The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-03-13
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (18,668 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Portland City Council's Labor and Workforce Development Committee met on 2025-03-13. Members present were confirmed by roll call, and a statement of conduct for public testimony was read before proceeding to the agenda. The first item covered workforce needs across the Public Works Service Area (PBOT, Water Bureau, and Bureau of Environmental Services), including presentations on staffing vacancies, upcoming retirement waves, recruitment and retention challenges, and workforce development programs such as apprenticeships, internships, and career pathway initiatives. Figures on vacancies, retirement eligibility percentages, and hiring/applicant demographics were presented, though some figures were stated inconsistently. Discussion also addressed parking enforcement staffing challenges, wellness support, span-of-control issues, and outreach to schools and universities to build future recruitment pipelines. The second agenda item featured representatives from several labor organizations, including the Northwest Oregon Labor Council, union locals representing city employees, and public safety associations, who addressed budget priorities, contracting practices, health care costs, and overtime concerns in public safety bureaus. Discussion touched on potential use of reserves, ending fund balances, and the possibility of temporary tax measures. Public testimony was heard from two individuals raising concerns about contracted labor, worker safety, and staffing reductions. Votes, if any occurred, are recorded in the vote ledger.
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 Yes. Let's get that straight, everybody. Yeah. Okay. And then it's time to check my. Exactly. It's going to be great. So be like one of the bhr. So altogether the mobile office. Is right there. Okay. That's what I got you. What do. You. Do? I know jeremy looked Sameer. No, I'm just trying to. Where are you going?
1 To? And you? Speak into the mic going into our second meeting of the labor and workforce development committee. I'm councilor Loretta Smith from district one. I'm a resident of wilkes neighborhood, and I will ask my fellow councilors to introduce themselves, starting with our vice chair, councilor Greene.
2 Hello, everyone. I'm proud to be here today. Thank you, madam chair. My name is Mitch greene. I live in the west Portland park neighborhood.
3 Councilor Dunphy.
4 Thank you. Chair Jamie Dunphy. He him pronouns. I am also proudly from district one and I live up in parkrose.
5 Councilor Kanal.
6 I am Sameer Kanal district two representative. I live up in the portsmouth neighborhood.
7 Thank you, councilor Novick. I'm Steve Novick, councilor from district three, and I live so far south in woodstock that I think of myself as living in the woodstock suburbs.
8 Thank you. We are joined by rebecca daubert from the city clerk's office and megan layman from city operations. Rebecca, will you please call the roll?
9 Good afternoon. Dunphy.
10 Here. Canal here.
11 Novick here. Greene. Here. Smith, here.
12 Thank you. Rebecca. Megan, will you please read the statement of conduct?
13 Good afternoon. Welcome to the meeting of the labor and workforce development committee to testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at. Portland governor slash council agenda, slash labor and workforce development committee. Or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In person. Testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The chair preserves order. Disruptive conduct such as shouting. Refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, state your name for the record. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you very much.
14 Thank you. Megan. If there are no objections from the committee, we will move on to the first agenda item.
15 Item one public works service area, top work, top workforce needs and priorities.
16 Rebecca, you read the agenda item and we have our folks here.
17 Thank you so much.
18 I believe deputy city administrator priya powell will be leading this presentation. You're going to start first. Thank you so much. Welcome. Miss nepal, please introduce yourself and your team. And then you can begin with the presentation.
19 Thank you chair Smith. Good afternoon, chair. And members of the labor and workforce committee. For the record I'm priya nepal. She her pronouns and deputy city administrator for public works. And I'm here with my incredible team director millicent williams from PBOT. Incoming water bureau interim director quisha light and incoming bts director ting liu.
