The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-01-22
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (32,130 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
This work session of the Portland City Council was held on January 22, convened at 2:03 p.m. to review a mayoral plan aimed at addressing unsheltered homelessness in the city. The session opened with a presentation outlining current conditions, including figures on unsheltered homelessness, emergency response times, commercial vacancy rates, and comparisons to peer cities such as Boise, Boston, and Philadelphia; some figures, including population and cost estimates, were stated inconsistently across speakers. Presenters described a proposed emergency management structure, including an incident command system, executive policy group, and multi-agency coordination, along with budget estimates for night shelters, day centers, storage facilities, and behavioral health resources across the upcoming biennium. Additional topics included funding sources such as HUD grants and state legislative requests, coordination with Multnomah County and the Joint Office of Homeless Services, staffing and safety officer roles, RV enforcement, camping ban enforcement philosophy, workforce development programs, and housing production challenges. Council discussion covered budget sourcing, cost comparisons between shelter types, concerns about stay limits, definitions of success, and requests for additional data on indirect costs. Votes, if any occurred, are recorded in the vote ledger. The session closed after approximately three hours of discussion.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
0 For. For. For. For. For.
1 Diego, can you hear me?
2 Yes. You sound great.
3 Great. Thank you. Phones off. Okay. It's just my last minute check.
4 I will call to order this work session of the Portland city council on January 22nd at 2:03 p.m. Thank you all for being here today. We are excited to have a couple of hours with the mayor to talk about his plan for ending unsheltered homelessness within the city of Portland. Mr. Mayor, welcome. It's good to see you there. Usually we have you up here with us, but thank you for being here. We have three hours scheduled, which should be plenty of time for presentation. And about half of everybody's questions. So we will work through as many questions as we can and try to make sure that everybody has time to ask at least a couple of questions. This is also an opportunity for portlanders to hear this plan. I know that, mr. Mayor, you've spent a lot of time talking to our city about what you hope to do, but I'm also hoping we can go into a little bit more detail today, because I know that there have been a lot of questions, not only from councilors, but from our constituents, your constituents, about what this will look like on the ground. So with that, I will turn it over to you and your team to start your presentation.
5 Thank you so much, madam president. Thank you, madam vice president. Thank you, councilors. Thank you and colleagues, I appreciate you this opportunity to present the future of really where I'd like to see Portland this next year. Councilor Morillo you had asked for the presentation before with plenty of time. And I got to tell you, the presentation, you'll see, is a little bit slimmed down. That's the problem of getting it out so early that we were making changes. But I'm glad that you have really the larger, less truncated version. So good afternoon please. Go back one. There you go. Thank you so much. We face a crisis that can be overwhelming to many of our neighbors are sleeping and suffering on our streets. Heroic work has already gone into helping thousands of unsheltered neighbors, guided by leaders like councilor Ryan, who of course, I'm giving him a shout out and he's not here. Director of jails Dan fields and our new commissioner, shannon singleton, who was Dan fields predecessor. We've got a lot of great people who've done a lot of great work to date. That work is vital and must continue. What I want to talk about today is a plan to solve the crisis and relieve the suffering we all see on the street every day. And we when we work together to do that, we will make our existing programs to reduce homelessness even more effective. I believe we can solve this crisis and help our suffering neighbors, and by doing so, we can help Portland recover. Today, I want to tell you how we're going to work together. But first, let me level set. Portland has the highest unsheltered homeless rate in our history, and the unsheltered are dying in unprecedented numbers. The recent domicile unknown report shocks the conscience. Every conversation and working session we have about unsheltered homelessness must reflect the moral imperative this number represent. We cannot look at this chart and think of terms of one year plan or three year plans, or 5 or 10 year plans. We must think about the best we can do right here, right now. We must change the way we think about the crisis and respond immediately and decisively. All Portland is impacted by this humanitarian crisis. Ten years ago, a police officer would respond to a priority call in six minutes. Today, in your most urgent time of need, the average response time is 24 minutes before they can reach you. Firefighters, paramedics and even public defenders. They're all overwhelmed. Our systems are designed to operate normally, while our first responders excuse me, our systems aren't designed to operate normally. While our first responders simultaneously serve on the front lines. In the biggest humanitarian crisis our city has faced. Here's why the public disapproves of our current strategy. They've begun to associate increased spending, and the promises we've made with increased suffering, not progress. Our victories ring hollow when the public sees unsheltered homelessness and domicile unknown deaths rise year after year after year. Livability and economic issues are compounding. Our job creation is among the worst in the nation. We see more and more closed storefronts. We're losing our identity as a small business town and community of entrepreneurs. In 2023, one downtown business had 93 empty storefronts. This past year, that same neighborhood has 150. Excuse me, has 115 empty storefronts. And behind each one of those empty storefronts is a broken dream. Commercial vacancies in our urban core are the highest in the nation, and our livability has gone from being one of the most desirable cities in the country to one of the least. The urban land institute, which is a professional group that aggregates in a barometer. Livability and real estate investment and economic development, ranks Portland 80th at 81 cities. By comparison, in 2017 we were the third most livable city based on their ranking, and because of this, our tax base is declining, making our job and the job for this council that much more difficult. We have issued a fraction of the housing permits we need to reach our housing goals. The solution isn't complex. If we if we restore cleanliness, safety, compassion and livability, we can be that city that we want to be. Thank you. And the suffering are not nameless or faceless. Every one of these pictures shows people I care about. Father john built a movable shack for his son, trevor. Elizabeth lives downtown between the greyhound station shelter and a tent. She's my neighbor. I've seen her grow up since she was a baby because she's not required to engage to stay in shelter. She uses it for food, for showers and for laundry so she can stay on the street. This has been her life for over two years now. Doug was dumped by emergency room security guards in a public park. He was naked except for that blanket, and had chest pains and patrols. Portland does not have enough emergency shelters or detox beds, and our hospitals have become the shelters of last resort. To function. They force the unsheltered into parks or onto city busses to nowhere. The bicycle in the background isn't his. It's mine. Because I stopped to help him. Portland has no system to get him from where he lay into shelter, and the overwhelmed emergency room wouldn't let him back in. And then there's jess, the person on fourth on main, a block away from where we're at. You've all seen him. So from the first day I gained this job, I noticed jess going from block to block, moving out of the removal zone, and I stopped and talked to him. He grew up in coos bay. He went to marshfield high school. I've offered him shelter. He's declined. He says he owns Portland. I said, well, that's great because I happen to be your mayor. So the point is he suffers from mental illness. You see him every single day and every day. We walk by him or drive by him. Us as leaders have created a new policy saying that that's acceptable in our community, that that's normal. The 13 of us are legislators and leaders. Anytime we walk by, we have to own that or we've created that message to our community. Suffering people don't get better. Living on the street. Living unsheltered puts up daunting barriers on the journey to addiction recovery, mental health treatment, job counseling and family reunions. On the street, individual outreach is hampered and those we want to help are too consumed by day to day survival. To rebuild their lives, we must shift from a maintenance approach to a crisis response. We've devoted people who have been treating this crisis for years. We have to listen to them, and we have to mobilize the city to the moment. Compassionately revitalizing our community begins with sheltering our unsheltered. We must prioritize. We must prioritize emergency shelters first, and then move on to day centers and solutions like built for zero. We're not building from scratch. We'll use what has worked in the past, both in Portland and our peer cities. Emergency nighttime shelters are important, but they're not intended to provide a comprehensive solution to the humanitarian tragedy on our streets. We'll use emergency shelters because we must treat the crisis like a crisis and will respond with a full disaster recovery strategy to compassionately and cost effectively shelter our unhoused population, and will end public camping and once again enforce basic norms of safety and sanitation. It's a necessary step to repair, restore and revitalize the quality of life, livability, and the dignity for every portlander, both the housed and the unhoused. What is missing? Emergency night shelters. So here's a blueprint on how Portland must respond to this crisis. Go ahead. I believe we need to shake up what we are already doing. In 2017, we changed our sheltering guidelines. We need to modify, and we must go back to and improve and increase and stand up. A network of nighttime emergency shelters. In addition, we must make changes to our 24 hour shelters as they are reintroduced. 90 day stay and stay limits require engagement with case managers and follow bed utilization rules, where we make sure every bed, every night is being used for life saving care and never empty. Cost effective, scalable emergency night shelters are not a replacement to other housing programs. Project turnkey safe rest villages. Temporary alternative shelters, 24 hour supportive shelters, and supportive housing all have a critical role to play. Emergency shelters provide a no wrong door first step for those who are ready to move off the streets, and a safeguard for those who slip through the cracks of our complementary programs. They're also a cost effective pressure valve that frees up resources to help the rest of the system function. Low barrier nighttime emergency shelters should be a trauma informed space that provide nighttime housing using existing facilities, such as community centers and businesses and churches. They can work for those with mental illness, addiction, or physical disability. They ensure guests are rested and ready for the next day, which for many include their next working day, their next work shift, or a positive step towards permanent housing, or an opportunity to gain behavioral health or addiction. Referral at a day center. And I'm happy to say, the response from neighborhoods and businesses, nonprofit and the faith community have been overwhelming. It's so much more than I dared hope. Businesses have come forward with lists of 40 locations to add to our existing list of 3050 nonprofit, 50 nonprofit homeless service providers attended a listening session to find out what they need to set up these shelter beds rapidly. Their unsheltered people who are ready right now, they are ready for shelter for addiction and mental health services, and to be reunited with those who love them. It's time to turn to them and say, and Portland is ready to. We must raise the lowest level of the housing ladder, from destitution on the street to a warm, safe bed for every portlander. Every night. Nighttime emergency shelters are staffed with professionals, volunteers and people with lived experience. Homeless service providers work to ensure a safe and welcoming environment, with a focus on a safe night's sleep. Building owners are compensated for the use of their space. All adults are welcome, but minors and families with children are handled as part of a separate system. Sobriety is not required, but drugs, alcohol and weapons are not allowed. They are cost effective. Nighttime emergency shelters utilize existing facilities, eliminating construction and capital costs. In comparison, a transitional alternative shelter costs millions while providing fewer beds in addition to low upfront costs. Nighttime emergency shelters are far cheaper to maintain. They are scalable. The most important benefit of a nighttime emergency shelter is that they're quick to set up by utilizing existing buildings. Nighttime emergency shelters can often begin serving our community in days. In addition to being quick to set up, they can be closed just as easily when needs change. We enforce stay limits. Stay limits encourage guests to engage with services and move from emergency shelters to permanent housing. Without this rule, there is often little incentive for an individual to address their root cause of homelessness. They're generally near transit corridors to provide easy access for staff, volunteers and guests, and they they are complemented with day centers. Day centers are supportive, trauma informed facilities that serve as a warm handoff from the nighttime emergency shelter. They link a person to a comprehensive network of services. Services can include meals and showers, clean clothes storage, transportation vouchers, mental health services, addiction services, family reunification, and a path to permanent housing. Should we combine night shelters and day centers into 24 hour shelters? While 24 hour shelters have an important role converting from emergency shelters to 24 hour shelters has downsides. In Portland, changing to a 24 hour strategy roughly tripled the expenses without adding a single bed. Highly experienced shelter operators were defunded and new operators with innovative solutions to homelessness, mental health and addiction crisis were shut out. In addition, 24 hour shelters are far less capable of taking walk ins. Given the struggles our unsheltered neighbors often face with addiction and mental illness, these delays made it far less likely they would voluntarily come to a shelter once a bed was made available. The delay forced them to adapt to a life on street where many remain today. Other common 24 hour shelter rules have hampered portland's ability to move people off the streets. Under the current systems, beds can be reserved even if not used. This means a guest may have the amenities of a of a shelter, such as meals, shower and laundry, but without the bed utilization or stay limit requirements. To create an incentive to move to permanent housing. We lost track of the missing resource. Most cities in America rely on night time emergency shelters to maintain low rates of unsheltered homelessness. Boise has 115 unsheltered homeless on their streets tonight, and they have less affordable housing than Portland. Boston has 169 people living unsheltered on their streets. And again, less affordable housing than Portland. And philadelphia has 706, but is twice the size of Portland and Portland. Today. Tonight, 5398 souls will live on the street. At this time, I'd like to introduce shad ahmed to present.
6 Thank you mayor. Good afternoon, madam president, vice president and councilors. My name is shad ahmed, director of the Portland bureau of emergency management. As the mayor has indicated and directed, we're going to approach this as an emergency mission like we would with any other emergency incident we face. We're activating our incident management principles to mobilize the resources and processes that achieve our objectives. This requires us to align all of our citywide resources, bureaus and assets internal to the city to move with urgency, but it also requires us to build, enhance and engage those external partnerships that are so vital for us to achieve our goal. As we do this, we'll track metrics and data to ensure that we're staying aligned, and we will build dashboards to visualize our progress. As you know, it's important to see where we've been, where we're going, but also that we're continually validating our objectives to ensure that alignment. So how do we do this? We do that through a few key structures that you see on the screen here. We start at the top with the executive policy group. And executive policy group sets the policy objectives and the direction and de-conflicting existing policy for all that are at the table. A multi-agency coordination group will also be stood up. Also known as a matt group, that matt group will allow all of our external partners to align with us in a common operating picture. This will allow them to provide input, advice, counsel and de-conflict policy and streamline resources on their end to support the mission. You'll hear in a second a little bit more of the details, but an incident commander will be designated with the overall responsibility to direct those assigned resources, and those resources will come from both city and regional agencies that are committed to working together in this arena. I'll note that we've been meeting internally for several weeks to ramp up this structure, and you'll hear a little bit more about that in a second. I also wanted to just introduce the concept of emergency support functions. When we troubleshoot an emergency, any type of emergency in front of us, we pull together the right configuration of these key sectors that you see on the screen. And this is, you know, in this case specifically, we're going to be leaning on some of those that are highlighted in particularly calling your attention to esf six mass care and shelter, esf eight health and medical and esf 13 public safety. Those will be some key areas that we will need to make sure we have the alignment and support of. And some of you know, my background being a little bit relatively newer to the city coming from other parts of the country, in particular the northeast and the boston metro area. I just wanted to kind of level set what the standard kind of tiered system for sheltering is and what that should look like. So on the screen here, you see, tier one is that year round shelter, 24 service 24 hour services. And when conditions warrant we escalate to the second tier. We do enhanced outreach, enhanced services when it's needed. And then there's this third tier that we refer to as surge capacity. And surge capacity. Is that temporary additional capacity that is needed specifically for life saving activities. And then when we have to pull out all the stops, we have that last year where we refer to as disaster sheltering, kind of as a last resort when no other option exists. And I just wanted to highlight my own observation that in this region, we are really lacking some capacity there in that third tier for surge capacity. And that's really what the mayor is talking about and what we want to strengthen at his direction and build capacity in is that area in regards to these overnight shelters. So that's just an important distinction I wanted to make. And with that, I will turn it over to director of Portland solutions.
