The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2026-07-28
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Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Public Works Committee met the morning of July 28, 2026, opening at 9:32. After approving minutes, staff updated the committee on local transportation funding: the Transportation Utility Fee and Street Damage Restoration Fee take effect January 1, with a council-directed 75/25 maintenance-to-safety split, three candidate models for a low-income discount reaching multifamily renters, commercial rate methodology still in development ahead of a September vote, and discussion spanning pothole backlogs, camera-placement equity, and a proposal to bond against the new revenue to accelerate sidewalk construction. The committee then reviewed draft administrative rules for automated vehicles under Title 16.40 — seven policy concepts including authority to cap fleets, a 50,000-mile testing-permit threshold, suspension metrics, limits on stopping in bike lanes, data-sharing restrictions, and workforce-transition fees — with councilor positions ranging from a phased framework to an outright local ban, against acknowledged state-preemption risk. No votes were taken; both items were updates. The committee adjourned to August 11.
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0 Good morning everyone. I'm going to call the meeting of the public works committee to order. It's Tuesday, July 28th at 932. Diana, can you please call the roll?
1 Good morning. Koyama Lane. Here, Green here. Smith. Absent.
2 Kanal here.
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3 Clark here. And claire, can you please read the statement of conduct?
4 Thank you chair. Good morning and welcome to the meeting of the public works committee. To testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at Portland.gov/council/agenda/pubc works committee or by calling 311. 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. Please state your name for the record. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. And finally, virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
5 Thank you, claire. Colleagues, for today's meeting, we have two updates from PBOT on topics where there is a lot of interest and a lot of anticipation. First, we're going to hear about the implementation of the tough and the street damage restoration fee based on direction that the council gave them the past this year. And then we'll have a discussion of automated vehicles, including in progress rulemaking. And I would like to entertain possibly policy concepts. But before we get to our main items, we need to adopt committee minutes for our meeting of June the 9th and June the 23rd. Let's see. Diana, can you please read the first item.
6 Item number one June 9th, 2026 to June 23rd, 2026 public works committee meeting minutes.
7 Great. Do I have any comments? Objections, support seeing. Okay, so the minutes are approved by unanimous consent. No objections. Great. Let's move on. Diana, can you please read the first item?
8 Item number two. Document number 2026-265. Update on local transportation funding.
9 Terrific. So, colleagues, as you recall, when we passed the transportation utility fee and the street damage restoration fee this spring seems like so long ago at this point, we included there lots of concerns, lots of work to be done by PBOT. So my understanding is that there are specific methodology on some of those concerns. Concerns are still being determined, but we're going to get an initial status update today, as well as a preview of some of the more detailed information that we're going to get in the fall before implementation. So with that, I would like to hand this off to I see director williams is here, and shoshana cohen and gabriel graf, welcome. Thank you for being here this morning. We're happy to see you. We're really looking forward to this update.
10 Good morning. Thank you so much for having us. Give me one second. Please shop some things around this morning. So good morning. My name is millicent williams. I am the director of the Portland bureau of transportation, and we'd like to thank you, council vice president Clark and members of the committee for having us here today. I'm pleased that we're here today to provide a report back to the progress of setting up our new local funding structures. Next slide please. Our public works service area delivers clean drinking water, maintains an award winning parks and recreation system, provides reliable sewer and stormwater services, and keeps our transportation system safe and accessible so people can get to where they need to go. For years, funding for the maintenance of a safe and accessible transportation system has been eroding and unable to keep up with the needs of the system. Thanks to you and your council colleagues, PBOT transportation funding is now a bit more stable. The transportation utility fee and street damage restoration fee have already helped to stabilize this year's PBOT budget and helped our staff to plan for the year with a certainty that we have not had for many, many years. While these mechanisms are helping to stabilize transportation funding, rolling them out is a collaborative public works project. We are five months away from implementation of the transportation utility fee and street damage restoration fee, and we're working together as a service area on communications and many structural preparations. This is an exciting opportunity for cross bureau collaboration, and I'm pleased to be here today with our first implementation update. As has already been mentioned, we've had challenges across all fronts at the federal, state and local level. One could say PBOT financial foundation is standing on a wobbly stool. And if you'll advance to the next slide, I'm sorry I didn't mention that. And even though this graphic, which I am not a huge fan of, shows one wobbly leg, we've had really three wobbly legs.
11 Great graphic.
12 Oh, thank you for whoever did that. Your compliments to the chef. Next. Thank you. The local funding for our work has been coming from the local gas tax and the heavy vehicle use tax. The local gas tax now buys half of what it did when it was established in 2016, and our ability to fund our work has been steadily decreasing. Next slide please. Thanks to all of you. We now have a much more solid foundation at the local level. There will be another attempt at a statewide transportation package during the 2027 session, and PBOT ability to continue to stabilize our operations and maintain our transportation system will still be dependent on a successful transportation package. However, today we are here to focus on the implementation work that we have begun around these new local funding sources. Once again, I wish to thank all of you for making this work possible, if not for the transportation utility fee, PBOT would have faced very significant reductions in services this fiscal year. Thank you for preventing this loss of critical services and for providing funding for maintenance, operations and safety work on our transportation system. Today, we are here to provide our first update on the progress we are making to implement the transportation utility fee and the street damage restoration fee, implementing these new revenue sources and delivering this work is a bureau wide and as has already been mentioned, really a service area wide effort. It involves teams from maintenance, engineering, project management, vision zero finance, our utility partners and others. Some of our work in the first few months has been focused on setting up an internal structure that will ensure we are coordinating, coordinating this large body of work across teams, and delivering in a transparent and accountable way. To that end, I'd like to introduce gabe graf. Who will be who? Excuse me. I'd like to introduce gabe graf, who you will be hearing from during this presentation. He is taking on this overall project management of delivering this work. Gabe is a seasoned project manager. He works in some of the most difficult environments to deliver on amazing work. And he is he is respected throughout the community and he is respected throughout the bureau. And we're excited to have him on board for this critical project. As you know, the transportation utility fee and the street damage restoration fee will both go into effect on January 1st. We're still building the program and getting ready today. We are here with the initial updates because we want to bring you along on our process. However, we still have additional work to do, and we will be back again both in September and November to go deeper. Next slide please. So here's our agenda for our presentation. We'll share an update on the implementation timeline and a reminder about the transportation utility fee directives that we are working on. We'll provide an overview of this year's budget allocations, and then discuss the implementation work that we're doing around communications billing, financial assistance, methodology updates, utility outreach, and accountability. Now I'll turn it over to PBOT chief of staff shoshana cohen. To begin with, the timeline for our work. Shoshana.
13 Thank you, director. For the record, I'm shoshana cohen, PBOT chief of staff. This implementation schedule before you includes upcoming milestones for both the transportation utility fee and the street damage restoration fee. We have a busy six months or so ahead of us. It's already been a busy six months, but continuing. We have a special fixing our streets oversight committee meeting next week on August 4th and we will be back. As has already been mentioned before this committee again in September with a more detailed update. And then we expect to return to council again in November with a code alignment ordinance and to ensure the code reflects all the directives related to transportation utility fee. And as directed, we'll be holding a hearing for the nonresidential methodology by February 15th. And we also plan on hosting district open houses in February. This is the time when people will be receiving their first bills early in the year for the transportation utility fee, and we want to be out in the community at that point, making sure that people are able to learn about the work that is being funded. Currently, the street damage restoration fee team is drafting revised administrative rules to incorporate the damage fee into the current permitting process. As part of the drafting process, we're engaging impacted utilities to help inform, review and refine these rules. We also have permitting software updates that we're working on to allow for the coordination and assessment work that's required with the street damage restoration fee, and for both the transportation utility fee and street damage fee. We have ongoing outreach and communications work. Next slide please. So this is a summary of the directives that were included in the transportation utility fee ordinance and these directives. You know thank you for all of them. They really are driving our implementation work. You provided guidance around revenue allocation, establishing a low income discount for multifamily housing residents, developing a commercial appeals process, and an impact based rate rate methodology for the commercial side and a number of directives around accountability. And we are we really are working on all of this. And now to sort of jump more into the details, I'll hand it over to gabe groff.
14 Thank you, shoshana, and thank you, director williams, for that kind introduction. For the record, my name is gabe graf. I'm a capital project manager at the Portland bureau of transportation, and I'm newly assigned for to manage the standing up of this transportation utility fee and street damage restoration fee. I'm just a little over two weeks into this assignment, so I still have a lot to learn, and I may lean on my leadership here for questions that I can't answer. That said, I'm very excited to about the work ahead and appreciate the opportunity to provide you all with an update. Next slide please. So this slide shows this year's budget allocation aligned with the direction from the transportation utility fee ordinance and the street damage restoration fee resolution. And we will talk about each of these revenue allocations over the next few slides. But before we do that, I want to highlight for you that we plan to be back in front of this committee in September with a more detailed local funding at work investment strategy, which will really dive into each of the buckets and including more detailed prioritization criteria, reporting metrics, that kind of thing. Today will be more of a high level overview. You'll note that at the bottom it says initial estimates to be refined. These estimates will change some of the factors that will affect our estimated net revenues include fine tuning our collection costs, the implementation of the low income discount, working out the appeals process and other policy and implementation implementation details that will get refined along the way. The transportation utility fee are tough. Funding is split out per council direction, with 75% of the funding for maintenance work and 25% of the funding for safety and the street damage. Restoration fee funds are dedicated to pavement maintenance. Next slide. So here we are in the pavement maintenance category, which is where the majority of the new funding will be invested, with funds coming from both the street damage restoration fee and the transportation utility fee. You'll see a range of investment levels here from 15 million to $26 million for this fiscal year. And this range is driven by uncertainty on the level of funding that the street damage restoration fee will generate. At this stage of our work, this category of work this year is focused on pavement maintenance, including grind and paves, where we take off the top two inches of pavement and replace it with a smooth new layer of two inches of asphalt seals, including crack seals and slurry seals, essentially treatments that prolong the life of existing pavement by preventing water from getting through the pavement and eroding the base layer below. Base repair, where we tackle specific segments of the road where water has gotten through, and damage to the supporting road
15 Structure underneath, and potholes, which are generally self-explanatory. And all of these categories, the team has put considerable time into thinking through how to prioritize projects and maintenance activities. And you can see here we've got some criteria for how we select streets to pave or potholes to work in. This category will be spread across all four districts, with a focus on streets of citywide significance. These are streets that play critical roles in moving people and goods across Portland. These streets support transit, high volume travel, freight, emergency response, and neighborhood greenways are prioritized pedestrian and cycling routes. We're also looking for opportunities to further our safety work and leverage opportunities with our sister bureaus across public works and other partners on all categories of work. We are committed to transparent reporting on our progress, and you'll see here our reporting metrics are Lane miles paved and number of potholes filled. Next slide. Okay, the street lights and signals bucket of work is also in the maintenance category, also funded by the transportation utility fee, with $1.8 million invested in this fiscal year. This work will be focused on repairing streetlight knock downs and vandalism, applying protective coatings to streetlights and signal and rapid flashing beacon maintenance. And like all of our maintenance work, while this is in the maintenance category, there are clear safety benefits to these investments, and we're coordinating closely with our vision zero team to leverage opportunities to enhance safety. Alongside these maintenance efforts. Work in this category will also be spread across all four districts, with work prioritized based on asset condition, the length of the disrepair, and whether the infrastructure is on one of our high crash corridors. Next slide. Thanks. This this slide just gives a little bit more flavor for the type of work that will be funded with the transportation utility fee and the signals and street lighting category. So you can see example projects like rebuilding of signals, addressing vandalism, and repairing or painting streetlights throughout the city. Next slide. Okay, we're moving on to the safety categories investment for the transportation utility fee here and the vision zero category. We've got $2.9 million in this first fiscal year focused on both programmatic work and capital improvements. On the programmatic side, we're investing in safety analysis, project identification and development, community engagement, and safety evaluations to ensure our capital investments are having the desired results. The capital investments in the vision zero category are focused on high crash intersections, where we can make cost effective improvements to make intersections safer. We're also looking to leverage that existing maintenance work we talked about earlier to gain additional safety benefits. So, for example, when we know we'll be sending crews to do routine maintenance, we can also have them install reflective signal back plates, no turn on red signs or pedestrian head starts, all of which will make intersections safer. Our vision zero work is data driven at every level, including in the project. Prioritization and work will be focused in this category on our high crash network and high injury road segments. Next slide. The cip or sidewalk alternative pathways category is our final category investment. Also on the safety bucket, we've got $2.9 million here in this first fiscal year, and we'll be focused on sidewalk infill projects similar to this one shown on the slide on southeast flavel. Project selection for the cip is building off of our existing plans, such as ped pdx, with a careful look to project readiness so we can stretch our limited dollars as far as possible. In this category, we are identifying early deliverable small projects in districts one and four, and looking forward, we are drafting a larger 200% list of potential cip sidewalk projects, building off of previous planning and engagement efforts. We'll be sharing those longer lists and gathering feedback through community engagement and at our February open houses that shoshana mentioned. Early next year. Next slide. Now I'm going to shift gears a bit and talk a little bit about some of the other program implementation work we've been doing. Next slide. On the communication side, we have launched our fixing our streets, your local funding at work website. We're going to continue to build out the website, but each of the local funding sources now has a page that can be found at www.Portland.gov/fixing our streets. We're working closely with our partners on the utility utility customer service team to develop communications that will go out to customers and help them prepare to respond to questions from customers. As we get ready for the utility fee implementation date. Next slide. January is coming up quickly, and as we've mentioned, one of the critical path tasks is making sure that our public works colleagues, that with our collaboration with our public works colleagues, that our implementation is going smoothly and we're prepared for January rollout. I just specifically want to thank customer service director becky and her team for their support in this process, and I'll turn it over to shauna to go over the next couple of slides.