20 Can we turn up the mic? Because she has such a soft voice?
21 The volume is up as far as it can go. If everyone can project directly into the microphones. Thank you.
22 Thank you, chair Smith. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about an issue that is central to the success of portland's infrastructure and the well-being of our city, which is the labor and workforce that powers the public works service area, a public public works service area. Is the public works. Infrastructure is the backbone for the city of Portland. Our roads, our water, our environmental health. They support our daily life, public health and economic stability and allows the city to function smoothly. And behind that infrastructure is our workforce. And today we face a critical moment in ensuring that the workforce is strong, sustainable and prepared for the challenges ahead. Next slide please. For today's presentation, we will provide a snapshot of the current state of our workforce where we are today in terms of vacancies and potential upcoming retirements. We'll also discuss our recruitment challenges and highlight some of the strategies we are implementing to attract, train and retain a future ready workforce. Importantly, we'll also discuss how this committee can support and strengthen these efforts through policy support, partnerships and advocacy for workforce development investments. And at the end, I welcome your questions, insights, and partnerships as we move forward together. Next slide please. Our goal is for you to come away not just informed, but also motivated to act, to champion our workforce needs through budget decisions, policy support and community advocacy. And together we can ensure our public works bureaus have the human capital they need to keep serving portlanders effectively now and in the future. We need your support to sustain staff resources so we can continue delivering the critical services public works provides every day. And we are looking for support in advocating for solutions that will help us address the recruitment challenges and improve succession planning and workforce development. And finally, we ask for your advocacy and connections within your districts and our community to help build a stronger, more sustainable workforce. Next slide please. First, we will be looking at the staffing vacancy across the public works service area, which are a foundational challenge to our service delivery. The next couple of slides will provide some high level summaries of current vacancy data that is within the service area. Next slide. Here you can see a total number of authorized positions, vacancies, and potential reductions by bureau and bargaining unit as of March. As of this month, across PBOT water and bts combined, we have approximately 3300 authorized full time positions, of which 249 positions are currently vacant, which is roughly a 10% vacancy rate. In other words, we have roughly 2063 staff currently doing the work of 2312 positions that are budgeted for, which means our teams are stretched thin and these vacancies span all levels, from frontline crew to technical specialists and support staff. And every vacancy represents work that is either not getting done or is putting extra strain on existing staff, which can impact the quality and timeliness of a service to the public. These openings cover a wide range of functions, and so the impact is felt across the board in our operations. Additionally, the bureau of transportation and water bureau have put have potential position reductions on the table as a part of the budget process. Next slide please. This chart provides a breakout of the type of work that the 249 vacancies are currently assigned to. As you can see, the field workers and laborers top the list, but this is mostly due to the 42 vacancies within PBOT, 34 of which are up for potential elimination and therefore are being held vacant pending budget decisions. The remaining vacancies by work type are spread across the three bureaus within the service area on a more consistent basis, and some of the most difficult to fill positions include inspectors, technicians, engineers and parking enforcement officers, which you'll hear more about later in the presentation. There have been specific inquiries from this committee regarding the number of vacancies in PBOT, and the significant time that some of these positions have been vacant, and I would like to use this opportunity to invite director millicent williams from PBOT to help address it in the next slide.
23 Good morning, chair Smith and members of the committee. My name is millicent williams. I am the director of the Portland bureau of transportation, and I'm excited about being here today to share with you information about the Portland bureau of transportation and how we intend to continue to do our work efficiently and effectively. As the dca has mentioned, there have been specific inquiries regarding the number of PBOT vacancies and the significant time that some of these positions have been vacant. Of pbot's 141 vacancies, 73 of them have been held vacant. As we anticipated this year's reduction package. As you can see, the bureau is focusing reductions on the longest held vacancies. Of the remaining 68 vacancies, 33 of them have been vacant less than six months and are in active recruitment or frozen, a choice that I made until the budget becomes clearer. 17 of them have been vacant for 6 to 12 months, 12 of these being parking enforcement officers. And we can talk about the challenges that we have in that space regarding retention. But regarding the number that we have on currently planning to join our force, we can only hire eight at a time due to onboarding and training needs and restraints. And then the remaining 18 positions positions which have been vacant longer than a year, have various reasons for the delays in hiring, which are explained in the next slide. Next slide please. The reason behind long term vacancies not only applies to PBOT, but we also see that trend in at least one other bureau within the service area. Some require a reevaluation of work performed and therefore must undergo a reclassification process. And we do that in partnership with the bureau of human resources. Of course, some are held vacant for budgetary savings, but are not eliminated due to the time it takes to request new positions. For example, at PBOT, we recently utilized five older vacancies via reclassifications to address workload issues. In other areas, positions can only be added through a formal budget amendment process, which does not allow quick reaction to increased workloads. Positions can be held vacant if the future of assigned work is unclear. As another example, also within PBOT, three positions were held vacant while an agreement was was made with Portland permitting and development, or pd, regarding which functions would stay in PBOT and which would transfer. Next slide.
24 Thank you, director williams. Now that we've delved into the current vacancies, I'll turn to another major challenge looming ahead the retirement wave in our workforce. As you'll see in the next few slides, a significant portion of our workforce is approaching retirement age. Next slide please. The public works service area must prepare for a significant loss of personnel in the coming years due to retirements. And many of our experienced employees are nearing the end of their careers, which is both a testament to the long service and potential risk for our operations if we don't plan ahead. Across the public works bureaus, roughly one quarter to a one third of our employees could retire within the next decade. In PBOT, about 174 employees, or roughly 31% of the bureau's workforce, will reach retirement eligibility by 2035. The water bureau could see roughly 28% eligible to retire and be at about 26%. In short, a large cohort cohort of veteran staff may leave us in the near future, and that represents decades of institutional knowledge and specialized expertise in maintaining infrastructure and delivering services. The loss of institutional knowledge and skill sets in hard to find technical positions will be difficult to replace. However, attrition is also an opportunit. As the city changes the types of positions needed to provide for our services will continue to evolve, and attrition allows for changes in workforce without impacting existing employees. Creating hiring pipelines and succession planning needs to be an important focus for us moving forward. The following slides will have additional details on upcoming retirements for each bureau. And with that, I'll pass it on to director williams to talk about PBOT retirements.