7 Thank you. Director skyler brock. Councilors. Madam president, director of Portland solutions. As director ahmed mentioned, we have stood up this incident command structure. As of yesterday, we had a meeting with our section leaders and the leaders in this group, as well as the executive policy group. As of yesterday. We will meet every single day going forward to address this crisis. As the mayor mentioned, this is obviously small print, so I apologize, but we are also happy to walk you through kind of the larger structure at any point. But I just wanted you to see what we've stood up and this current structure in place. So the mayor obviously, as providing that strategic guidance, that vision that he's laying out today, the executive policy group. Thank you, sean. The executive policy group will be those decision makers setting that policy and then working directly with that multi-agency coordination group. So the other agencies, you can imagine who those are, the homelessness response system, the joint office of homeless services, etc. There will be an incident commander who's in charge of really ensuring that all of these pieces are met, that we're delivering every day towards this goal and those policy objectives. We'll have a deputy incident commander. And then underneath our four section leads, these are just elements of emergency management. And as sean director ahmed has taught me, there are operations, logistics, planning and finance. And that's just standard operating procedure for emergency management. So we've filled a lot of those roles with our current staff. We're trying to make sure we have role clarity to match these clear deliverables that the mayor has laid out. And we want to make sure we're using our existing structures and processes to be as efficient as possible. So not bringing new people on who haven't been engaged in this work, we want to really encourage our current team at the city of Portland that's doing a lot of these, a lot of this work in Portland solutions and other bureaus to continue engaging in this work. But just in this incident command structure that really meets that need of that emergency crisis response. Thank you. I'm going to go through the budget that the mayor and his team and I have put together. This is, again, a very fluid concept of the budget. Overall. We just wanted to give you this idea of, based on our current practices, based on discussions with providers and those facilities that the mayor mentioned. Excuse me, what we're able to accomplish and for how much. And we wanted to show you that scale. So this is based on real costs that we've experienced. I think as we go through this crisis every single day, we're problem solving every single day. We're talking to new providers. That will be a fluid approach, and we will just need to be meeting that moment to deliver as many beds as possible, as quickly as possible for folks on the street. So I will just walk you quickly through some of these numbers. These are for comparison. So some of the newer kongregate 24 hour congregate shelter beds within, brought online by the joint office of homeless services, are at about $102 per day. Some of the safer us villages, the task sites that we brought online in the last few years are about $190 a day, and some of these other costs are for just those night time emergency shelters, as the mayor mentioned. So just that overnight bed, really making sure people are safe off the streets, have somewhere to stay at night. Are these costs that you're seeing? So a little over $16, $19, and we're looking at about $35 as our average right now, just based on a lot of those conversations. So for context, we brought on those 200 shelter beds. They came online in one week. So really fast ramp up. And those are at about $40 a bed. So we're just using some of our current context and we'll adjust accordingly as we move forward with this process. The day center shelter costs are examples are two day centers that we work with closely. We're using the rose haven day shelter example or day center example at about 54, 50 or $55 a day per person. That is one of the premier day centers in our community. They serve people who identify as women, and they do a very good job. They're recognized nationally for the level of support that they provide. I would just also like to say for that specific day center cost, we would like to add additional services to what they're able to provide. So we're working closely with them and other day centers in our community. But I think it's important that we think big and really connect people to all of the services available. I know councilor Dunphy was talking about state resources and federal benefits, and making sure folks are actually on site at these day centers to connect people to those services they're entitled to, and those benefits. So I think we need to talk to our coordinated care organizations, to nonprofits. We're already working with health share of Oregon. That's a medicaid payer in our community, as well as central city concern to provide that medical care, that behavioral health care that's desperately needed. Next slide please. Thank you. Okay. So we talked a little bit about that surge capacity. I'm going to walk you through how we got to this number. So the 505,398 individuals. That's a number pulled from the by name list from January of 2024. So we have we will get some updated numbers as we move through this process with the county. But just for context, that's the number that's used in the intergovernmental agreement with the county. With that, the city has that created the homelessness response system and the wrap the homelessness response action plan. So we're using that for context to show you why these numbers matter and how we got there. So if we wanted to add an additional 3000 beds to our system to really accommodate that need, for example, we would need those thousand beds that are already promised through the homelessness response action plan. We've already delivered on 426. I believe it is, but I will get those precise numbers as of last year. And then this year, the county has committed to delivering the rest of those beds in conjunction with the city. And because of budget shortfalls, I think we'll both have to work together in partnership to determine what we're able to deliver and how we're able to deliver it. We're also working with the state on some of those funding models. We're also looking at public private partnerships. So 500 beds. This is the example you've already heard. But blanchet house is opening a shelter where I just was on the phone today with scott kerman, who runs blanchet house, and we're just partnering with them to make sure that they can find the space that they need, that they have adequate staffing, that they're able to serve that population, that they want to serve and bring that shelter online as quickly as possible. But they are looking to fundraise privately for the money that would operate that site. The city of Portland, then, is also saying that we would like to increase that surge capacity by 1500 beds to really meet that need on the ground, to have a bed for every single person who wants one. Those 1500 beds would include the 200 that we have already stood up. So 1300 beds to go. And we are looking at that number every day to say, what can we add to that system? What can we stand up immediately? We're talking to providers. We're looking at locations. We're looking at funding mechanisms and trying to add as many beds to the system as possible. These are just some costs associated. Oh, sorry, just some costs associated with that as well as our staff to client ratio, which I think we've already talked to you all about. Thank you. All right. And then the whole idea that the mayor mentioned is flexing up and flexing down. So being really responsive to the needs on the ground, not necessarily having, you know, a thousand empty beds at night or even hundreds of empty beds at night. If we don't need those beds in the system, we can begin to ramp down. But first we have to ramp up. So we need to create the beds necessary to meet the need. Already we've created those 200 beds I mentioned, so we are on target and ahead of schedule based on these numbers that are outlined on a monthly basis. This is the these are the numbers that the incident command team will look at every single day and say, where are we? What? What do we have planned for the future? What's our short, medium and long term plan to meet this goal by December 1st? Next slide please. Thank you. And then you see that flexing up capacity starting on the fiscal year. So July 2025 to that December deadline. So that 1500 beds. So this is what we're charged with doing. This is the strategy that the mayor has laid out. And the very clear vision that we are trying to address to meet that goal of December 1st, having those 1500 beds in conjunction with those other beds that I laid out, then you will see the you begin to see the flexing down of that system. So this is just our thoughts based on other cities, based on what we've seen in the community. That obviously could be adjusted over time depending on what we're seeing on the ground. For example, if we had a pandemic or some other natural disaster fires in our community, that would be something that might affect whether we could ramp those beds down and or whether we would need to flex up. So we need to be incredibly responsive to meet the needs on the ground. And we want a system that is able to flex up and flex down. Still having a lot of those other services, including those 24 over seven shelters online. Next slide please. Thank you. So you'll just see the continued ramp down here. But I'm not going to go through every single month with you. Happy to talk more if folks are interested in that. Thank you. So these are just some final estimates that I just wanted folks to be aware of. We're looking at four data centers, one in each of your districts that would accommodate about 150 people. Again, that's based on the rosehaven model. So they accommodate up to 150 people a day. That could be adjusted depending on the capacity at a specific facility. But that's what we're aiming for. Then we would put that cost, that daily cost I mentioned. So the 5468 is based on that rosehaven operational cost. And that comes out of that total of almost $12 million for that day center. The storage units are an added important part of this system. So we currently have day storage that we work with central city concern on providing. They actually provide it for up to 450 people. We have a conservative estimate of 300 people here, but it actually does have more capacity than that. We would need for additional day storage centers. And then we have the cost associated based on our experience with central city concern. Again, that would depend on the location, the facility, the provider. But we just wanted to give you some of those estimates based on our current practices. Next slide please. The total biennium cost. So we wanted to roll all these numbers up and show you where they're coming from, but then give you the total. So biennium because we're going to the state legislature, we're actively working with the governor, her team with state reps. And the mayor has been meeting with them regularly to really emphasize the need for these shelter spaces, day center spaces and storage in our community and see what's possible, how we can partner with them on funding. The 2025 2026 fiscal year would be at about 20, a little over 28 million, and then the 2026 2027 fiscal year would be a little over 24 million. That's again based on our assumptions for flexing up or flexing down and could be adjusted accordingly. But we wanted to give you that estimate that we are working with right now, and that we will give to our incident command team. Next slide please. Thank you. In conjunction with this plan is all the other work that we're also doing. So you've already heard from the homelessness response system team. One of those things that is emphasized in the homelessness response action plan is, is all this behavioral health support and reducing those barriers to access. So the detox beds that the mayor mentioned, but all those other pieces of the system that we've been really lacking in our community, I'm working closely with that team on the implementation subcommittee, and we work with a lot of different health care providers, the coordinated care organizations, nonprofits, hospitals, and the state to really bring forward this need and get it funded for our community. So this will be a joint legislative strategy between the city and the county and metro to come to the state legislature and say, we really need these elements brought to bear in our community. It's also already underway. So just one thing I wanted to point out was central city concern is bringing on about 72 secure residential treatment facility beds on 16th and Burnside that would fall under that second category that should be online in April. So we're really excited about that. We've been partnering with the county and with central city concern on that. We also are working closely with commissioner Edwards and the county team on a drop off sobering center. That's been something that's been in the works for many years, and we're really excited that that's coming online soon, and we're already working with them to develop that sobering capacity at the deflection pathways center right now. Okay. Thank you. I'll pass it back to the mayor.
8 That last slide is really important too, because sheltering individuals at night is really only dealing with one part of the very complex equation. And so partnering with the county is important because the behavioral health and the addiction referral really allows us to address the acuity. And that's something that chair vega peterson and I have spoken about, where we're really focused on helping one another out as far as our individual jurisdictions, and then how we talk to other funding agents to really realize both of our visions and both the county and the city's needs. With that said, though, we've already begun, and I presented to each of you three weeks ago about the 200 shelter beds that we've brought online, that was the overall approach about meeting this crisis head on. And chair van peterson was the first call I had made as a newly elected mayor. And I'm happy to say that we've already initiated that crisis response. And you can see that in the photo right there. We've already set up 200 emergency beds, and the word is getting out and people are coming. The more we take care of the folks who are ready, the more freed up resources and momentum we'll have. We're going to work with people who are ready, and we are never going to give up on those that are not yet ready. Emergency overnight shelters are the final lifesaving safeguard our city offers. My work with shelter Portland proved we can find a bed for everyone in our city. Our ultimate goal is to get our most vulnerable into affordable housing and to provide the supportive services they need if they experience setbacks in their journey home. They also needed an emergency option that isn't on the street. So long as unsheltered homelessness is a crisis, we must have a crisis response. We're building a movement. Local, county, regional, state, even federal. They've all told me they're stepping up. There's an outpouring of support. Let's turn the hope into action. I'm happy to say that one of the first calls that I made as the elect mayor was to HUD, the housing and urban development had been working with them for years, and we have a local connection with them, and they just delivered a grant just a couple weeks ago, and they'll be the first funder of this system. And they delivered a $2 million opportunity for us in this fiscal year. So we're already on our way. It's about what's the next part of that journey. When I look at people I meet every day, I don't see what I can or I can't accomplish in 100 days or dwell on principled disagreements. I look for the helpers, and I'm grateful because I see helpers everywhere, and I'm thrilled with portland's solutions. I'm thrilled with the conversations that we've had, the conversations with county. Everybody is in this to help us along this journey, but I need your help too. So not only did I immediately start working with chair peterson, but we made the call to the governor and I've talked with her twice already. I asked her for breakfast next week. We can't stop, nor can we give up. And we cannot delay. Hud has joined us. I had breakfast with chair marsh of the housing and homelessness committee last week. We have to get ready for these presentations. I'll be presenting to the state legislature, and I invite you and especially our new homeless committee, to come with me. We'll be presenting to metro council. President peterson has welcomed us in to present, I believe that's February 4th. We'll be presenting to county commissioners. We're we're thrilled to be before you right now to be presenting with you. But we need your help. We can't do this on our own. It can't be a mayor's initiative. It has to be our partnership. And I need you to help with your relationships throughout the community to begin funding this. And if we lift this together, we don't just make this a one term project, but we make this evergreen and we make sure it's a Portland that is always going to be livable and caring, and we don't leave anybody behind in our city. What I'd like to do now is just open it up for questions, and I'm looking forward to it.
9 Thank you very much, mayor, and to the team for bringing us some comprehensive information today. We have a lot of questions lined up. So councilors, I know some folks ask a lot of questions at once, and some bring them in one at a time. But just try to make sure that you're leaving space for our fellow councilors to councilor Green. Why don't you kick us off?
10 Thank you, madam president. And thank you, mayor, for the presentation. Just I want to be selective about my questions because I know everyone's going to have a lot just kind of working from the backwards on the flex up, flex down concept. How are you going to ensure you have flexing capability as an enduring resources? Do you have like a retainer model in mind, like can you say a little bit more about that?
11 Yeah, you know, that was anecdotal evidence. And so working with the mayors of new orleans who went from 8000 people in shelter to a thousand people in a matter of 24 months, and then working with the mayor of boise, who also had a surge sort of focus. They were certainly the new orleans is larger issue than what we're dealing with, and boise was a smaller issue. But in between that, on those timings, new orleans mayor went to his homeless service providers and brought him into a room and said, we're going to end this population, and I want to do it in 12 months. And they said, mr. Mayor, that's going to be very difficult. We haven't done that before. And he sent them away and he had them work amongst themselves. They came back a month later and they said, sir, we can do it. And he said, great, now I need to deliver it in six months. And they did. And that research paper is on the research tab at shelter Portland. And mark johnston, the fellow who helped the mayor and the obamas, who helped the mayor, are also helping us. So that's one of those anecdotal points. And then the mayor of boise, who did a surge after he lost martin versus boise, that seminal ninth circuit court case that says you must offer a shelter bed if you're going to enforce your no camping codes. Well, he accomplished that in 30 days. And then he had explained to us the model of diffusion. Or, you know, when he ended on shelter, homelessness, he had talked about a third leaving and going back to homes regionally and a third going back home locally. And a third actually took him up on the shelter bed. So that's kind of how we know that while we have 5300 beds, we don't we do not feel it's a 1 to 1 relationship where we need 5300 units because we know through dual residency individuals, there are people in tents that are also, you know, at shelter beds or have apartments. And I can tell you anecdotal stories so we know it's not a 1 to 1 councilor, but we know we have to address this by December 1st next year because winter is coming soon. As I was elected, we had no strategy this winter. We know it's here. We often always had six, seven, eight winter shelters, shelters that we opened up prior to 2017 and we just stopped. And so that's why we opened up this 200 beds. So it's a long answer to say it may not be a perfect timing, but that's essentially what our incident command is set up to do to flex up. We've got the resources we have to fund it, and we're going to begin that planning to do that December 1st as our flex up date to get to that full capacity. But it's fluid councilor We hope to reach it by September. It may take us to January 1st, but it's a it's the journey we're going to begin.
12 I appreciate that answer. I think I guess I'm a little bit more interested in the flex down, because here's where I'm going with this. Suppose we solve unsheltered homelessness and then it comes back. Right. And so we didn't solve it. It's a question of measurement and timeline.
13 That's exactly right.
14 How are we going to keep the capability in place to ramp back up in a short amount of time? Because what I worry about is resource loss.
15 It's a great question. It's a philosophy. So back in 2017 we had eight winter shelters we would set up on November 1st or December 1st. We had already had that plan in place. So it's not something we're going away. What we're doing is, is we're creating institutional knowledge with this. And god forbid an earthquake happens, we're going to be ready for it. Because operationally, schodde and his team will already know what we're doing. You know, he's essentially addressing this with 11 months. But if something were to happen and I would turn to him and say, you have 11 hours, we're creating that institutional knowledge. So councilor, we're never not going to use this model because this is used in most cities in the united states. But it's not. It's based on circumstances. And truth be told, a lot of people will live on the street throughout the course of the year. In the summer, they might be sleeping on a park bench, but when it comes to January 1st, they're more willing to come inside. So we want to be there with them, with that flexible resource. And a lot, a lot of communities use winter nighttime shelter. And she was explaining, we're missing that whole leg. All we're doing is we're adding it back.
16 Thank you. I think that does address that question. And then I'll just do one more and then I'll yield. I'll yield my time. The on the org chart that you showed sky, you had a sort of safety officer role. Can you say a little bit more about what that safety officer is going to be advising on?
17 Yeah, it's a great question that I might defer to director ahmed on, because he will be telling me what that safety officer should be in charge of. But in my experience, at least with different emergency scenarios with the city, that safety officer is really important for everyone involved. So not only all of the folks you see on this org chart and who will be involved in the day to day processes at the city, but also everyone that we're engaging with on the ground. So I think we just need to be sure that we're adhering to all those safety protocols. So osha standards, for example, are obviously a huge part of that. But I also think for shelter specifically, there's just quite a few different elements of fire life safety issues that we just want to make sure everyone is adhering to and then making sure that we are having trained staff that are trauma informed. And that person, I think, will be helpful for some of those elements. There will be other people in that org chart who are also focused on that, but I think that'll be an important safety mechanism. But please.
18 Yeah, apologize. The thing got screwed up here. But yeah, that guy is absolutely right. The safety officer ensures both guest safety as well as staff safety. They're always looking out and comparing against those standards to make sure that we are tracking the one unique ability of a safety officer in an incident command system structure is that they are the only outside of the incident commander. They're the only other position that can essentially stop an unsafe practice. So there's a little bit of a check and accountability and a balance there.