16 Next slide please. Thank you gabe. So we're also doing a lot of work on the non residential side of things in alignment with the direction in the transportation utility fee ordinance. This work includes developing an appeals process for the first year of the program from January 1st, 2027 to January 1st, 2028. During this period, the transportation utility fee for commercial and nonresidential residential non residential properties will be 4.3%. Excuse me. Of their water, sewer and storm water bill. The appeals process will be developed to provide relief for non residential users, where the water sewer stormwater bill is disproportionate to the transportation impact based on regional averages for similar types of businesses. We're currently developing regional average commercial rates that will serve as the basis for the appeals process. We're also working with city billing staff to analyze the administrative and financial implications of this work. We'll use this information to develop a draft process, and this work will include feedback from businesses with a special consideration, as I believe you asked for, for the impact on small businesses. In addition to the work on the appeals process, we're working on developing draft recommendations for an impact based transportation utility fee methodology for non residential and commercial properties that can be presented at a rate hearing by February 15th, approved by city council by April 1st and implemented then by January 1st, 2028. At a minimum, the approaches will include a trip based transportation utility fee that's similar to 31 other Oregon cities and a land use based methodology with a combined per unit and parcel square footage rate model in order to meet the ordinances intent again, that special consideration will be given to impacts on small businesses, will be meeting with representatives from small businesses and other interested parties in advance of the rate hearings in February. We'll this is, again, just sort of an initial touch, letting you know we've gotten started with this, and we intend to provide a more significant update on this work when we're here in September to ensure we're on track to implement an effective and efficient appeals process and successful rate hearings on discussing a next methodology. Next slide please. We've also been exploring pathways for transportation utility fee discount for income, qualified market rate multifamily residents. Another thing that we know is clearly important as as we brought this forward, as you probably remember, the utility bill includes a discount already for low income, single low income customers and single family housing. And that will be extended to the transportation utility fee. However, there's currently no way for individual multifamily households to directly receive a discount through the existing system. This is because multifamily residential residential properties typically have an overarching water sewer bill account, and individual tenants don't pay their water bills. The city doesn't have a direct connection to the individual household, so it's pretty complicated to find ways to give them a discount. This is a challenge that our utility bureau and utility bureaus nationally have grappled with for years. However, I'm really pleased to say that we have a team who's very excited to be digging into this and looking forward to making progress and really being a leader in this complex area. This team has been researching low income discount programs that exist within the city, regionally and nationally. There are three approaches that have emerged from the research, and they're shown on the slide. The first is a property based discount pass through model. In this model, the utility discounts the sort of overarching master metered property account with the expectation that the owner will pass the discount along through to tenants through rent reductions, credits or service enhancements. Enhancements. However, there are some significant limitations with this model. The model relies on the property owner or manager to comply and pass the discounts along to their tenants, and it can be hard to know if the discount ever reaches the tenant. Additionally, in market rate units, the model may put tenants in a situation where they would need to disclose personal income information to their property owners or managers to prove eligibility for the discount. Another utility discount approach we looked at is across utility crediting model for this model. Another bill that the tenant does receive such and what we've seen is on an electric bill is used as the vehicle for delivering the discount. Our team met with staff from the city of austin to learn more about this model. It has proven effective there. However, austin's utility environment is much different than Portland because the city controls the municipal. The municipal utility services, the electric service. There are not many cities that we've seen. Austin, maybe 1 or 2 others, but not many that do this. And we don't believe we haven't found yet anyone that does it with non municipal utilities. So again, it shows promise. It's working well in austin. But we think in our in our environment it would be pretty challenging. The third model is a direct tenant rebate or credit model. Tenants apply to receive a discount and then sent a rebate in a number of ways, either via mail check, loaded debit or gift card, a digital app, or potentially another delivery model. We believe this model is the most promising at this point because we could reach tenants directly, and it works in our utility environment. Any of these options will require new administrative processes. However, we'll be looking to fight opportunities to streamline and find efficiencies through program design. Next slide please. Again, we're sort of giving you bringing you along. That's where we are right now. We still have more work to do before we can come back with a clear recommendation. The ordinance directed us to be back with our study in December. However, we plan to be back with our with a clearer recommendation in September in order to ensure we can get your feedback in time to implement a program next year. We're on a tight timeline here. In doing that, we're continuing to work closely with a variety of city partners, revenue, city data, office, all sorts of folks, and really thinking through implementation feasibility. We'll also be doing more outreach with organizations that can help us better understand how to make this work for the people who need it most, and also can help us to make sure that people know about the benefit once we make it available. Next slide please. We also have staff are hard at work thinking through the new pavement coordination and utility assessment processes, and how we update our administrative rules for the street damage restoration fee. Next slide. We want this work to be informed by utilities, and one of the things we've just completed is a survey that was sent out to utility representatives to gain their input on things like how best to improve coordination and incentivize reducing the number of street cuts. Next slide. Pbot is still assessing the survey responses, but initially, utility feedback includes encouraging us to provide more advanced notice of paving and capital projects, improving the visibility of planned work by PBOT and other utilities, and providing centralized coordination versus project to project communication. They've also asked that the administrative rules clearly outline how the fee will be calculated, ensure the permit requirements are consistently applied, and PBOT provides dedicated staff to support utility coordination. We really appreciate this feedback that we've been getting, both from our external utilities and our partners in water and bts, and it's truly helping us to ensure we're able to put together an efficient program that is grounded in minimizing street damage. Next slide please. The existing fixed streets oversight committee, which used to be primarily over the ten cent local gas tax, is expanding its oversight to include the transportation utility fee and the street damage restoration fee. We really appreciate the volunteers on this committee embracing this larger scope and responsibility. Next slide please. At their next committee meeting on August 4th, the committee will review some updates to the bylaws to reflect this new responsibility and review an overview of our implementation progress. Very similar to what you're seeing here today. Next slide please. Finally, as we've mentioned already a number of times, we'll be back again in September with more details on all of this. And we also staff, we want to make sure you all know, because there's a lot of details here, that staff are available between now and September. For any additional feedback or engagement on these items. And we encourage you all to be in touch. And then finally, in November, we will be back to have a conversation about some things we'll have to put back in code with an ordinance. And next slide, please. And I believe that concludes our presentation.
17 Terrific. Thank you all and welcome, gabe. I imagine this is a little more complicated than a capital project. I don't know.
18 It's a lot to learn.
19 A lot to learn. Yeah. Well thanks and welcome to the team. We really appreciate this update. I know you can't dive too deeply, but we appreciate at least getting the skeleton of what's going on. And I know we're going to have lots of questions and comments here today. So why don't we start with councilor Kanal.
20 Thank you, chair Clark. Thanks, everybody for being here. I appreciate the presentation. I as I listened through the first, let's say, 18 slides, I appreciate. And at the end as well, a lot of what's been done here. And it seems like the, the core function process is going forward. Councilor Avalos. And I put up an amendment to the original ordinance back in what was that? April. And it doesn't it doesn't appear like a lot of work's been done on that yet. I appreciate, shoshana, you saying that we're going to be coming back with more information in September, but my understanding is September is when you're also going to be asking us to vote. And so I don't know how we're going to have the opportunity to to provide if there's going to be the opportunity for a feedback loop. And I'll give I'll be more specific about what I'm looking at. But just from a process perspective, are there going to be two different touch points in September, or is those going to be on the same? Are those going to be on the same date?
21 We're happy with you to work sort of as, as.
22 You sort of would like us to do. We can we can come with two points. I think that's why we were laying out sort of right now where we were, that we have those three options. So happy to follow up and make this work as you as as you see, I think that we're also looking for some feedback on what we what we presented today. So I think this is sort of one of the first points, but again, happy to continue working with you as much as you would like.
23 Yeah, I think in terms of the sdr, it feels like I have no immediate concern there. I'll follow up if anything comes up, but that that feels like it's going well in terms of and if you could go to slide 19, please, the it'll be 19 and 20 primarily, but it'll start in 19. So. The understanding that that I have from how that amendment went is that the intention was to actually increase the amount of research and not limit it to what we already had. Actually, we should start with slide 20. I apologize. I I'm a little surprised. I don't know if anyone else here is a renter, but I rent a market rate unit. The idea that it may require tenant to disclose income to owner, and that's a new thing is a little bizarre to me. You already have to do that. That's how you get approved for an apartment or rental. That's not a new thing that happens just about everywhere around the city for 47% of us and who rent. And so that being a concern there, it, you know, the second one having primarily seems to only have been based on a conversation with austin, but also we. And the idea that we don't run electricity. So we can't. We we run water and sewer, though. We have that billing authority. So it seems like we're just, we've already decided that we want to go with the third option. And I, I want to be clear, I won't vote yes on anything if I don't get another option. Besides that in September. I am very opposed to that being the only thing that we explore. And it appears that's all that's been explored.
24 Can go.
25 Ahead, if I may, councilor, thank you for raising your concern and referencing the amendment that you and councilor Avalos put forward. These are but three and we've not made a determination about which one we're just talking about for implementation, the challenges or. Lack of challenge with implementation. If we chose one path over another, we're not suggesting that we wouldn't do the most involved resource research driven solution, but our team does need a little bit more time to continue to do the work, to get to both the answers that you're wanting. In terms of looking at a full panel of options and weighing that against the ability for us to do that implementation in a way that supports both the goals of this initiative, as well as supports community that's being served by it.
26 Yeah. And just to be clear, I, I am.
27 Perfectly fine with the idea of taking more time on it. I'm also fine. I'm not saying I necessarily want to pursue either of these first two options. I understand the challenges of, of associating this with a water bill. I am concerned that there was one opportunity, one option presented back in April for a specific, a specific, not only methodology, but vendor. And that's the only thing that has a Green under it right now. So by putting a red and Green up here, that's a thumb on the scale as far as how I interpret it and how I think the public will interpret it in terms of challenging and moderate. So I really want to be clear, I, I need a second option besides the one vendor and option that was brought up in April.
28 I also want to be very clear that a couple of things just. And again, we're happy to sort of continue this conversation as much as possible. And I think we had reached out to your office last week to try to get some feedback. We're happy to can, you know, we're here sharing sort of what is emerging, but we have no, we'll take as long as it needs. I do want to clarify that a couple of things we. We have done more research has been. In some ways, I think the team on this has dug in the most quickly and done. You know, this is just a hard area. As we as we said, there's not a lot of solutions nationally. So I think what we saw early on, we are continuing to see. I think if it was easy, if there were a lot of good solutions, more people would have done it. But I do want to be very clear that it wasn't. I know there was an earlier water bureau report. We've done more of our own original research. We really have been digging in. And then also on that third option, I think what we're seeing is some sort of direct payment to people. Seems like the thing that people would want most, like, send me a check that seems like, you know, send me a check. Or for people who don't have bank accounts, send me a debit card, something I know there is some conversation about a particular vendor. We are not saying that this is a recommendation for that particular vendor. We're saying that some sort of an app thing is still on the table. Some sort of a direct check is on the table, some sort of a debit card, something like that. And that's where we also are trying to talk to community organizations and people and say, what would you prefer? Would you like a check? Would you like, you know, would you would you like an app? Those are the things we're trying to dig in, but we're not saying there's been no sort of conversation about this is this is, you know, this is what we're presenting. Again, I think the research so far did has continued to lift up some of the challenges that we saw earlier. But we can go back. I think we also felt like we were under pressure to deliver by the beginning of the program, or as close to that as possible, which means there's some limits, but.
29 So I understand that, and I think I just just to correct the record here, the time was offered, my staff did meet. We asked if more research had been done. And in that briefing we were told no. So I just want to get that on the record here. Secondly, I'm perfectly content to have other ways of doing the direct to tenant like that can be subdivided into different options. And I get that in terms of seems, I do want to note, you know, I'm having a picnic and other events. We offered that to your staff to come to do the community engagement. So that seems can be verified by data, right? That's August 9th from 12 to 3 at mccoy park. Anyone interested? But I just wanted to to make sure that that's the on the record here because I, I do understand the time crunch and I am content to look at potentially offering a legislative flexibility to ensure that we're able to do it right. I'm, I'm concerned about being sort of shoved into. The only option that was identified in April. And so that's, that's what I'm trying to trying to avoid here.