25 Thank you, donna paul. So the chart that you see reflects all PBOT classifications, with at least three employees approaching retirement age in those classifications. And while it may look a little heavy on one end of the scale versus the other, I encourage you to think about the size of those work groups. So within the maintenance operations group, we have roughly 400 employees. That's where you're seeing the majority of those workers that have been identified as potentially taking advantage of retirement within the next ten years. So you see that utility workers, equipment operators, parking enforcement officers and several others have a pretty high frequency or a large number. And so we do focus our attention on making sure that we will not have that gap in service delivery based on what we are anticipating. And we'll talk more about some of the ways that we're preparing staff, that we're recruiting staff. But my colleague, incoming interim director quisha light, is going to share some of the themes that we have identified as challenges and opportunities in this space.
26 Miss williams? Yes. Could you tell me a little bit more about the parking folks, the parking code enforcement officers? What is the challenge that you're having in terms of keeping those folks?
27 Well, so first of all, we were pleased that in the last fiscal year, we were able to add additional capacity in the parking enforcement space. In general. We were able to double the workforce in that space. The challenge that we have with retaining that workforce is one, there aren't opportunities for advancement. You're a parking enforcement officer today. You're a parking enforcement officer tomorrow. There are some opportunities for people to move into supervisory roles or some of the other regulatory spaces within parking enforcement or any of the other areas within the bureau. But as a parking enforcement officer, there's not tiers to parking enforcement. The other challenge that we have with retaining parking enforcement officers is they're the first face of the city in many, many interactions with the public. And often the interactions that they're having are based on them issuing a citation to someone, or they're interacting with people who are using the right of way in ways that are alternative to just pedestrian activity or parking their vehicles. So they're facing pretty harsh conditions. They're often the subject of the ire and the frustration that people are having about whatever it is, whether it's the citation, the general state of affairs. There have been numerous incidents when people have been verbally accosted. They have certainly been physically.
28 Yeah, I can imagine they have some very spicy conversations.
29 Very spicy conversations and interactions, spat upon, kicked at, thrown objects thrown at them, trash thrown at them. It's it is really challenging. And so you have to have pretty strong mental fortitude to handle that and understand that it's a series of things that are contributing to why people are reacting and responding. The other thing is that for some time we have been a little bit less stringent in our overall enforcement of parking. And so whereas a person had perhaps previously for months or in some cases years been able to engage in behavior that was inconsistent with the rules around parking and parking management, now we have staff that are able to go out and help with that enforcement. And the questions are often, you've never done this before. Why are you doing it today?
30 Excellent. So the other question, is there anything that we can do policy wise that we can change in terms of having different steps? I know that that, you know, once you you're in parking enforcement, that's where you are. But is there anything that we can do in terms of policy that will help to elevate what they're doing? Is there a senior parking enforcement person or, you know, there.
31 Are a couple of tiers within the overall structure of that organization. And we can look at what a career path could look like for someone who comes into the organization. As a parking enforcement officer, I did mention that there are some who have moved on to supervisory roles. We I recently had a conversation with one parking enforcement officer who identified that not because of the emotional strain, but the physical strain of the job. He would like to look at something else, and we worked with the management team to identify an alternative for him. So there are ways that we can work on a case by case, but also more systematically some of the work that we do intend to do as an organization, especially as we're looking at the future of the bureau, is that career pathing, not just in the roles that are similar to parking enforcement, but across the board, you could hear the same questions coming from an engineering tech to say, how can I move from this space into engineering supervisor or engineering manager and on up? So we're going to be working actively on that.
32 Thank you.
33 Councilor Kanal thank you, madam chair. I just to follow up on that, I'd also like to know about the wellness side of things, because one of the things that we do really well here is we have parking enforcement in our transportation and not under police, but we the trade off of that is we have to provide wellness that is different from someone who's working in a desk job. So I want to make sure that that I have enough information on that and see if there's any gaps there in collaboration with labor partners on that.