19 So and just last follow up question on that. And you sort of touched on it. So this org structure also would suggest the accountability structure. So if the community has issues with with safety in these shelters, safety officer would be the first line in that accountability structure.
20 So go ahead. So yeah. So if there's an issue certainly from a safety perspective there's yes the safety officer is accountable for that. But the way the incident command system also works is that there's a process for inputs and outputs. So we have actually I believe it's listed here as the liaison officer somewhere. Maybe. If not we will clarify that. But there's a liaison officer that is responsible for that. Community engagement, perhaps through public information also is another way that we might do it. So there's a couple of mechanisms that we can use to address that. There's also built under this. Like as the director said this is a little bit high level, but under the operational section, there's going to be some specific components related to the engagement zones. And so there's going to be a lot of ways that community can provide some inputs into this process. And we will make sure to clarify that very clearly as we move forward.
21 And also for guests, I will just say at our shelter sites we have different information that's posted. So if they want to make a complaint or file anything, talk to an ombudsman, for example. We will have that information posted per federal law.
22 Thank you.
23 Councilor Smith.
24 Thank you, madam president. Mayor, I am so excited about this very ambitious, ambitious housing and homelessness plan that you have set forth for the city of Portland. I'm going to go back in time just to make sure that we're clear. I was a part of the first county commission that signed the iga with the city of Portland, and the city of Portland was expected to move all of their homeless stuff over to Multnomah county. So it appears that we have pulled back in to producing homeless programs out of the city of Portland. And the question that I'm going to ask is for skyler. So we all saw the $100 million, nine page letter last week. How much is the city of Portland spending between safe rest villages and Portland solutions? Everything that's being done out of the city of Portland. How much are we spending in this fiscal year?
25 2425 oh, okay. Let me try to remember. So a lot of it was one time dollars for this fiscal year.
26 And that's why I'm going to the question I'm going to ask the mayor is going to be very important going forward, because I need to know that number, and I need to know the number that we're spending in the joint office that we actually spend. I don't want you to add the 31 million. I want to know the programs that are being produced out of Portland solutions, safe rest villages, any day shelters that we are producing and that we it's coming out of the city of Portland. How much money are we spending?
27 2425 all right. Back of the napkin. I would say about 75 million for all in on Portland solutions. So that's including all of our programs, including impact reduction program and all of those.
28 And it's including the safe rest villages.
29 So the safe the safe rest villages and the task sites, it's between 40 and 50 million right now.
30 So it's 75 plus 45.
31 No, no, no, that's part of the 75 million okay. Yeah. And some of that money is coming from the county, the state, other sources obviously.
32 But but I'm trying to make a point here, mr. Mayor. We're going into 25, 26. We were just given a letter saying that we have $100 million hole. We are now producing $75 million worth of housing. That should be that should be paid for out of the joint office. How do you expect us to be able to afford this for 2526, to add an additional $75 million on top of our current budget?
33 Yeah, yeah.
34 And to propose it, you, you you have some idea, I assume, because you have to drop the original budget of where you're going to take $75 million away to be able to pay for this as we go.
35 You bet. So the first and foremost is to not focus on the Portland budget. But sky and I are always going through a funding exercise. We have like 11 different buckets that we're going after first. So it's always, what can we use externally? What relationships do we have to go after? And that's why I'm meeting with so many people around the state and federally as well. We are also in discussions with county right now about who's going to pay for the safe rest villages. As we transfer that cost over to the county. So we're in that discussion right now. In fact, we'll step out of here and we'll have that conversation tomorrow. So we're just trying to figure out where that relationship is braided right now. And we're trying to remove those costs over to the SHS to see what is going to be our lift on this. But then I want to tackle this from a different direction councilor as well.
36 Okay.
37 We can't afford not to do this. We're spending 27 million just on camp removals. $2,000 per warrant for an unsheltered person, and we get nothing out of that. The county, the, the judges. There's like $10 million in costs. And most of these individuals are fdas they failure to appear. Then they turned out, then they get arrested. And I've heard it's up to 50% of the arrests our officers are making are of the unsheltered. On the counter side of that, if you have basic nighttime shelter provided to somebody, it's only 2%. Our public safety system is imperiled because we aren't caring for our least or our most vulnerable. And the cost just keep adding up. I think it was like, well, 15 is out because there's an encampment built around and it's been out for two years. Our water district no longer sends one of their technicians out to a emergency without security. We have so many braided costs in our system, it's not $70 million. That's a direct cost. The indirect cost and loss to our city is in the hundreds of millions. And then if we compare our vacancy rate just to downtown vacancy rate.
38 Right.
39 I did it on the back of a napkin. Right. It's $3 billion in in lost wages and rents. And then our property taxes are plummeting. Where has that ever happened in the city of Portland and our business license taxes that we all rely on are falling. If we don't arrest the situation, care for our most vulnerable, improve everybody's livability, not just the housed, but the unhoused.
40 Right?
41 Our problems as a 13 person body are only going to get progressively worse.
42 As a region. I agree with, you.
43 Know, as a city.
44 And we're in this.
45 So yes, yes and yes, you're right. Talking to the mayor of Beaverton, you know, they've ended unsheltered homelessness there at functional zero in Washington county. They have less than 200 people in Washington county tonight. And Clackamas county has less than 200 a matter of a mile away from where we're at. And when I talked to the mayor there, I said, we're going to, you know, this is what the portland's going to do. And I want you to know, mayor, this is going to affect your community because, you know, we are housing or we have in shelter a lot of your community members. And the mayor said, absolutely, I totally know that. And we're ready to help, and we'll set up nighttime shelters. And she said, I can do this. We can do it. She says if portland's unhealthy, our region's unhealthy, and at least we're getting good feedback from the rest of the mayors from around the region as well.
46 I get this, and I understand that, and I appreciate you telling me not to worry about the Portland budget, but I have to.
47 Absolutely I.
48 Do too, I assure you, I assure you.
49 And so here's the here's here's I'm just a numbers person. And so you have to walk me through miss skyler.
50 Yeah.
51 We got 75 million of one time. Only money that the last mayor and the city council approved. That's a part of our $8.2 billion budget right now. And then we send out a letter that says we have a $100 million shortfall. Why did we put $75 million of one time only money into the 2425 budget, knowing we didn't have that and that we had this $100 million looming on us. And then secondly, we have to really have a courageous conversation, mayor, we really do, because what is the use of an iga if we're not going to follow it? We're over here doing services, homeless services, and we've agreed to have those services done in Multnomah county, at the county, in the joint office, if we're just going to continue to do our own thing and say, okay, I don't think we're the direction that the joint office is going is where we want to go. So are we prepared to take that $31 million that we give to the joint office that we gave this last year? Are we prepared to take that $31 million to help fund your new program?
52 I don't believe we're at that point yet, councilor, because that's an agreement we have to abide by.
53 Yes, sir.
54 Yes, sir. And what I'm saying to you is we don't have the money.
55 May I just say. And we also have our friends from the joint office that are also here, leadership who's also here. So thank you for coming and supporting. So I just wanted to say councilor, we met last week on Friday, actually with a lot of the folks involved for this precise reason. So just trying to compare budgets, knowing we're both in budget reduction mode and trying to see what we're going to plan for next year. However, we are both budgeting for those costs. So that means that 31 million we are looking to send to the joint office for those same adult congregate shelter costs that we have for years. They are also budgeting for the cost for our safe rest village and task sites. Going forward, they will likely have a reduction to that. I will just say, because I think they are in dire budget constraints with chhs, and there's a lot of reasons for that. But I am also looking at state funding, potentially from representative marsh's committee. So our office of government relations team has been working diligently, knowing that we're going to have a gap there, knowing that the county is budgeting for some of that. And that is really wonderful. And we're really grateful for that partnership. And we're going to have a gap that we need to fill. So we're hoping that between county and state money, we'd actually be able to carry that. What will be probably about $41 million.
56 And that's what I was trying to get to. Are we going to shift some of these costs into the joint office off of the city operating budget, so that they're doing the bulk of the homeless services? And we're keeping to the agreement. We want to keep to the agreement on one side, but we're breaking the agreement on the other side by creating additional dollars to pay for homelessness.
57 Yes. So I think what we're trying to do is meet the crisis immediately and set up a system for the long term. So my entire program is based on mostly one time money, and a lot of us are on year to year contracts. So I think we know that this needs to be a nimble program. We're trying to meet that need on the ground. We might not need to be in the homeless services business or even running shelters in the future, but I think we have shown success in setting up those shelters. So what we're working on with the joint office and with the mayor's working on with the chair is seeing what does that look like long term? We talked about in the iga transferring these shelters over for that precise reason. So I think that's part of the process right now. I think it's going to be a little bit slower than we initially intended, but that doesn't mean the cost sharing won't be there. So we're both budgeting in good faith, knowing that we need to adhere to those iga principles.
58 Okay. Thank you.
59 And I promise I can always talk to you offline too on the specifics if you want, with finance people who are much smarter than me.
60 Great.
61 Thank you.
62 Councilor Koyama Lane.
63 Thank you, madam president. Thank you, mr. Mayor and your hard working team. I first want to express a genuine I want to express genuine gratitude for this presentation and for being willing to do this out in the public so we can all see it and give ask questions and give comments and thank you. This topic is very important for anyone that did any door knocking. We know that this is something that is top of mind for all portlanders. I really see your passion and your determination. I understand the sense of urgency, and I also understand that the focus is on emergency night shelters and still holding that as true. I do wonder, you know, what do we know about who's likely to be served by this congregate shelter model who is not? When I think about that photo that was shown of the salvation army space, I'm wondering about folks like survivors of domestic violence, seniors, women. Are we prioritizing a particular population? If there are many people living on our streets who do not feel comfortable in the congregate shelter spaces?
64 Yeah, it's a good question. So first of all, it's a no wrong door. So it's low barrier. So all are welcome because it's life saving. If somebody is reticent to come in or they have behavioral health issues or they're suffering from schizophrenia, they're probably not going to come in. If they're hearing voices and need to really isolate and control that. But that's where that continuum comes in. Nighttime shelters are only the missing piece, but we still have shelters, we have transitional housing, and we have permanent supportive housing and then housing somewhere along that continuum, our outreach workers like sky and or hank, who's back here, who tells us stories about people that aren't going to go into congregate shelter, but they're the ones who are ready, but they're not ready for that. Well, we find that need, and then we solve that need. So what we need to do, though, is, is that there are people who are ready to come in right now, and we don't have that resource for them today. And so that's it's really all are welcome. No wrong door. And then if somebody is reticent to come in, an outreach worker will find where they get placed in that five pillar continuum.
65 And I would just share that picture is from the safes shelter that we opened on Burnside, which is just for women identifying individuals. So specifically for that population.
66 Thank you for sharing that. And if I could just ask kind of one more piece if you're able to here or in another space surface, maybe some of the trade offs of, you know, this is focusing on the emergency and emergency night shelters. What are some of the trade offs for focusing on that? Because this will have different outcomes than focusing on housing placement and getting people into housing. What are we trading off here?
67 It'll actually create flow. So right now in our 24 hour shelters, we've removed stay limits. We've removed engagement requirements and bed utilization. So we have and it's arguable we don't know what the utilization rate is, but we know it's at least 10% of the beds are empty tonight. There are some people that say it's up to 75% that are being utilized, so 25% not being utilized. What are the trade offs? Well, if we address that and start implementing those guidelines like other communities are. Yeah, you're right. There's going to be some trade offs because people are going to be uncomfortable because they're going to be engaging in the system. We want to move you up to housing. The trade off is, is if you're in a 24 hour shelter right this minute and you're also living in a tent and you're addicted to fentanyl like elizabeth is the trade off is she's going to be uncomfortable. She's going to have to make a decision. So the individual isn't going to be given a tent anymore because we'll be able to have a shelter for her. And if she's in that shelter and she doesn't engage or she goes beyond the stay limit, she's going to go back to a nighttime shelter. Do you see the trade off is human behavior. You're not going to be able to live in a tent a pardon me, and you're not going to be able to live in a shelter indefinitely like elizabeth. So the trade off to her. But talking to her mother, she says, please, can we do something? Why are we fostering this behavior? So it's that personal autonomy that's going to be the trade off.
68 Thank you so much.
69 Councilor Novick.
70 Mr. Mayor, first of all, I should tell you that I'm basically on your side. I think the I think it's going to be a very long time before we have enough permanent housing for everybody. So we need to be thinking in terms of shelter. And if we could talk the county into spending every dollar they have from the homeless service tax on shelter, I might be for that. And also on your side in terms of we need to address this problem in order to bring more investment down to Portland, into Portland. Et cetera. There's I have a number of questions and reservations about your plan. I'm just going to spew them all out at once and don't expect you to respond to them all today. I'll put them in writing and send them to skyler later on. But here's here's my spew. First of all, the question of how many people will we get to go to these shelters? Skyler was part of a presentation recently where I think that we were told that 34% of people who are offered shelter take it, but then it goes up. If you have a more intense conversation with the police officer question present. So I'm curious if you think that that 34% is enough to take up all these 1500 beds, or if we're going to need to have a lot of intense conversations with the police officer present, and do we have enough police officers to have those conversations? What will the cost of that be? And I. A second and also, by the way, I want to say that I suspect that the caliber of the shelter affects people's willingness to come in like the safe rest village. I assume that people are more willing to come in to a place where they can close a door than a place where they can't, so I think there might be some trade offs in terms of cost of things like the safe rest villages versus acceptance rates in terms of our peer cities. I one thing I just want to mention, just from random googling philadelphia, at least as of 2019, was proud that they had mostly 24 over seven shelters. So the three peer cities one of them did was not an overnight night. Only one thing that strikes me is that it might make it easier for people to get into shelters than the three cities you mentioned. Is the weather. It's colder in those cities. We all know it's colder in philadelphia and boston. I didn't know boise until I googled it last night, I confess. And there's five months in boise that are colder than the coldest month in Portland. There's five months where the nighttime low is 33 or below, and three of those are in the 20s. Now, people say familiarity breeds contempt, but I think it actually more likely brings acceptance. So it seems likely to me that if you know, you have if you have to be in shelter because otherwise you'd freeze five months of the year, you're more likely to accept the idea that you keep going into shelter the other months. So I think that, you know, if there it's easier there for those reasons, and it would be harder for us to convince people to go to shelters here because it's not so cold. On the issue of. That stay limits. I sent you an article last night, mr. Mayor, that said that if you go to whether it was in boston or in massachusetts in general, the average shelter stay was 429 days. And the reason for that is boston's like us, they simply don't have enough affordable housing, and they have as many homeless people as we do. They're just not unsheltered. So I don't see how you can impose stay limits when we know there are simply no houses to go to. That's the strongest reservation I have. About your plan. Let's see. Another thing that I wanted to note is that although there are these indirect costs of what we have going on now, a huge percentage of arrests are of homeless people. We need to be careful not to suggest that we can save tons of money by limiting those indirect costs. I seriously doubt that we're planning to lay off half the police force if we eliminated unsheltered homelessness. Another comment is that I think that in terms of perceptions of Portland and why people aren't investing here, most of those perceptions are gained during the day. People see people on the street during the day. Unless you've got people sleeping on your doorstep, you don't see it as much at night. So I would suggest that in terms of changing the perception of Portland, it might be more important to get people off the street during the day than at night. And let's see, what else do I have? Finally, I cannot resist saying that it's kind of clumsy to constantly have to say task sites and safe rest village sites when I think they're pretty much the same thing. I also note that as a cold war era person tasks, I think of tasks as a soviet news agency, so I would suggest sticking with the soviet news agency theme and calling all the safe rest villages and task sites collectively as pravda sites. Thank you.
71 So if you could take the first question, I'll take philly, I'll take boston. Okay. I can do the police and then at night.
