not disaggregated. It's not identified in the budget as a line item. So I can't tell exactly where this money came in. If it was a one time source, if it was a general fund source, if it was something from the federal government, or even if it was ARPA, but it was 10,000,367 161. In the revised 2425 budget. And then you requested 868 on page 54 at the top of the page in table five. And you got that. And I'm trying to figure out how are you able to support your programs because you're you're about a, you're about a couple million short from the revised 2425 budget.
53 So, nathan, I know you're still there at the at the desk. So let me get started. Nathan. Then maybe correct me if I'm wrong. So a councilor We do have a significant amount of intergovernmental revenue that we receive by grant. And we will typically when the our when our budget session season is going on, we will apply for these grants they haven't been awarded yet. So we will see that we will not see that revenue until they actually do get awarded. The grant. Types are Portland police bureau has some of these intergovernmental grants. The Portland bureau of emergency management has urban area security initiative grants. Portland fire and rescue have safer grants, and some of these are for things like chat also has grants. So you'll see that those are the different types. And we will not see that revenue until they actually get awarded. Nathan, is that is that a correct answer for the councilor?
54 Yeah, and I'll elaborate that, you know, for the service area as a whole, this past year we had 28 different grant applications that we made across the bureau's grants, some of which are going to be sort of sure things. You know, there are state grants we get, especially on traffic safety, where it's pretty much assured we will receive those dollars, generally smaller grants. There are other grants that are competitive and they may take 6 to 9 months. Generally, the federal grants, they work on a cycle there where we apply in the spring, and they don't actually get awarded until the end of the fiscal year for the federal government. So September, October timeline. So usually we will be budgeting for what we've already received and what money we know we have. Most of these grants are multiyear grants. So depending on the nature of the grant, it may be a grant budget that is specifically laid out that we know these dollars are for this year. Others are sort of larger lumps where we may budget the entirety of the grant so that we have the flexibility and we can't spend towards a grant that we haven't budgeted. So it provides us greater flexibility if we have over budgeted, rather than creating the risk we've underbudgeted for grants. Either way, the spending can't go beyond what the appropriations are that we've received from the external partner, and we don't appropriate anything in the budget until we've actually received it. So the variation you see, especially if you look back a couple of years, there was a lot of grant dollars that our service area received from the American rescue plan. This was more on paper. We received these grants that the American rescue plan was available for helping cities in a variety of ways. We did a lot of programs that were specifically around COVID response, but the city also chose to do some revenue replacement, where there was just a swap that took place as just a paper transaction midway through the year, where in particular the police and the fire bureau both had their budgets reduced for the general fund and replaced with ARPA funds, that was a way for the city when it was having reduced revenue overall to be able to sort of bridge those gaps over those years. So when you see that sort of precipitous drop off, that's largely due to that shift that's.
55 Taking place. And I understand that. So what I'm trying to understand now is how much money do you think? How much are you? Are you projecting that you're going to give back as beginning working capital at the end of the fiscal year.
56 In terms of grant dollars or in terms of general fund dollars?
57 Just just what general fund monies are you going to give back to the general fund? Are you projecting.
58 Yeah. So as I mentioned, we're having our monthly meetings that take place. So these dollars, they shift from month to month. You know, there are points in the year where we were showing the police bureau being significantly over budget at this point. For each bureau I can go through, the police bureau is currently looking at it being around $2 million under its budget, so that would potentially fall to balance. There's caveats there that if something unexpected happens that could shift. There's also generally been a position where.
59 What about the public safety department that's dealing with cease fire and all those those non those public safety agencies but non fire police or emergency. How much is going to be left over. Do you think.
60 So. Community safety which encompasses office of violence prevention ceasefire Portland street response. It's currently projecting to be $1.5 million under budget. Okay. There is the caveat that generally in the fall bump in the past, there have been encumbrance carryovers allowed where if a bureau has underspent their budget in the prior fiscal year, but encumbered dollars, so they have a contract in place where there are plans to spend it, they are oftentimes in the past have been allowed to ask to bring those dollars forward. It has been fairly typical for the office of violence prevention and the work of ceasefire, to have this be the case, where they may put forward a grant or a contract agreement in the spring that doesn't actually get spent out towards the summer, especially around a lot of the violence prevention initiatives that are really ramping up in the summer, it's imperative to put those in place earlier on.
61 So I totally understand. I get that, but what I'm trying to prevent from from happening is that you all are asking for us to budget, use a certain amount of money and you double dip. You get money for particular program and then you also at the same time, don't let us know that you're applying for other federal funds or state funds and you get that money in. And so you have it twice and you don't ever give us the money back. I passed the ordinance in February of 2025. It was an ordinance that the city manager, because the grants go into to a one big fund in the city manager's budget entitled grants and unassigned funds, and that ordinance requires the city manager to notify council in the finance committee every 15 days of new money that comes in. Because here's where we're having the problem at and it is at the top. We are not being let know who gives us money, who, who we got it from. We just it just says grants. And I am trying to get this council and the executive agencies that are under it to make sure that you notify us that you received monies. So then when you get your monies that we fronted you in the beginning, that you give it back to us in the in the general fund and not keep it and don't tell us. And so a lot of that is going on, I can tell you for sure. So I want to make sure that we keep as much money to be able to help other bureaus under the city who need assistance, who are also applying for monies. We need to get that money back and not allow you all to underspend something that you should have given back to begin with. And I'm not getting on you about this. It's not that I know anything about any of this, but I know how this whole thing goes. They take the money, you get the grant and forget to come back and give it to the commissioners to tell them to do a budget modification so that we can put that money back in the general fund. So I want my money back. I'm just letting y'all know right now. I'm trying to check to make sure you're not double dipping. So that is and I'm not saying you've been double dip in dca. Myers but some of y'all have been and I'm not going to call out no names.
62 I can respond to a little bit of this. So first of all, I think that is very fair. Oversight request by you that I think we can easily follow that that direction. So the council knows we just talked about the accounting period report that we do every month. I have also out of my office, directed all bureaus to follow a level of spending guidance. So part of that spending guidance is they must put into a spending request anything over $25,000. It flows up to the dca. We talk about it and I either approve it, put it on hold, ask more questions or deny it. But one of those are one of those spending guidances is to assure that all underspending is held. And in any, any, any thought of spending, the underspend must be evaluated by the dca's office and approved. The purpose of this is several fold one. I know the public safety service area came out of the budget process in really good shape, while other service areas were taking deep and heartbreaking cuts, and we all had to work on that. And so when we talk to our bureaus about, listen, you know, we have a critical responsibility here to manage every dollar we're spending and collect it and return it back to the council, back to the budget office. So I want you to know that we do that every month. We just had our meeting today. I go through that expense form with nathan and elizabeth perez every I think two weeks now and then we have our accounting period conversation every month. So loud and clear. Councilor we get it. Thank you.
63 Thank you I, I appreciate that and I know the mayor probably appreciates it. Thank you so much.
64 And I guess I'll just clarify for the record, you know, the code of federal regulations that rules most federal grants to cfr 200 does not allow for supplanting, which is the practice that you described, where federal dollars would come in and replace local dollars. So we are not allowed to apply for grants where we would be doing that, in large part because the federal government doesn't want to see that sort of shifting. There are a couple exceptions. You know, American rescue plan was a peculiar time where that was sort of struck and there were the ability to do that. But for the most part, grants will be additive. They will be new programs, either pilots or replacement of things that don't have direct funding for them when we make the application.
65 Thank you. Thank you so much.
66 Thank you, councilor Smith. We'll move on to councilor Novick.
67 Thank you, mr. Chair. So I just want to run through two proposed amendments that I have relating to public safety, just to inform the committee. And I'm not going to have questions for our folks, our staff folks, about them, but I think my colleagues might. So let me see if I'm able to share my screen, which I don't think I've ever done before in my life. Let's see. Is that done? Is there? Oh, whoops.