30 Councilor. I think that we've clarified that there's actually a lot more going on or has gone on. And I think some things get lost in translation. So I would encourage you to personally discuss this with shoshanna or somebody else from the team, if you can.
31 My, my team did, and I'm happy to do it again, but I have the dates on that. I'm talking about records, public records there. Thanks.
32 Thank you. Councilor. Koyama Lane.
33 Thank you chair. Sorry, I am virtual today. I, I wanted to say as I was hearing this presentation, I wanted to say that I could really see that you all at PBOT really have taken close notes of what councilors are serious about and asking. As I saw different sides, I was like, oh yes, we asked for that. We asked for that. So I know we don't have all of our answers and solutions yet, but I wanted to start with that, that I could really see that. And I can't see the faces of, of those who were presenting. It's kind of like teaching virtually on zoom, but just know that I have appreciation there and hope you feel that for my questions. You know, I'm just I'm thinking about the limited tough revenues. It's really exciting. And we also have, you know, especially when thinking about vision zero, we have a lot to accomplish. There's a lot of different projects from capital projects to reporting community engagement. I'm wondering how we can make sure that we're really strategically deploying those funds to make sure that projects that are going to save the most lives possible are prioritized. And I'm wondering if whoever is the best suited person could kind of speak to some of the thinking and planning around that.
34 Sure. I think in this first fiscal year, we're really focused on intersection improvements and using our data driven approach. It's a limited amount of funding that we have available. So we're both looking to do, you know, proven safety countermeasures at intersections that have a documented crash history and leveraging other maintenance activities at intersections that have a proven crash history to provide safety benefits. So that sort of double approach, I think we can stretch the dollars the furthest and have the most safety benefit.
35 And maybe I'll just add the project selection is all driven by our vision zero team. I know there's, you know, there's the citywide vision zero lead, but we also still have a number of staff who are dedicated vision zero staff in PBOT, and they're the ones who are using the data to identify the projects.
36 That's great to hear. You know, following up on a question from last week's committee of the whole when we were talking about vision zero, I am wondering if there's a funding source that could be used for safety assessments and studies when we're paving streets to improve high crash corridors, kind of like like when we were talking about Burnside and the questions of like, could, could we be conducting traffic safety assessments before we're doing big PBOT projects? Could tough funds be deployed for those types of studies? Is that something that is possible?
37 Thank you for the question. Councilor. Koyama Lane. The safety assessment is something that we start with and we end with. So there's pre evaluation. It helps to inform which projects we select the things the types of things, the types of treatment that we actually provide at locations. And then in many instances, especially those where we're making a very significant investment. And by that I mean capital projects. We do post work assessment after a number of years to determine the effectiveness of that work. We we use that to, to guide our efforts in ways that ensure that, as gabe has mentioned, we're making the most impactful choices in the ways that we deliver our work with regard to us being able to identify funding within the tough funding based on the prescription that this body has provided for us, we would need to ensure that that would be something that we would be able to pull out, if we would define it as being a component of a project. Perhaps that's a way, but that is something that we would need to discuss further in terms of how to actually finance something like that. As you are well aware, we have very limited discretionary funding to be able to do other things. I don't want to say extra things, but other or additional things. And so we would need to be creative in figuring out how to best do that. I'm not saying it's a no, I'm just saying I think we need to have more time to be able to go back and do the assessment to determine how we might be able to do the work that you're asking for.
38 Thank you, director, that's really helpful. And what I heard you say is that before there are big projects that there there are safety analyzes happening already. So that might be something that's, that's already part of the culture. And part of the process is that what did I hear you correctly? Because that is important for the public to know that.
39 Yes, that's what I'm saying. I think that there's a lot of behind the scenes work that happens before any project even breaks ground. And what we are actually excited about being able to do is to tell our story better because of the need for us to amplify. This is what tough is paying for. People need to know what goes into the choices that we make, that we aren't just arbitrarily deciding on a site and a plan to deliver, but rather that we're looking at any number of factors before making a determination, before we before we cut once we measure twice to ensure that we're doing the right and best things. And I think I agree that it's an important thing for a community to know. I know that we've had lots of conversations about people's impressions, about some of the work that we do and the what and the why. So we are going to be able to use, we believe, this opportunity to better amplify the whole of what PBOT does as an organization, and why all of those components are important in us delivering ultimately for the communities that we're serving.
40 Thank you for that, director. And if there's any way that I can help, my office can help with boosting some of that sharing. Let me know. I know there's a lot of behind the scenes that the public needs to know more about, so let me know how I can help. And my last question is looking at slide 14. It's really exciting to see, you know, different ways that those vision zero funds will be used. And I'm just wondering, like looking specifically at the capital improvements, is this is that kind of this a set set list? I know the no turn on red is something that councilor Smith and I are excited about and are working on. But I'm wondering, yeah. And how long will will funds be reserved for that? Is it really the the first six months into 2027? Is there how flexible is that list? I know my team has is in the beginning stages of exploring what it would look like to have four way stops on corners that are adjacent to schools. Is that something that can be added to that list? Is it something that would be considered in the next fiscal year? If someone could speak a little bit to slide 14 in that list, that would be great.
41 Sure. Thank you for the question. Yeah, we're really the list of capital improvements on this slide is for this fiscal year, for this $2.9 million. So I think looking forward to next fiscal year and future fiscal years, that list can grow and we can work. And, you know, in consultation with all of you on what the highest and best use of those funds are. And I think in September, when we come with our investment strategy, we'll look at not just the first six months, but the first 18 months, year and a half to sort of flesh that out a little bit more.
42 Great. Thank you so much for your work on this, everyone. That's it for me for now.
43 Thank you, councilor. And I'm I appreciate you bringing up Burnside, because I'll want to come back to that in a moment. Councilor Green.
44 Thank you, chair Clark, thank you so much, PBOT for the presentation today. Big stuff and a lot to a lot to chew on here. I want to jump right into the tough kind of rate design question. Back in April, when we were contemplating this ordinance. I had sort of signaled that I might bring an amendment to change the rate design. And then I pulled that back because I thought that was hazardous to do on the fly. I think it is still a hazardous thing to do on the fly. But part of my commitment for the ordinance and the fee schedule itself was understanding that we're going to work together to kind of look at taking another bite at the apple on how to design the rate structure. So it's not so impactful and regressive too, particularly, I mean, the commercial commercial side of the question is going to be pretty, pretty hard for a lot of our small businesses. So and I know that on your implementation schedule, I see a nonresidential rate hearing scheduled for February 15th. So that's good. But I guess the question I have is where is that work happening now? Is that is the rate design question happening sort of internally behind the scenes now, how can I engage on this?
45 Yes. Thank you very much for the question. And we spoke to one of your staff just yesterday, I believe, about this. So to date, we've been doing some research talking. We have a couple of, you know, super, super smart people on this stuff. So we've been doing a little bit of initial research and then we what we spoke to one of your staff about just yesterday is we would really like to engage more with your office because of the feedback you gave, so that we can make sure that what the research we're doing is really reflecting what you and, and you know, what, what you're interested in. And again, have a touch point. So I think there is some sort of behind the scenes work, I guess, and then have another touch point on that publicly in September so that then we can be ready for the rate hearings in January or February. We sort of said by February 15th, but we it was a initial research study. And now I think we're ready to sort of start engaging and make sure we're on track and just dive in deeper.
46 That's great to hear. And I just kind of want to offer this, you know, council has a recess in the last two weeks of August. I will personally be on hand to dive deeply with with you guys on that. So please consider my office a resource. Me personally, I'm actually kind of looking forward to literally rolling my sleeves up and maybe cracking open some spreadsheets and kind of working with folks to try to make it clear like what it is I'm looking for and raise any concerns that I might have or present some opportunities, because I think if we can do that together in that timeline and have that first look in September, be something with some real meat around it, I think that's going to go a long way towards communicating to the public to say, don't worry, we're not pushing this off. We're being very proactive in understanding that there's going to be this sort of differential impact not only on your bottom line, but the the broad question of fairness and happy to clear my schedule and make myself available for that work. Thank you. Yeah. And, you know, thanks for talking to my staff about this. I got a little pre-brief on that this morning. And so just kind of bringing this into the public and making sure folks understand that we are talking about that. So that is good. There's a lot as you as you all know, there's a lot of different ways to get to a number. There's a ton of ways you can design rates to get there. And they all have trade offs. And so just being crystal clear about the trade offs, who loses, who wins, I think is, is a critical matter of public interest. And I'll support that. The next question I have is related to cip. Actually, first of all, I'm just going to say I appreciate on slide eight, just a call out to the oversight committee and recognize the importance of that. It I keep I'm going to sound like a broken record, but every single meeting I'm at, at the dais now, I'm going to talk about this metro polling that we received on the housing bond and why voters, if you were to put the housing bond out now, would say no, it's because they say they don't do enough oversight in our public bodies. And so every opportunity that we have to say we recognize there's there's issues with trust. And in the public sector, with the administration of our dollars, we're going to hit that head on. We're going to do oversight on ourselves voluntarily. That's a really good thing. I'm going to support that. So thanks for calling that out.
47 Councilor before you go to your next question, I just wanted to acknowledge that that oversight committee really is an active body. They're not just there to say that they're there. And for us to check a box, we bring forward project work. We ask them to help us to make decisions about prioritization. If we have the opportunities to see savings on one project, we ask their guidance about where they would like to see the additional investment go. If we find that we have a gap, we ask if there are recommendations for how we might not just fill the gap, but make different decisions and potentially even sometimes make a different decision about a project altogether. Whether or not we would make a minimal investment or hope for something to happen and be able, in, and on the other hand, be able to fully complete a project. We're asking for that type of guidance. And in addition to having the oversight committee provide the insight, and we report to them and work with them on a quarterly basis. We will also have, as we've discussed previously, dashboards for the public to be able to see exactly where we are, exactly what we're doing, what the timelines are. Just like we have project websites now, but it will be in a centralized location to ensure that people are able to see exactly where their dollar is going, when it's going to be invested, and what the outcomes of that work will be.
48 I remember, I think that the members of the oversight committee came during the hearings on the tough two and testified before us, so we might want to have them back. Yeah, at some point.
49 Absolutely.
50 Have you bring them with you?
51 I'm sure they would be happy to come.
52 And, you know, any time that we have, you know, big questions around rate design or anything like that, just I'd love to hear, I'd love, I'd love to know what that oversight committee is, is how they're, how they're engaging on those kind of questions.
53 I'd be happy to be involved with that as well.
54 Thank you for interjecting and kind of adding that there. Feel free to always interrupt me too, because sometimes I get on a rant.
55 I try not to, but.
56 No, it's you've never seen that before, have you? Okay, I want to go now to the vision zero stuff. I want to pick up on something that councilor Koyama Lane was asking about in the 2627 programing. There's the $2.9 million of vision zero programing, and there's some enumeration of the capital improvements. I see I see some great stuff. I see no turn on red. I see signal head, reflective black back plates, pedestrian head starts high vis crosswalk and protected left turns. I don't see daylighting on there and I wonder why is that just sort of embedded or is it implicit? Or are we not thinking about that as a vision zero investment?
57 No, it's not that we're not thinking about it. It's that this is a limited set of funding. And I think in this year especially, the team is focused on, you know, has lifted up these things. And I actually we may have to double we may have to follow up, but I'm pretty sure we actually have some other funding that we're continuing to do some daylighting with. So I think that work will be continuing through this year, just not with the tough funds. But we can we can triple check that.
58 Okay. Thanks for that answer. I just want to I just want to note that hoboken, new jersey, had some high success by doing like infrastructure, physical barrier based daylighting. I mean, the flex posts, which are, which are one tool which are not very expensive. Also planters in a daylight zone, you know, there will be some folks on that street who are used to park in that spot and they'll be cranky about it, but we'll save more lives. And that's not very expensive.
59 I do also think I know because we have been doing daylighting and I again, we can double check. I don't think we have the the team in the room, but I think that we have done daylighting on most of our high crash corridors already. So these are other interventions at our high crash intersections. But I know with the daylighting work we've been doing, there's been already an. And emphasis on high crash network areas. So it may be that in these places that's already done.
60 And I, I also wanted to mention that all of our capital projects, if they're visiting the streetscapes, it's incorporated in all of those capital projects. So we have several dozen projects where daylighting is a key component. That would not be something that's funded by tough, that's funded through the capital program that we have. But that is something that we're thinking about all the time. The concerted effort that we had earlier this year and found funding to support daylighting is something that is what shoshana was mentioning. We do have the opportunity to continue to do that. And I would dare say, while this is the a good list, I wouldn't suggest that it's an exhaustive list. So there may be things that are not raising to the level of being mentioned in the slide that we'll be doing, but we can certainly make sure that we keep daylighting front of mind. It is an important thing for me as well. I've mentioned it, I believe before this body, having lived in other places, when I moved here, I was like, why are people parking up to the stop sign? That seems very strange to me. I've never seen that. I lived in a city that in front of my house, I used to get tickets because I would be too close to the stop sign. And so that's a behavior change that we need to work on with folks, helping them to understand that it is safety that we're seeking. And we recognize that losing a parking space in the front of your house, if that's something that you're used to, maybe hard for folks, but it is something that we look forward to being able to continue to do in places where it's a, a particular need, especially not that we don't need to do it everywhere, but where it's a particular need. Yes.