34 Thank you. Councilor Kanal so certainly we do engage in pretty significant wellness work. That said, it is not at the scale of the fire service or police bureau. And so we have some opportunities to do some learning there about how we can work to ensure that we're protecting our team and that they're feeling that they have the opportunities to work on themselves individually in support of their overall health and wellness and safety in the spaces that they're in.
35 Thanks. And I think this relates as well to other work groups that are outside of public safety service area, like park rangers.
36 I was thinking of it, actually. I was going to mention that park rangers have a very similar set of challenges, and there has been some discussion about how we might provide, even from a policy perspective, greater protections for them in terms of their ability to be protected and respond in a way that allows for them to know that the city is behind them and that they have the protections in place that other enforcement bodies have. Thank you, thank you.
37 Thank you, councilor Duffy, please.
38 Thank you very briefly. Not super directly relevant, but do any of your parking enforcement staff work after 7 p.m?
39 Some of them do, especially as we have entertainment districts. Look at the convention center, moda center area. There is enhanced enforcement there during the up to 10:00. And then we also have folks who are working around the clock because they're dealing with emergent needs, people parking, extending over a driveway, parking near hydrants, otherwise obstructing the flow of traffic. And so we are able to call on our teams to dispatch both services personally and then call in the appropriate personnel to company to deal with the with the obstruction.
40 Excellent.
41 Thank you. Thank you.
42 Thank you.
43 All right. Good afternoon, chair Smith, vice chair, Green committee members. My name is quisha light. As mentioned, I am currently the customer service director at the Portland water bureau, and I am the incoming bureau director. As of March 17th. Over the next ten years, 28% of water's workforce will reach retirement eligibility. Key roles at risk include engineers, our water operations, mechanics, electricians, customer account specialists, environmental specialists and more. Engineering and water operations have already seen a seven year retirement wave, creating a cycle of internal promotions and ongoing recruitment needs. These positions require specialized skills and certifications and which makes them harder to fill quickly. Some roles take years of training to develop the necessary expertise. The biggest concern we have is a loss of institutional knowledge. Many retirees have decades of experience troubleshooting and maintaining portland's water system, and that knowledge isn't easily replaced. The upside is that these retirements also create promotional opportunities, ensuring employees feel empowered rather than stuck, while also allowing us to infuse fresh perspectives and drive our culture of innovation. Next slide.
44 Good afternoon, chair Smith and vice chair Green and councilors. My name is tim loo. I'm currently the deputy director and the incoming interim director for the bureau of environmental services starting April. So similar trends here in the next five years, as you heard from dc downpour, over 200 employees is eligible for retirement in the next ten years, which is about over 30% of our workforce. So some of the key classification at risk is very similar to water bureau. And this is something from the water industry is very common, including wastewater operators, millwrights, instrumentation technicians, environmental specialists across the public works. We also see the similar engineers and analysts. That's really a key risk. So some of the additional challenges due to the water industry, private and high tech competition for these talents, specialty job class like electrician and instrumentation tech. We do have some special state licensing requirement that other states are not having the same requirement. So that's another challenge here.
45 Thank you. Thank you for your presentations. I'm going to open this up in councilor Green.
46 Thank you, madam chair. A couple of questions. I'm going back to transportation for a moment. I know that the presentation is on staffing, which is a cost typically. Right. So we think about it. But on the traffic enforcement, can you speak to whether or not we were seeing like a return on investment? Because I know last year we staffed up on we did a surge on traffic enforcement. Do we do we get a sense that that that pays for itself in some sense.
47 Traffic enforcement or parking enforcement?
48 You know, I was actually parking enforcement. That's what I'm thinking.
49 Yes. Thanks. Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to make sure that I'm giving the right set of responses to the question, especially because we were talking about parking enforcement. We jeremy patton is here. The bureau's chief financial officer and enterprise services lead. He can speak to some of the specifics around the numbers. Have we seen a large increase? I don't know that we have, but we have, you know, I didn't think so. But we what we have seen is that there has begun to be a shift in people beginning to comply. So the, the, the role of the enforcement officer is as much a it's not a revenue generation tool is as much an opportunity for revenue to come into the bureau as as it is a regulatory function that causes people to follow the rules. So when people know now, people are beginning to see we're enforcing and we are beginning to see people paying, we're also seeing more people parking, which is a good sign. And so that's there's yet to be the bump. But jeremy can speak to the numbers that we do know.