68 It's showing up in for us. But it's not. It's up.
69 There. Okay. So my first proposal will be to cut the Portland police bureau budget by $3 million. The anticipated savings of sending unarmed responders to welfare checks, armed. And my rationale here is, as reflected in the second slide, we've been told by the bureau that the police spend 6% of their time going to welfare checks, and I'm going to go through what welfare checks are in a minute. And I think, demonstrate that it makes no sense for armed officers to be going to them. These calls can be taken by psr or ps3 folks, which each cost about two thirds as much as a police officer. Again, 9% of police calls and 6% of police time is spent in welfare checks. I get to 3 million because 6% of the police general fund discretionary budget is about 16 million, and then one third of 16 million, which is what you'd save by having much cheaper people going to those calls is 5.2 million. But chief day has said that because of certain fixed costs, you can't assume that a percent reduction in calls automatically translates to the same reduction in staffing needs. But I think that partly because psr is already expanding and should be able to respond to at least some additional welfare checks if we add additional ps three or psr people to take over the remaining welfare checks from the police bureau, I think it's reasonable to assume $3 million in savings. Going down to. This is the document we had from from the bureau saying what percentage of time they spend in various calls, including 63.1% on welfare checks, cold and 2.9% in welfare checks. Priority. What are the types of welfare checks? This is information we got from boec. There's the occupant welfare checks where a person hasn't been seen or in contact with relatives, neighbors, etc. And somebody calls up and says, could you make a welfare check? I can't go to their house myself. I've been told that this might be problematic to switch to non-armed officers, because if you need to actually go into the house, only armed officers can do that. However, I've also been told that this is only about 6 to 8% of calls. I've been told that the majority of welfare check calls again by boec that fall into these categories. A person welfare check. A person appears unable to care for themselves, and there's no indication medical assistance is needed. Person down and checked on a person in a sidewalk, street, park or other area that's conscience but seems unable to care for themselves. Psr already goes to some of these person down and unchecked. Again, psr already goes to some of these. Pb goes when psr is not available. A category I've been told is extremely small. Is psychiatric review board revocation where a person is not followed, check in procedures with a psychiatric review board, or has had their status revoked for some other reason. That might be a call. You might want an armed officer to go on, but I've told that they're incredibly rare. And then the other category is mixed, which again, is a smaller category is missed medical appointments. So again, I see no reason why we have armed officers going to these calls. And frankly I do not understand why, since ps3's at least were established in 2019, I don't know why it wasn't a priority to have ps3 start going to them years ago. Subsequent slide addresses how many welfare check calls there are as opposed to this percentage. It's 24,000 calls in the last year. So that's going to be my proposal to reduce the police bureau budget. I would plan to spend the saved money on parks maintenance, the second amendment that I wanted to address would be to increase funding for the Portland bureau of emergency management. First slide is an overview. I was extremely disturbed to learn that pbem does not have people awake on duty 24 over seven. They need to have. If an emergency strikes boec, or somebody needs to wake a pbem person up to take care of coordinating response to an emergency. So I went to pbem and said, what are some other fundamental things that you don't have and what would it cost to address them? So they said they to start building out a 24 over seven watch capacity that would be about six fte. They also need about three fte to have a coordination of response category, etc. So we'll go through the each of the each of the each of the items 24 over seven watch this again is pbm's description. These are folks that are awake 24 over seven to keep informed of everything around us and prepare briefings for city leaders and affected bureaus and partners to initiate response actions when something becomes a problem, and to alert the public to take life safety actions when there is needed. And again, this reiterates the currently pbem depends on boec to wake up a pbem on call person who then needs to learn what's going on, formulate messaging and then issue an alert. So beginning to have 24 seven capacity I think is vital. The second item that pbem listed was coordination and response, asking for three fte to coordinate functions, communications and operations for everyone involved in response, both internal and external partners to the city. Another item which they were asking for but actually thankfully is in the mayor's budget is having somebody to maintain moderate update. The emergency alert system that we have that's listed here as an item that was a high priority that has been met. So it's listed as zero fte. Another item that pbem said that would be critical is to have a citywide incident management system manager. Most other cities have a software project to manage all the information and track data and metrics related to emergency response. We don't, but the mayor authorized the funding to procure the software in this budget. But once it's up and running, it will require someone with specialized ability to manage the system and train others to use it. So that's another fte planning and preparedness. Our ability to successfully respond to emergencies depends on our plans, the vast majority of which are years out of date. Pbem is asking for two fte to take over the planning functions and then training and exercise. I know this is something that councilor Zimmermann has indicated an interest in. Once plans are built to conduct training to build the skills required by those plans, we exercise the plans to ensure the plans actually make sense. This builds muscle memory so an emergency occurs. Responders aren't thinking about what they need to do or how most cities have a team of folks doing this work. This. The mayor's proposed budget eliminates the last position that we had allocated to this space. They're requesting one position to update and restart this program from the city. And then there's rent. When we add additional people, the bureau needs to pay rent for the additional space. And they're estimating that these additional people, they would be charged about $400,000 in rent. I propose to pay for the pbem budget enhancement with a cut to council budgets of about 303.3 million 300,000 per office. Accepting the council president. There's a particular reason why it's appropriate to fund pbem with a council office cut, which is that council office budgets are largely come out of discretionary general fund overhead. So you can't cut a dollar from the council office budgets and automatically translate that dollar to bureaus that are not overhead bureaus like, say, parks. However, pmem itself is largely an overhead bureau. So ruth levine was telling me this morning that if you cut council budgets and give the money to pbem, it can be pretty much 1 to 1. So that concludes my introduction of these items.
70 Thank you. Co-chair Novick. Did you have any questions or should I move on to the.
71 I thought that I move on to your own and other colleagues questions.
72 Sure. I'll pass it actually, because councilor Zimmermann, you only asked a couple of things earlier if you'd like to go first.
73 Thanks, chair. Well, mr. Novick, you've certainly changed my line of questioning now. So start with what was proposed. I want to make sure I understand this idea of not going to welfare checks. What I don't understand in this idea that you're proposing is how and why it would immediately shift to a necessary budget reduction, because what I could see is that there is a system built where officers don't take that type of call. But I've done enough ride alongs in my life to know the number of calls we didn't get to. And so I don't know why this would transfer to an immediate reduction in force and a $3 million savings if we just didn't go to this type of call, because we have so many others that we're not getting to.
74 Well, we're using up a lot of overtime going to all the calls. So reducing the number of calls to go to should reduce the amount of overtime.
75 I, I'm going to push back. I don't I don't think we've probably ever put an officer on overtime to go to a welfare check call that just these come in in the regular course of a shift.
76 That's right. But you have to staff according to how many calls you expect to get in each shift. And if these aren't part of the calls you expect, you should be able to reduce the number on shift.
77 Okay. So I want to just highlight something here. We have as a community said that there are a required number of firefighters that we're going to have on in the city of Portland, regardless of the hour and regardless of the day, based on on how we how we staff stations, trucks, engines and the response times that we want to achieve, I will say we all we do not have that standard in policing. So when the police bureau generally has to use an employee in an overtime status, when we're talking about shifts versus like an investigation comes up at 3 a.m, that's different, but a shift idea, we don't use mandatory. And so we already are accepting that fire has a standard. But police doesn't in terms of how quickly we want people to respond in this community. And the reason I'm going down this, this line is that. It sounds like when you're articulating this amendment that you are saying that it could potentially lead us to say. A precinct may not have to have as many folks on. And that is very alarming for me, because I don't think we're at a place where I would be comfortable reducing any precinct's footprint in the regular course of shift work, and I'm not talking special events or things of that nature. I'm just talking the day in and day out shift work. I would have a tough time there, because the fact that we're having to cover those with overtime already says that we don't have enough officers, and if nobody volunteers, that shift will go unmanned. And that's very concerning to me. And it's actually the opposite of what I think we should be doing. I think we should have a mandatory aspect to some of this.
78 And I mean, you're right, we don't have a minimum staffing level, but and this the staffing level that the chief attempts to reach, I've been told by one of his analysts, is just based on historical norms, not an analysis of how many people exactly you need. But the bottom line to me is you should be able to save money by sending certain calls to cheaper people. And I actually asked the chief at one point in one of our previous sessions if the number of calls went down by 50%, how many of your people could you do without? And the chief said, off the top of my head, about 25%. So that's really what I'm relying on here. In saying that, I think that you can assume that if you replace 6% of the calls with one third cheaper people, then take that savings, divide it in half. It's kind of crude math, but what I just what I cannot accept is the idea that it's impossible to save money by sending cheaper people in place of more expensive people.
79 So I would expect. No other answer from a person who wears a uniform. And the reason I say that is that there is. There is an ethic and there is a for anybody, whether they're military, police, fire that we give the best advice that we can to the decision makers. And we say, this is the budget. I need to do the thing that you're asking me to do in the best manner. And then from there, whenever you say, still go do the mission, we will always say yes. And I feel like that answer is an answer that says a person who's a sworn officer is always going to say yes, but that doesn't mean that they are doing it from a position that is as funded, as successful and as appropriate as as could be. And there's just a different ethic here. And I, I feel like the aspect of your amendment, councilor That is related to the type of call is that is a worthwhile endeavor I think we should go through, but immediately attaching it to a $3 million deficit in this year is that would cause me a lot of angst. And I think it would be counter to the last three and a half, four years of this city's story of trying to come back from from some pretty damaging efforts. So. The police bureau will always say how high when we say jump, but I think we have to put a few more lenses on that. I do have more questions. A chair with respect to pbem. I also I hear some of those amendments. I think that those are quite aggressive with that many of them. And the idea of a 24, I just don't know. How many employees does it take to staff a 24 hour on duty staff officer? All year long? I don't know how many fte that would be.
80 Yeah, very bare minimum. Probably 5 or 6 fte. Okay. And that's with no redundancy. So those people are sick or off then we don't have that coverage. So bare minimum five ish. Yeah.