61 I appreciate you recognizing that. And I'll just note that, you know, it's even in some of the business district neighborhoods, it's just really common for, you know, folks who are visiting to park or, you know, I used to live in brooklyn, you know, when there's a show at the aladdin, you get folks who are basically parking in the intersection at that point. And so I get that you want to find a place to park, but like it's unacceptable and people get hurt from it. So thank you for acknowledging that this is not an exhaustive list. This isn't really I do think it's actually a relevant and I don't know what like photo radar ticketing machines. How do they play into this? I know there's some. I certainly don't want flock style, you know, photo radar, but I've had constituents. We we have constituents in who live in like the forest park, part of the city in the district. And skyline boulevard is increasingly used as a cut through a major cut through. And it's not it's, you know, the speed bumps on skyline, but but people go off into the ditch all the time and what they've asked for. I don't know if you've had this conversation, but they've asked for can we get ticketing radar system up front before they get into that part of the, that part of the road and start to send some of that, that signal that's sort of like, you know, behavioral change stuff, if that's at all in the world of what you're contemplating now, I just want to lend my support to that. This is something that my neighbors are asking for. And so it's not one.
62 Of those.
63 Things where it's like, we're going to pop this in now. We're really mad at you. It's very much like, please put this on my street.
64 It's a preventative measure.
65 Preventative measure. Exactly.
66 Sure. So thank you for that. Councilor. We will need to work together to identify how we can best deploy that tool to do that preventative work that we're talking about right now. Our cameras are on the high crash network, and we don't have the team here that's responsible for managing that system. We are always open to figuring out how we can more comprehensively provide that coverage that's necessary in the in the space of not having other tools available. We know that that works. And so what we want to be able to do is figure out how we can further enhance the the camera network, ensuring that we're using it as a meaningful tool, not a punitive tool, but something that helps to again, curb that behavior and do it in places where we would glean the most benefit. So happy to have that conversation.
67 I just want to add to that, councilor Green, I've had this conversation with councilor Novick, who's really dug into it. And I think one of the problems is the judicial pipeline and processing the tickets, if you will. And he's thinking about maybe a legislative effort to help fund the judicial department to process our ticketing, and that there is the potential to expand it. We just have this little backlog at that end of the process. So I think there's a lot of support for expanding this program. Absolutely. As an alternative to other kinds of things. So we might want to talk to councilor Novick.
68 And the revenue that's received does cover the cost of the cameras. So it's not like we would be having to identify additional funding.
69 But it's not we're not making money on it. It's just.
70 And it's not intended to be a money maker for us.
71 So yeah, and this is just one of those situations where, I mean, I'll name some of the controversy around this style of measure. It's it tends to hit folks who are lower income and already suffer from a series of sort of overlapping oppressions and of an economic and broad nature. But people who live on skyline boulevard tend to be a little more privileged. And so like the risk factor in that regard is different. And so I think let us know how we can help.
72 We really grappled with the placement of the cameras and recognizing that they're on high crash corridors where the majority of the high crash corridors are, which means that the people who are harmed once, are harmed twice, are harmed thrice. And so figuring that out will be something we want to work together on. But they're hopefully at a point those the number of high crash corridors and the things that we think to do on them to create a safer environment will be fewer. So it'll give us an opportunity to be more judicious in the ways that we're spreading around that love.
73 Yeah, that's one way to put it. Thank you. One more question, if I may. Just turning to cip now, thanks for having a slide on cip. It's it's good to show what a muddy pathway looks like versus what what we could have. And, and sending that signal to voters is, is pretty key when it comes to sort of saying like, here's, here's how your tax dollars are transforming into something that's good for you. On that note, I know that there's some sequencing and timing about the collection of our revenues from tof versus when we can really start to do this work. And I know these are this was a budget allocation that was put in the budget to get some cip money going. But I want to just raise, again, my support for bonding against tof related revenues for cip, because 2.9 million would support something like $27 million in bonds. And then if we were to sort of frontload that work in that kind of a way, we could do more at once and then put a big sign that says, brought to you by cip. And this is and it's and it's these bonds are backed by this revenue that you are paying, by the way. And so that's how this transportation utility fee translates into not walking in the mud and actually having a safe route to school. So I don't, I don't know if you guys are working on a with jonas that sort of put together a bonding proposal for council, but I, I would really like to see that.
74 There are conversations that are happening. I also know that the city administrator is particularly keen on figuring out how we can bond against. Some of the investments that are planned are being made. And so we look forward to being able to come back and talk about that more.
75 All right. Thanks so much.
76 Thank you, councilor Green. Great questions. Now I have quite a list, but they're short. We have a pothole backlog. I'm just wondering how you're prioritizing the potholes.
77 So we're going to be doing two things. We're going to continue to take the reports that people provide for us on a daily basis. And when those reports come in, the teams measure is to fill those potholes or fill the potholes within that area within 30 days. And so we are within the frame of we are within the limits of doing that. But we also intend to, on a quarterly basis, pick a district, not pick a district, but go district by district. I got you and we will do some targeting work, targeted work on, on areas where we know that there are particular challenges. So it's going to be two things happening at one time, kind of like driving a stick. We're going to continue to do the the daily work that we're doing, but we're going to have some I don't want to go so far as to call it pothole opelousas, because that may turn my maintenance team. They may get a little upset with me when I say it, but many opelousas all around to make sure that people are seeing the thing that they're wanting to see until we don't have to pothole anymore.
78 That's terrific. I imagine you have quite a backlog, though.
79 Quite a list.
80 We have a good number, but we also tick through quite a few on an annual basis.
81 Terrific. That's so meaningful. You know, I talked about pothole vigilantes and I hope we can prevent that.
82 But I would like to prevent that, but prevent that.
83 But I think I don't think there's any in our district. Councilor Green but I am interested in the possibility in the future. You don't have to answer this, but just is there the possibility of some sort of neighborhood association training for for painting the the sidewalk, not sidewalk clearance. Yeah. Or any of that. Is there any potential that folks that want to go out and paint the stripes on their street? You know, it's easy to do. Can we train them? Can we give them the right paint? Is there a multiplier? Is that a possibility? Do a pilot.
84 Sure. That is a possibility. We currently actually do work with an organization of volunteers that do some of that work with and for us. So we could look at how we could replicate that around the city. Okay. Obviously that would allow us to do more, and I hate to use the term do more with less, but it would help us to create the.
85 A lot more out.
86 There to do more with more with more people.
87 Can you send me a link to that? Because I think we've got neighborhood associations that would just love to be engaged in that kind of activity.
88 There are a number of ways that we could engage volunteers, and you and I councilor Have talked about volunteer engagement. It is a little bit more difficult with some of the work that we do, based on the fact that it's often union represented staff that are doing those types of things, so that we have to be thoughtful about which areas of work we can provide support for or take volunteer hours on. But I think we know that the volunteer hour is valuable in the state of Oregon, volunteer hour right now is valued at about $35 per hour. So if you get a few folks together on a weekend or a weekday, we're making investments in our community in ways that people may not even realize by engaging that volunteer support.
89 Terrific. That's great. Just an observation that there's got to be some overlap between what we're doing in maintenance and operations and vision zero. It seems like the vision zero number seems kind of low, but there is there's a lot of seems like there's a lot of projects within the maintenance category that are vision zero.
90 If jody were here, she would tell you maintenance is safety. And it is. That is true. A lot of the work that is being done is being done, and it's been identified because of its nexus, with the need to create a safer environment for the traveling public. And by traveling public, I mean how anyone is moving about the system. So. To suggest that it is not being invested in safety would be a bit of a fallacy. I would share that we, we would classify, be able to classify much of our maintenance work.
91 As not to make more work for you, but somewhere down the line, it might be interesting to try to quantify that or just to show that a lot of this, a lot of the maintenance work really is falls into vision zero.
92 I'll share that when we started the vision. Excuse me, vision zero, but the fixing our streets work, it was we were required to separate the work out by maintenance versus safety. Those were those the buckets.
93 Of fixing. Yeah, yeah.
94 It was 4357. So we, we, we have a tool to be able to determine what is, is. But sometimes that is a challenging definition to reach. And so we're making sure that we're landing in the same space in terms of what maintenance means and what safety means and how we can separate out those buckets. I'll share that. I was in a conversation at the state level talking about maintenance, preservation, and safety. And one of the things that I shared in that conversation was one person's preservation is another person's maintenance is another person's capital program. So it's the meeting of the minds on the definitions, making sure we're articulating that clearly both to this body, but also to the general public, so that there is an understanding about what what is happening and what is funding that work. That's excellent. Yeah. So we can certainly work on to do that.
95 A couple more quick questions. So I know that a lot of this work that you're doing that was in our requests requires help from bts. And I'm just wondering, I know that, you know, with core realignment and they have a long priority list, if you're getting the help that you need.
96 We have, as we were asked to provide insight to pts on what our priorities would be or needed to be, especially in the coming weeks and months. We shared that the implementation of the tough was something that we needed to make sure that they continued to focus on. There are a number of other programs that we use on a daily basis that we're anticipating, understanding how pts will be able to provide the levels of support that are necessary to provide continuity of operation. But we've been in direct conversation, and in fact, I just heard from director rosen. Two days ago about connecting on maxima, which is another system that we use, the work order system. We also use e builder, which is a tool that b, e s also uses. All of those are tools that we need to depend heavily on bts to help to support. And so we're in those conversations. And then of course, gis is another one that depending on the flavor of the work, it takes on many different forms, but we're working to make sure that they are well aligned with our needs and expectations. And while we will probably need to come back to report about how the pace of some of the work has needed to adjust based on that centralization effort, know that we have made sure that they are aware of the.
97 Just let us know if. If we need to, to get a message across. I want to go back to the question that councilor Koyama Lane brought up. And in the context of Burnside, there's been a lot of pushback by some of our constituents on the work that you're planning to do. And I know that on page 11, you talked about the level of complexity, and I just wondered, can you address that a little bit for what's going on there? I know it was a it is a high crash corridor, and there are definitely maintenance needs on Burnside. So just can you address it?
98 I certainly I'm happy to address it, and I'm going to not ask gabe to take the weight of some of the choices, but he is the project manager for yet another. He was the project manager for forth as well. So he's he's a pretty well adept at addressing really strong needs and opinions of community. I will share that. As we were looking at the landscape of the city and the needs citywide, there were a number of streets of significance, and I would not necessarily call it a. This one is a street of citywide significance. But some of the streets that we looked at that were in need of a a touch based on where they are, what they carry, how they currently operate, that needed some care. The Burnside bridge project was planned some years ago. The funding for that fell through. That was when we were going to work to do work on Burnside. Since that did not happen, we were looking at the need to figure out how we could address some of the needs, especially around not just the esthetic, but the actual use of Burnside and the practicality of the use of Burnside, because it is a gateway to the city. And if you drive it, if you walk along it, we recognize there are places where it's in particularly wide, especially at the bridgehead. There are places where the crossings are particularly challenging for pedestrians. We recognize that circulation is a challenge all throughout that corridor, but what is at its foundational element challenging is the general condition. And so the call was, and I will share that. I challenged the team to identify a way for us to address Burnside. And when I asked the team to look into that work, I said, we're going to address the maintenance needs. And I recognize that there are probably going to be needs for us to go back and do more, especially because of the need for considerations around safety. The sidewalks are particularly narrow in certain portions of that corridor. All of those things were were things that we we knew going in that we would need to think about. And so gabe and the team looked at a phased approach, and he worked with our maintenance folks as well to figure out the best ways to address the areas of greatest need, see where we had already made some investment, which is why the, the phasing is, is how it is. There were some investments that were made. And again, gabe can speak to some of that, but it was it was busses stuck in ruts, people not being able to cross the street, people's heels getting stuck while they're trying to make crossings. The businesses that are contributing so much to the brand of the city, sitting right in a, in a space where the, the neglect that has been a. Symptom of under or lack of investment. Powell's being right there. You know, it it was an eyesore for, for us. And so that was my challenge to the team. Did we think about all of the full universe of ways that we might be able to reimagine the corridor? I will share that in the urgency to move. My request is that was that we not forego, but that we phase it so that we could look at how we might be able to get to a better place on that corridor. And so the three phases would be happening over the course of three years, which does provide the opportunity for community input, for feedback, for recommendations, doing what we would imagine would be something that folks would desire in terms of bringing it to a certain level, would require a significant level of investment, which, as we know, we do not have. What we are fortunate in, though, is that there are alternatives on either side of Burnside that we have made investments in for folks to be able to use that aren't just car centric. And so we want to be able to highlight that as well as as we continue to think about how we're going to reimagine Burnside.