72 Okay. Councilor we will also provide you with maybe some written responses or I'm happy to meet with you separately, but quickly. I will just say I think, yes, thank you for paying attention to our previous presentation to recognize kind of that difficulty, I think, of getting folks to access or want to take advantage of the shelters we're learning every day, kind of the best way to engage with different individuals. I think we were at a steering and oversight committee meeting this morning with county partners and the mayor of Gresham. Just discussing it really is important who is making that offer. And so I do think one thing I'm really proud of with our program is having four outreach workers total, but they're really quite good at knowing which type of shelter might work best for someone and really encouraging them to take advantage of that. So they've been working the last few weeks to educate folks on the street about the two shelters we've opened, and they've seen a lot of people who have taken them up on that offer and are really excited about that opportunity, especially the safes shelter. Just because it was operational pre 2019. And folks are really excited that that's back. So I do think it it will matter who is making that offer. And that's just something that I've been engaging with the mayor on is how do we create a robust outreach and engagement process that's effective. And we're working closely with the joint office of homeless services, currently on an outreach and engagement strategy that will be a little more geographically based for that pilot program. And I think that will also help because people will be engaging with the same outreach worker in the same geographic vicinity regularly. And we know the first time people might not say yes, but the second, the fifth, the sixth time somebody offers it that particularly cold night, maybe. Or you want you need food or to engage with others or just a safe place to sleep tonight, folks might take us up on that offer. So I think it will matter how many times we're offering who's offering. And I think we just keep having to offer as many times as possible and create the service. So we have the resource to actually offer to folks in that moment.
73 All right. So we're going to do rapid fire. So philadelphia is mostly nighttime councilor I'll send you the brookings report on that. And you'll see it clearly delineated. There was an analysis between new york, boston, seattle and philly. So I'll send that to you once we finish this meeting. I'm not certain about 2019 regarding boston. They have a right to shelter law. So their community was so fed up with people living on the street, they now have a law that requires shelter to be available for every single person. Yes, our community can pass that law in Portland too, and we'll have to fund it. Or we can say, we're not going to have a law and we're going to recognize that we take a stand, and we're not going to have a city where we don't have a bed for everybody every night. So it's one way or the other. We already see the law passing the ADA law that was passed. Was it a year ago? So it's already coming. We can either choose morally to take care of our neighbors, or we can let our citizens do it for us. They can pass a ballot. They could do a right to shelter, just like new york does. New york has 60,000 people living in shelter tonight, and they're spending billions of dollars to do it. Or we can choose what direction we want to do and care for our neighbors. It is the moral imperative that we should be doing. We should not have to wait for our neighbors to get so angry that we aren't doing our job. So they pass a ballot measure to tell us to go do the job they want to be done. I put that percentage of who wants things. 86% of voters are not happy with us. 82% are saying, I want shelter, care for people. Councilor you said that I don't want to see people on the street during the day. That's not what you said. But that's what I heard. Go by blanchett house at 10:00 at night or 13th avenue at 11. It is absolute chaos out there. I see fights going on, knife fights, people dealing, people in fentanyl, stupors because we have dozens and dozens of day centers open during the day, and libraries, we aren't seeing it nearly as much as you see it at night. Drive our streets in downtown in any community. Go down and look at the rvs that are parked pockmarked in east Portland, or the small greenways that we have throughout Portland. On the side of city hall. We have a person living, just suffering right there on the corner of fifth. Right? They're not even in a tent, for pete's sake. And none of us have the ability to go up and say, I want to help you. What does that look like? But you shouldn't stay here. I want to arm each and every one of you. When your neighbor cries for help for you, and you answer the phone and say, I have nothing, I got nothing for you, well, we're going to end that. You're going to have a nighttime shelter in your district enough to make sure nobody gets turned away, and you're going to have a day center to connect them with services when they're ready. And if they're not ready, we will be, because we're not going to leave anybody on the streets of Portland, because that's the way it works in most cities around the nation. I respect and I appreciate your your questions. I just want to say, let's get going.
74 I just want to know about th. Your plan seems to provide for 1500 night shelters and 600 day shelters. So I was assuming that meant that there would still be a chunk of people you'd expect to be on the street during the day. And I wasn't talking about my personal attitude. I was saying that I think that the national perception of Portland is probably driven more by, you know, daytime observations than nighttime.
75 And with all due respect, counselor, I appreciate your questions. As you can tell, we're treating this crisis like a crisis in Portland, and I'm asking for each and every one of you to join me in this journey that we have to take. It's only going to get harder before it gets easier.
76 And I would just add that discrepancy. Councilor is due to the fact that we are assuming some of those folks who are utilizing those overnight shelter beds are actually using day services already. So that's actually what we know from talking to different individuals, talking to service providers. Folks who are in rose haven or using blanchet house every day are actually looking for a shelter bed. That would be an overnight shelter bed.
77 Councilor Dunphy.
78 Thank you, madam president. Mr. Mayor, I have about four questions. And, skylar, maybe specific to some of the slides, there was a slide, I think maybe the next slide that said specifically that we're trying to build. I think the number was 1500 new beds to try and meet the 5300 people who are on the street. How does one bed reduce more than one person?
79 So going back to that boise story, working with the mayor he had. Tents all around the town. When he lost that court case, he brought his fire and emt and police into his office. He said, ladies and gentlemen, what is going on? And they said, mr. Mayor, we lost that court case. And he said, well, we lost the court case, but we didn't lose our ability to care for our community. We're not going to be a camping town. We're going to be a caring town. And he immediately searched up those shelters and he said, here's what happened. A third when and they ended unsheltered on one day. And we can't do that here. We have such a high acute population. But they ended unsheltered homelessness on a particular day. And he said a third went home. He went back to wyoming, went back to Portland, cheyenne, whatever the case may be, he said a third went back home locally. They were couch surfing, had interaction issues with mom and dad, and he said a third came in. He said that was really anecdotally a surprise to me. And he said what scared him the most was by setting up the shelters. He thought he was going to be a magnet for other communities to be brought, and he said no. It was completely the opposite. By not caring for his community and not enforcing his community standards of sanitation and camping and so on, he actually drew people to that lifestyle as opposed to reduced it. So it was an anecdote. So I used that same analysis. 5398 we're going to add up about half of that population. But we also know we have a shelter system that's underutilized. So we also know there's 300 to 800 beds not being slept in tonight. So in my mind that's about 3800. There's 5300. I'm using loose numbers. I've ran it by my leadership council at shelter Portland. And they said, well, that's about 30, 40% more than we think you need, but we'll be ready. And frankly, councilor, I hope it's not that many. I hope a third come in and a third self-select and come back home, and a third choose to go back to Beaverton or Clackamas because I get calls from deputy da saying, we're getting ready to release a person from the Clackamas county jail. And do you know what? We're not going to do it until his rvs moved. Can I bring his rv to your shelter and drop it off in Multnomah county? So those are the things that are happening in our community, and they're not going to not happen until we start caring for the basic individuals that we should be caring for in the first place. Okay.
80 On the slide, you don't need to fast forward past it, but it said behavioral health beds across multiple categories. It looks like about 490 planned behavioral health beds puts at about 9% of the unsheltered population. Is that what is what are those numbers based on? I kind of had heard that behavioral health issues specifically are much higher than 9% of the people who are sleeping outside.
81 Yes. So these beds are specific metrics that are in the homelessness response action plan. That's not the totality of the system, nor what is being asked for the legislature to provide or other systems to provide or hospitals to provide. So these are specific asks that came up as part of the homelessness response system, brought together by a group of experts and city and county leaders who decided, okay, these are our top asks that we're going to bring together as a city and the county to the legislature to really fund and bring online. So again, it's only a small fraction of the system, but the pieces that we wanted to emphasize were necessary right now because of what we were seeing. So this is coming from hospital groups, the coordinated care organizations, nonprofits, folks who are doing the work on the ground who said, these are the pieces we would like you to emphasize as city and county leaders and governments to the state legislature to bring forward. So we're lobbying basically for this fraction. Obviously, we would like a robust system in totality, but these are the specific pieces that everyone kind of said, we need these right now as a community. So again, just a fraction of I think the totality, but is what we're specifically lobbying for. And I think just from a tactical perspective, it was stated we need so much in terms of the continuum in this community, but it's really helpful when you go to the legislature to say exactly what you're asking for and be very precise. So from a strategic perspective, this gives both offices of government relations at the city and the county something very concrete to lobby for at the state legislature.
82 Thank you. Last question is, you know, the city currently has a camping ban in place. And if someone were to refute, you know, you've talked explicitly about people being hesitant or service resistant is a phrase. And we're not going to be building. Like you said, we're not building 5400 beds. That that is not the situation we're looking at, but how and when. At what point does the, the stick get matched with the carrot? How you know, at what point are you thinking about this in terms of enforcement and what to do at what you know, when we are at capacity and the number of beds have been built, how do we proceed at that point?
83 Yeah, it's a great question. And it's one we're going to have to develop as we go along. The most important thing is, is there are presumed service resistant, but we also know about a third are ready for shelter. So we immediately go after that. Third and we help those that are ready. And then we always make sure we're ready for those that aren't, we take the pressure off of our system, but the last thing we want to do is focus on a police response. We always want to be there when somebody is ready. I've got anecdotal evidence from other mayors who've ended unsheltered homelessness, and they didn't use police to do it. For instance, when the mayor of boise stood up that surge the year before, they had hundreds of misdemeanors and citations and arrests the following year, he said, keith, I had six. He armed his police, police with resources, but they were the last people who got engaged. The first people that got engaged were the outreach workers who always had a resource to offer somebody. I want to help you. What does it look like? But you can't stay here. And when you think about our camp removal specialists, you know, we don't send out police with those. But the camp removal specialist, right now, we're just we're removing somebody, but we're not offering a resource at that point. Now, house bill 3115 provides protections. It says you must have a shelter bed available if you're going to enforce your encampment. House bill 3124 says you must provide a 72 hour notice before you do it. Once we do that removal, the goal is, is to not allow that person to reestablish an encampment, which means the 72 hours doesn't reset. Now, that's something we'll work with the Oregon law center, the aclu, disability rights Oregon. Let's bring them in from the beginning, which I've already started to do. I've already had conversations with the Oregon law center. The goal is to care for portlanders first. We shouldn't have to be sued if they're already at the table to help us through this process. The goal is to care for portlanders first and foremost. It should not require a police response, ever.
84 My last sort of question, I guess, is around the flex down statistics there, and if I was understanding and I think, you know, I don't remember who asked it earlier, but the flex down, but it looks like it's a it is an intentional choice to try and reduce our capacity at certain intervals. If I'm reading, if I'm understanding this correctly, yeah, partially because the demand may go down. You're saying, you know, in the summer March, people are more likely to want to sleep on a park bench, potentially at that point than when it's freezing? How does that factor into the ultimate the goal of ending unsheltered homeless, and then also trying to prevent using police resources? If we are acknowledging that people will opt out of the options we're giving them.
85 Yeah. You know, you don't have to come into a shelter. We don't make anybody come into a shelter. It's just about the lifestyle or the tent, the makeshift shelter or the rv that are ubiquitous around our town right now. That's really what we're after. But if you go to milan or rome, any city around the world, you're always going to find people suffering from mental illness. But what we're going to be able to provide here is that connection to services when they're ready, and outreach workers that are always going to not be overwhelmed, to be able to provide that help. The flex down is intentional. Councilor, because I firmly expect during the winter months to be more at capacity at the shelter that I'm partnering with the united gospel mission, church of nazarene and shelter Portland partners. You know, right now we have 45 bills, 45 beds, and they're filled on March 31st. It'll be 15. Okay. So it's natural, but at that point we go through the winter and we know we should have hundreds upon hundreds of empty beds. We start to flex down, but we know there will be no more tents, no more rvs, and no more makeshift shelters. But yeah, there's going to be people sleeping on the street and such like that.
86 My last note is that I would just I would be cautious about using specifically boise and previously salt lake city was an example that people used, you know, heralded as the champion for ending this, when in fact two big factors that they that both of those cities have used in the past is redefining what counts as homelessness and also use of a bus passes and saying, hey, you have a friend in Portland, right? Here's a bus ticket. Good luck. We don't have that option. And I think as a community, we don't want to change the definitions or, you know, move the goalposts. And I think that unfortunately, some of our regional cities, especially smaller cities that are certainly smaller than Portland, have been doing that looking for, you know, just trying to make sure that that we are being very clear in our definitions here.
87 I'm glad you brought that up. So our reunification program takes 14 days when somebody wants to go see a loved one. We had somebody at our.
88 Last night.
89 Last night wanted to get back to brooklyn. It takes 14 days, but what we're going to do in Portland is, is we're going to accelerate that. So we will always connect somebody with a warm handoff, a mom, a dad, a friend. We will not be that community. Like I'm hearing california cities are starting to do. Let's let's provide two things a shelter or a bus pass. Well, we know they don't have shelter. And so they're essentially saying we're going to provide you a bus pass without that knowledge of who they're being sent to. We're not going to be that community. So councilor That's something I can guarantee you. We're not going to create a program funded with hundreds of thousands of dollars just to make that offer every night, to put somebody on a bus to nowhere.
90 Councilor. Avalos.
91 Well, first, thank.
92 You to councilor Dunphy, because you asked a lot of the questions I was planning on asking. But I do want to put a finer point on the camping ban and just want to, because I have the same concerns that councilor Dunphy had mentioned. And I'm hearing your answer. And in general understanding. But can you just tell me what are your intentions in general on enforcing the camping ban? Like, what's your overall philosophy? Because I think, you know, this is a new council, a new right, new leaders, and that is a point of contention in the community. And so I want to understand what your approach is about that. I'm hearing a little bit of that in your answer to councilor Dunphy, but I want to put a finer point on it.
93 You bet. So if it is a law on the books for the city of Portland as your mayor, my job is to enforce the laws. It's about how you enforce them, though that really matter. You can be a community where you're going to do law and order, or you can use the law to help you help people get into services. I think your question is, if I can read it, is are we going to start arresting people? It's the last thing we should be doing, because when you arrest a homeless person, the only thing you've guaranteed is they're going to be homeless for another day. And it's the highest, second, highest cost of housing, second only to an emergency room. Our officers are overwhelmed and overburdened. It takes 24 minutes for them to arrive to us. It's the last thing we should be doing. So I'm going to do my level best to limit the engagement as much as possible. You know, I know I'm all about anecdotes, but the mayor of boise again and councilor, I hear what you're saying, and I assure you, I've been to dozens of cities around the. I could give you examples of so many different cities, and we're always going to find a negative and a positive, whether it's rockford, illinois, it's cold or it's gulfport, mississippi. Well, that's the north or pardon me, that's the south. There are always these little nuances between san diego, but the mayor of boise said when he did this, he said he he armed his officers with five warnings. And the sixth and only the sixth would they act. And I thought that was pretty powerful. If somebody were sleeping in a shopkeepers corridor. Hey, sam, it's time to move. You got to go. Hey, sam. It's time to move. They always defaulted to making sure that the offer of shelter was first before. Just saying, you can't be here. I'm going to arrest you, or I'm going to cite you for whatever that case may be. So that's the that's the sort of public safety response we're going to have. But again, councilor, let's not leave with police. Let's lead with resources first because we're already leading with police today. You know, they're spending so much time arresting the unsheltered homeless. We're already using a police response for those that are suffering on the street. We need to rethink how we care for our neighbors. It's already happening. I want to change that response.
94 Thank you for clarifying. Another question I have, and I don't think I saw it on this powerpoint. Maybe it was on a previous one, but I had written this question when I saw that that you were suggesting getting rid of the 72 hour posting notice. So I wanted to understand why.
95 Now the law is the law, but if we can work with the Oregon law center to state that if it's an established encampment, we must provide a 72 hour notice. And that's as a courtesy. If they've been there for weeks on end, that's their life. Those are their belongings. But if we remove an encampment on one side of powell boulevard, and that person chooses to move to the other side of powell boulevard, which is an anecdote that hank Smith was talking about, and that is no longer an established encampment, then we should be able to help that person and say, I want to help you. What does it look like? But you can't stay here. So the establishment clause is the critical part. Now, I don't have answers. We have 11 months to work through the details, but I've already started conversations with the Oregon law center to say, how does that work? And you know what? They responded to me. They said, keith, first of all, nobody's ever come and talk to us first before they implemented a law. They always wait for it to happen after, and then we sue them. And he says, you're the first candidate or politician that ever has come to me to ask me my opinion. But he said, keith, I can't give you guidance, but at least you're erring for caring for your community first and you're providing that resource before implementing or enforcing the law, he says. I think you're going to be just fine now that that's not legal advice, because he isn't going to give me legal advice, but they're going to be at the table with us during this journey, this next many months.
96 I was trying very hard to follow. I don't feel like I heard the answer I'm asking for. So are you saying that you are not trying to change the law to lessen that 72 hour posting notice, or I don't think I.