81 And I this is the 3 a.m. Question. Right. And I think that's an appropriate question to have. We've had this similar conversation. But we in. I think that this is a large increase in the in the short term for this. And I and frankly, I wouldn't be willing to give up some of the other stuff that I think wherever we're taking from. But if we're taking police money or if we're going to now lay off a bunch of folks from council ops, I just don't really understand that. But I will say this city, more than any other city I've ever worked part of, or any organization I've worked a part of, thinks of itself as separate silos. And that is our old system. But. A sergeant on the police bureau who's awake and on duty at 3 a.m. Does have a duty to the overall health and safety of the city, a lieutenant in the fire bureau similarly similarly, and I think that that goes to the heart of the national incident management system and ics system, which is whomever the most available person on scene is the incident commander and can start rallying. The troops can start rallying the call. And so this to me sounds like a really good roadmap for where we would want to get, but not in a year where we are facing $93 million deficit. And so from that perspective, I am supportive in general of the direction that these amendments highlight for pbem. But I think that the cost to achieve this right now is made from a silo instead of we all work for the city of Portland and it and it doesn't get at or it doesn't it doesn't recognize just the huge budget challenge. And frankly, that would be is that I think it'd be tripling the size of pbem in a, in a year with all the other officers that we just discussed, the staff officers and the 24 hour watch commanders. So I just I just have some concerns here. Councilor. I think some good academic exercises, but I appreciate that I do. I wanted to highlight just one other thing, chair, with respect to the question about investigators and our partnership with the da, and I didn't want to interrupt because miss howard answered, great. And I, I also wanted to cite some of my own experience having having worked in some of the neighborhood stuff is that I just want to remind folks that Portland police bureau used to serve the trial subpoenas. There was a time when we did that, and that's an expensive endeavor. To your point, using the expensive officer to do something. So we now pay for investigators at the da's office, and we only pay for, I think, a couple of them or maybe a certain amount, but we get access to I think they have over 20 who do that across the county. So I just want to highlight that. I think it's a cost saving perspective. It also allows those investigators to do some follow up investigations, instead of having our detectives who are who are in PPB do that. And I think that is a good symbiotic relationship between the da and the police bureaus. The other piece with respect to the neighborhood da's, I do know, and I think, stephanie, this might still be true, but I think that the neighborhood da's have helped the neighborhoods deal with a lot of the real deep nuisance problems. And in a world where we have a jail and a court system that doesn't really deal with a lot of small level stuff anymore, a lot of things that happen in Portland, you don't really get booked for them, but if they happen in happy valley, you'd go to jail for them. But the neighborhood da's have helped those really chronic nuisance folks in terms of putting together people who always do the little thing, but they do it 100 times. And there's a word for this. I don't know what it is, but it's in terms of packaging that together. The other piece is, I feel like the rockwood neighborhood da program was helping a lot with expungements fees and fine reductions, so that we can kind of get some of the barrier reduction out there from the da's office. And I think that that is part of why the city has paid for it. I think it's only a part time or a half time position. And I think, you know, it's split with either the county or Gresham. But in my work before I was on council, the neighborhoods that I worked with in terms of some of the chronic nuisance stuff, I felt that the partnership with the neighborhood da and the neighborhood response teams from the Portland police bureau was very productive, and it helped us with some of those chronic things that don't rise to, you know, bodily injury assaults and gun violence, but still have a big livability impact. So I just wanted to share that, and I didn't want to speak out of turn earlier when it was not my turn. Thanks, chair.
82 Thank you. Councilor Zimmerman. I think I am up in the queue now, so I will say. First I just want to note two areas of interest beyond the service area for later park rangers, which I'm interested in ensuring that it has enough capacity to meet the needs of portlanders visiting our parks, as well as the community board for police accountability, where I'm interested in ensuring that the charter is followed in full. Those are in two other service areas, but just wanted to flag those. No proposed amendments to discuss yet, but I wanted to flag that I might by Friday. I do have a comment for one of the six sections of the psa, and as questions for five, the other five. So I'll just mention I'll start running through this just for community safety. I wanted to comment that I, I may put something forward requiring hires or holding aside the money for the ovp director and psr director. I think it's important that we find leadership that believes in this work and can can build community trust in those particular programs, starting with the questions. Director cozzie, thank you so much for being here to everyone. By the way, what would be the impact in your view of converting the eight limited duration telecommunicators limited term telecommunicators to ongoing?
83 You know, my goal is to convert all of the limited term positions into permanent positions. When we look at the data month to month, depending on the time of the year, we need 130 or so in the wintertime. Certified call takers. In the summertime, we need about 150. So averaging that out, we really need about 140 certified call takers across the board. So when we look at the fact that we have 128 fully funded positions and eight limited term positions brings us to a total of 136, that tells me that those limited term positions really do need to be transitioned into permanent positions right now, ideally. But what we are doing at boec and what we're looking at in terms of overtime savings now is being able to leverage the reduction in overtime to translate to permanent positions. And my hope is certainly within the next year or so that we might be able to use those funds, which is already in boec budget, to hopefully shift about four of those positions over to permanently funded positions.
84 Thank you. And I will just preview that. I may be proposing an amendment to do a portion of that in this budget. And looking currently at just which ongoing dollars to elsewhere in the city to convert to one time to allow for that. Chief jackson, my I have two questions for you. My understanding is that station eight is one of the fastest growing in terms of service calls, and that a couple years ago, not last year, it lost its second apparatus due to budget cuts. This is the station by fred meyer on lombard and interstate. My question is about the increase in the capital budget from 4.5 to 6.5 million under the line item of apparatus replacement. Does that include restoring a second apparatus to station eight? And if not, what exactly does do you expect those dollars are going to go to?
85 Yeah, no, it does not add an additional apparatus to station eight. It used to be staffed with an engine and a truck, and now there's a quint, which is kind of like a hybrid of both an engine and a truck that's stationed there. What the current 6.5 is allocated to. There's three apparatus that we have a replacement cycle, and we extend that beyond what the typical standard is. Our logistics section does an amazing job of rotating busier rigs through slower stations and extending their life as a reserve rig, and then assign them out to training, where they're then used by recruits. So we would look at replacing three different rigs on the replacement cycle. So as of right now there's two trucks, one midship to replace truck one another truck is on scheduled for station three. And then the third one is being discussed. And re looked like from a priority standpoint, engine one happened to be on the list. And that's the electric engine. It's not due for replacement. So now we're trying to prioritize if it's going to be an engine a truck a boat where those funds will be allocated. But we're following the current replacement cycle of apparatus.
86 Great. That's thank you for that. And I'll follow up with you on the station eight stuff at some point. Switching gears to chat, I'm happy to see that chat funding was restored in the mayor's proposed. I would like to see some of the money be ongoing in the future, along with grant dollars we're receiving from outside sources and using one time funding primarily for those dollars that we anticipate could eventually be medicaid reimbursable in the in the more distant future. Do you have an estimate of how much that funding might eventually be able, in terms of a percentage to be medicaid reimbursable or even a ballpark?
87 I don't, and there's a lot of legwork on the back end of it. And it's kind of like the clientele that you respond. They are dispatched by boec on low acuity medical calls, and there might be an avenue to go down there. We haven't done a deep dive. You know, our efforts have been on trying to sustain, like the service levels and the positions and to find funding, because as you do know, it has been one time funding from its inception in 2021. And as we go through this budget cycle, just like prior years, you're getting down to April, may, June, and folks are wondering, do I have a job? Do I have funding right for my position, or do I need to go look at another job? So it's caused anxiousness amongst our workforce? Burnout folks have left to try to find something more stable, so I'd love to see it downstream start converting that way. And I think it would send a positive message to our partners who have funded the program. Oregon health share that the city has a commitment to this beyond, you know, what we've been able to do thus far.
88 Thank you. And I hope to send that message with my colleagues and alongside you as well. Deputy director wiley, I just wanted to kind of follow up. A lot of my questions got asked by my colleagues here, but I'm trying to understand, you know, we talked about the emergency management disaster planning position going away and the emergency operations coordinator to and that being part of the 14 positions in the memo that that councilor Novick was citing, I, I'm also interested in the continuity of operations role, which doesn't necessarily need to be its own position if I understand correctly. But I guess what I'm trying to say is I too am trying to figure out something between 0 and 14 new positions that start the process of building there. You don't have to be able to answer this now, but is that something that you could help support our offices? I'll say all three of ours.