99 Well, I think I wasn't aware of the three phases, and I don't know that the public that we've heard from in district four was aware of the phases. So it would be helpful, perhaps, for councilor Green and I, to receive maybe some more information or an explanation of exactly why we're doing what we're doing now and not doing the full meal deal. That is, if there's a plan for it phased in. And I think it was germane to that. You mentioned the bridge, how that kind of the loss of funding for the bridge kind of changed our trajectory. So I think that would be helpful for at least us to and possibly for the whole committee to hear about that.
100 To share that. And there's some more analysis that has been planned based on some of the feedback that we've received. We have received the letters and calls for pauses or other actions. I don't know if there's anything else you'd like to share if I covered it.
101 I think that's a pretty good summary. The first phase of work is between 15th and 20th on west Burnside, and that segment we selected because, as the director noted, we've made a number of safety and crossing investments already at 18th and 19th and 15th and 16th. Most of the corners of the corridor in that segment have been upgraded and are fully accessible and certified. So it's the it's the segment of the of west Burnside, where the least additional work is needed in order to pave the street and sort of buys us time to continue to look at the rest of the corridor.
102 Well, just
103 Getting some sort of explanation spelled out for us would be really helpful for us to respond to our constituents. So let me move on really quickly. And just a heads up, colleagues, I think I want to when I'm done, I'll turn this over to councilor Kanal and then we'll take a break before we go on to the the next issue. Just one quick question. Very painful. I know that in the state legislature, there's going to be another effort to have a transportation package. And there's been conversation among some legislators, as we saw evidence at the last the short session about changing the distribution formula, the 50, 30, 20, which is truly the holy grail. It has always been the holy grail. And I just wondered if you have done an estimate, should that change what we might lose the range of the dollars that we would lose if they change the formula. You don't have to answer that now, but I'm concerned about that. And it'll be on our legislative agenda that we don't want to have that change. If anything, it should change in our direction. But that's a real concern for me. And just a heads up.
104 I can just share. I mean, I think yes, we've heard the conversation about potentially changing. I haven't heard yet. I mean, I hope that there is not a cities don't get anything. I think that there's been some conversation about changing the proportion. So there's sort of too many things to have done specific estimates, but it would be, as you know, very impactful, certainly any, any amount that they reduce of our share will be very impactful. That's still a contributes a large amount towards our general transportation revenue. So continuing to see the state share, you know, again, we know you guys have done this important work to stabilize at the local level, but we are still relying on that state funding to.
105 Thank you so much. I'm going to turn this over to councilor Kanal. He's got more questions.
106 Thank you. Chair Clark. It's actually a comment, not a question. So just to kind of indicate where I'm thinking about this as we go forward, I think my vote on this back in April was contingent on credible affordability programs being offered to multifamily. I think it's clear that Portland costs are rising. Renters have expressed their inability to keep up, and I want to make sure that our most financially burdened and hurting multifamily residents are not required to foot the bill completely when they don't have access to discount programs. And I want to appreciate I know that the staff has told us and has told you, madam chair, that it's operationally expensive to deliver discounts. I appreciate the challenge in front of them, and I appreciate the work that they're doing on this, but I want to make sure that I'm on the record as saying, you know, choosing to deliver this bill in a way that is easy and or cheap for the city, but harmful for our community's most honorable was not a policy decision that I thought I was voting on in April. So I just want to put that on the record. Thanks.
107 Thank you, councilor Kanal, for that clarification. I appreciate it. I don't think we have any other questions at this point. It's been a great update, great conversation. Really appreciate the work that you're doing. I know there's a lot more work to come, and we'll be really interested in hearing about it in September. So thank you. Thank you all again. And with that, colleagues, let's take a ten minute break when we come back at 1101. I mean, yes.
108 1101 you anticipate.
109 Yes.
110 Well welcome back everyone. Sorry we're a little late. Diana, can you please read the next item?
111 Item number three. Document number 2026-266. Automated vehicles rulemaking update.
112 Thank you. Diana. Colleagues, we've been really eager to dig in to the whole issue of automated vehicles, and we're going to get an update today on PBOT rulemaking efforts and the public input that they've received throughout this process. Additionally, PBOT staff are going to be reviewing the regulatory pathways that we could pursue to ensure that automated vehicles operate safely and contribute their fair share towards our infrastructure. This is a good opportunity for us colleagues to learn about approaches that other jurisdictions have taken to regulate autonomous vehicles, and what we can also learn from them. But it's important that we, our council sets this regulatory framework to ensure the best outcome for the city. My goal, which I've shared with some of you, is to really take a unified approach to this work, to the extent that we can and develop in concert with our colleagues at PBOT committee ordinance, that we can move to the full council sometime this fall or before the end of the year. In anticipation of the 2027 state legislative session, where we know this was an issue in this short session and is due to come back in January. So with that, I'll hand it off to director williams. Hello again.
113 Fancy seeing you here.
114 Thank you. Thank you. And your team.
115 So thank you, council vice president Clark. For the record, my name is millicent williams and I'm the director of the Portland bureau of transportation. We are here today to discuss automated vehicles. This is a quickly evolving new technology that is already having a big impact in multiple cities across the country. The city of Portland began preparing for automated vehicles in 2017, but as you've heard from this team, when they presented their draft proposal in February to the transportation and infrastructure committee, much has changed since then, and the industry is expanding more quickly now. You'll hear today from PBOT staff who've been learning about the impacts of avs from peer cities and have been working with staff from across our own city to consider a path forward. I want to thank you for your time and consideration this morning. And now I'll turn it over to PBOT chief of staff, shoshana cohen, to begin the presentation this morning.
116 Thank you, director williams. Good morning. Council vice president Clark and members of the committee. Again, for the record, my name is shoshana cohen, and I'm the chief of staff for the Portland bureau of transportation. Here we have the agenda for our presentation. We'll first provide an overview of the strategy that we've been sort of taking so far around automated vehicles. We'll then move into an update on the administrative rulemaking process, including an overview of feedback received from portlanders during our public comment period. And finally, we'll discuss a set of policy concepts that we'd like your feedback on. And your input will help us sort of collectively all determine next steps in the regulatory approach. Next slide please. And continuing. So I want to start by grounding us a little bit more in the goals, our goals, at least in coming to this public work session today. First, we're here to share updates again on the process that we've been going through and the strategy since we last briefed the transportation and infrastructure committee on February 9th. Second, we're here to share a small set of policy concepts. We have we have more, but we're going to sort of dig in on a few of the key concepts we think. And the outcome of, again, of this discussion will guide our team as we're continuing to work on some administrative rule updates and some code updates that I know is a collaboration with you all. Before we dive into the details, I'd also like to highlight the the concurrent work that is still happening. Again, we have sort of a bigger list of administrative rule updates that we're going through and some of the basic code updates that we're continuing to work on. And these code updates live under Portland city code title 1640, which we're already working on, even sort of outside of automated vehicles we're working on for some other reasons. 1640 is the overarching regulatory framework that governs all of the private for hire transportation, including taxis, tour busses, limousines, uber and lyft, and now automated vehicles. And then finally, as you already alluded to, we're preparing for the 2027 state legislative session, which we expect to again include legislation around state regulation of automated vehicles. And I'll touch on that a little bit more in a couple slides. Next slide please. So the team before you today really sort of frequently deals with emerging technology, but I do want to emphasize that in the topic of automated vehicles, we're really on the leading edge here. There's no city in the country that is currently regulating for hire automated vehicles. And in fact, every city with an active deployment of avs has been preempted by state legislation. There are a few other cities that have regulations around testing of avs. We have some seattle does, and there are also a couple other cities similar to us that are discussing local regulations right now, like minnesota and Washington, d.c. But no one has been able to set up a full regulatory framework yet. So this really gives you all an opportunity to lead the way. And in thinking about the approach, if we're going to be out front, at least the approach that we've been thinking about and and as we've discussed with our peer cities. Sorry, I just lost my I started talking too much and lost my place in, in talking to some of the cities that have been preempted and what we've learned from them and what we've heard from the public and what we heard from you all last time, is that we really want to take an approach that sets a really high bar with operational standards and set that high bar. And then as we move through the process, sort of go slow and verify that whatever is happening is meeting our standards along the way. And part of the rationale for setting this high bar approach is that automated vehicles companies really are claiming that their drivers are safer than human drivers. And so we believe we should hold them to that standard if we're going to let them in. Let's sort of make them prove that they're doing what they can, say, what they're saying they're doing. So again, this is the approach that has been guiding the staff as we've put together some things for you to think about. Next slide please. So as mentioned, we've been spending a lot of time talking to other cities, learning from what's going on in other cities. And again, unfortunately, the other cities that we're learning from don't yet have the ability to develop and enforce their own regulations. There has been this sweeping trend towards statewide preemption. At least 16 other states have passed legislation that preempts cities or counties from setting their own regulations. This includes every city with current for hire deployments, which initially included cities in california, arizona and texas, and has now expanded to florida, georgia and tennessee. So while speaking to peers in those cities, we've been learning about the significant challenges that they deal with on a daily basis. From having for hire. Avs operate commercially without the ability to regulate them. We've heard the challenge of having limited, or in most cases, no local ability to hold companies accountable for actions such as passing school busses with the stop arm extended, or driving into flooded streets. And finally, these cities that have no regulatory control also are not receiving any data from the av companies. That means they don't know how many trips are actually happening. They don't know where pickups and drop offs are happening, and they just don't know how many avs are on the road. It makes it really difficult then to plan for and sort of help regulate the impacts on the transportation system. Next slide please. So again, given what we're seeing in other states, we do remain concerned about the possibility of preemption here. As as you already discussed in last year's legislative session, house bill 4085 would have enabled automated vehicles and put all regulatory authority at the state level, completely preempting localities. And as as you know, we had many concerns about this bill. It didn't adequately address the likely impacts on the transportation system. And while we all help to ensure this bill didn't move forward last year, we do know that ab legislation is likely to resurface again. In fact, waymo stated in their public feedback to our av administrative roles that they look forward to seeing a successor bill approved in the 2027 session. So as the staff has been thinking about our local approach, we're definitely keeping that state conversation in mind and trying to figure out how what we do with regulations here can help us move the bar and maintain our local authority. And with that, I will turn it over to jacob sherman. To begin with. Updates on the rulemaking process.
117 Great, thanks.
118 Thanks so much, shoshana. Good morning, council vice president Clark and members of the committee. For the record, my name is jacob sherman, and I lead the city's work on emerging technology at the Portland bureau of transportation. Our team works on topics including electric vehicle car charging, zero emission freight, the private for hire industry, shared micromobility, as well as automated vehicles. Next slide. The draft administrative rules that we presented to city council's transportation and infrastructure committee on February 9th were built on policy direction from the city's safe automated vehicle initiative. As our team developed updates to these rules this past fall, we built them under the framework of city code 1640, which, as was previously mentioned, regulates all of the private for hire transportation industry. As shoshana mentioned, we talked with many peer cities and one on one conversations and through convenings by expert groups like nacto. And we also coordinated closely with staff from across the city and some of the bureaus and teams that you see here. I actually want to pause for a second, just to thank staff from across the city that have contributed to this work. Our own policy team, our vision zero team, and to colleagues like hannah, who will speak shortly for her own leadership in this space. Next slide. So this slide contains a summary of some of the details in the draft regulations that we discussed with you in February. These were the regulations that we put out for public comment. The existing draft included a requirement for companies to provide a testing of statement and a statement of testing and deployment experience that would disclose all reported crashes, injuries and other incidents that have negatively impacted the transportation system. This will help ensure that we permit safe companies, not possible unsafe companies. Our existing proposal also requires a submission of a passenger safety plan. This would describe the main risks that passengers could face in the steps taken to mitigate those risks. This could include everything from how passengers should safely identify, enter and exit the vehicle, and what passengers should do in the event of a crash or how they should respond under unsafe scenarios outside of the vehicle. We would also require a first responder plan and hands on training for first responders. The goal of this would be to ensure that first responders know how to respond to all types of scenarios with automated vehicles, from disengaging the automated vehicle driving system if needed to safely move an av off the roadway or to other items. I think it's worth noting this is not controversial at all. This is something the av companies are already doing in many other places. Our existing proposal also included a requirement that all for hire automated vehicles be electric vehicles in order to submit support our city's decarbonization goals. And finally, we also want to highlight our requirements to coordinate with us in order to receive data and information on road closures like for Sunday parkways, the Portland marathon, street fairs or other emergency events, as well as just the changes that we're making every summer to our streets in order to promote safety. This is just a selection of the requirements from our draft rules. We also included key topics like liability insurance, public outreach, accessibility, accessible service, and more. And I also wanted to note that our liability insurance liability requirements that we're thinking of or have been developed kind of in partnership with the city attorney and we believe would give us fairly strong protections. Next slide. So after we presented to the transportation and infrastructure committee in February, we moved forward into a public comment period to ensure that we gave portlanders enough time to review the rules and provide feedback. We extended our traditional 30 day public comment period to just about two months. We sent notice of rulemaking in the public hearing to over 3000 people on our email lists and posted it on multiple public sites, including in the newspaper as well. And consistent with our rulemaking process, we held a hybrid public hearing with at the Portland building, where people also had the option to attend virtually. We hosted a dedicated listening session with the private for hire industry, and we also presented at all of PBOT modal committees and held one on one conversations with industry as well. Next slide. During that process, we received over 220 comments from portlanders, our team. And again, many thanks to hannah morrison and Clark goldenrod. Then spent the next several weeks reviewing all of these comments and considering feedback and policy suggestions in order to ultimately develop a summary report. Some of the key themes that emerged from the comments helped inform some of these policy concepts that we want to talk with you about today. In our summary report, the largest theme that we heard from the public was safety, with over 50% of all comments mentioning safety. Of those comments, 79% were concerned about the possible negative impacts of automated vehicles and suggested accountability measures like fines or safety reporting for transparency. The other 20% were excited about the opportunity of automated vehicles and the possible safety benefits. Most often from their own past experiences writing in them in other markets.