50 Yeah. Okay.
51 Good afternoon jeremy pan with PBOT finance. Some of the numbers that we've recently been working with the county, a lot of the so when we write a citation, it goes through the county court system. We have been writing about 20,000 more citations in the current fiscal year, but we've yet to really see a bump in overall citation revenue so far. And there's a couple reasons for that. What we're seeing is a little bit more leniency, we think, from some of the court system as far as the fines are actually collecting, we're seeing a little bit of a drop on the average fine. We're still and let me preface this a little bit as we're still working through the data with the county. So this is kind of this is very, very new information. So we're seeing a little bit of a drop in the average collections. We're also seeing an increase in the amount of fees that are just going unpaid. So they're getting their citation. They're saying yes they'll challenge it in the court. They're saying still pay and folks are still not paying. So we're seeing a little bit of a drop in that. So the revenues just haven't come in. But the citations are definitely rising. What we're also hoping with is with the additional of the officers, the more that they see folks see them on the street, the more people will start paying the meters in general. But we're just not quite seeing the turnaround yet in some of those areas.
52 Thank you. Appreciate those responses. Because and I want to reiterate here, it's not just about the primary tool is not revenue generation. It is it is sort of ensuring that we've got public spaces that are safe and people are conforming to norms that I think are long held practices. And I think a lot of what, what I have heard from my communities is there was a breakdown in norms during the COVID period. And so this seems like a pretty gentle way to steer the ship back in the direction it needs to go. And I think it will have follow on benefits. So I, I just want to affirm my support for parking enforcement as, as a line item here.
53 Thank you, councilor Green. I'll share that in the past year, we have pretty aggressively sought to reinstate the things that were relaxed. We, in fact, had a summer of enforcement when we identified every neighborhood and provided very early advance notification that we would be coming around to just make sure folks knew that there were expectations. You need to park in the right direction on the street that you're in. You can't continue to obstruct the sidewalks. If there are sidewalks, you need to make sure that you're clear of driveways. You can't park close to hydrants. You need to renew your registration, things like that. Or you need to make sure you're parked close enough to the curb so that you're not obstructing travel lanes. So. So there were a number of ways that we've gone after ensuring that people were adhering to the social contract that we have as residents of a city, and that was largely met with a great deal of almost excitement and appreciation, because there had been a period, again, as you've acknowledged, where we were a little relaxed. And so we're excited about being able to provide that level of support that's communities have been asking for. We've even been asked to look at some of the places where there are no parking signs, making sure that people are really complying with that without it being punitive, because that's the other piece. Everything is not a punitive exercise. So we balance that and try to make sure that we're looking at how we can help support community in the in the ways that we can. And so it truly is a partnership that we're excited about, the ability to move forward in a in a meaningful way. Thank you for your support.
54 Yeah. And thank you so much. And then, if I may, just one more question, and this is about the public works, the rate funded entities and looking at the ten year, you know, I'm not going to call it crisis, but it is a significant threat to and I do come from this background. I know that these are very specialized skill sets to keep a the core infrastructure of our city alive and without waste and water. I mean, you've got you've got dysentery, you got cholera. Not to be dramatic chair, but.
55 Just a little bit.
56 But but the but I would like to ask a question and, you know, please be candid is the proposed. Suppose you don't get the rate increase that you're asking for. Does that exacerbate this problem, or do you think you can manage in it?
57 Yeah, I think it's the continued challenge for the water industry. So what the challenge has been a lot of the workforce coming to this sector is because of the clean water act, which started in the 1970s and 80s. So we are seeing this so-called silver tsunami. So there is a lot of succession planning and things that we as an industry need to focus on. So later you will hear some of the training programs we are planning for. And also the other challenge from a regional level is once the operator is in another utility, because of all the benefit and the seniority, it's really hard to attract them to a different utility. So that's where we are really starting from the entry level. And even before that, and helping them to develop the skill sets to stay.
58 Yeah, I would say that we have the programs in place, right? We've known for years that this was coming. So but it doesn't mean that if we if we continue to see our rates not keeping up with the need to maintain the system, the people to be in place to maintain the system when we're, you know, cutting positions, to be able to meet the budgetary needs. Yes, it it will. There's a point right, where we're not going to be able to maintain certain service levels. Certain service levels. Well, of course, but we are public servants, right? We are going to do everything we can. So if it means we put in a little extra work, we do that. But it does get harder to keep maintaining without those rates.
59 Thank you and I am done.
60 Thank you. Councilor Green councilor Kanal.
61 Thank you. I would like to ask about span of control because I'm noticing in all three slides, in particular the environmental services one, that managers and supervisors are near the top of the classifications. I think too often in our past, when we've had reductions in staffing, it's gone to the bottom. And the represented employees who are not managers or supervisors. And I wanted to ask if you were evaluating the manager and supervisor positions that might be able to be combined or eliminated over time.