89 Absolutely. Yeah. So we've we've been asked by council repeatedly in different forums to be able to give us a price tag and tell us what you can do with it. And so essentially we're we're doing that but in different ways. And it almost we can slice it differently depending upon how you look at the problem. But we are so bare bones now that we're cutting absolutely essential functions. Losing the one remaining planner is a critical central piece to emergency management that puts us in the hole. If I could circle back a tiny bit on on council, councilman Zimmermann's comments, I would say, you know, 24 seven watch. That would be a new function. We don't perform that today. That's something new. But that is best practice across the country as we're seeing more and more disasters more frequently. I think we there's a sense and I and I share that also with, you know, police and fire colleagues, that we're a little bit behind the curve in terms of being able to respond to something large scale. We're we're rolling the dice every single time it happens. And nine times out of ten it's probably fine. And on that 10th time we're going to fall hard. And that's the concern. And that's 24 over seven. Watch it. To come back to your comments. We want the police focused on the police issue. If it's a police issue at at two in the morning, we want them focused on the police issue. If it's a fire issue, we want them focused on the fire. But if that fire is going to take off in a, you know, somewhere and become a larger citywide incident, that's where emergency management comes in, where tying in other bureaus, we're informing leadership, we're wrapping in communications plan, potentially developing an all, you know, an all city response and potentially even, you know, neighboring jurisdictions should we need to depending upon the issue. That's the function that we're talking about adding to adding to pbem. Potentially we can do it in stages. We can do it little by little. If we had one position more tomorrow than we have today, we'd be in a better position. We are. We are so tiny and getting. And as director myers has mentioned, decimated over the last couple of years that whatever we can find and where we can find it is ultimately going to help. And I think that does ultimately make a situation where we are more unified as a city where we're able to do those crosscutting functions, all hazards for citywide approach. So that's what we're moving towards, if you ask us, because somebody asked, I can't remember if it was councilor Novick or not, but if you could have everything you wanted, what would that look like? And that's 55 positions. That's $10 million on top of what we have today, what we're what we're looking for and to respond to. Councilor novak's request was to say, if you received a few extra fte, where would you put them? And these are us kind of plugging holes in a dam right now with those positions. But but come July 1st, thankfully mayor has that added alert and warning position. That's awesome. And we really appreciate that we're still in the hole in terms of being able to fully perform our mission, essential functions. We're not able to perform today our mission, essential functions.
90 Thank you. And you answered my next two as well. Okay. I'll ask pbem has 22 staff and six of them, if I understand correctly, fall into director, deputy director or manager positions. And I when I looked at the org chart, it was strange to me to see a four layer org chart on a bureau that truly has been decimated multiple times, and things like an analyst or coordinator, three supervising an analyst or coordinator two can you speak to if span of control and getting down to a ideally three layer org chart is part of the plan for this coming year?
91 Three layer. I don't know exactly what you mean. What I can say is we do need to be a bureau of leaders, and when I say that if we run into a situation that really isn't all city response, we need to be able to have a anybody on our team managing a large group of people that they've never managed before and maybe never manageable, maybe never will again in an emergency operations context. So, for example, if you've been out to our emergency operations center out on 99th and busch shared with boec, there's seats for 75, 80 people if we really rally the city. And by the way, external partners as well, to be become part of an incident management team for a large scale event, our staff, our pbem staff now have to take roles within that incident management team. So they go from maybe managing 1 or 2 people to managing 20 or 30, you know, those sort of things. So we absolutely need to be thinking about and preparing ourselves to be a bureau of leaders, despite the, the hr requirements on, you know, span of control and things like that.
92 Yeah.
93 I hope that gets a part of your question.
94 I think. So I think it it takes the budget question out of it, and I think is more of a policy conversation for post budget, you know, and maybe part of it is, is how do we explain that? Because I think in other bureaus it is pretty clear that there is a management bloat across the city broadly. So as we're talking about everything else, I figured I'd have to ask here as well.
95 Yeah. Appreciate it. Thanks.
96 Let's see. I have two minutes left before I'll circle back to it later. So I'll go to enterprise services because I have fewer questions there. And I don't see director perez, but I will see if. Nathan, I can put you on the spot. Okay. There you are. And one of these probably will be for nathan as well. Actually, I'm thinking so. I'll ask two together. Can you tell me about which of the back of house functions are expected to be integrated that have not yet been over at the service area over the next year, and also what the expected impact you see of the 20% reductions to all those lines of business in the mayor's proposed are over the course of the year.
97 Thank you. Elizabeth perez. She her I'm the enterprise services director for the public safety service area. So the other pieces of enterprise services are budget procurement, accounting, communications personnel. Let's see what else am I missing? The legislative piece. Equity. And then as we are working through all of those, we are also working with the parameters that the city administrator has given us. So right now we're in flux and we are pulling some of these things into the dca's office, but also kind of not completing anything until we know for sure what the direction is going to is going to be from the city administrator. So in terms of the 20%, that's hard to say because I don't exactly know. What all will be centralized versus what will be kept within the service area.
98 Great. I think that might be a post-budget conversation. I'd love to be to have that in this this committee. The other two are together as well, and they're both related to the budget, so I'm not sure who to ask. Why is intergovernmental revenue so much less this year than last year? And our and sort of relatedly, on the expense side, are there any policy and compensation set asides in this budget? I think, as councilor Smith put it, there are very things that are very few things that are disaggregated in a way that makes it clear. So I'm trying to understand if anything exists that we just kind of missed in a broader bucket.
99 Yeah. Any shifts to the intergovernmental revenue piece are likely due to cleanup from various changes that have taken place in the past couple of years. Part of that is going to be that Portland street response has moved from Portland fire and rescue into the office of the dca, the office of violence prevention has moved from the mayor's office. So some of those are shifts that it's getting expenses in the right place and revenue in the right place year over year. The sort of biggest shift that we're seeing for intergovernmental revenue for office, dca is that rpa component where those dollars are expiring and going away. There had been funding previously for. Ovp that will be expiring.
100 Copy that. Thank you. My time is up, so I will stop here. But thank you. And I will pass it back to councilor Smith. We'll start the sort of second round on this.
101 Thank you, thank you. Co-chair dca. Myers I'm looking at the request that you made from the cannabis tax fund on page 54 of the mayor's budget, and you requested $450,000, but the proposed from the mayor's office is 564, 790, which is the revised cost that he put in that was put in in this last council. Did he tell you?
102 Yeah.
103 Did he give you an idea of what he wanted done with that $114,000 out of the marijuana? Tax fund.
104 Ginger dameron, budget manager I'll just this one is technical, so I'm going to answer it. Psr has a cannabis tax allocation as part of their revenue. We put in 450 because the revenue has been going down. And cbo wanted to sort of make sure that we didn't over budget when it came to propose. They added the additional 114,000. And it's just in line with what psr is allocation is this year. It's the same amount, okay.
105 Which was the same amount for 2425. There wasn't a new program that he had designed. He was just trying to make it whole and level the playing field for psr. Okay, okay. That's what I was I was trying to figure out. Thank you.
106 Thank you, councilor Smith. We'll go back to councilor Novick.
107 Yeah. I just wanted.
108 To spell out my thinking in asking for additional money to pbem and paying for it by reduction in council office budgets. 12 years ago, when I learned that people have been jumping off the vista bridge for 80 years, I concluded that it would not be able to live with myself unless I put a barrier up and put a stop to further suicides off the vista bridge, and I feel very good about the fact that I put a barrier up, and that method of suicide is no longer available. If the earthquake comes in this next year, which it could, and thousands and thousands of portlanders die, I would not be able to live with myself if I did not think that I'd done what I could. To ensure that we have a basic, functioning emergency management system, and I especially would not want to think that I passed up the opportunity to ensure we have a basic, functioning emergency management system by reducing what I regard as our bloated, bloated council office budgets.
109 Thank you, councilor Novick. Go back to councilor Zimmermann.
110 Thanks. In the history of emergency management, emergency management has never prevented a disaster. Right? They manage the disaster after the flash in the pan. And I think that is important with respect to the profession, the role, the emergency management theory is that we have a collective understanding for how we're going to rally resources and where we're going to vest authority. And so that earthquake could happen. It's front of mind for me to councilor. And I think that. The ability to ensure that more emergency services arrive to ensure that the state emergency management, which is one of our layers, that county emergency management, which is one of our layers, are informed, timely, all valid and important. But all of those are none of none of those are going to prevent the thing from happening. And so I just caution that that type of approach, because it presumes and it is part of, I think, our, our, our lexicon over the last 24 years has been that FEMA, emergency management, this theory should stop all things. And I think that's really become very problematic. We now declare an emergency every time we have a weather event in this community. And what I would say is that the fact that we have to surge our shelter capacity is not a disaster response, it's just a weather response. But we put these we put this language around it that has really run emergency management professionals rampant in terms of they are being called because we have this expectation that somehow government can prevent nature. And so I'm just very cautious here. What I want to be prepared for is when that earthquake does happen. But we won't be if every time it gets below 30 degrees or every time it gets above 90, we put the red light in the building and say, we are in emergency management. We're not, we are not. We are in we are in surge capacity. We are in maybe where we kind of reassign some folks, but these words matter. And I think it has I think it's actually hurt the profession. I think it's hurt how we approach it. The other thing. I don't think we have any standards for our bureau directors, dca's, deputy directors, office managers in this city for if you hold a certain rank in this organization, must you have ix credentials or nims credentials? Am I wrong on that?