119 Jacob.
120 Can you repeat that one more time? How that broke down?
121 Yeah. So so of the 220 comments we received, over half of them. So over 110 comments mentioned safety. And of those 110 comments, about 80% mentioned concerns on safety. So that would be what, 85 or 90 comments. And then the remaining comments mentioned excitement about safety, having kind of mostly from their own personal experience with avs and other markets. Many of the comments that we received, over 35% mentioned concerns around accountability and enforcement, with questions on how automated vehicles would be ticketed, and comments suggesting that avs should be held to equal, if not higher, standards than human drivers. Another broad theme that emerged from the public feedback was the possible impact on jobs, with 34% of all comments mentioning concerns around labor impacts and suggestions ranging from protecting the remaining human private for hire drivers to supporting a just workforce transition. Finally, many comments highlighted concerns about how avs could impact the transportation system through increased vehicle miles traveled, how it could impact other modes like transit, biking, and pedestrian. And there was suggestions given about how to mitigate this, including ensuring that avs know how to yield to busses and will not block max tracks to prohibiting pickup and drop offs in bicycle lanes, or establishing a per mile fee to discourage miles driven without passengers. The full report is linked to in our slides and is available on our website and contains a lot of very detailed additional information about this. So moving forward, I'd next like to hand it over to hannah morrison, who's going to talk with you about some of our proposed policy concepts so that we can get your direction as we move forward with thinking about rules and then working with you all on potential changes to our code.
122 Thank you jacob. Good morning, council vice president Clark and members of the committee. For the record, my name is hannah morrison and I'm a planner on the mobility and innovation section at PBOT. We have seven policy concepts that we are hoping to get your feedback on today. I'm proposing to go over all seven of them, and then we will move to discussion. So our first policy proposal is to clearly define automated vehicles in private for hire code rs221 .495 clearly defines our ability to regulate private for hire transportation. And this is something the city has done for over 100 years, beginning with the regulation of jitneys in the early 1900s. So through title 1640 of Portland city code, which you've heard a lot about today, PBOT regulates a variety of private for hire transportation. This includes horse drawn carriages, pedicabs, tour busses, shuttles, party busses, limousines, non-emergency medical. Transportation, taxis. Transportation network companies like uber and lyft. And now the next evolution in private for hire of automated vehicles. The administrative rules that are regulating avs that we've discussed today are already linked to title 1640, and any code updates related to avs we believe should go in this code as well. Our second policy concept for discussion is to establish the authority to set fleet caps for automated vehicles in city code. We believe that it would be stronger to establish this authority in city code, rather than in administrative rules. And to be clear, we are not proposing to establish the actual fleet size and set a number in city code. Just establish the authority to cap automated vehicle fleets. Under this proposal, the performance of a company during its testing phase would inform their initial fleet size, and testing itself would also be done with a limited fleet. Once a company graduates from a testing permit to a for hire permit, an initial fleet cap has been established. The city would conduct an annual analysis on operations and safety of that fleet to inform fleet cap changes, setting a cap on automated for hire vehicles will help us safely manage this change to our streets and to the greater for hire industry. Next, I'd like to discuss defining testing permit metrics. Under our proposed framework, every av company would be required to begin local operations with a testing permit. This would ensure that they prove their technology can navigate unique aspects of Portland streets, before beginning to offer paid rides through a for hire permit. Under this proposal, all companies would be required to log 50,000 miles across their entire fleet with a testing permit before becoming eligible to apply for that for hire permit. I want to highlight that this mileage requirement is just one piece of our permitting structure, so companies would have to complete those 50,000 miles while complying with all of our other safety and operational requirements. Excuse me. Safety and operational requirements. The 50,000 miles driven with a testing permit aligns with california public utility commission statewide requirements and we believe could strike the right balance between enough miles driven to prove that they can safely navigate our streets and not too many miles driven that we are encouraging empty vehicle miles traveled. Next, I'd like to share our proposal around metrics for permit suspension. These metrics were informed by the claims that you've already heard mentioned today that automated vehicle companies are making that they are safer than human drivers. In fact, waymo's homepage currently states that waymo software, or waymo driver is over ten times safer than the average human driver. Well, we have a standard for permitting human private for hire drivers in the city to ensure that we're permitting safe drivers. And here we propose holding the robotaxis to that same standard. One key difference is that since the av companies treat their software as a singular driver, this proposal would consider violations by any car within one company's fleet as accumulating to the same driver because it's using the same software. For example, under this proposal, if two separate vehicles within one company's fleet were to get traffic violations, that would count as two traffic violations for that company's singular av driver and would be grounds for suspending that company's permit. And just to make sure it's clear, these metrics of two traffic violations in one year or violating the expectation of operating in a safe manner are the same standards to which existing private for hire drivers are already held. I'd also like to point out the degree to which this differs from the language from last year's unsuccessful house bill 4085. In that bill, there were only two ways that the state would revoke an av company's or suspend or revoke an av company's permit. First, if the automated vehicle was found to not be in safe operational condition, or second, if their operations created substantial risk of death or had already caused death or serious injury. And we believe what was proposed in that bill is too low of a bar.
123 And can I interrupt you just for a second? If you don't mind. That's really good to know. How we stack up against that preemption measure. But can you go back and tell us on each of these concepts? Are these things that the other states or other cities around the country that you spoke to regarded, they regarded these as high priorities or what what were their major complaints maybe you could elucidate either during or after your presentation?
124 Yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to. I can answer this a little bit right now because we're in very early conversations. Most other cities are in very early stages. I was on a call with five major us cities just last week, and we were trying to identify actually everyone's priorities. So that is kind of the stage we're at. The number one priority for most people is preemption and the ability to simply regulate, issue and suspend permits and set fleet caps. But beyond that, there's still a lot of work to be done.
125 Thank you for that.
126 Of course. So just to kind of conclude this slide, under this proposal, the remedy to the suspension of the av driver and therefore the entire fleet would be for the company to show that they have addressed the issue or issues for which they receive tickets, which would likely be through a software update. The next policy concept is also safety focused. While we can see that automated vehicles stopping in bicycle lanes to wait to pick up passengers or drop them off could become a safety hazard. We actually are already preempted by state law and our ability to prevent these actions. State law allows, as you can see on the slide, the momentary stopping or parking and bicycle lanes while actually engaged in loading or unloading property or or passengers. So our proposal here and we'd like to hear what we'd like to hear your thoughts on, is to explore defining, loading and unloading in private for hire code to limit av stopping in bicycle lanes. One way to do this would be to put a time limit on those loading and unloading activities. I'd also like to point out if this definition was added to private for hire code, then it would apply to all types of private for hire trips from avs to taxis and taxis. The next policy concept focuses on exploring limitations on the sale, sharing, or transferring of data collected by avs. Avs collect data both inside and outside of their vehicles. They use lidar radar, 360 degree video and audio data collected from outside of their vehicles. Use of this robust sensor array is crucial for their safe operations. For example, using radar allows the av to cut through heavy rain, snow, or fog in order to track pedestrians, vehicles or other hazards at far distances. And so while we understand the need for this data for safe operations, we also believe it's important to have a conversation about what else this data is used for and where it goes. We have begun to work with the city data and privacy office to ensure that any regulations here would be consistent with related city policies on surveillance and policy, such as city code title 34 that prohibits the use of facial recognition by private entities and places of public accommodation. On this topic, we would like to discuss limitations around selling, sharing, or transferring data from our streets that we can add to our administrative rule. And this is the final policy concept before we move to discussion. Under our current proposal, avs are subject to the same fees as tncs, including all permit and per trip fees. Another area where we think a fee may be appropriate is around workforce transition. A third of the comments that we received during the public comment period for this administrative rule were related to labor, as you heard from jacob, and it is undeniable that there will be workforce impact with the introduction of avs. A workforce transition fee could provide funds for things like job training, job placement or other support. We know this council just passed the driver's resource center ordinance, and there may be a way to connect workforce transition activities to that new center. And finally, we think that there should be some further consideration of other impact fees due to the continued growth and impacts of the entire private for hire industry on our streets. Thank you. And I'd now like to hand it back to shoshana cohen to share next steps.
127 Thank you hannah. Next slide please. So again, before diving into discussion, just sort of reiterating next steps for this process. As mentioned, we've already been working on the next stage of av administrative rules and some potential proposed code updates, which we really want to hear more about sort of feedback. And I think that's back and forth with you all. And we expect, based on the feedback from this conversation, to be back sometime in in the fall. And then, and I believe derek bradley is in the room from the office of government relations. Again, we're also already preparing for the state conversation. We know it's coming. And our, our just, you know, really trying to make sure we're not preempted as our top priority. So that concludes our presentation, and we're looking forward to hearing your feedback.
128 Thank you all very much for the work that you've done to date and for outlining some policy options for us. I know we have a lot of questions and and a lot of concerns about this. So let's start with councilor Green.
129 Thank you, chair Clark. Thank you, team, for the work on this. It's been much anticipated. My office has had a lot of conversations with your folks about ways that we might want to sort of respond to the waymo question or the av question. And so kind of knowing that there's just this robust rulemaking process that's, I think, maybe envisioning more than just rulemaking, but kind of thinking, how do we lead on codification here has been a very good thing. So I just want to acknowledge that. So I want to respond, I think, just right up front to the because you're testing some ideas with us. And I think it's I think the seven items are great. I think it's a really great framework. There's not much there that I think, well, there's nothing there I disagree with. I think I want to flesh out some areas a little bit more, but one of the things that I do want to make sure that we acknowledge here is I appreciate understanding that if if we go down this road to permit waymo to operate in our city, there will be a labor displacement problem. Like that's real. And I think if we're going to say, let's deal with that through a just transition style impact fee, the fees are going to be large because those those are those are not just little, you know, a couple hundred bucks per, you know, like this is these are real livelihoods. And so if we're going to go down to that level, we need to be pretty serious about what those impact fees might be. So I'm just kind of noting that now that if we're going to send that signal to the workers that you have to, you have to be honest that you actually want it to be a supportive tool. There's obviously more conversation we need to have around this piece of it, but I want to touch on a couple of areas. I support the approach that you kind of framed up of saying, we do need to take a codification approach through the city in partnership with PBOT. I would I'm grateful to be part of that. I support that through this committee. I councilor Koyama Lane and I have been kind of working on sort of a little bit of a one small element of a theme that's in here, which is really the vision zero compliance piece. We were worried about missing the moment and not having any regulatory authority to say, I don't want to start issuing permits for these things before we have a handle on this. I, I don't really buy their claims to safety. They're not really grounded in evidence. And so it's good to see that in here. And so we were wanting to kind of move kind of quickly on a very. Sort of tight code change in the tnc code, understanding that that's not nearly sufficient enough. And it was about really making sure you have a vision zero compliance piece. But I'm, but I'm seeing that language kind of already on the slide, which tells me that you, you're incorporating some of the things that we've already been talking to you guys about behind the scenes, which is a good thing. I think for my part, I, I think that if you cannot meet the basic bar of respecting our vision zero framework and not abusing the kind of preemption, which, by the way, is deeply troubling to me, maybe we want to take that up with the state legislation that, like, we need to tighten up what that language means, because people camping in the bike Lane with the hazards on for 15 minutes is unacceptable. And happens to me all the time. I ride my bike to and from work all the time. And I see, you know, I see folks just waiting there and waiting with hazards on if if we expect that to be a waymo outcome, that's going to doubly enrage me because at least someone's not getting paid for that work. Right? So anyway, I'm rambling. The point I'm trying to make, though, is all of this vision zero work rests on a scaffolding of commitment to make sure every opportunity we're kind of tweaking or turning our dials to kind of go towards enabling the outcomes that we want. And so I support this broad framework. I think the the claims, the safety are grounded in this idea that you completely replace your fleet with autonomous vehicles. And then at that point, you get scale benefits of safety. But that's not ever going to happen because people are never going to just give their cars up and just take robo taxi rides all the time. So measurement matters. Metrics matter. It sounds like that's what PBOT wants to commit to here. I like the idea of a conditional test permit, because that allows us to say. It's easier, I think, to regulate up front than it is on the back end. It's kind of what I'm saying. Data sharing and privacy limitations are core. Like we cannot be in the business of allowing companies to drive around our city and surveil us, and then sell that to whoever. And yeah, I probably have more to say, but I just think, you know, the reason why I was comfortable backing off. And I think councilor Koyama Lane was comfortable backing off on approach is because we recognize it's important to do this right. And with maybe a broader buy in here, and you can't have three conversations with committee members, otherwise you violate quorum. And so this is one of those moments where I think there's enough alignment on this committee to say, let's do this all together and let's kind of work in partnership with PBOT. And I think fall timeline makes a lot of sense. So I probably have more to say later, but I'll I'll take my hand down.