62 I think as a city, we are doing a span of control exercise, which looks into the specific question that you're asking about, and we will be evaluating. You know, how it looks like for our service area as well. And in with respect, we are for the water and bts in particular. We're looking at, you know, merging of having one leader and merging of the leadership teams and possibly the business functions as well. So that's an opportunity to look at the span of control and also how we will go about doing that as well. And I don't know if there's anything in particular for each individual period to share in this in this aspect. But that's something on a service area level that we will be doing as an exercise moving forward in the next few months.
63 Anything I would share is complementary to what the dca has already shared. We've begun to do that exercise, and even as we've looked at the upcoming fiscal year budget work that we're work that we're doing right now, we've looked across the full spectrum and identified potential places where we would need to make reductions. It is inclusive of managers at all levels, as well as line staff represented non-represented and. But I will share that in 2008. And jodi can correct me if I'm wrong. She's the bureau historian. Jody yates, the maintenance operations director. When we reduced force based on the economic climate at that time, we lost a great deal of leadership in at least in the maintenance space, and the span of control became unwieldy. And so you ended up having far too many staff people assigned to one supervisor for there to be effective overall leadership. So there's a delicate balance with doing that reduction exercise and that reevaluation exercise that we will want to help to inform to the extent that we're being directed to do that type of work.
64 Thank you.
65 Thank you. Councilor Kanal dca deanna paul, I want to work with you and walk with me through what I can envision to maybe help you. Oftentimes, we don't go into areas where we see young people and talk to young people about what we do. And I do want to thank miss light and miss lou for your new expanded roles at the department. Your leadership is so very important and critical, and I would like to be able to work with you all and just do like a road show. On what kind of positions there are at the city of Portland. Go to go into the schools, to the high schools and let people know. I think when we when we think about entertainment, young people, they they like to watch sports. And so they aspire to be athletes. What you all do is so very important to the health of this community that I think we need to show people who you are, what you do, what you look like, where you come from, how you got to where you you are right now. And if we could do something like, I know we often do the take your child to work day, but I want to figure out some kind of way we can go to a career day and we can present in front of young people to let them know what the opportunities are, because I just don't think that we're getting the message out. I don't think that we're we're really pouring into our next generation about the work. It is being a public servant. Maybe we can do commercial marketing about, you know, jobs in the future. I just think that we need to do more. I think what you do is so critical, and I'm really worried because long after I'm gone, that's when you're going to have the greatest issues. So I think it is upon me to build a narrative and a foundation to making sure that ten, 15 years from now that this city of Portland is not just surviving, that we are thriving and we're thriving with folks who come from the community and who who got a leg up because we took the next step in being intentional, being very deliberate about what we do. So if you if you guys can indulge me and let's let's figure out some ways that we can go to go to high schools and even in universities to let people know that we are we are open for business, right. And we're open for folks to come in of every ethnic background, male, female. But we just need to tell people, I just think that we have so much to offer, and I'm excited about being able to be here as a council person. But let me tell you, miss light, if I could do what you do, I'd be trying to tell everybody that I know what I do in my family and my friends, and to get them excited about wanting to work in public service. So that's that's just my tangent today. In addition to wanting to know what we can do to be helpful to decrease the number of vacant positions that we have in your bureaus. And if you all have anything else that you want to add to the record on this, raise your hand.
66 Dca yeah. Thank you, chair Smith I'm going to jump at the opportunity to partner with you all to, you know, public works, especially the work in the city is truly incredible. Our staff are so mission driven because of the essential work that they provide to portlanders. And we are proud to serve portlanders. The essential services that we do provide, and we're happy to partner with you and the leadership of this committee to whether it's reaching out to high schools or universities to create that, you know, enlightened folks about the entry level jobs or, you know, the stem, stem fields and other things that we are doing to encourage folks to get into our field of work or to show what options are out there. And we do have a few more slides left that will go into some of the partnerships, workforce partnerships that we have, like the diversity partnership that we're talking about. And we hope in addition to youth, we also want to partner with communities and organizations that will help diversify our workforce as well. And we hope to have your partnership and advocacy in building that. In addition to the youth as well. So if you're okay with it, we would love to show you some of the training and workforce development that we do, and happy to hear your insights and thoughts on how we can partner together.
67 Thank you. And just so that, you know, I was in Washington, dc this last week, and every time I go to a city, I always go to a university, talk about what I'm doing, encourage and urge people to come to Portland because they I think in their minds, for some reason, I don't know why this is so. They think that Oregon is cowboys and indians and that's not it. They come here. We are a not just surviving city. We are a thriving city. And I talked to students at howard university this last week to make sure that they know that they have people who who are from Oregon. And then there are students who have come from Oregon as well, that you can come back to your city and you can contribute. And we have great jobs here, careers that you can start in local government. And I think it's often looked over for a shinier city of sorts, but we have a lot to offer. So I appreciate you and what you and what you've put together today.