111 That's correct, that's correct. There's no mandated. Yeah. And some bureaus have their own programs, but it's not uniform across all cities. And there is a national qualification system. Yeah. That is a national standard.
112 I would say that more a more present standard that we could actually meet would be allocating some dollars to bring in training teams that say, if you hold this rank in our organization, the city of Portland, regardless of the bureau, regardless of the director, regardless that you must be qualified within 12 months of appointment or you are sent walking papers. And I think, frankly, it's a basic standard. And the reason why is that when the real thing kicks off, where we are truly in emergency management, all the other stuff, nothing matters. We all come together and we start assigning duties. We need a logistics chief. We need an operations chief, we need a communications chief. And that language. Half the room when I just said that. Well, not maybe not this room. This room knows what I'm saying when I say it. But if I said it in any other council meeting, they go, what is a branch chief? What is a comms chief? What is a logistics chief? Our bureau directors and below do not have the ability. The skill set or or the experience to plug in to a system that pbem will help us set up. And I think that is an area where I would be interested in what are our training standards, how much money is it going to take to achieve it, and how do we broaden the number of people who we can use in an emergency so that that's the first one. My next question, I have two questions for chief of police. Philosophical is chief, I would, given that you return to us after retirement, I would like to know a little bit about the bureau's. I'll call it bench planning for senior leadership. And if you take a $3 million cut, and I will say I'm also reading in the news right now that another councilor has proposed a 75% reduction of your overtime budget. I'm curious, are you going to cut detectives? Are you going to cut the neighborhood response teams? Are you going to cut the bike squad? Are we just going to stop patrolling certain precincts on certain nights? If we take a $3 million cut? Because these are real services and we can't just say, a $3 million cut. I want to know if you had to, what would you cut if you had a $3 million less budget?
113 Thank you councilor. So regarding succession planning, it's definitely top of mind for me. Bureau went lost a lot of people between 20 and 23 when I came on board and lost a lot of experience. And so we are working diligently in our leadership development. Handled had a series of efforts around that in the last year with our mid-level and higher level managers really trying to identify what the future looks like. And it's a challenge because people stepped up in a very honorable way into roles that I don't know that they were exactly prepared for, but they had to because the need was there. And we continue to be very anemic in many of our leadership positions. I have about 20 sergeant vacancies right now, and that's such a critical rank for our organization. I'm proud to say this week we're doing a sergeants process. So we'll have a list established, and we have a plan to start to promote people into the sergeant ranks for the second half of the year. But from a, you know, a mid management lieutenant, captain, commander, chief role, you know, it's very it's very top of mind. So I've been working with some consultants on that as well as looking at the org chart, trying to evaluate are we, you know, managing appropriately. There was a lot of condensing of the bureau during that time period. Some of that led to greater efficiencies. I also think it led to too much span of control and not as much direct supervision as I'd like to see. So all of that's top of mind leadership development and succession planning as we go forward, and I can provide more detail for that. If we were to take a $3 million cut. I've been clear with all of the conversations I've had, that any reduction in our budget would be a reduction in services. It would simply it's just common math. I just checked a minute ago and we had about 67 calls holding right now. Some of those calls are holding for well over an hour. So as you said earlier, councilor, you know, we are in a struggle for what we have an expectation for police response and public safety. And our primary is going we're going to default towards those calls for service. So a $3 million cut, which, you know, we have done in the past, council took $27 million away in 88 positions and 21 or 2020, 21. So we would collapse many of units that we have just begun to restore. You know, we would collapse our teams and put them into patrol. We would collapse the bike squad and put them into calls for service. We would, you know, take officers that are working on investigations and put those into calls for service. And we would have to meet that basic calls for service that we are now funding through overtime. And I've been clear with, with everyone that I don't think funding through overtime is the strategy is not fiscally responsible. It's not good for our members, it's not sustainable. And I believe we have a plan in place that will begin to grow the organization, to eliminate that. We are literally hundreds of positions down from where we were even a decade ago. And yet the population has risen. Calls for service as well. In fact, just this year, we're seeing an increase in calls for service, both dispatch as well as self-initiated some of the self-initiated. I relate to the crime reduction missions that we're doing. So any reduction in budget, a $3 million budget would mean the wholesale dismantling of several units that are demonstrating a return on investment in other ways for follow up investigations, human trafficking, our fire focus intervention team. I mean, there's just no way.
114 So I.
115 Appreciate the answer. And I and I, I put it on a point because I, I guess I don't want to live in a city where the police, the only thing police do are respond to 911 call. I guess I just I'm not there. I think that the aspects and the ideas and the and the, the goal of community policing, or the goal of intervention, instead of just always being focused on a 911 call that describes more of a city I want to live in. And I feel like we have clawed our way back. I was happy to see that the mayor did not propose any cuts to your bureau, but I am worried that we have to put a fine point on the types of cuts, because those those services you listed, the one you didn't list, was just the 911 patrol calls. Right? Those have to happen regardless. Everything else is a choice, and that worries me. So thanks, chief.
116 Thank you, councilor Zimmerman. Next in the queue is councilor Smith.
117 Thank you, chief de. On page 144, it presents a table summarizing budget allotments for projects under the bureau of technology and services. I saw that the mayor has proposed no funding for the public safety radio system network refresh project. This project received almost $1 million in this fiscal year, and about 1.2 million in last fiscal year. Why is there no funding proposed for this project for this next fiscal year?
118 Well, that might be a question for technology services. My understanding is that we don't anticipate and I'll also ask mike maybe to help me out here, but we don't anticipate that need with our radio updating system is how I understand it. But I could be mistaken on that.
119 I just want to make sure you have the tech that you need, and that you have the resources to do the job that you have to do to keep all the residents of Portland safe. And if and if there is a need, or you cut that out because it was because of the restraint, I wanted to make sure that you have all the technology that you need.
120 Right. I feel comfortable with our, you know, current proposed budget, with the mayor's budget regarding meeting that technology need. There's always going to be, you know, concerns around that. As we look at our mdc replacement needs and, you know, ongoing issues with body worn cameras, etc. But I feel comfortable with the mayor's proposed budget regarding that allocation.
121 Perfect. Thank you.
122 Thank you, councilor Smith. Go to councilor. Morillo.
123 Thank you, councilor Canal. I appreciate this discussion and some of the hard questions that we're trying to address with this budget, but and maybe I'm just too sick and too tired to not cut through some of this a little bit in a more blunt manner. But a lot of that what you stated, chief day feels like pretty intense propaganda, frankly, because we saw from multiple community surveys that the community actually said that they would be okay with reducing police funding as far as community policing, quote unquote, goes, where police are going into neighborhoods, as long as it meant that they got to save other services. So that's what portlanders are asking for. And to say that there is while all of our bureaus are suffering, while we are having to cut employees across the board to say that there is nowhere to cut within the police budget, I think doesn't really make any sense. There are certainly things like, I don't know, school resource officers where we are having a school to prison pipeline being started and funded by our city council. The fact that we spent millions, millions of dollars on protest responses for protests that didn't actually amount to anything is a huge waste of resources at this time. And it's also my understanding that the 2 million proposed in the mayor's budget is additional funding. So anyone who's talking about reallocating that 2 million isn't even talking about a cut to the police bureau like we're talking about for every other city bureau, they're just talking about removing the additional that was given. Is that not correct?
124 I know that's incorrect. We were given $10 million last year above our budget. This year we're given two. So it is an $8 million reduction from what we were given last year, both of which are one time funding. But we are taking a cut, and I've been clear since we began the budget conversation with the city budget office that any reduction, both in the basic budget as well as one time funding, would be considered a reduction. So the 2 million is above the cal. Is that the correct term, the $2 million above the cal? But it's $8 million less than what the police bureau received last year.
125 Thank you. But we're also having a call study allocation being done right now. Can someone speak to where we're at on that right now, and who the appropriate responders are for which calls councilor?
126 I can I can start with that. And then maybe elizabeth, I'm not sure if nick mcdonald is available to kind of comment on where we're at with the call allocation study. Councilor, this is mike myers, the deputy city administrator for the public safety service area. We started the call allocation study probably three years ago. I was the community safety transition director at the time. One of my responsibilities was to have a discussion around sending the right responder to the right call. And there are multiple alternative responders to traditional response types of police and fire. There's we have a private ambulance contract with the county, with the American medical response that handles all kinds of different kinds of medical calls that we cooperate with. So there's room there. We have Portland street response, we have ps3's. We've talked about a few of those today. One of the things that came out of the study was that clearly, there's room for improvement on call allocation across the board, on police, fire and medical responses. And so we have currently a call allocation working group, I think councilor They meet once a month and includes director causes team, Portland police bureau team and fire, all working to review all of those calls. Elizabeth. Is nick mcdonald available to kind of maybe help answer clear clearer answer for the councilor?
127 Yeah, I'm right here. Nick mcdonald performance analyst with public safety.
128 So the sort of core question, nick, was, what's the status of the project now? And where do you think it's going in the next 6 to 12 months.