97 Am changing any law. In fact, the government relations said, where are you on house bill 3115? The previous council was going to ask for it to be changed and I pulled us out of it. We're not going to change any laws. The laws are designed to care for people. We don't need to change a law.
98 Okay? And then I guess my last question. Hold on. Let me find it. Oh, I was just wondering if director ahmed could just or any, any of you could just explain to me when you what the difference is between surge capacity and disaster sheltering?
99 Yeah, absolutely. Councilor. So surge capacity is adding a capacity that is normal. Like, you know, you're not thinking of, hey, there's an extreme scenario or extreme event. We need to really do anything that we can. So that is, you know, there are systems in place, there are protocols in place, and you're just activating existing mechanisms. When it comes to disaster sheltering. We're really talking about there's an unforeseen event or an unforeseen circumstance. You know, maybe there's a large fire that displaces a large number of residents that we need to now house somehow. That's where we talk about how else can we achieve what we need in front of us, because it's not a planned capacity.
100 Okay. Thank you. That's all for now.
101 Councilor Morillo.
102 Hi. First of all, I just want to say thank you guys so.
103 Much for being here and for all your hard work that you've put into this. I know it's been a lot of hours and research, and I've seen you here at all hours of the day, mayor, so I appreciate you very much. I, I want to start off with some one on one reset for a few of the things that I heard. Not not from panelists, but just overall in the conversation. And I think that we've been conflating like safe rest villages and 24 hour shelters and some of our other supportive services. These are not housing. They are purely emergency shelters, including the safe rest villages, including the ones that are tiny homes with doors you can lock. Those are still not housing. They are emergency shelters. And I want to reaffirm that, because we need to make sure that when we're thinking about getting people into housing long term, that we have a finer point on that. I also can't help but look at these budget numbers, and I really appreciated everything you said, councilor Smith, as well, looking into that budget aspect of it. But I did some back of the napkin math, and I'm not a math girl, okay, so bear with me, but I it looks like it costs about $102 a day to house someone in a 24 hour shelter. That's about $3,000 per month. It also costs about $189 a day to house someone in a safe rest village. That's about $5,800 per month, and it costs around $1,700 for an average one bedroom apartment in Portland. We don't seem to really have the numbers for parsing out what type of unhoused person we are helping, right? So you have some people that are going to need a lot of supportive services. They have mental health, they have addiction. Maybe they have some physical disabilities as well that make it difficult to have employment. But there's also people that were like me when they were unhoused due to some circumstances outside of their control. You know, I never suffered addiction issues. I was in college, I was studying, I was making $11 an hour working minimum wage while in school, and it simply was not enough to save up for a deposit. Right. So I was really at the mercy of my community at that point if it means to get out of that. So I'm looking at these numbers, though, and I think that there are probably a lot more unhoused people that were like me who just needed a place to live than people who need a bunch of supportive services. And the cost of these shelters are extremely high. Given that we do. We could afford, you know, paying for housing is what I'm kind of seeing here. And then on top of that, I think you brought up that sweeps are costing us about $27 million annually as well. So I just want to ground us in the cost of that per day and per month of what we're looking at and what our different options are for the future. I'm going to stop there from my comments, but I think that there are also a lot of assumptions made about the services offered. For example, not everyone has a safe home to return to. I did not have a safe home to return to, so it would not have been possible to return with my family were I offered a bus ticket or another option like that. Not everyone needs shelter services, they just need money. And I also just don't hear us asking a lot of unhoused people why they don't want to go into our shelters in the first place. And I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by that pattern in these meetings, because we say we're going to set up these shelters. We say that there are a lot of people that are rejecting going into our shelters, and we're not really asking why or how we're going to change these shelter systems so that people will want to actually voluntarily go in. And so I'm hearing contradictory things, too, because you're saying we're not going to force people in, but there's a large portion of them that don't want to go, and we're going to have to push them in somehow. And councilor Novick, I firmly reject this. Love you, bro, but firmly reject the idea that we're going to use our police to force unhoused people into shelter systems. I think that would be an increasingly dangerous escalation. I think that's going to impact black and brown unhoused people far more than anyone else. So I do appreciate that that you have stated some of that, but I think I've also, you know, I read the presentation, I saw some of the stuff about ending the 72 hour notice, ending the 90 day, or instituting a 90 day stay limit. And some of these things I just think are not going to help people get back on their feet in the long term. A 90 day stay limit is simply not long enough for most people to get back on their feet. I was very lucky when I was unhoused that a family took me in, and they didn't put any limits for how long I stayed there, and because they allowed me to live with them for two years, I was able to actually graduate college and now I get to be on city council. That is not the story for most people. And for the times that I had stayed with people where it was for a month at a time or something like that, that is not stable enough to actually save up money or to do anything to get back into long term housing. So I have a lot of concerns about some of the limits that were laid out here. And the cost. It just doesn't make sense to me why we would spend this much money on 24 hour shelters, when we could be putting people into permanent housing.
104 Yeah. Councilor you bring up a host of systemic questions, right. The high cost of 24 hour congregate shelter. You know, a couple of things that at the top of your point, you know, we're only building 196 doors this year. That's it. Our goal is 6000 and it's only falling. So we're going the wrong direction on housing, which is the way to end the crisis, right? I mean, that's the way you address homelessness. And, you know, you talked about the high cost of 24 hour congregate shelter. Not only is it high cost, it takes 12 to 36 months to build. And that's the short sided time. So even if you if we wanted to try and build our way out of this, it still take 12, 36 months. And that's just if we're setting up a safe rest village, if we're going to build a four walled facility, it's going to take 5 to 10 years and cost $27 million if it's a 300 person unit. So you're right, those are difficult. Hence, that's why I brought forward this crisis approach where we know we have thousands of people on the street, and we know many of them want to receive care tonight regarding state limits that's used around the nation, like those cities that I showed, those are best practices. All we're doing is using best practices. I was talking to commissioner Singleton earlier today, but we must build a trauma informed system. If somebody is suffering from dementia or behavioral health, that stay limit is not going to apply because they shouldn't be in a 24 hour congregate shelter. But that's where we go through and we find that person's vulnerability. You know, there's a five legged system and each one of those legged systems, we want to know what that need is. We don't want you in a nighttime shelter or a 24 hour congregate shelter. If you have psychotic or behavioral health issues. We want to move you based on your vulnerability index all the way to permanent supportive housing. Or maybe it's addiction and it could be an oxford house. You know, it's finding the right resource at the right time for that person. So it's trauma informed. It's not a one size fits all in any of this. Yeah. It has to be focused on the individual need of the person. So while a state limit is there and if that person has their agency they came to town. That state limits is to help them engage in services. What's next? Workforce development. We're going to get you into this transitional housing that's working. We're going to move you into housing then. And so it's just to help you through that system. But it's always trauma informed. And so you may not be able to move in the system, but skye and her team will find out what's the best placement for you.
105 And can I just add to I think you brought up a lot of really incredible points and one that I'm just I talked to commissioner Singleton two actually this morning about was, I think to your point, there are just some folks who really need help paying the rent. And so we need to get really creative about making the best use of the units we currently have available. And I am well aware of some units that we have available. The mayor and I have actually engaged with some different providers who have, you know, sros or apartments that are not being used, but we need to subsidize probably those units or think really creatively about braiding funding for the rent for those units. Or maybe folks only need three months or six months of help. And how can we maximize moving folks into those units? That is different from my charge. And so I think we'll be working very closely with fbe, with the joint office of homeless services, and with others who do that work already to maximize the number of units that we're using. Because I think we have to it has to be all hands on deck, and every single possible solution has to be explored. But I think to your point, we need to think very creatively for the folks who might have been like you and really needed that extra help with rent, but don't necessarily need all those wraparound services that are very expensive, to your point. So I think I would love to engage with whoever on this council or the housing and homelessness committee, and then the folks who really do that work in fb and others who can help us think of new solutions. I know the fb director is very interested in not only building new units, but also thinking really creatively about how to get folks access to those units. And it might be a subsidy from the government that's a lot less than a shelter bed. So I think we just need to think about all of those pieces of the puzzle.
106 Yeah, thank you for that. And I think I'll find the name of the organization that just did this and send you all a link afterwards, and you as well, mayor. But there was an organization that just bought an apartment building on Hawthorne for, I think. What was it, $7 million. You're shaking your head so, you know, $7 million for an apartment building that's going to give permanent housing to people that, you know, I'm just looking at the costs and some some of it doesn't add up to me when we could be offering people permanent housing. I do have some clarifications around. I think other folks have touched on this, but I don't I don't know why the way you're speaking is not clear to me, but what? What do you mean when you say that you want to enforce norms on rvs and camping? If that does not mean sweeps or like, what does that enforcement materially look like in the moment?
107 Well, we're doing that right now. If you have an unregistered, unlicensed, interoperable rv and you're living outside on the street that's unsheltered homelessness. And so we're we're currently enforcing that law.
108 And does that mean you're towing those okay.
109 Yeah.
110 We do our normal posting. But I'd have to really rely on hank and skye to answer that.
111 Yeah. So we can connect folks to the different rv safe parks that we have. But then we also will offer other shelter opportunities. If folks are willing to give up their rv. And then yes, we do go through a tagging like a notice process, and then we tow and folks have 30 days to collect that rv from our tow yard. Basically.
112 Where are those rv parks located and how much capacity is there for the rvs that are still, you know, up and running for the most part, but they just don't have a place to park them.
113 Yeah. So currently we have 55 spots at the sunderland rv safe park, but we're not taking intakes right now. I know that was an earlier discussion that this committee also had. So if we would like to invest in that, that is something that I'm actively talking to the mayor about, just to see what the direction is going forward. Frankly, in terms of budget for this next fiscal year. But we also have just created the north Portland shelter site, which includes 70 rv spots. So our outreach teams are currently working with folks who are interested in moving into that safe park that also has 90 pods. The idea is that folks would eventually move from their rv into housing or into a tiny home, and then maybe onto housing past that. But the idea is to start folks on that journey of the continuum to really get folks keep folks from living in their rvs on the street.
114 But isn't sunderland park closing in March?
115 So that is we're not taking intakes right now. But if this council or body wants to continue the work there, it will just require a funding mechanism for this next fiscal year. So actively looking for working with the mayor and his team to determine if we're going to keep that safe, park open or close it down, I think there's an interest or at least ability now that there wasn't previously to continue those leases with the port of Portland and with PBOT. Thank you. Yeah.
116 Councilor Zimmerman, thanks.
117 This has been great. I'm reminded, based on our meeting this morning with the county, that this is just one facet of the money of the joint offices mission. But I want, you know, when I look at this slide right, and down here, this small numbers, when this is the domicile, unknown report of deaths. And when we started to commissioner Smith's noting earlier when we started the joint office we were taking at the time, I think as a community, what we thought were drastic actions at numbers like 80 people who died on the streets, 79 people who died on the streets. And since establishing the joint office and since establishing the chhs dollars, we've watched it balloon to a level of damn near 500 people died this last year who are domicile unknown. And so we've taken some pretty drastic actions, and the numbers right now are are only getting worse. And so given that, I guess what I'm saying to you, mayor, is I'm particularly open to a new approach in a community where we put more money at a problem and more people die in that community. And the average police response number, which is what you quoted, was 24 minutes, is the greatest representation of a failed government that I can cite it. It is the mission at our feet. It is the most important thing that we tackle over this next couple of years is sheltering our unsheltered population in Portland. And so that is why I'm willing to I'm going to shoot some holes in the plan just like the rest of my colleagues, but I'm shooting the holes in the plan to get it to be better and more effective. Right. That's that's how we partner. Right? That's versus I think Portland has a long standing tradition of shooting holes in plans to avoid actually doing anything. And so my I'm a critical person. You guys are recognizing that in my style. But it's going to come from how do we make this work and how to be effective. And frankly, dogma has no place in this. And status quo, frankly, on those numbers hasn't got any place in this. So recently. You know, I appreciate that. You've got storage units across the districts. One, I think having a district association and everything we do is a right direction to go. The storage units, you know, by law, if we collect a person's belongings after a cleanup, we have to retain them for 30 days. And that sounds good. And that sounds important. Until you hear that we're at, like a 4% return and get your stuff rate. So my question probably to sky is can we improve that rate or is this one of those we have to spend money on this legal thing we have to do, but we're never going to improve the retention rate of people's belongings.
118 Yes. Councilor two part answer. So I would say one clear difference is the legal requirement after a removal for those 30 days. What we're proposing is day storage. So those kind of four day storage facilities around the city, the current day storage facility at central city concern in old town is actually highly utilized. So folks do pick up their stuff at the end of every day. A lot of folks who are working just because they want to make sure their belongings are safe. There's folks from clean start who staff that facility. So I think it is a difference from the property storage warehouse, where we are legally required to keep folks belongings for 30 days per state law. I would love to increase that number. And we've tried a lot of different mechanisms to increase awareness and pass out cards with the, you know, address of that facility. We've made sure it's in the central city, it's close to transportation, but I think there's always room for improvement on getting folks to pick up that property.
119 So, so we've got the storage. That is when things get cleaned up. But the day storage is the kind of storage that's enabling a person to then go about their day. Correct. Okay. Thank you for clarifying that, mayor. In terms of the rv thing, I think I if we could get a little bit more clear in terms of how do you envision this sheltering plan in terms of ending rv, rv parking, rv camping in our neighborhoods? Do you see a path where that is ending is the same way you describe the tent camping?
120 Yeah, exactly. Rv if when you're living in an rv, it's unsheltered homelessness, all right. It's not fit for human habitation. And unfortunately, in Portland, we have people who own rvs. Just dropping them in Portland, they're they're filing down the vin numbers. They're just using Portland as a salvage yard now. But that's because, you know, we can't keep up. And so once we end unsheltered homelessness, provide a bed for everybody, then we're able to really go out in a more instead of waiting two, four, 12 weeks. Now we're out there addressing the rvs in a more frequent basis. So it's just about unlocking the efficiencies in the system, right? We're so overwhelmed with everything right now. The system is just we're in we're in quicksand right now.
121 I appreciate that, mayor. I do hope we stay on that. And if you ever have recommendations for this council to pass laws relative to the salvage yard that we've become for the region, I'm all sponsor the hell out of that, because, yeah, in my district, I would say I've certainly have residents in my district who are camping and living in rvs, but I have so many more who are being used as a cover for other criminal activity that is unrelated to living, but is so related and abusing kind of the privileges that one has for their home, for other types of activity that's having a scourge on a lot of neighborhoods. So thank you for keeping this in the midst. I, I am curious a bit about the ramp downs coming out of the seasons. I would we don't need to go into it here, but I would just ask for maybe some more clarification to help me understand what does that look like? If we get into a sunnier season, why we would ramp down to other people's points that the effect we have excuse me? The impact and our perceptions out on the streets and how people are living shouldn't change in the summer, just from the winter. So that's just a little unclear for me. Let's do more to follow on that. And I just, you know, for everybody, you know, the rent assistance relative to, you know, it was a great exchange this morning with, with commissioner Singleton about some folks are going to need the support of services for a while. Some are going to need it for life, and then some are going to remain in poverty. And that's a rent assistance area where we're helping just with covering the rent. But that's a you know, that that line of business in our community has ballooned in the last several years to a decade. But it it is happening outside of this conversation because it's just this is just sheltering. Overall, my impressions of this plan are that I appreciate that it is coming from an emergency emergency management framework. I think that we can only learn, you know, I think a lot of shelter operators are doing all things right. And what's important about this emergency framework is that you see operations, you see logistics, you see finance. And there was a fourth one that I'm missing.