130 Thank you, councilor Green. I really appreciate those comments.
131 Councilor Kanal thank you, chair Clark. I'm a little confused by something I heard early on. Shoshanah I think you said what we heard from you all last time, and I think someone else mentioned February in the context of hearing, we want to take an approach that sets a really high bar with operational standards. When was this?
132 So yeah, thank you for the question. I realize this was the previous iteration of this committee when it was the transportation and infrastructure committee. So we would we would be happy to give you some more background if that would be helpful.
133 Yeah. Our committee started April 14th. And at that, you know, previous to that, a quarter of the city was not represented here. And so and I just want to, since it's my first time, I guess, to be able to express it, that that is not my opinion. The approach I want to take is a categorical ban and a full press ogre effort at the state against preemption. I'd like to have code that simply says all vehicles require a human driver. It would take six words. I'm also concerned that the it appears there's a thumb on the scale here. I mean, there's marketing materials in city presentations, which is concerning to me on slide 14. We've got their slogans and stuff here. I'm I'm concerned about that. And you can go to slide 14 if you'd like. I. Waymo coming would require more training for PPB and emergency responders broadly on how to interact with driverless vehicles. As of right now, waymo permitting costs are any autonomous vehicles. I think the current plan is $500, which is way too low. By the way. It's not supplanting general fund dollars for public safety trainings over time and training pay is expensive, and the need for the training is being caused by a technology that's not. The companies that are pushing are not paying for. Additionally, I believe, jacob, you said requiring training for first responders, I appreciate that. Has any discussion occurred related to bargaining about required trainings?
134 Sorry, councilor Kanal, I didn't quite hear the last part of your question.
135 Has any conversation happened in the bargaining context as it relates to represented workers and required trainings?
136 No, not that I'm aware of. We have started conversations with Portland police bureau about like what these kinds of this kind of training could look like, but we haven't gotten into a conversation on bargaining.
137 Okay, I'm switching gears to the data side. I agree with everything councilor Green said. And, you know, we don't know broadly what what these companies do with the data they collect. And so another reason we shouldn't have them here is that they're not being required to share all their data as a stipulation of operating in Portland, I'm also concerned about the use of the word limitation on selling. What limits do that bans do not is allow some right ban means none. Limitation could mean we're. We're restricting it by 1% and 99% of. It's okay. So what I'm curious is what's the sum that's being proposed to be allowed? And I have significant concerns about that. I think our our existing rules, compliance with them is vital and they're itself not enough, which is why we started the conversation about data privacy and governance at council. In previous legislation, waymo does not currently recapture the cost to society in terms of environmental impacts of data center usage of both electricity and water. I don't believe that we can account for that. So instead of, I guess, broadly speaking here, I'm concerned about the approach of trying to either regulate something that just should not be allowed or use regulations to sort of backdoor a ban when we could just ban it with six words, it might need more than six. I understand that I'm being rhetorically six words. Jacob, you mentioned that we've heard from 220 people so far. Was any outreach done in district two?
138 Our outreach was we didn't do any physical outreach in district two. You know, again, we kind of marketed this very broadly, went to all of our committees, bicycle, pedestrian, freight advisory committee. I'm sure some of those stakeholders kind of represent district two interests.
139 Well, and it was sent out to 30,000 people throughout. We did we did sort of the standard administrative rule making outreach. Plus, I think knowing this was something that people were really interested in, we did send, I think, more emails. Do we extended the time, I think twice as long as typical. So we didn't go out to a lot of places, but we did. I think what we would consider robust outreach for administrative rulemaking process.
140 So I recognize that that the primary responsibility for engagement is no longer going to be with the bureau. So I'm not putting this on you, but I do want to ask, what is the takeaway from the idea that time was extended? More emails were sent three 30,000 email you said, and that 220 people responded in the context where this may be a high profile, high engagement, high interest item, what, what what was a conclusion drawn by the level of participation, if any, by PBOT.
141 Thank you for the question, counselor. I don't know that a conclusion was drawn other than perhaps people aren't seeing the urgency and don't know the potential imminence of this type of tool being employed in the city. Potentially. I would imagine that if we were to go back again, perhaps even changing the way that we introduced the survey, if we did some personal district by district outreach, perhaps we'd have a different outcome. But I don't know that we can draw a definitive conclusions on what that's saying. Other than that 29,800 people chose not to comment.
142 Yeah. And to be clear, I, again, I, I think this is probably something that we need to reach out to the city wide engagement team on to provide support and not count on PBOT doing it.
143 Thank you.
144 That's all I want. And I also want to offer to assist in that. I know they have capacity concerns too, but we I don't think we can make a wholesale change to a very significant. The place where I think portlanders interact the most with the city that they know they're interacting with. The city is in transportation. I would put water and sewer on there too, but it's not always known which is private, which is not. And so if we're changing that front end of, of people's interaction with the city significantly, I think it does require more there. Two final questions. One, the bike Lane thing that you cited, a state law, do we know if that establishes a floor or if it is itself preemption? Like just because they exempted it, does that mean that we can't provide legislation that. And I don't know if you've asked the lawyers already on that.
145 I believe that we can double check. But that is our understanding is that that does prevent us. But we can follow up again and double check.
146 Thanks. Yeah, that's another concern. I agree with everything there. We currently have amazon ups, all sorts of delivery vehicles blocking driver lanes, bike lanes all over the place. And we've, we've shown an inability to deal with that. The idea of having a fleet of additional vehicles doing it is pretty concerning to me. I routinely get stopped between driving around here in downtown while one Lane is going, and I can't get over because I'm stuck behind a vehicle that's that's just stopped illegally. I should note, last thing I wanted to mention is, is in the context of labor, you know, this is a new generation of, of tech companies here, but previous ones have developed a model that they call disrupting to the taxi industry. And the taxi industry has its limitations, of course, but they did it by creating taxis. And, you know, in parallel, I lived in new york. They had developed an app that let you hail a licensed, you know, medallion taxi there. What tnc did that was different is they also added the second thing of making drivers, instead of being employees, independent contractors. And, you know, that took away labor protections. It took away benefits from a workforce that is largely black and brown men. And now we're talking about that wasn't good enough. The only way to extract further profit is by putting that workforce, which remains primarily black and brown men out of business, entirely out of a job entirely. That alone, to me, would be enough for a ban. We do not have the capacity. We don't have the money. We don't have $500 for a permit or whatever is not going to cover the cost of a just transition for one driver, let alone, you know, the hundreds and thousands that we have. And so I am concerned that we are accepting the premise that this is going to happen instead of fighting as hard as we possibly can against it. And we might lose, but it won't be because we didn't stand up for people in our city. And it won't be because we didn't stand up for our environment or our data privacy or our budget. In the context of ensuring payments for that, that supplant general fund dollars on trainings. And it won't be because we didn't care about safety. It'll be because we tried and we failed. And I am okay with that as long as we try. Thanks.
147 Thank you. Councilor Kanal, I appreciate your comments. I'm going to ask a few questions before I turn it back over to councilor Green. And I don't see councilor Koyama Lane hand up yet. Just a couple quick questions related. When there are closures or special events, I've noticed that my g, I s or whatever it is on my phone doesn't catch up either. That's a problem. Just I don't know if you guys have noticed that when you're going places that that doesn't work either. Let's see, on the fee concept, I think I really appreciate your adding that. I think that was at my request in a meeting that we charged for something. And you're right, the workforce impact fee is really not great enough. But I think we should also consider a transit impact fee. I just throw that out there. And I know you are already speaking with the public safety community. It sounds like already working with them. I just bumped into a firefighter here earlier today and said we were talking about this issue today, and he expressed grave concern. So I'm I appreciate that. I'd like to call up derek from ogre and ask him a couple of questions. And you may wish to as well. Thanks for being here today, and thank you for your work last session and trying to impact the preemption bill that was floated during the 30 day session. You know, I spent a part of my career trying to stop preemptions, working with a governor who was willing to do that, who was willing to not preempt cities, at least on revenue raising issues on a mandates with no money. We had an agreement to do that. That kind of went away with the next governor. And I guess I just wanted to hear you, derek, talk about what your what you think might happen next session in January. This bill, whatever it was, I don't remember who the sponsors were. Maybe you can share that as well is going to be reintroduced. And I would imagine the same format. Can you just talk a little bit about that experience with us and what you foresee in the future?
148 Certainly, chair Clark, members of the committee. For the record, my name is derek bradley. He him state legislative, state regional coordinator for the city of Portland. Relations coordinator. Sorry. It's a little bit of a cloudy crystal ball at the moment. There is certainly some amount of, I would say, passion in the legislature about creating a statewide av system that would have certainly some amount of preemption. The the amount or where that lands on the gauge is an active conversation. There is, however, a lot going on and building up to come forward next legislative session, not just about transportation, which will have another attempt at a package, but serious questions about managing the impacts of h.r. One at the state. And there's, I think, some uncertainty about capacity for some of the.
149 What was h.r. One?
150 Is that right? The federal.
151 Oh, yes.
152 Yes. Sorry. The federal transfer of public wealth to. Not the public. And so I think there's a very real chance that something returns. I believe there was enough communication with legislators that we're not going to see an exact replica of the previous bill. But again, how far along are they? What position they start from, how willing they are to consider local impacts is very it's difficult to tell at this moment in time. One thing that I do think I should emphasize for consideration is we have jurisdictional partners that are interested in the outcome of a statewide preemptive system, but I do believe they largely view this as a. This will impact the city of Portland first, and maybe only for a while. And we have a very serious and large agenda and transportation agenda already bubbling. So when there are moments and again, I, I hesitate to even put this one because I don't want to speak for my colleagues that are lobbying for other jurisdictions. I don't want to speak for legislators haven't decided what they're going to pursue next year or how. But I think there's risks involved with wherever the city lands, wherever the city, however far on the dial, as you move further and further or all the way to a ban or tighter or tighter regulations. There will be a a reaction from not just the company, but from people that are believers in Salem, that this is a technology that should be embraced and that will create risks of preemptive language being introduced and garnering support. And so. I think you have I will offer a worst case scenario and a best case scenario and put, you know, for your consideration is how you want to pursue in your deliberations. I think worst case scenario is that the city implements a ban or highly restrictive framework. It creates a large
153 Upswell of interest and passion in Salem to make a statewide framework. There are is a lot of interest among the pro av community, while other jurisdictional partners have a very substantial amount of workload and can't participate as much as they might on a thing that directly impacts them immediately. And it's a very difficult, if not impossible, uphill struggle to stop a package from moving forward. That is not exactly is not what the city is particularly interested in all the way on the other end. Best case scenario, council considers, deliberates and passes the av either ban or framework that works best for them. There is some upsetness from for profit corporations that stand to make money off of this, but it falls upon deaf ears as legislators have other things going on, and other jurisdictions and partners come in and say, this would be terrible, and we think we should give Portland a shot to see how this pans out. It is a large. I acknowledge it is a very large like point a to point b is very far apart from one another, and how the reactions might play out. It's difficult to say, and so I do apologize. I don't have a better sense to offer. I do think there was some very good like education and discussion with legislators in this year's legislative session. I think there was an initial belief that we had to hurry up and go down in Salem on this, and I think there was there was clearly some success in slowing it down. How well that translates into action next year is, unfortunately, beyond my current ability to predict.
154 Well, thanks for that. Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts. I never found the Portland delegation, maybe the regional delegation very interested in transportation, frankly. I mean, maybe they're more interested now. But I thought that the sponsors of the preemption legislation were from the metropolitan area. Is that right?
155 The. And I think to I want to yes, but it is someone that opened the conversation saying, you know, I want to engage with the city of Portland and make sure we get this right. But I want to. I want a statewide framework, and I want a statewide framework that works for local jurisdictions and for the avs to come in and operate. And that was from a representative in the metropolitan area who is, I think, considering their level of interest in pursuing an updated version next year. I think she's last I spoke to her last month. She's still working through her options and her considerations, but she was a great. She very active, proactively engaged in with the city, with PBOT myself and realized that the initial effort was not best suited to get done in the short session. And so she has shown herself to be interested in these discourses and dialogs. But I don't think we've gotten much further past the bill in the short session was moving quickly and had a lot of unanswered questions, and there were concerns raised by local jurisdictions, so we needed more time. I don't I don't think we've gotten beyond that.