129 Of the allocation? Yeah, so we gave a briefing on this a few weeks ago. But we're in the middle. This project started June last year. We're anticipating getting recommendations out in the next month to bureau directors and chiefs and getting the changes to the call types that the working group has been working on, done, depending on legal and bargaining issues towards the end of the year or by mid next year. So the three primary areas where we're expecting to make changes and this is not finalized yet, but we anticipate it to be in the area of burglar alarms. The unattended medical deaths calls and the welfare check calls. So yeah, we expect there to be some efficiencies based on the anticipation that we would not need to attend all of the unattended death calls that we do now, or we wouldn't need to attend all of them for as long as we do now. There is potential for some efficiencies in responding to burglar alarms, particularly repeated false alarms, either choosing not to respond to all of those after a certain number of false alarms, or finding corporations that that continue to do that. And I think, you know, the question that's been talked about, about the welfare checks, whether there are more welfare check calls that could be routed to either psr or to ps3's right now, we don't send ps3's to welfare check calls. Typically. I think there have been 14 occasions where they've corresponded with police officers on those. It's a little unclear whether current rules would allow us to increase the ps3 responses without going back to bargaining. I think ppa thinks we would need to bargain that issue. I'm not sure without seeking some some other advice on that, whether I think the same. Yeah. Are there any clarifying questions there?
130 Thank you. I, I think I've heard the same thing when talking about reallocating calls from officers to things like Portland street response or police, although I think that is definitely the direction we should be heading as a city for some of those calls where a police officer is not needed or is too expensive, I think that would actually be much more prudent for our budget, if we're ever willing to have that conversation. But I do think that bargaining tends to be a constraint there. But I guess I'll just close with this, that the city spent an estimated $1.1 million on munitions, shields and training for police at the beginning or at the end of last year in anticipation for protests that never actually happened. All things that would be used against our own people, with a level of force that is, in my experience, pretty intense. And we've sat through multiple budget meetings where we've paid out police settlement after police settlement after police settlement. So there's there are no other bureaus. When we talk to them about how bad things are and the things that we might have to cut that they, you know, they'll tell us how bad things are, but we don't experience the same level of pushback and pressure or grandstanding that I think I see from the Portland police bureau. And I find that a little frustrating when we're trying to have very difficult discussions with every single part of the city about what we're going to cut.
131 And chair. If I could respond to councilor Murillo's comments around the expense on the protests.
132 Please.
133 Councilors, I this this subject has come up repeatedly and around the expense. Last year of, I think, over a million and a half to $2 million that was expensed out primarily by Portland police bureau, some a smaller amount with fire. And I want the council to know that responsibility 100% relies with me. I early on last year, in preparation for what I didn't know was going to happen with the election and the inauguration several months prior, in April of last year, I directed the Portland police bureau leadership team fires leadership team to start preparing. At the time, the reason we did it there, there were individuals that if we were to have the need for teams out there in the community in that type of work, they needed to get trained back up. There were negotiations that needed to happen with the with the unions. There were gear that had expired or wasn't available that we needed to purchase well ahead of time. I couldn't wait till the last minute, and I directed Portland bureau of emergency management, the Portland police bureau, and Portland fire and rescue to get together, unify your commands, be prepared. That entire week. We cannot fail. We cannot have bad things happen. And I spent the money not because the things didn't happen. I spent the money so it wouldn't happen. And you are correct. Nothing happened and I'm so thankful for that. But I want to make sure that the responsibility for that expense is directed toward me, and I am deeply regret any. Expense of any fiscal dollars for the city. It was done in the best interest of the community and what I thought I was preparing for. So my, my, I just want to get that on the record.
134 I appreciate that response. Dc myers and I think it's honorable that you're owning that. It's also my understanding that our police bureau continues to have more funding every single year. The only time they had a cut of around 16 million was back in 2020. And there has been this story regurgitated over and over again that they have the most dire budget. I have never in the entire time that I've lived in the city of Portland, ever heard the police say that they're not in a dire budget moment. So I guess I'm just confused as to when things are not dire, because it seems like it increases every single year. And regardless of whose responsibility it is, that money is in their coffers. And if that's 1.1 million of what they are asking for, that is money wasted. And again, we have other areas for things like school resource officers that, frankly, should not exist because they have never stopped a school shooting and in fact just contribute to sending kids to the school to prison pipeline. But we continue to fund things like that when we talk about urgent things that are happening on our streets. So I would much prefer if our police would actually do the groundwork and address 911 calls that are urgent and address crime, which is what they are meant to do. Thank you.
135 Thank you, thank you, councilor Morillo. Nathan, you look like you were going to say something earlier with relation to the dollar amounts. Can you? I want to make sure you get the time there. I don't think people could see you.
136 Yeah. I can speak up on some details on the budget things. I guess I'll go back to the beginning. Councilor Zimmerman, you asked the question. Were there cuts to police, fire and boec? And the answer was no. I will add some nuance to that. Police and fire both did have cuts in ongoing funding that are put in the proposed budget, $2 million each. Those are backfilled with one time funding, so that for this year would have no material impact, but for future years would. If the bureaus aren't able to absorb those cuts within their budgets themselves.
137 Can I can I just rephrase that and make sure I understand exactly what what you're saying? Given the nature of how we use one time and ongoing, what you're saying is that the cuts that are happening in the bureaus that are sitting up here aren't going to lead to any reduction in force or change of operations in this upcoming year, even noting that it is a reduction in the ongoing meaning if we don't figure out how to replace it as ongoing, or continue to always use one time only each year, that eventually would catch up to us and be a reduction. But in this upcoming year, we've mandated something with some one time only. Am I understanding that correctly?
138 Correct? Yeah. And so in the proposed budget, the mayor explicitly said for both bureaus that the desire is to see a decrease in overtime, whether that be a shift in programing or whether they're able to staff up and absorb some of those costs, whether they could is yet to be determined. And one of the budget notes we have is to say, let's examine that on a monthly basis and see whether they would be able to absorb those costs.
139 Great. I appreciate that focus and clarity.
140 Yeah. So that's one reduction that took place that's, you know, sort of one for one, a more technical one. There were reductions to all of the bureaus, including boec for enterprise services functions, the core services reductions that have been talked about, those are largely placeholders at this point, due to the need for that process that will take place over the next six months for the seven different core services to see what gets cut. Most of the cut for the service area did come from the office of the dca, where we've centralized most of our business services functions, but there are still some of those core services that exist within the bureaus. So each of the bureaus had a cut there as well. Then I'll say on the question that councilor Morillo had of what the ads were versus the subtractions. There are five main packages that exist for the police bureau in the proposed budget. Why they were broken up into five. I will defer to the mayor's office that do a little bit of a dance back and forth. So I mentioned there was that reduction of $2 million from the police bureau that is then added back, and then there's an additional $2 million that was added on top of that. So I think that's the 2 million that councilor Morillo is referring to. One one package reduces, another package is adding four. So it's a minus two plus four net two. Then there is a package that is one time funding that is largely reflecting the request that the bureau had for this year's budget and received for this year's budget for one time funding to keep going special missions. So there is a $8,050,000 package to continue that current level of service. And then in addition, there's a package for ongoing funding for the body worn camera program. The bureau had received a grant to sort of from the federal government to start up this program. It was known that that was one time funding. It was known that would just be kick starting it, and there would eventually be ongoing needs. The bureau has received ongoing funding in past years for staff and support to build to support that program. These ongoing dollars will be able to continue the contract for the program itself and the sort of core there. So those are the primary clarifications I was hoping to make.
141 Thank you. I think I'm next in the queue and I'll just start with a clarification. How much is that body worn package body worn camera package.
142 It is 1.4 million.
143 Thank you. All right. So I will start by asking I asked two before. Are there any policy or compensation set asides in this current budget? I don't think he answered that the previous time I asked two together. So sorry.
144 Are there any policies or no policy set? Asides will generally be cleared out at the end of this year, and they would be funded again either in the adopted budget or in the fall bump. And I'll look to my budget team. There are no policy set asides that currently exist. There are a number of reserve funds that the bureaus have. They may be for equipment or for capital asset replacement. Those things do exist and they carry year over year for police and fire primarily.
145 Thanks. So the budget notes this is a police related. Everything in this queue will be the budget notes in addition of $8 million for overtime hours, a reduction of 2 million in ongoing and an addition of 4,000,000 in 1 time funds is the. And this is sort of a two part. The $8 million appears to be ongoing funding. If you can confirm that one time, that's one time the eight. Okay. Thank you. And then, relatedly, will the 10 million that's marked as an increase to the precinct patrol category, which I believe is the net of all of those three things I just mentioned, be used for overtime hours specifically because I believe that's separate from the money that's being allocated to fill the vacancies. Which I'm very supportive of, by the way.