68 Thank you. Councilor chair Smith, should we continue with the presentation. All right. Great. Next slide please. I'm even more excited now to share some of the workforce training programs and retention and recruitment strategies in workforce workforce partnerships that we have. And next slide. Our public works bureaus are investing in workforce development and retention programs to address both immediate staffing issues, such as the vacancies and long term retirement outlook that we, the three bureau directors, shared with you and our people. Our staff are our greatest assets, and I will always say that. And so we are committed to supporting and growing that asset. We have defined clear workforce development goals as outlined in the slide slide that guide our actions, and it includes supporting employees in maintaining necessary certifications, especially for our skilled workforce, and ensuring equitable access to training and career advancement, training skill development for future needs. Continuously improving the employee experience to boost retention. Diversifying our recruitment approach and candidate pool, and planning for future needs within our budget constraints. A strong workforce, in my opinion, is more than just skills. It's about creating connection and engagement to improve performance and retention, and our heroes will focus on building cohesion across the teams and strengthening alignment with our mission. We are also continuously improving our recruitment strategies to attract highly qualified, diverse candidates and ensure that the workforce reflects the communities we serve. And with constrained budgets and a wave of retirements ahead, we are carefully planning for the future through targeted recruitment, retraining and upskilling to keep our workforce strong. Next slide please. Our bureaus run apprenticeship programs and training programs that develop and retain talent, and we would love to when we when we have an opportunity to go through each one of those in detail with chair Smith and this committee as well. We later on in the presentation, we'll have each bureau representative talk more about the some of the key training programs that they have. Some of them are the water distribution worker training program, the water operations mechanic apprenticeship apprenticeship program to train people for maintaining pump stations and treatment equipment, and be as a be as a r operator in training program. These programs allow us to bring people who may not have all the credentials yet, but have the aptitude and desire to learn, including candidates from underrepresented communities who might have been overlooked in a traditional hiring process. So by growing our own, we build a loyal workforce and fill critical roles that are hard to hire for in the open market. We also participate in internship programs, which places engineering students in paid internships with us through army corp and c corp programs. They also serve as recruiting tools. As many interns return to us as full time hires after graduation and already familiar with our work, we also partner with trade schools and community colleges that offer relevant programs to connect their graduates with city jobs and to increase our operational resilience. We have job rotation programs and encourage cross training employees in multiple skills, and this is great for succession planning to rotated employees gain a better understanding of other jobs, which prepares them to potentially step into these roles into the future. I you know, I want to pause for a moment and thank chair Smith and this committee for asking these questions of us, because this gave us an opportunity. A public work service area is seven months young, and it gives us an opportunity as leaders to look into some of these important and challenges like vacancies, retirement and what are we doing as a service area? Even within the bureaus, there are different programs that are approaching this at different aspect. Like how are we doing at recruiting, how are we planning for retirements? And so this gave us an opportunity to discuss across the board, across the service area, and how we can strategize and work in partnership with council to, you know, have have better response to addressing these challenges. So thank you so much for that. I with that, I also with that I want to pass it on to the PBOT director to talk about the career pathways that turn seasonal employees to full time positions and turning it over to director williams.
69 Thank you, donna paul. Specifically, within PBOT, the bureau utilizes seasonal employees to prepare for future needs these temporary employees receive on the job training, and in their second year, they can participate in the cdl or commercial driver's license endorsement training program. Once completed, they're encouraged to apply for utility worker one and utility worker two openings. Many of these go through the seasonal maintenance worker program, are hired directly as utility workers. The bureau also works with them to provide the training and required licenses, such as commercial driver's license, as I just mentioned, so that they can fill their probationary requirements. While we have multiple pathways for skilled labor and for those developing their skills to become PBOT employees long term, I'd also like to share. And it was mentioned in the previous slide from the dca that we do welcome engineering and planning interns on an annual basis. We employ community service aides and work with bhr to identify hatfield fellows to support our efforts. We also encourage, as has been mentioned, job shadowing and create opportunities for people to work cross-discipline to better understand what options they have as they consider their future at the bureau. And I'll go off script just a moment. I want to highlight that the maintenance operations group, the maintenance operations division that's over in kirby, has been identified as a the employer of choice of the year from wts. Jody yates has done a tremendous job of making sure that she's recruiting effectively. She is looking across the full spectrum of opportunity and need all of with the exception of one new division manager. All of her division managers are women. She has diversity in the ranks based on gender, gender identity, ethnicity. She has done a tremendous work and so we're excited to highlight that. I also can never take an opportunity, miss an opportunity to fully embarrass my niece who has come to Portland to spend spring break with me. She had the opportunity to go to the beach, and she wanted to come hang out with her aunt and see what we do on a daily basis. So she got to go to maintenance operations last night, see the sign shop, see the operations, see all the trucks. She was really excited. She says. It's really cool. She says, I'm in a lot of meetings. She's in this one right here, right now.