122 Planning.
123 Planning, planning for the next one. Planning for the next period. Planning to open more or close down what you need. Right. That I hope can be a framework for us to learn better as a community. So thank you for bringing that perspective. And I think it is a systems perspective instead of an individual perspective. And we have a systems problem that affects individuals. Right. And that's that's our our task to figure out here. And at the same time I would say, you know, this this council has talked openly for a campaign's worth of, of months about tackling the speed of housing. And so I think we're doing the other complementary things. We should be revoking anything that slows down housing outside of fire life safety and seismic safety. But that's for another committee to pass and let's do it. And then I also just want to share with the my colleagues about the conversation we had this morning with the county that I think is important to share is that there are going to be different types of shelter, both in this plan, in the county's plan. You know, this plan that the mayor is unveiling is not the only shelter in this 1500 that the county has, according to their own documents today, 3143 shelter beds that are funded and operational today, and 1500 of that. And you add the 120 that they scaled back from their plan for the end of 2025. And we're getting to a functional zero in terms of the number of beds that are available every night. But those come with a variety of services. And I think that different costs are important to recognize because I'm not going to. What I don't want to be asked is only fund the cheapest shelters or only fund the most expensive. I think that the variety matters. And so I say that knowing that different people and different needs are out there, and I think our goal is that we reduce the reasons why a person may be shelter resistance, we increase the variety, but we still have a line of accountability, which is a Portland street. Lifestyle is not something we can continue, and we've got to solve for the majority while protecting the individuals. And then, you know, I just lastly, in terms of introducing urgency, if this is the most important thing that we're solving for, I very much appreciate this. In my career, I've seen a couple senses of urgency on this topic because shelters have kind of been the rejected child of this continuum for a while, but the srvs were a point when I saw urgency. Commissioner Ryan, thank you. The test sites from the mayor's office a couple of years ago and now this approach. So huge kudos. I hope you invite us to shoot more holes in the plan so that we get to an executable plan.
124 Thank you. And you know, this is a pretty comprehensive presentation and it's pretty big I get it. But it's January because I want to invite your scrutiny now because we can't wait for this conversation in October if our goal is December 1st. So I really invite a robust, open minded conversation. Come into my office, tell me what your thoughts are, what your anecdotes are, what your research is. Thank you. Councilor Novick. Let's start making it better. It's an iterative process because it's an emergency. So we don't focus on the perfect. We focus on the good and we make it better and better and better as a partnership. Thank you.
125 Councilor Clark.
126 Thank you, madam president. And thank you, mr. Mayor and panel. You were marvelously ambitious and I, I appreciate that. It's greatly needed. I want to go back to what councilor Smith was talking about earlier. It would be very helpful for me and maybe for others to look at on a very simple one page, a couple columns, just what we're spending now and just currently, and maybe another list of what you called your the braided costs or the indirect costs, because I don't think you've documented all of them. I think there's more than what you mentioned, what those other costs are that we're, we're paying for that are unrecognized. And then your, your 2526, you know how this stacks up. Just just a comparison a chart would be really helpful for some of us. Absolutely. For me at least. And thank you to councilor Smith for bringing those differences up. I want to ask just a couple easy questions. I think they're easy. I know having met with doctor andy mendenhall multiple times, that our acuity level is incredible. And you feel it when you're downtown. You see it. And in your presentation you mentioned 20 civil commitment beds. And I want to thank you for talking to disability rights. Oregon Oregon law center representative marsh, all the people that you've reached out to, I really, really appreciate that. But about the civil commitment beds, are we talking about the state hospital and 20 doesn't seem like enough to me, but I just wonder what we're talking about here. And is that a legislative proposal?
127 Yes. Yes is the short answer. But there have been ongoing work groups that the city has participated in, but are really led by folks who are doing this work in the community. So providers and disability rights Oregon participates, but also a lot of the judges who are in mental health court, judge waller, for example, who are engaged, have been engaged in work groups to determine and make a proposal for the legislature. This legislative session around civil commitments. So this is in addition to any change in law that would happen. We want to make sure we're also providing that resource. And it would be my hope would be it would we would have more than 20. But I think we're just also trying to recognize that we have a lot of things to fund. So at least 20 in this community I think would be helpful.
128 But 20 at the state hospital or in our community?
129 No. So this would be, well, I think people are open to different options, frankly. But I think what this proposal would be pointing toward this community. So across the state, there's obviously a need. And this would just be for our immediate community. And that proposal would be brought by the city and the county under this plan. Again, I think they are very open to discussions with the state legislature, discussions with oha, discussion with the governor's office to determine where those beds would be, how we could add to the system in general. But there's just a deep need. So that's been a part of long standing work.
130 Absolutely. Well, I'm really pleased to hear that. Another question you talked about having day centers in each district. Are you talking about rose haven being district for day center or are you talking about another one incremental.
131 So we would be addition to what we currently have.
132 In addition to rose haven. Yeah, it's hard for me to imagine 150 people in there, but.
133 They serve quite a few.
134 Yeah, it's a it's an amazing day center. It's fantastic. And so I assume that you're using rose haven as a model, a transferable model. Yes.
135 To some degree. You know, each like the day shelter that I partner with on 82nd avenue. You know, we have homeless court program in rose haven doesn't. And we've got workforce development. So we have 19 grants for helping people off the street and into workforce development. And rose haven doesn't. So each day center may have a bit of a specialty. And rose haven is a women's only or I think women identifying and the day center that I'm a part of, it's all are welcome. So I think I envision the ones in each one of your districts as resources for you and your community members, but most likely all are welcome.
136 Terrific, great. And I would just echo the comments of counselor Zimmerman about the rvs. We have the same constituents, and I hear about that all the time. Thanks. And we don't have time for this now, but I would love to know more about the incident command center, just how it operates. It sounds a little militaristic, but I'd just like to know exactly how it works. So. But we don't have to do that now. Thank you.
137 Yeah.
138 Councilor Kanal.
139 Thank you everyone. Thanks for being here. And thank you so.
140 Much for giving us details. I just want to note for this is what we've been asking for from the rest of the administrative side of the house. So I appreciate having numbers and budgets and things. So I hope that the city administrator dca's bureau heads are looking at this for the type of information level of detail. I want to start with something really big picture, which is, generally speaking, I'm very happy to see the focus on increasing capacity for short term emergency night shelter and the flexibility of the shelter and the partnerships I do share. Councilor Morillo concern about needing to combine this with a housing conversation, given that many portlanders are a few paychecks away from being homeless themselves, and similarly, most homeless folks are a finite number of dollars away per month from being in permanent housing. And I do have a question on that later. And then the last sort of process note I'm particularly happy to see director ahmed here. I think pbem has been underutilized in the past for incident command. I'd like to continue to see pbem play a major role in work like this. On the other hand, I am concerned to not see one of our most capable and experienced professionals on this, the head of shelter services here. As part of the presentation. I'd like to make sure they're involved too. Just to clarify, is pbem leading on incident command? I understand that you're establishing the structure, but can we reasonably expect an incident commander to come from that side?
141 Yes. So we are supporting the incident command structure through the executive policy group that we detailed before. We are participating as an observer to the executive policy group and advisor, and we will be supporting within the incident command system structure as well. We will have some pbem support identified as we move forward. That's being worked out right now.
142 And brandi westerman, who is the director of shelter services, will be a part of this incident command structure. So we are actively working with her. It's a lot of Portland solution staff that will fill a lot of these roles.
143 Thank you for clarifying. So my concerns are primarily around the how we get people into shelters part, as I think a few of my colleagues have said, this has to do with the role of police, the role of psr, and sort of big picture on enforcement. I just want to clarify, because I don't want to misinterpret the reference to martin v boise can be interpreted in a few ways. Is the sort of philosophical part of this, of creating this level of shelter to allow us, under martin v boise to, quote unquote, enforce. Or can you speak more to that sort of philosophically?
144 Yeah.
145 You know, we have a camping code and all cities have camping codes. I mean, it's inhumane, it's unsanitary, it's unsafe. And that's why we have camping codes. But the reason why martin versus boise was stood up is because we shouldn't be able to criminalize somebody for being homeless. And so that's why you have that law. So let's set up shelter and provide shelter for those that are in need. So if we're going to arrest people, that's not the goal. Nor is that an effective city. And that's not what they're doing in boise. That's not what they're doing in most cities around the united states. And so we don't need to do that as well. You know, it's we keep thinking it's a binary choice or it's either law and order or it's allowing people to live on the street. I, I just kick back on that, you know, there is no we, we got to get away from this dual sided camp where it's a choice, you know, just just provide care. Now, we can't force people to come in though. Councilor. You know, that's not what we're going to do. We can't do that. It's not a it's not something we want to do.
146 Thanks. So switching gears to kind of a psr on slide 24, I think it is might be the number from the previous version. It talks about voluntary transport. And I just I'm strongly supportive of psr having the legal ability to shuttle passengers. But I am also concerned that psr might have its focus shifted from its original purpose, which is to take calls about behavioral health that would otherwise be responded to by police and become more of a city homelessness response program. And that's not its purpose. At the same time, I think that if psr is getting a 911 dispatch call for service for like a downed person experiencing a behavioral health crisis, it's vital that they are able to move them, including possibly to a shelter. And that's part of the solution to homelessness, even though that's not the purpose. So I guess, can you give us some reassurance that psr can be a part of helping this in the course of their primary responsibility, and not that its purpose is going to change?
147 You can have my guarantee. So we want psr to be operated as a shuttle when necessary. So if you're going out with police and I encourage you all to do ride alongs, you'll come along. People suffering and they have nobody to turn to help that person out. Chief dave was at dawson park four weeks ago. Fellow was naked, suffering from sb he had an apartment, psr was called. We didn't have clothes for the guy and psr couldn't do the shuttle. Three hours later, chief is still there with the fella, and we finally were able to get somebody to give the guy clothes, and then we were able to give him a rideshare back to his apartment. So it wasn't about getting him to a shelter, just getting the guy home. Psr didn't have that mission. So we're working on changing the mission to let them help our community so we don't have to have police in that situation. You have the chief of all people three hours on that. That should have been a quick response. Oh, and by the way, the first responder was psr in that case, and they didn't have the mission scope to care for that person, which is what we want. And so then a police was called councilor and we don't want police in that situation. The guy was suffering from a behavioral health episode and he had housing, but we had no transport because it was naked. A taxi wouldn't take him, right? It was right next to a school.
148 And thank you for bringing up the fact that a lot of the folks that that psr responds to are housed as well. So yeah, I think I'll skip the part. I think there were some questions around the 72 hour posting. I think I understand your intent here and the comments on arrests. That's been really helpful. I did want to ask a clarification on the rv, and then I have this, my second to last thing. So you mentioned that your view is that a person who is in an rv is unsheltered, is a person who is in an rv that's parked at sunderland rv safe park, unsheltered.
149 By technical, by the technical definition, yes.
150 Okay. I think it might be worth considering whether it's counterproductive to take people out of a situation that is at least stable. In that context. I'm not talking about where they're parked, and I do see the concerns around that. And I'm not advocating for leaving the rvs where they are. But in terms of how we consider it, I don't think it's necessarily the same as a person sleeping in a business's doorway downtown. And I think that's an important distinction to draw as maybe your sub categorizing and prioritizing. So I just wanted to flag that. And relatedly, we absolutely need to keep sunderland open. And I do want to flag that just because I know it's in the district. So and then lastly, and this is more a comment than a question because I think that's this the conversation around housing affordability is a little outside the scope here. But in terms of the financial commitment that was posited, I agree completely with the problem statement you issued. I don't think that this is a financial commitment we would have to make to do it, because we have vacant properties and we need to be finding or taxing people who are hoarding rental properties in the city, unfilled for years at a time. This is not a financial commitment. This is something we need to do as a long term vacant property tax to pursue. And I hope I can flag this for colleagues to consider, because that's going to bring rents down and get people into our vacant properties and also help everybody who's already paying the rent, including three of us up here, to continue to stay in homes. So thanks.
151 Councilor. Ryan.
152 Thank you. You you skipped over a couple, but they've already gone, right.
153 Correct.
154 All right. Just making sure I didn't cut. First of all, sorry I missed the very first few minutes. I heard you said something nice. Yeah. I'll take any love I can get, so thank you. I really do appreciate this overall. Like, I really, really do. We're the first responders. That's what the city does. And so this is a first response to our humanitarian crisis. And you're putting out a bold vision that is that people can digest today. Trust me, in 2020 through 2022, this would have been much more of a dead on arrival. And there's a couple reasons. One, because of COVID, we looked at that shelter that wouldn't have been able to be possible because of public health in 2020 through 2022. About so and then there were other reasons. My point is this is the right moment, the right time to be bold on this. And I really do appreciate that. I also really appreciate the incident management system, the command. It is kind of a military jargon. Not good, not bad. But it's made me wonder about its connection to the other system that was built in the fall of 2020 and the famous fall, but money to work with the county to get the sfc established. So how does this gillian back there? Yeah. So how does this connect with the sfc?
155 Yeah, yeah, I can answer. Thanks. Councilor. So actually this will be intimately connected with sfc.
156 So that's a good start.
157 Yeah. So the sfc again is really bringing together existing folks and bureaus who are already doing this work. So a lot of the first responders that we've already talked about today, but nate takara, who leads that team, and those three outreach workers on the sfc team, will be directly connected to this org chart for the incident commands structure. And we already have talked to him about hosting the daily huddles in conjunction with our sfc huddles that we already do on a daily basis. So we're going to make sure that those groups are brought together to really maximize what we're already doing and make it as efficient as possible. So we're trying to meld this into our current processes within the city and then just add additional resources and individuals to really meet this specific goal. The sfc is really to try to solve immediate problems and bring everybody together under kind of one structure. But this is again for this specific goal, and we want it to be in partnership kind of with that structure. But that is an incident command structure as well. So it works well to partner together.
158 It is I liked what I was listening to and I like the word meld. I think we're at a point where I keep hearing about new and improved systems, but when you're doing that system change work, the hardest part is system change is what do you dissolve as you improve? And I'm not saying I want to dissolve something that was hard to build and is finally we're getting results from it. But I also don't want to tip over at the top because we keep adding more systems, and I worry that we're going to lose some of our agility. Yes. Is that fair?
159 I completely agree with you, and I'm trying very hard to create as nimble of a system as possible without without completely overburdening my current staff. But yes, I'll try.
160 Very hard on this, so I'm glad to hear.
161 That it is. Yes, they're jumping in.
162 Yeah. Councilor Ryan, could.
163 You please clarify what sfc stands for?
164 Yeah. Why don't you.
165 Do services coordination center? I apologize, thank you. Yeah.
166 And I always forget. That's why I use the acronym.
167 Yeah.
168 Indirect costs has come up so many times. And maybe you don't know this, but since I did that amendment last year in the budget, that took two years to get it approved. But we do have a note in the budget for this fiscal year that all of our bureaus are supposed to be counting the numbers on all of those indirect costs, so that this council will finally have adequate information about how expensive this is to respond to the humanitarian crisis. So I didn't want that to get lost in any institutional memory. Got it?
169 Yes.
170 So it would be fascinating then to see those updates, because now we're into the second half of this fiscal year. And last time I asked the question, I didn't get a sense that those numbers were being counted and I could care less if it's perfect. I just want it to be good. Meaning we finally have something.
171 I think.
172 Instead of all the anecdotes for the last four years.
173 Yes, councilor, I have seen some initial numbers from ruth levine in the city budget office, and so I think there's some initial pieces. I think obviously certain bureaus, it's a little bit harder to pull those numbers and differentiate. So I think there will be additions, but we can share that like initial I think assessment with you.
174 Okay. The people at the joint office. Hello. They're here. Hello, Dan. They won't be surprised at my next question. I always look for what is the workforce strategy? What is the behavioral health strategy? Heard enough about behavioral health to focus a little bit more on workforce? In my opinion, it's never too it's always important to instantly get people busy with new behaviors as quickly as possible. Workforce is one. And so where's that in this strategy when you're doing intake work, if you're doing intake work and someone actually could get into the workforce quickly, what's that journey look like?
175 Yeah.
176 So I mean I'll give you anecdotal. So just at the day center that we had we when we asked somebody to come off the street, we immediately offer them an internship. It's 40 bucks for four hours, two days a week. You choose the days. And all we're trying to do is get the self-actualization going in that person. I did something, I got pay, I liked it, and we do that for like ten weeks on the ninth week. If they're doing well, then we're going to offer that full time employment. And that's through work systems and the grant program. It's 300 hours with $1,000 bonus at the end of that program. And so you're right. And during that period of time, we've moved them from the street into temporary shelter, cultivate initiative or somebody, whoever the partner is. And now we're sheltering that person. And then at the end of that 300 hours, that 1000, they complete our homeless court program. So at that point, we bring the judge.