146 Yeah.
147 I tackling that one.
148 Well.
149 Why don't you start? Because I'm a little confused with the with the with the question. So I don't know if, if you understand the question you want to lean in and I'll.
150 I guess I would say there is not a programmatic change that has taken place in that shift. You know, how we allocate overtime dollars in the past, we generally lumped them all into one, one category so that the chief's office had the sort of the greatest discretion. We've begun carving that into smaller pieces to make sure that there's the d.o.j. Settlement agreement requested that we have dollars set aside for training. So now there is a specific training overtime budget that exists within that program area. Most of the other resources are still in that sort of larger lump.
151 Oh, sorry.
152 Go for it.
153 Okay. So I appreciate you getting me started there. So where we're going with overtime around this. And nathan commented on it, but we've been doing this now for the last few months is we're allocating hours and costs to divisions. So we're telling each precinct, here's what you need to work within. We're telling north precinct, here's what you need to work within training division. Here's what you have based upon the historical need that we've seen. And then also trying to reduce the number. And that's where we're seeing some of the reduction coming. We're also so we're seeing some of the you know more pushing more of that responsibility down to the primary responsibility down to the commanders. Lieutenant sergeants in the precincts are in the divisions saying, here's what you have to work within. See if you can make that happen. And we're we're seeing increased amount of savings because of that. So rather than just having this big pot, you know, allocating it out.
154 Thanks. Last year there was I'll just following up on, on councilor Morillo question. Last year there was $2,500 in the budget for school resource officers. And this year there's a proposal 27,000. I know it's a small amount of money, but can you speak to what that funding is used for and why there's a requested increase or proposed increase?
155 I believe those dollars are connected to an intergovernmental agreement we have with Portland public schools, where they've requested services from the police bureau, and it's the shift in dollars is based on what we've seen historically over the past year. So that iga, I think was signed a year ago. So it's relatively new. I can pull up a phone. A friend, Ryan zubieta, who is our lead budget analyst for the police bureau, to talk a little bit more.
156 Afternoon. My name is Ryan zubieta. I work as the bureau's budget lead. Similar with the overtime where initially we budgeted in a single large bucket to be doled out as needed. We're trying to take that same approach with the bureau's internal materials and services. So with the school resource officer, ims charges specifically that $25,000 increase that's related to the vehicles used by school resource officers. And so I was just taking while developing the budget, a more detailed approach of computing those costs to the units that incurred them.
157 Great. Thank you for that. That's very helpful. We talked about disaggregation a lot. I share the concerns about the program itself, but it is very helpful to have that information there. You might be the best person for some of the future of these. So given the conversation that we had around pbem and it's lines, I'm curious if you could give more clarity on what the line items that are titled emergency management, emergency response and problem solving and tactical emergency response are I believe the last one is cert, and I imagine our our team might fall into one of these. Maybe. But if you could just clarify what these line items specifically refer to.
158 Yeah, we've got that here. Let me find that. Just a minute. That's it.
159 And while we're at it, there's also $255,000 for strategy and finance, which is a line item that got zeroed out when a lot of that function moved over to cfd. And now it's coming back from 18 million to 0 to now. 255. So if you could speak to that too.
160 Sure thing. I'll start with the strategy and finance piece. I looked into this yesterday and it's a clerical error. Those dollars should be under patrol operations overhead. And it's with some legacy issues in sap where program names were changed in one area but not in another. As far as what do emergency management response and problem solving and tactical emergency response programs do? Tactical emergency response is the bureau of specialized resource division. So that includes, you know, units like canine traffic, air support, knock narcotics, and organized crime. Fit folks that have very specialized roles within the bureau.
161 We do have an emergency. We do have a full time sergeant assigned to emergency management. So that would have included some of this language is just a little bit outdated. Like Ryan mentioned, the terminology emergency response and problem solving. We don't have that quote unquote title or program as you mentioned. So, but emergency management, we do have a sergeant assigned full time to then tactical emergency response programs are those programs that he highlighted that support, you know, those critical incidents that that happen.
162 So emergency management is the management of the people that are in the tactical emergency.
163 We have a full time. We have a full time sergeant who works in emergency management, who works in, you know, helping us with events and liaisoning with pbem and etc. So we have quote unquote, an emergency management division. It's one person who works as a liaison to all of those things that come up.
164 Great. And then the emergency response and problem solving, it does have 252,000 on it. So I'm just trying to get some clarity on that.
165 Yeah. I thought when we talked yesterday that that was a different name. So because we did this, this was when I got your questions councilor Over the weekend, I wasn't familiar with that title.
166 So I think that's another clerical issue in here. I have that 252,000 allocated to east precinct. So I think again, it's a an issue where one field in our system was renamed and the other one was kept. The old.
167 Thank you. All right. So I'll have I have a couple more. Can you speak to the efficiency aspects of having 4 or 5, 10 or 11 police vehicles responding to a single call? So I went on a ride along with the fit team. I seen examples where this makes sense. I was on a call where five responding officers in three vehicles responded to a call, and given the nature of that call, it made perfect sense. I've also seen when I was doing a sit along at boec, a bar disturbance where I think seven police officers were responding to it, all of which arrived six arriving after the first person had addressed it. So I just want to understand the sort of the rules around that and how you manage to that from the perspective of having those other six officers potentially be able to answer other calls for service.
168 Yeah, and a lot of that lands on the shoulders of the supervisors and making sure that they're adequately managing their resources. So priority call is always going to get a two person response. Could be a two person car. It could be two two officers. But that's largely what you're talking about. You know multiple response. So priority call is going to get sent to officers. And depending on the nature of it and the experience, officers may assign themselves, for example, shooting calls we have seen consistently over the years, about 8 to 10, maybe as many as 12 officers respond to a shooting call because they know that, you know, high propensity for maybe ongoing violence, but there certainly could be a crime scene, perimeter, etc. So officers do have the latitude to self dispatch, but my expectation is and is that, you know, once on scene that supervisors are paying attention to what's happening when the rest of the city and allocating those resources appropriately. But I always want the officers and the sergeants to have that discretion. I am encouraged. I'm, you know, when I am not stuck in the office and I'm out and about listening to the radio, I'm hearing more of that. I'm hearing more of our sergeants on the air, directing officers as to what to go to, timing, time out, time spent on those. But that's primarily a supervisory role for them in the field. There's so many things that happen on a call, particularly our complex calls. And because of the number of shootings used to be, shootings were about our 12th or 13th most common call that's now elevated into the top five in the last several years. And given the complexity of the calls, you know, sometimes we just don't know until we're there, figure out where the needs are, plug the holes and try and release others. But that's that's the bottom. That's the bottom line of where I want that to stay. With that discretion and those supervisory oversight.
169 So this is maybe a related point, but it might cover the same themes because you mentioned there are 60 calls waiting. When I was at boec, I saw, you know, the units on the screen with their various numbers associated with the police precinct and district and the, the unit assigned to that. And I also saw units, I believe it was 27 something which were marked unavailable for calling for dispatch to a call, not because they were on a call or on their way to a call, but because they were, quote unquote, doing community engagement. And this was separate from assistant chief lavelle's unit with officer harnsberger and the great work that they do there. I want to be clear, I do value that. But in terms of those other officers who are just out at a community event, do you know what the impact of that is on response times and whether or not having, you know, to what degree having them available would reduce the times that officers that that portlanders are experiencing when they're waiting for a police response.
170 Yeah. I don't you know, I can't speak specifically, obviously, to what you're speaking, what you're asking about because I wasn't there, the screen, etc. But I think philosophically, I get what you're saying. So there's a couple of things. We'll just take the central bike squad for a minute. Central bike squad is out and about interdicting, you know, primarily drug behavior downtown. So they're not necessarily taking calls for service. They can assign themselves to calls for service. They sometimes are dispatched for calls for service. When there's a need. A 2700 unit, for example, might be a fit team. It might be the focus intervention team. It could be, you know, a nerd officer or something, not a typical district officer. And so, you know, their primary responsibility is to do whatever that assignment is. It's not call taking. It goes back to councilor Zimmermann's comment. You know, if there is a reduction in the budget, then we would put them into call taking mode. Excuse me. Whenever we have, you know, a critical incident, we see those people respond and show up and be able to manage and provide that life safety. But we're making an intentional decision. It is an intentional decision in terms of how we're staffing, because the benefit that we get from some of these other units and these other details, I think is really significant, particularly in the area of crime reduction, but also in the area of community engagement and our neighborhood response teams, I think are a great example of that. I could close all our response teams and put them in cars, and we would take calls, but we would lose so much connectivity. There's we are struggling, I think, as a community to determine what it is that primary responsibility is of the police. I'm hearing that on this council. I'm hearing this, you know, my conversations in the community and, you know, if the overriding sentiment that everybody wants is we will not everybody. That's a generalization. But if the overriding sentiment from the majority is we want people, we want officers to simply get in their car and drive and take the call and drive and take the next call. And that would mean a massive restructuring of the organization. And we are trying to meet that basic need, as well as what our other needs that I hear from the from the community investigations, human trafficking, whatever it might be. I mean, the reality is we have one. We are we are less officers today than we did in 2005, less officers today than we did in 1990. I don't understand where the supply and the demand. There isn't a whole lot of give and to councilor Novick amendment proposal. And we've talked about it, and I appreciate his outreach and the conversations we've had. But as I explained to him in the conversation, we are so woefully behind the curve that I did give that assessment or that comment regarding the hypothetical, if we took a number of cars away and what could we do? But we're so far behind the curve that it's really difficult to make an assessment as to what it is that needs to be taken away to make it, you know, equitable or manageable or fiscally responsible. I, I appreciate the effort that we're trying to do there, but it's it is a challenge.