156 Well thank you derek. I think I'm glad you're here today. I think you will benefit from the presentation that PBOT made today that has piqued our interest. And my own desire is to come up with an ordinance that puts much of this on the books for us. And I would like to think that that strengthens our position going into the session. I don't know if there's a lot of unknowns, but we'll we'll have that that conversation here. Again, I'm also going to ask PBOT for your help in drafting that for with us. For us, given all of your what you've heard to some extent and some of those policy issues and particularly what you're learning, what you will learn, continue to learn from the other cities and their experience across the board. I think we can really benefit from that and we can share that with our delegation. Our Salem delegation as well is this is what's happened in other cities. We don't want that to happen here. Et cetera. Et cetera. When we start thinking about January, I'm sorry, I'm already I'm in January. But thank thank you for your comments. I'm going to stop there. And councilor Koyama Lane hasn't had a chance to to ask a question. Would you like to speak now?
157 Sure. Thank you so much for the presentation. Thank you chair. I love this idea of us being a united front as much as possible and working on this with as many committee members as we can. Yeah, this is something that I have been working on and talking about for months. Thank you, councilor Green, for recognizing that work. You know, there are a lot of issues around privacy, safety, permitting. Happy to see see some stuff move forward. I have a couple questions for PBOT. I'm wondering if, you know, if av companies that are operating in other cities have dedicated human staffers on call to address safety issues and other real time troubleshooting. What have you found when looking into that? If you have?
158 Yeah, I can answer that one. So there are what we've seen is that for first responders, there is a dedicated person that is there to respond to those incidents, especially for first responders. For city staff, they typically have a point of contact, but it is less of a safety issue, more of a kind of issues that arise every day. So there's those two separate contact flows.
159 And have you looked into much how some av companies are outsourcing those, the human support staffers to other countries?
160 We have tried to there honestly is not a lot of information on that. That is something that has proven very difficult to get more information on beyond some of the news articles that I'm sure you've also seen.
161 Okay. Thank you. And some other. My some of my colleagues have touched on this, but are there any other thoughts that you all have around what we can be doing to protect local jobs, in particular drivers of taxis, taxis who continue to see consistent disruptions in the private, private for hire transportation. Is there anything else that you can add on to that?
162 Councilor. Koyama Lane. I think in many ways, kind of the, the, the package of concepts that we're thinking about kind of working in concert with one another is where I think we see probably the most synergistic benefit. So if you were employing something like a just transition fee in concert with a fleet cap that kept things relatively small for an extended period of time while we saw this and start to roll out on the streets alongside high standards that hold the av companies to their claim that they're safer than human drivers. I think it's kind of the combination of all of those things that we think would probably be the most protective. There's probably some additional strategies we could consider. We'd be happy to talk with you or your staff on that, or with any other members of this committee. But I think in general, it's the it's the combination of these moves where we think we get the most benefit. I don't know if there's anything you'd add.
163 Well, just sort of building on that. I think, you know, both of those things, a just transition fee or workforce transition fee, of course, is a, is a big idea. There's lots of other industries where, where automation is taking over. But, you know, is, is there a way that even a relatively small, you know, maybe it's huge or maybe it's relatively small just to start to add some benefits, even if it's not comprehensive. And the fleet cap idea, you know, in san francisco, we think there's 800, you know, we could start really small here. We could start at 50 or something and just, you know, we to allow for some folks who are interested in seeing what potential benefits could come, you know, we could we could not only start it start small, but we could keep it small. We could, you know, have a small fleet that exists on our street just to offer this alternative for people who really think that it's another, it's another good alternative and really keep it there for, you know, for a while depending. I mean, I think there's just a variety of ways that we could address the concerns. If, if that seems like the thing to do rather than sort of letting what seems likely at some point for the state to take over, we might, we might be able to push that off for a while. But, you know, at some point, it is likely that the, the, the state conversation will continue.
164 This is really the, the favorite, favorite pastime of lobbyists speculation. Thank you for that. Thank you. Councilor Koyama Lane councilor Green.
165 Yeah, thank you, chair Clark. You know, I what's challenging about this specific one? And it's not even about the topic. It's about the committee itself is I think there's a shared interest that we all everyone on the committee probably wants to do something about this, but we can't talk more than two at a time on specific thing. And so if this is going to be a shared committee ordinance, like we have to kind of engage with our differences in approaches very publicly. And so to, to the extent that I'm I mean, I do want to have a committee approach that says, here's what the committee is going to do. But. We have to be kind of vulnerable about that. And so it's good that we're talking with our ogre publicly, with our strategic approach publicly. But and so we might have maybe some differences of opinion on what the risks are preemption, what the stakes are. I I'm grateful that councilor Kanal kind of laid out a different position because that's, that's frankly, much closer to my position. But I wasn't really prepared to say, you know, we must kill all the robots today, you know, which is not exactly what you said, but that's a meme. So I, I guess what I'm just trying to telegraph here is we either need to sort of flesh this all out up here over the course of the next few committee meetings, or be prepared to have multiple proposals come forward and then just debate them up and down and amend them as we as we normally do. But I want to respect that you you wanted to pull this together and have this unified approach. I don't know if you're gonna be comfortable with councilor Kanal approach or not, but I, I will note this. I think the transportation piece of the legislative agenda is going to be very big. And I think that there might be some appetite from some incoming representatives and senators to go a little bit harder than some of the ones that are currently in there now. And so I don't know what that does to the balance of of power in Salem. But I think if you think about where Oregonians are at when it comes to you use the word tech bros. They think about large data centers killing the bees in their neighborhood. And they and they think about ai and they're probably associating that with waymo. And so I all I'm saying is that there's probably going to be a political situation that provides cover for legislators who maybe want to take a position that's not the same as the lobbyists in this situation. I think house bill 4085 was written by waymo. I mean, with almost no exceptions. And so and it's like, you can get that done by with a $1,000 campaign donation. And so that's what happens down there. And I think going to the next legislative session, it is riskier to kind of play this sort of game, but it might be more principled. And so I'm just sort of expressing my openness to seeing how this conversation unfolds. We have to do it publicly or else we're going to violate several meetings law. So I'm really trying not to do that. So that's why I'm talking and kind of weird generalities here and being kind of open about all this because I because this is the only place to do it by the letter of the law. So we'll see how this goes.
166 Thank you so much for that comment. Really. And I'm always trying to thread the needle. Yeah. And having been in Salem and spent most of my career there, I understand the threat to us. And by I was going to say something nasty, but I'm trying to figure out what the best strategy really is for us as a city and whether something is inevitable or not, I don't know, but I want us to be in the best position that we can possibly be. And the more that we're united, the stronger we are. And we did that on the tough. We did that on the street restoration fee. We were pretty much united front, and I really appreciate that. I think we can replicate that with some different degrees. So we'll talk. We'll talk more about that one on one. We'll be we'll be careful.
167 Councilor Kanal thank you, chair Clark. Two things. First, just housekeeping. I want to make sure I got my my exact wording right. Previously, I think I used the word primarily, and I want to make sure that we know it's disproportionate in terms of the workforce percentages primarily is in some states I'm not sure about nationwide. So I just want to make sure I amend that to disproportionately. Getting back to what we were talking about here. And thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it so much. And I, I don't know, you know, that that having a small number, these things don't tend to get reversed. All that tends to do is slow it down. And so I slowing it down is better than doing, you know, open season. But I, I would be, I don't love the idea to get to the original ask of having only the right to make a number in code, I would want to have the hard number in code. I just it's been. The mayor's clearly supportive of this, and so I don't want that to be just. Whatever the mayor decides is an appropriate number to pursue. I would like to have that require a public conversation. But again, I think the, the, the challenge I have and the difficulty with, with answering those questions, which are very good questions and I appreciate the work that's been done, is I don't want to talk about how to do the thing that I don't want to do. I'm just going to be that blunt about it because, you know, we could, you know. It's like asking, how many people do we want to die? And I that's why I always talk about, you know, vision zero is a numerical goal for me. It's the same idea here. It's, it's, you know, you want to reduce, but you also want to get to zero. It's kind of the idea of, I don't want to open the door to it at all. The other point I wanted to raise with relation to, I'm scrolling up here through my notes, I apologize. I appreciate councilor Green bringing up the the serial meetings law. That would be something that the, the, the state legislature should spend its time on instead of this funding TriMet should be something that the state legislature spends its time on. Instead of this, I think for all the criticism that individual councilors and the council as a whole have gotten for our choices of where to spend time on other pieces of legislation, I think you've all seen that if you work in Salem, and I don't think you want to have to defend why you stopped us from saving lives and also didn't fund transit and also didn't fund public schools, and also didn't do all the things that that portlanders and frankly, Oregonians are counting on legislators to do, not to mention enabling us to do our jobs better. And every county, school board and everything else by, by fixing the the public meetings law in a way that that maintains transparency and sunshine provisions, but also allows us to do our, our thing. The other piece that I was bringing up is with relation to, to human support. I think the answer we got was about city. He mentioned first responders and city staff, but I don't know that we had anything about staff of waymo and zoox and things like that. Was there anything there?
168 I mean, we know that the companies have like in field operations staff. I don't think we can provide a specific number of how many staff are in different cities. But, you know, they they typically do have staff in field in order to respond to issues.
169 And when you say operations, are you distinguishing between operations and customer service in that regard?
170 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So operations that could actually help respond to an incident or something like that, retrieve vehicles or those kinds of things differing from customer service. If you, you know, got overcharged on your ride or needed to talk to someone about kind of app based based issues.
171 In the last since I've taken office, I'm going to say it that broadly to not name the specific one. I attended a conference. I know that there's often negativity associated with attending conferences. I think they're very valuable, but this particular one was very valuable on the whole, and it was sponsored by one of the ride sharing companies. That's, sorry, one of the autonomous vehicle companies, one of the ones we've discussed today, and the company, they were like one of the lead sponsors. And so they spoke early on in the conference and they in the hallway before you entered the room, they had a vehicle of theirs kind of in the corner. So you'd walk in, you'd go into the room, or you'd keep going straight and over towards the restrooms and stuff. There's this vehicle and they, one of their brags was in their, in their intro introductory speeches that we collectively put it in neutral and pushed it up the ramp and around the corner and then down the hallway to get here. That was not the flex that they thought it was that it took pushing to get it there. You would think that that these sorts of things could be programed. I'm not comfortable necessarily saying kill all the robots yet, but I am comfortable saying that, that it's not at a place where we can just blindly trust that it works, because it's better theoretically than a human driver. We all know terrible human drivers, don't get me wrong, but the idea that this is something we should put tons of, I mean, literal tons, right? Weight driving around without any sort of verification piece on it. Liability wasn't brought up to date either. That's been a concern in the past. That's where I'm coming from on this. Thanks.
172 Thank you so much for those comments. Councilor Kanal. I don't know, did we talk about liability and any of the any of the proposals? Okay.
173 I think I briefly mentioned it, but it was part kind of included in our base set of rules. So we weren't really spending time talking about it because I think we're planning on advancing some of those liability protections that we've already worked on with the city attorney's office. So didn't spend a lot of time on that, because we're kind of already taking that as a kind of a starting position, if you will, and wanted to talk about some of these other policy concepts. But I apologize for glossing over that. We probably could have spent a little bit more time knowing it was a topic of some interest.
174 No apology necessary. Well, colleagues, I don't see any other hands up. I think we'll conclude this part of our meeting. Thank you so much. I, I do I'm going to ask you, at least from my office, to begin to craft that ordinance while you're also working on your administrative rules. And we'll schedule a time for you to bring that back. I think we need to incorporate everything that you've presented today in terms of the policy areas. I'm I was a little surprised to hear the start small with 50, but that's a that's an interesting concept as well. And we will, I guess it's a. It's incumbent on all of us to talk individually with our colleagues about this as well, those that are not on this committee that will have a real interest. I know others who used to be on this committee have a real interest. So that's incumbent on all of us, but I do. I would really appreciate you. I know you're busy, but put together a draft for us, an ordinance that we might be able to implement if we get the votes on this council before the legislature begins. That would be my my hope in some way, shape or form. So thank you so much for the great work that you do. Really appreciate it. Great presentation. And thanks also again, derek, for being here. Okay with that. Just a little announcement. My colleagues. Our next meeting is Tuesday, August the 11th. We're still working on that agenda, but I'm, I suspect that we're going to bring back the bus advertising piece. If you've gotten the information that you wanted input from the city attorney's office, I believe we'll see if we can bring that back. And then I'm hoping that in our role on oversight, that we are going to bring back the bull run filtration project and specifically learn about their owner's rep and the independent filtration oversight panel, oversight over oversight. So I think that will be beneficial. I'm not sure what else we're going to add or how much time we'll have, but that's what I'm thinking at this point. So so with that, I will adjourn the meeting of the public works committee. Thank you all.