177 Homeless.
178 What it's called the homeless court program. And so oftentimes when you're living on the street, you'll have a host of misdemeanors and sometimes $10,000 in fines, which is going to impact your ability to get to that next step of housing. So we bring the judge in the da, the public defender, because you completed that internship and the work program, we immediately reduce all Multnomah county, misdemeanors, fines and fees and TriMet just joined our initiative and they're going to drop all TriMet tickets as well or pardon me, they like the program and are all in, but they haven't given us the clear yet. So you're right, it's all about workforce development. I've seen some magic things where a guy who had been chronically addicted to alcohol for ten years living on a tent, it was just that internship that brought him in. Everybody has a different journey. Everybody has a different reason for recovery or coming in. But we got to find what that reason is. And I believe workforce development is a huge part of that equation.
179 And I'm happy to hear that it wasn't in the presentation.
180 There's so much you guys, I wanted to I didn't want to keep you until 10:00.
181 Okay. Why she does. That's right.
182 Well, I think I really do think it's important to weave this into the narrative on where you're going, because I think a lot of results come of that, and that's what we're trying to get to. Just a little statement on behavioral health crisis. University of oregon's campus with the balmer institute. They could be a partner. We know we have workforce challenges here, just like we've had workforce challenges in education. So we have people that are in grad programs that that are also doing part time work in our schools. I hope that we can find some agility here. So even though they're not completed their master's program, their internships are a part of this system.
183 Yeah.
184 I look forward to that conversation. Of course, that's located in the concordia neighborhood in district two, and I would love to be helpful in that regard.
185 Thank you. Shameless plug right there, everybody. Yeah.
186 And of course we'll move on. Rose haven and this Portland saints love. Is that what it's called.
187 Pdx saints.
188 Love pdx sorry pdx saints love. There's never apples and apples but they were double the cost at the rose haven. Do you know why they're double the cost?
189 So pdx saints love is a shelter Portland partner. So that's the organization I founded.
190 So the.
191 Saint peter and paul church on 82nd avenue was closing. They called me and said, I see you're opening shelters. So we had already discovered and looked at what the costs were for a nighttime shelter. So I chose to open that up as a day center. And I did an RFP, and crystal delahunty at pdx saints love answered it. She's an extraordinary person. She had been doing day services outside, so we brought her superpowers inside. But she doesn't have to pay for rent or utilities. Shelter Portland covers that. And so we did rent for about 3 or $4000 to make sure it was included. But it's really not market rent. You know, you're not going to get a facility for 3 or $4000. So that's why it's $27. That's why we chose to do the rose haven, because that's that's all. And fully loaded day shelter during the day.
192 Okay.
193 But since you had the cost, I wanted to ask the question because.
194 Yeah, you.
195 Stick out.
196 You bet.
197 So you're doing a presentation here today. You're going over to the county. I agree with my members of council that are so appreciative of how you're reaching out. I do recall conversations with the law center prior to the safe rest villages. That's okay prior to opening them up. But, you know, memories are short. When are you doing this presentation to the provider network? That is the those who receive the contracts at the county. That's the culture.
198 Yeah.
199 That's where the money's been spent. That's where results good, bad or different are measured. So when are is there going to be a very authentic presentation to that group. And will it be funneled through the good people at the joint office, or will you directly give that presentation?
200 It's a great question.
201 Councilor. So this presentation to homeless service providers have been going.
202 On for.
203 Two years now, but in a more formal structure, shelter Portland only has board members that are executive directors for homeless service providers, six of them. And so I wanted that board to be practitioners, people who are experts, not people from the business community, because we needed experts to keep an eye on what we were doing. But we did ask and invited 50 homeless service providers in two weeks ago, and we presented this in a light session because we wanted to bring in the those that are funded by jails, by chhs, by the city. And we wanted to harmonize all of our contracts together, or Portland wants to be and or match as close to the jails RFP as possible to make sure that there's no misgivings between the those that are getting jails funding and those that aren't. So I mean, you might want to speak, but we're going to bring them back in in about a week or two and answer their questions again. We just want everybody at the table. Councilor. But I mean, if you want to speak to.
204 That.
205 No, I think we were really excited about that really robust conversation with 50 service providers, as the mayor mentioned. But I think really excited about follow up conversations. They they were very grateful that we had convened that group and had brought forward the mayor to answer questions and provide his vision. We're going to be asking for specifics that will help inform an RFP to get qualified providers for a lot of these services. So I think they're excited to engage and excited to give feedback.
206 And I'm grateful that you did that, too. And I hope that there's a lot of persistence to connect with them. I hope there's strategies that they're involved in the continuous improvement work that they can be actually in this system. They can bubble up their thoughts so that they're listened to because they're the workforce that is behind this, and we need them to continue to be communicated with. And I think the joint effort of your office, with the joint office collectively coming together, speaking on the same page. So it might look like we're actually finally rowing in the same direction, is really important over the next couple of months.
207 I agree.
208 All right. I'll just end with this. Now I have to pick one to end with. I'm not hearing enough about two things. All right, I lied. Two more points. So we've had some dialog up here about how to get people to a yes. And that's really difficult to do. I remember my first time doing that was cleaning up Laurelhurst park, because we were getting like thousands of messages every day from that neighborhood in 2021, and all five offices came together to agree to a plan. And but the big takeaway, besides doing the cat herding here before we had any of these systems you're talking about, was how fast, how painful it was to accept the fact that the trust was not there no matter what we were offering. And it was more than 50% that said no. After multiple conversations over a two week period of time, the reason the safest villages, I think came out of that is because we wanted to get people to a yes, and we knew that we were offering services, that they could say yes to. That said, I'm not hearing clarity. If I was a person on the ground doing the outreach, I would want crystal clear. Advice, no crystal clear commands, crystal clear direction, direction on how I'm supposed to deal with that conversation. If after five conversations, there's still a hard no. And I'm not saying that's an easy answer, but we cannot continue to be in a foggy place on this one. I really think we need crystal clear direction from your office, combined with the joint office and the county and the city being on exactly the same page. How's that journey going?
209 I think it's going great.
210 You know.
211 I have.
212 Been here's the.
213 Thing,
214 Councilor chair baker peterson and I have been friends for years. Every time I've called her, she's stepped up and helped me and vice versa. I'm not going to let that relationship be compromised because of past relationships. It's a new day. It's a new relationship. We need county to succeed. County needs Portland to succeed. We have to both reconcile that and work through the details. We both went halves on the shelters we opened up a couple weeks ago. It was a negotiation. We got there. It was difficult, but we also understood the importance of us moving people forward because, you know, people are tired of us pointing fingers at one another and that this election was about that. And so we're not going to do it. We're going to help and work with one another.
215 That's your optimism is something I appreciate. I can quickly get it back when I take personality tests. I used, you know, I used to always test high in that. I've had some challenging conversations on this specific topic representing the city. And it's very challenging to get to the same place. And so I'm glad you have a great friendship. As you said, as professionals, I hope we can continue to have this conversation and we can provide clarity to those on the ground that work day in and day out trying to do this hard work on the ground, because the confusion that we offer, I think the tension has been really helpful because it used to be there was no real dialog, and for us to have tension and some conflict over the number one issue facing our city and our county is healthy Portland. That's healthy. And that moves us to a better place. So I hope I hear more in the future about the actual action and the policies as a in addition to the fact that you're getting along well, does that make sense?
216 Yep.
217 Okay. And then day to day to data, please utilize these shelters as an opportunity to finally get to know people's names, to do assessments about what their real needs are, to quickly respond, that some can get into housing quickly, some need more services. I agree with my colleagues over to the left here that we're talking about the fact that whatever the amount of days you have here is not enough for many people. There's a reason why the safe rest villages are between three months and nine months, so just lean into that and hopefully get to know people by name. And finally include the provider network in doing that groundwork on that data and make that a part of their job descriptions.
218 Yeah, I agree.
219 I think I'm going to ask a couple of questions here. This is all fantastic, mr. Mayor. In a best case scenario. Yes. And I think some of the pushback you've gotten in some of these questions is the fact that when we're not in a best case scenario, we have counselors who want to know what then? Right. That's part of what counselor Ryan was just pushing on. And I know councilor Avalos spoke to as well. I hope that it works. In a best case scenario. These are laudable goals, and I appreciate having the vision for our city. And I would like us to continue to have conversations, continue to have you in before council, perhaps before our homelessness and housing committee, so that we can push a little more on what happens when we're not in a best case scenario situation. And I know that your plans are are still fully forming and some of this is iterative, but I hope that we can be a part of that iterative process because, as you know, there are counselors who have a lot of experience and interest in what the answers are when we're not in a best case scenario, I have three questions. One is pretty short. The first is how are your conversations interacting with conversations about housing development? And the reason that I ask that is if you truly plan to have a 90 day limit for shelter stays, we have to do something about housing, because right now I don't know where people are going at the end of 90 days, even in a best case scenario, right? In a worst case scenario, folks need services for longer than that. But even in a best case scenario, where is that person going? And have you had conversations about that? The nexus between the shelter plan and housing development?
220 Yeah. You know, the housing permitting and I mentioned it earlier, 1196. So talking to the dca in charge of housing, you know, we need to supercharge that, but we can't make that come out of nowhere. That's where affordable housing and the part with chhs may be an opportunity, because we know the Portland housing bond has now been been assigned, and we know that the metro housing bond has been assigned. So what's next? Are we going to go out and do another bond? Well, the polling on that initially is not good. And that's really what we need. We need bricks and sticks. But now we also need investment in our community. And investment is not coming to Portland. That's why I mentioned the July number where 80th at 81. Nobody's investing in Portland. I know that's a bold point, but that's what's happening. So we have to improve livability and make sure anybody who puts a dollar in Portland is going to end up with a buck five in a year and a buck 10 in 2 years. Right now, you put a buck into Portland and it's $0.95. It's $0.90. We're not a city that the country is investing in. So let's let's restore public safety livability. Let's get back and do the basics. And then we'll get the investment back. And then people will start investing and building again. But right now it's affordable housing and it's very expensive to build affordable housing. We know the stack on that.
221 So and we are having that conversation simultaneously. I think it's a different group of experts, as I mentioned, but it is in conjunction with ics structure.
222 Great. And I think there's probably more we can be doing there. And I know there's a lot we can be doing together, but I want to make sure that we're thinking about that. 90 days is a very short period of time, and we need somewhere for somebody to go, because I would hate to see that person end up back on the street at the end of 90 days.
223 Yeah.
224 There is one thing on the budget that you're going to be looking at, and it really should come through the housing and homelessness committee, but I you're going to see an ask for $3 million, and that's for a $3,000 credit or a grant to a homeowner to utilize one of their bedrooms to open it up for housing. Now, I don't want this to be conflated with homelessness. We have a housing shortage, and we have 190,000 empty rooms in Portland, just unlocking 1% of their half. A percent of that brings a thousand units on. And if we can provide a grant up front, $3,000 to change a lock, you see, if you are a housing or cost burdened, you're not going to become a home share or a padsplit participant because you have to put some money in on the front side. So working with padsplit and the owners of padsplit and working with the owners of home share, they said, you know what really activates housing like remember we're not remember, forgive me. 100 years ago, a third of all portlanders lived in boarding rooms. Did home share. That was 100 years ago. You know, it worked 100 years ago. It's going to work today. And what do you know? We have retirees that can't afford to live in the city that they built, or high school kids that just graduated. They can't work a minimum wage job and not live at home. So that's one part of the equation that we can bring on capacity quickly. And you're going to be reviewing that in your budget coming up. And that's a different conversation. But you bet there are other segments that have to be addressed in the housing equation to make this work well, but I don't want to conflate that with homelessness. We don't want to put homeless people with a retiree who's struggling to pay their taxes on their upcoming tax bill.
225 Thank you. And thank you for that preview. I'm sure we have folks who will want to learn more about your plan there. Second question is you referred a couple of times to commitments that either you have or you are hoping to get on the funding side. And we have a lot of current programs, things like the task sites that are funded with one time or short term dollars. Right. Are you shoring up the funding for what we have first? Is this on top of commitments there? Do we not have those commitments yet? And we're working the new things first. What is that funding conversation look like in totality?
226 I'll use one word and then I'm going to turn it over to scott. But I would say it's fluid.
227 Yes. So we are actually putting together just for internal purposes, but I'm happy to share it to with you all. Just like costs, revenue, just on a basic kind of one pager, just because I think even internally we are getting confused on the different kind of buckets of funding. I am looking under every possible rock and partnering with any potential funder. So I think we are talking to a lot of different people. We are looking for creative ways to fund dollars that are set aside for a specific purpose, seeing if that can be used for this specific purpose that aren't being utilized right now. So really looking for any cost savings we possibly can. But like I mentioned before to councilor Smith, that conversation literally on Friday was with the county to talk about how we are both budgeting given all of these shelter beds that we have stood up and the systems that we have in place. So we're working together to budget and figure out how to ensure we don't close any of those beds. I think the state will be a part of that as well. Like I mentioned, I definitely think we've had productive conversations with the ways and means committee and with the homelessness and housing committee and with the governor. So we've made it very clear that we are going to need some additional help, especially with the sunset of ARPA dollars. But we're looking at every potential avenue. And as soon as we have a guarantee, I will share it. But I think we are looking at what's probable, and then I'm kind of trying to plan accordingly and create a plan b, a plan c, a plan d to make sure that we do not close any of those sites.
228 So what I'm hearing is, yes, prioritize what we have first. Yes. No money is secured yet. Conversations in progress.
229 Yes. Correct.
230 Okay. And just very briefly on the chart about the incident command structure, do you have somebody identified as your incident commander for this work?
231 Yes. Hank Smith, who is sitting back there? He's my deputy director in Portland solutions. So I will be serving with other folks on the executive policy group. And he's tasked as the incident commander. Again, like we mentioned, with the funding, this is fluid, but at least for right now, that's what we have identified.
232 Great. Thank you. Councilor Green.
233 Thank you, madam president, for the opportunity for some alibi questions. I'm going to put the doctor counselor Green hat on for a second, because a bunch of you guys introduced a bunch of there were some good exchanges that were of an economics nature, and so I can't resist. So. So, mayor, when counselor Smith was asking the question about cost share and kind of really kind of testing who's who's paying for this kind of question, I thought that was a really welcome exchange. And you said something that I think we should keep as a principle through all of our work, is that there are some things that we can afford to not do. And that is a that takes a sort of avoided cost and opportunity cost approach to thinking. Right? We have to be doing that in all of our budget work, right? Not just this. The other piece is that councilor Morillo also introduced the same type of thinking with the kind of, you know, laying out the costs of housing people instead of homing people. That's another way to engage in avoided cost and opportunity cost analysis. So I so I really welcome that. I hope we do more of that. These these work sessions are great for that. In my in my opinion. And as we do the budget development I would urge, you know, the city administrator staff who who do this analysis to be thinking in the same way as well. And I bring that up because my understanding is that the forecasting model, the kind of five year, the multi year expensing model, treats the kind of revenue and expense variables as independent of each other. And to me, that's problematic. And it's problematic because some areas that we may cut are going to have interactions on the revenue side. And the thing that's in my mind right now is like, I think it's $10 million to come out of permitting. That came out of the memo on Friday. I may not have that number correctly, but there was a sort of proposal to think about cutting permitting staff. Well, if we cut permitting staff, it's going to exacerbate the housing production crisis that we've all been talking about. Now, there are long term effects, and there are near-term effects to these choices that we make. To council. President's question on, you know, sort of this kind of like this housing piece. Your response was, I think of it as a medium to long term problem recognition that we have to figure out ways to accelerate our rate of housing production. It was the 90. It was the 90 day thing. But, but but that's a very short term and immediate issue. So even if we were to clear our our permitting backlogs and we were to sort of shower developers with, with all, all the gifts that they would require and, and I'm not saying that in a pejorative, I actually think that we should do something about system development charges. So I'm on the record here that will not have immediate impacts to provide the 90 day relief in the timeline that you were planning. And let's just be realistic about that. And so in the short run, when we have this this kind of money question at play, we are about to go into a world with new tax increment financing resources that come online at the same timeline, and I'm going to be paying very close attention to that through our committee work with councilor Ryan, because prosper Portland is the agency that administers those resources. And I don't know why we can't use tif money to acquire buildings that are already existing. So that way we can put people in those buildings at the end of a 90 day stay. That's a question that I sort of pose. I don't know the answer to it, but to me, just in a very plain sense, like we've got money that's coming in. It's for affordable housing, 45% of it. We've got a problem that's here on this other side. We need to put people in places. It takes 18 months, 24 months to build a house. Here's a solution, a potential avenue of attack that we can take to kind of close that that gap there. So that's something that I hope we can all talk about and all think about. And I would encourage you to think about that as well.