171 Thanks. So I'll just ask the last two here and then I'll give it to councilor. Novick. So the first is what are the resale values of the crowd control munitions that councilor Morillo mentioned in her questions? And I'll ask the second together. The same approach to overtime reduction was applied to both police and fire. But in the case of fire, it was a net zero where it was the same amount of ongoing reduction as was added in one time. And in police's case, it was 2 million reduced in ongoing and 4 million added in one time. Can you speak to why that makes sense?
172 You help me with that, nathan.
173 Sure.
174 I'll say that. The fire bureau and police bureau are at different places with their staffing. So the fire bureau is at staff or nearly fully staffed and has been for the past several years as a part of this budget. They received that cut. They received the dollars back. That will keep them even for this year. Over the past two years, the fire bureau has received authorization for additional firefighters. That hasn't been an expansion in service. They haven't added new stations or new apparatus. Those have been folks who have been added purely to reduce the amount of overtime they have. Overtime has gone up in part due to labor contracts, their work week, in part due to just how their staffing is organized. But overtime is increased significantly, adding in those staff, including the ten that are added in this proposed budget, will actually see a reduction in costs overall for the bureau because once those folks are trained up, they will then be part of the travelers pool and be able to reduce some of the overtime they have in the future. Our forecasts do not indicate it will be a $2 million saving in this year, or in any year in the future. With just those ten folks, it would require dozens more likely to hit that 2 million.
175 So there's the training pipeline piece. Right. And so that is one of the biggest. And police is in the same boat. So we just can't hire someone and put them in a seat. So you're talking you know months and then they can enter a seat. But it's a you have to keep up with attrition, whether it's separation or retirements and still try to hire to keep that balance. So when we get this additional ten, we still have to hire them, train them for approximately ten months before they can actually fill a seat and start supplementing or taking away some of those overtime costs. So it's not an immediate gain with the nfte. We appreciate it because it helps, right? It may not be in the now. It may be two years from now, three years from now, as we ebb and flow through the 27th pay periods and trying to expand our pipeline under restrictions, you know, that are facilities have, but we're trying to do everything in our powers to continue to reduce that overtime cost.
176 So I'd say there could be a world where the fire bureau would have gotten if there were resources, even more money for next year to be able to have that training pipeline take place and to be able to absorb those costs, there will likely need to be some time management needed to be able to meet that need for next year. The police bureau is in a different place in terms of staffing. It's been running between 10 and 15% vacancies for its sworn positions over the past three years. It has been hiring at a rigorous clip, but has also seen separations at all points. You know, separations of newly hired folks within probation, separations of people who were hired 20, 25 years ago and are now just meeting the end of their their career. So they also have an added problem. That fire bureau has about a ten month pipeline police bureau. It's 18 to 24 months. So there's a much longer lead time there. So we know that if the police bureau were to hire into their vacancies, those folks aren't going to be reducing overtime for another couple of years. So some of those dollars, I think, were intended in part to be able to increase the amount of staffing that is being hired to increase recruiting efforts on all of that work, and to be able to make that bridge, you know, if the police bureau is continuing to offer this current level of service and if it is going to eventually meet the staffing levels it has, this is going to be a multiyear issue where they will need to have one time plugs to be able to keep them within budget.
177 Yeah. So thank you for that. So you know, that speaks to the long term staffing goal of trying to increase the organization. The other question you asked about the munitions I find it highly unlikely. I'm certainly willing to look in to see if there's things that we don't need or we don't think we're going to use. But I find it highly unlikely that even if we decided we didn't need them or didn't want them, that they'd be available for resale. There's a. A disposition process for that that we would need to follow that, you know, I'm fairly confident, but not 100% certain would not involve any kind of purchase.
178 So effectively a sunk cost.
179 Effectively, what.
180 Sunk cost?
181 Yes, yes. Yeah.
182 Thank you.
183 I'm going to pass it over to councilor. Novick.
184 Chief day. You know that I think that in certain ways the police bureau is under-resourced. You and I have talked about the value of creating a ten person burglary unit to investigate burglaries, which you think could make a significant difference when it comes to welfare checks. I've talked to you about them. I've talked to president schmautz about them. I have yet to talk to somebody who thinks that it makes sense to have armed officers going to 25,000 welfare checks a year, and it seems to me that a bureau that's strapped for resources, and whose officers are strapped for time to deal with actual crimes, should have been working hard since 2019, at least when ps3's were created to offload a whole bunch of those welfare checks. I realize you've only been there for a year and a half, but wouldn't you agree that it undermines the bureau's case when it says that it's lacking resources, that it hasn't made every effort to stop sending police, armed police officers and 25,000 welfare checks a year.
185 I would agree that I am absolutely committed to increased efficiencies, responses, whatever that might be, whether it be ps three police officers or otherwise, psr, etc. I would say that and would own the fact that we have been behind in some of that with the allocation of the ps threes coming on in 2019, 2020. Not to make an excuse, it's just a reality. What we are finding with our ps ps3's, as we're looking at the program more closely, that there is capacity to grow what they are currently doing, and it may or may not include welfare checks. Right now, we're not maximizing them in the area of stolen car thefts and some of the things that they initially started for. If we the conversation that we're having, as I said earlier, is really about, you know, what's the role and responsibility of police officers. And I'm happy to continue to look at welfare checks as an alternative to not have us respond to the but the challenge being the uniqueness of each call. There's always going to be a risk associated with that.
186 Chief, I have to challenge you on that. The vast majority of these calls are somebody calls in and says, hey, there's somebody here who doesn't look like they can take care of themselves, but it doesn't seem to be necessarily a medical emergency. And that does not seem to me to be something that's rife with I mean, you can any given day, you could walk out into the street and get run over by a runaway truck, but it does not seem to me that there's a credible argument that you can't assign a whole bunch of these welfare checks to somebody other than armed officers.
187 Yeah.
188 Thank you. Councilor Novick. We'll pass it at councilor. Zimmerman said he has one more. I know we're a couple minutes over, and I appreciate you bearing with us. So, counselor Zimmerman.
189 I appreciate the leniency there. Chair. I, I just want to talk a little bit. We sometimes have discussions and we hear that the public safety groups, they get an increase every year. Right. That's that term is used because if you do a dollar for dollar, a lot of times in government, in most organizations you'll see an increase. But we don't use a term in city of Portland, which is service levels, we use cal not a great term, but I just want to highlight that in a year when cost of living, the cost of officers, all those types of things grow. And because of that, your budgets without more officers have grown. And so it's the same service level for a more expensive check next year. The reason I say that is just to get around this idea that sometimes we hear, you know, Portland police always has a growing budget or there's always there's always fluff in public service or in public safety. And I just want to say, going down your chart in the mayor's proposed budget last year, there were nine captains. This year, nine captains. Last year, there were 88 detectives this year, 88 detectives. Last year there were 28 lieutenants. This year, 29 lieutenants. Okay. We grew by one. Let's let's mark that. Last year, 598 police officers. Oh, here's our one 597 officers. So we're back to no growth in humans. And last year, 123 sergeants. And this year, 123 sergeants. I offer that up just in the fact that you have a very big bureau, you and so do you, chief. Right. These are big bureaus with big dollars. And in a world where the cost to do business with that many employees goes up by cola, by our other agreements with our represented workforce, by the materials and services, it is important sometimes to recognize that while a budget and bureau may go up, there is no change in service that will happen next year because of that growth. And to equate that is a level of funny math that plays well in headlines, but doesn't do great in terms of describing what a portlander will experience from Portland, or from Portland police or from Portland fire. So thanks, chair. That's my last comment.
190 Thank you, counselor Zimmerman. So I recognize there's a lot of different conversations that we didn't get to hear. We'll probably have some of those at the full council acting as the budget committee. We may have more in the public safety work session. We're allowed to change, I believe, 10% after the approval and before the final adoption of the budget. So there may be some changes there just due to the scheduling of when our public safety service area work session is, which is may 28th. And let's make sure I get this right. 9:30 a.m. The next meeting of this committee is on Tuesday the 27th at 2:30 p.m. Here. I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who arrived here, who's in attendance, who's answered questions, including those online. Thank you and your team for setting this up with that. This meeting of the community and public safety committee is adjourned.