234 You bet.
235 I haven't thought about it, but certainly an opportunity.
236 Yeah.
237 And we can you know, we and we can have a conversation to 1 to 1. I have another question. I'm so sorry. And it's about the budget and it's about the kind of 28 million that's part of this presentation. Yeah. Is that 28 million already in the 100 million forecast. Yes. Okay. So that's so this is not on this is not 128 million. No. Okay. And how much of that 100 million budget forecast sort of that starting point. Does that incorporate past assumptions for like overtime for police and fire? Is that are we rolling forward assumptions on that?
238 I'm sure it does. Yes.
239 My assumption is it does. But I think.
240 And I asked that because I think that if we're successful in doing the work that, you know, has a substantive and very real impact on unsheltered homelessness, then that brings us back to this opportunity cost discussion.
241 Exactly right.
242 There's a cost benefit calculation. So I'll yield.
243 But there's a.
244 Leg though, just like.
245 The.
246 You know, we don't want to be doing $27 million in camp removals. But that's what it is today. But in a year's time, we'd certainly not want that to be the case. It's a great point you just brought up.
247 Thank you for engaging on that. And then I love indirect costs accounting. Let's do it. Let's do it.
248 Well it's hard, but yes.
249 Councilor Novick.
250 Two things. One, I'd really appreciate it if you could provide the cost per bed numbers for the peer cities you identified boston, philadelphia, boise. Also, I do feel compelled to beat the 90 day issue with a dead horse. There's with last last week, skyler and jillian sent a response to some questions we asked, including some questions I asked about the causes of homelessness, and they noted that homelessness is a predictable outcome when a community has high housing costs and low availability of housing. A 2022 statewide analysis suggests the Portland metro region is currently more than 33 housing units, shy of those needed to meet current demand, with an additional 10,000 deeply affordable housing units needed to house those experiencing homelessness throughout the region. As long as that, I mean, we're going to do our best to accelerate housing production, commissioner Avalos and commissioner, I mean, councilor Avalos and councilor Dumpty's committee is going to be working that from one end. Councilor Morillo and I will be working on it from the zoning end, but it's as councilor Green just said, that's going to take a long time. And in the meanwhile, there simply isn't housing for people to go to, just as there isn't in boston. Boston has doesn't have much of much unsheltered homelessness, but they have the second highest level of overall homelessness in the country. And that's why in that one article, I found the average shelter stay was 429 days. So I think that it's unrealistic to talk about. And here I'm going to infringe on councilor Zimmerman's prerogative as being the most confrontational councilor. I think it's unrealistic to talk about the 90 days, and I would recommend that you withdraw that from your suite of suggestions.
251 Point noted.
252 Councilor Avalos.
253 So I guess my last question for today is can you help me understand what you are defining exactly as success on December 1st? Is success. Having 1500 shelter beds open? Is success having zero people on the street? Can you just maybe more clearly define your goal for that date?
254 You bet. Success is. Making sure that.
255 Everybody in Portland who needs a. Bed has a bed to sleep in, that are safe, that are free from the elements, that have a toilet with dignity and decency that they can call upon. So that's success is making sure everybody who needs a bed and wants a bed has a bed.
256 That's all for now. Thanks.
257 Councilor Kanal.
258 I'm happy to go. I did notice that councilor Morillo, you had your hand up before and it got dropped and you were ahead of me. So I want to be deferential if you wanted to.
259 Put it down.
260 Thank you. Okay, I have four questions. I'm just going to say them all, if that's okay. I think for time and I don't know how long the first one is, it might be quick. You mentioned way up at the beginning that that this is largely different processes than what would go for families with kids, and we haven't really explored that as much. I'd love to hear more about that. The second thing is you mentioned sscc, the street services coordination center, which also has historically been the contract holder and manager for rapid response.
261 Bioclean no impact reduction program is the contract holder.
262 Okay, so can you just speak to rapid response bioclean role, if any, in any of this is the second part.
263 They will continue their same contract as is, so they perform a whole host of responsibilities for us, including last night doing graffiti removal and boarding up of windows. But they also do trash removal and they post and remove campsites as well.
264 Okay, that's maybe a separate conversation then to continue on. So yeah, the family's kids aspect of it. The second question is, I guess there's three now. You said we have 190,000 empty rooms in Portland. How many? If you have that info, do you have how many empty units we have in Portland? And then the third question is.
265 Yeah, sorry. No, it's a great question.
266 Yeah. The third question is on the topic of cost savings. And this has been talked about a couple of ways. It is true that you mentioned $27 million is the cost that the police spending on camp removals and that this is a $28 million ask. Obviously that's not all city. And you mentioned that as well. At the same time, I think councilor Novick assumption that you're not planning to lay off a lot of police officers is an accurate one and probably applies to a lot of the other groups. So I'd like to know how you're planning to see those cost savings, like specifically what you anticipate this diminishing. And I'll also note that although fire does have overtime related to this, I don't know that it's overtime is as I don't think elastic is the right word here, but I think I'm going to use it anyway to apply to what we're talking about. I think fire, there's a lot more complication there, but I would love to know how you're expecting to see that cost savings.
267 Okay, I'll take fire the 27 million. That's for the camp removals. And so I don't think we have police tied to that.
268 No. Police are rarely kind of brought in under the kind of like the presentation we gave, where it's very rarely become part of the special cases work group and are brought in. That's mostly through the contractor.
269 Okay, I think I misheard you then. Thank you. Yeah.
270 And then I want to draw the fire question. So I rode with station 23 for a day and I went through this plan with them. The same budget you're seeing with the same budget they did and presentation. This was probably about a year ago. And one officer told me he's just lost hope in Portland. And he said, this used to be graded as an a working for Portland fire, he says. Now it's a d on the best day. The other person in that four person team had just gotten away, just gotten just gotten back. And he had been at a 30 day inpatient because he was suffering from ptsd at the maryland. So the state of maryland, they have a firefighter hospital just for psychological or behavioral health issues. And he was just broken. He said he just can't take the callouts. And I put that slide up that said, 40% of call outs for firefighters are addressing unsheltered homelessness. There is vicarious trauma. So when you talk about overtime, that officer who had to go to that 30 day inpatient was backfilled by another officer who had to do overtime. We talk about indirect costs. It is going to be so hard to find the indirect cost, because what amount do we assign to that? What amount do we assign to the behavioral health issue that our first responders police fire Portland street response amr at level zero 18, which is what we were experiencing before we made the amr. I just want to let you know this is not a clinical exercise. This is a city in duress. So that's where the firefighter overtime, I know that's not really giving you the anecdotal pardon me the data, but I'm just saying they are getting hammered with getting called out when we're not caring for our citizens.
271 Yeah. I just to clarify, I'm not disagreeing at all. And I'm saying it's fires. Overtime issues are, I think, a little more hard to change through the call reallocation side of the thing. But that's a different thing. I went to the fire swearing in ceremony yesterday, and I think I want to make sure that the level of passion for the city that those new recruits had continues all the way through as well, and figuring out how to support them. But if you could speak a little bit to the where you do, if anywhere, intend to see this money as an investment that yields longer term cost savings, like specifically how and I don't imagine it will be tomorrow, but but when as well.
272 You bet. If you go to shelter Portland and go to the timeline and go to the bottom councilor, you'll see there's one clear item on. The mayor noted that he felt that there were direct and indirect costs of $300 million, and he noted that back in February. Now, I've asked the enterprise to give me that number, and it's so long and such an arduous process to find indirect costs. They said, keith, it's going to take us a long time to do it now. We had to move on to the current fiscal crisis that we have. So we have to choose. Do we know it's absolutely astronomical? Yes. And then where do we stop and when do we start acting? And that's kind of that latter part is where I'm trying to lead the city right now is we know we could spend a tremendous amount of time on this exercise, but we know it's affecting our city in all four corners of our city. So I hear you.
273 And I think we can give you kind of the obvious indirect cost, which a lot of you have stated. Frankly, I think my program is an excellent example just within this microcosm. But I think across the board, just in the last three years, what I've seen is we towed 150 vehicles out of the big four corners. That natural area was devastated and we are spending money to revitalize it to try, you know, parks, there are just different aspects that I think people don't immediately think of, but it's a clear, indirect cost of the city. And I think any bureau would tell you that this is a cost on on their staff, on their facilities, on their assets, on the public spaces, the public right of way. And we see that every day. We're trying to mitigate that the best we can. And this is one way of doing that. And the immediate term. But I'm happy to talk through the obvious indirect costs, and then maybe some of those larger costs that are a little bit harder to quantify, but are definitely there.
274 I'm going to try and draw back to the passion too. We have 456 people that died in 2023. We don't even know 2024. I feel that's absolutely unacceptable. And as a city and as your mayor and in charge of public safety, it is my absolute sworn duty to start caring for our community, not start. Forgive me. We have a great team at Portland. We have a great city of Portland team. They've been treating this like a crisis. All I'm doing is mobilizing the resources and great work. So I don't want to discount anything or join office or anybody. Councilor Ryan, but it's totally unacceptable. And I know that we could talk and determine. And I trust your decisions. I know indirect costs. It's the same thing I asked for. I'll give you the data that I have. And then jonas, our cfo, just said, holy cow, keith, this is going to take me months because it's so big. 456 of our neighbors are gone. It's totally unacceptable. We're treating it like a crisis. And I'm asking for you and your support, bringing it back to people, everybody.
275 Councilor Smith, did you have comments?
276 Yes, yes I do. Thank you, madam president. I just have a couple more questions. Just kind of housekeeping kinds of things. Thank you for putting up the cost of the different beds and that that was great. In addition to showing this around, I think if you also put another column that says how much it costs to put someone in a jail bed, and that really sends the message home, because if we start enforcing some of the, you know, the camping rules, then folks are going to be in our jails. And that is an additional cost, which I think is almost double of what you put down. The other piece is, as you're talking about these numbers, the one time only money could you put the money that you have, skyler, if it was paid for with ARPA money, because then that makes a difference to me in terms of how I'm looking at the budget and what is, you know, one time only ARPA versus one time only. Our money.
277 Absolutely.
278 The third thing that I saw, and you kind of briefly touched on it, mr. Mayor, and I want to make sure that I have your clear answer on this in terms of the metro homeless tax. They did a first reading the other day and you briefly said something about it. But I want to know what are your thoughts on that that tax and do you support metro's new tax. Because there's a coalition of folks who are asking metro to wait a while, and I want to know what your response is.
279 So thank you. You know, I our ogre is we're going to tack with the counties because we need that funding to be continuous. Right now I'm concerned about the reduction. But here's my point that I made to the county chairs, to the metro council. President peterson, it's the measurement that I have a difficult time with. We have 200 people in Washington county, 200 people in Clackamas county that are unsheltered, and we have 5300 in this county. I explained for any support for Portland to go through, we have to decide what the most important metric is. And I explained to them it has to be unsheltered homelessness, and we must treat it like nato. If one city is under water, all cities must come to help us. And so therefore the funding must go to the greatest need. And the greatest need is Portland, because our unsheltered rate isn't acceptable. And we know these other counties in some cases are using our services.
280 You're absolutely right. As a county commissioner, there was a chair there. He said, you know, you all are nothing but do gooders over at Multnomah county. And he said, when we get one time only money, we get it, we spend it and it's gone. But what you all do is you backfill everything and that's why you're operating. Budget is the way, way it is. And what they used to do, they didn't offer Washington county did not offer homeless services. They sent all their folks over to Portland. So you are absolutely right, sir. I agree with you and just wanted to get a sense of how you were feeling about this, the metro tax, and if you were going to be supportive of it. I think you have the right to fight for Portland for a percentage more, because we are doing a lot of folks work. And even in Clackamas county as well. So fight on, mr. Mayor, and thank you for your very ambitious plan.
281 Thank you. Councilor. I would also just mention to your first point, I think the jail bed cost, but also emergency room costs are something that I always like to flag because we see a lot of the same individuals that we're trying to serve in these in this shelter system who've been in and out repeatedly of emergency rooms. And it's a high cost for the community. Thank you.
282 Councilor Zimmerman.
283 I love a nato reference.
284 On there.
285 I love it, and in a totally non-confrontational way. Mayor, where will these beds be?
286 Where would they be?
287 Where will they be?
288 You know, they will be in locations on the resources that we gain. You know, we've businesses that have come forward not to say that those businesses are going to be locations we use, but churches have all been very interested in supporting this. And community centers, you know, I've talked to northeast community center, I've talked to linton community center. There are no guarantees for anything. We're just talking right now, but that we really are trying to use all four districts, and we're trying not to put all of them in one district. So we're really trying to be intentional. I called, I believe it was district four. Zimmerman and greene and Clark, two days before we opened the salvation army female emergency shelter. And we and then quickly called two. And now the hope would be to do one and three, to really try and be equitable in the distribution of these shelters. But locations and, you know, it was a two pronged question, the locations and then physically, what will they look like and where will they be? That's our our approach.
289 Great. So I recognize that it's a work in progress. Absolutely. And that's fine. That is a hard, hard task. Right. Citing shelters maybe one of the more difficult things. So I want to be supportive. I hope you bring me in the fold to be supportive in my district. And the way I get the most supportive is if I'm able to talk to the neighbors about the other types of services that come around them to enhance whatever ankle biter problems can come along with any social service. Right? So I recognize that I was part of building the ironclad version of a of a good neighbor agreement in our community. That was for a very specific large shelter. We're doing some other ones in the future that will be smaller. The impacts will be different. But I think the lessons learned for the neighbors is a great lesson to take forward in this mayor. I think that portlanders are incredibly compassionate. If they have a phone call to call with a problem, and they are really frustrated when they feel like something's been plopped down with no recourse, right? So that would be my advice. I will talk to my own neighbors. I will talk to my own, my district, and help anyone else navigate that. But it's an important way to get our community to say yes. After the council says yes.
290 And we are working councilor Zimmerman on creating kind of a uniform engagement zone, using a lot of the services we already have at our disposal from the learnings of those good neighbor agreements, and then also utilizing our problem solver meetings that already exist in every corner of the city. And I don't want to create new meetings for everyone. So I'm trying to utilize the existing structure to make sure folks feel like they have somewhere to go to interact with city leaders and really get their problem solved.
291 That controversial or confrontational at all? I don't think it was.
292 We did great.
293 Councilor Smith, are you back in the queue? No. Okay, mr. Mayor, I believe we have taken three hours of your time on this. Thank you very much for all of the answers to our questions. As I noted, and I think others have asked questions that need some follow up, there will be more conversation as your plans progress. We'd like to be kept in the loop on them and as we have more questions, we'll make sure to reach out to you. But we want to make sure that knowing that there will be a lot of asks to partners, that it sounds like are coming on top of, not at the expense of what we're already doing, which is great. But knowing that those asks affect everything else that we want to be doing with those partners. We want to make sure that we are working with you as those asks, go out as well. If you have any wrap up you'd like to do, it looks like you may. That is perfectly fine, but otherwise we are ready to wrap up, I believe.
294 Let me maybe make one point. And thank you, madam president, I appreciate it. I want to thank each and every one of you for this very difficult conversation. We all came into this with ideals and idealism, but we all have to work through them for portlanders. And then this last final offer, please, if you want to go and tour a shelter, let's go out and have dinner late one night. There's a southeast shelter that opens at nine. We start setting up at 830. It takes a half hour to set up. You know, we have a guitar player, we really are. And treat these individuals that are suffering. And some of them are just they just need a safe night's sleep to go to work the next day. But I think you would be pleasantly surprised to spend a half hour, an hour with me. We'll go have lunch. Pardon me. We'll go have dinner. Hopefully. It's not lunch, but I invite each and every one of you to take me up on that. And I think you would be pleasantly surprised about the humanity that we're able to provide for portlanders. So thank you for this opportunity. It's been a great honor. Thank you, thank you.
295 Thank you all for being here today. And we will hear more soon. I'm sure with that, we will close the work session. Counselors.
296 Thank you. We have some.