70 What's your niece's name?
71 Her name is sydney williams and she is a student at spelman. She says she wants to be a doctor, but after she got to hang out with me for a week, I don't know. Oh.
72 Can you wave your hand, miss cindy, thank you so much. Your aunt is very proud of you. And I thank you for sitting in on this because this is very important. We have a lot of our young women who go to spelman, which is in atlanta, georgia, and we lose them to the south. And I wish that some of our young people would come back, but they need to be inspired and excited. And I think the entire panel here today, you have excited a new group of folks to say, this is what I want to be when I grow up. So thank you very much. I really appreciate it, especially during women's history month. Yes. History month, this is this is great news. And jody, congratulations. Thank you for all that you have done to keep our offices diverse and current. And I appreciate you so much. Thank you.
73 And I'll turn it over to the next slide. Or can we advance to the next slide. Yes.
74 Yeah. Within bhs we implemented multiple strategies to increase the diverse applicant pool as well as addressing these hard to fill positions. So one of the recent examples we have is a wastewater operator in training oit program, which offers an entry level opportunities to individuals with little or no prior wastewater experience. This is designed to be equitable and sustainable, recruit and broadens opportunities, especially for underrepresented communities, ensuring long term operational sustainability and stability. So one good news is we have over 250 applicants applied for this program with various background and lived experience. We have only three positions for this program and it's already hired one trainee and working through the second and the third one for the pre hiring process as well. So they will have the on the job training and experience over the next 24 months to prepare them to become a journey level wastewater operators at our columbia boulevard wastewater plant, which is the biggest plant in Oregon. So we are very proud of our plant and the workforce program here. We also have some structured apprenticeship program. The first one is the industrial maintenance millwright apprenticeship. As you remember, that's one of the hard to fill categories. So this is a four year structured program that's through Portland community college. We have already graduated two apprentices who have become licensed journey industrial millwrights in the plant for instrumentation tech. Another job class that the program has started back in 2022. And we're in the process of continually updating this program. So far we have had two instrumentation techs get their licensing through this process and become the journey instrumentation techs. We also have two more that are in the middle of getting their program through pcc right now. So across the bs, we also have launched our learning exchange and assistant program lead program. As you heard from dci nepal, this program is designed to further support long term growth and collaboration allows employees to work in different areas of bureau, fostering cross-functional relationships, skill sets, development and deeper understanding of our culture. Next slide.
75 So this slide shows the career progression. I can't talk right now. Career progression opportunities available to water distribution workers, the path from trainee to leadership roles demonstrates how we build careers at water. And we don't just fill positions. Employees have the opportunity to gain hands on experience. They develop specialized skills and they move into leadership and technical roles over time. And a great example of this is charlie Smith, who's pictured here, who's career journey reflects the program's impact. He started as a trainee in 1999. He learned the ropes of water system maintenance, and then over the years, he steadily advanced through the ranks, taking on more responsibility and deepening his expertise. And just recently, he was named as the interim group director of our maintenance and construction team. And it's a testament of the opportunities that that program does create for our employees. The numbers for this program also really speak for themselves. 85% of trainees stay with the city building long term careers, and 50% of recent hires are people of color, showing that this program isn't just workforce development, it's a pathway for diverse talent to advance in this industry. As chair Smith was talking about, for many of our water distribution workers, what starts as a hands on job in the field becomes a stepping stone to leadership, technical expertise and a lifelong career dedicated to serving our community. Next slide. Like bts and PBOT, we have many programs in water outside of our water distribution training program. We have the soak program, and it's an immersive learning experience that helps employees see the full forest of faucet water system. This six day cohort program gives participants another hands on understanding of how their work connects to the bigger picture, deepening their sense of purpose. And we'd like to just show you a one minute video that showcases the soak program.
76 Further. Be paid for. By.
77 Nice. Beyond soaked, we also offer key retention and development programs that engage and support employees. Oh, give you a little bit more soaked. We have comprehensive onboarding, which includes a welcome day, a one month check in, and a six month survey to ensure a strong start for employees. We have, share and learn events that promote expertise exchange. We have linkedin learning access for professional development, the ambassador program, which connects employees across the bureau. We have people management training to support effective management and leadership throughout through a cohort learning. And I also just want to quickly say that one of the things that you talked about, chair Smith, I think these the public works service area does a really good job. We are out in the community. We are at the good and the hoods. We're at all those events. We're going out to our schools because you're right, they need to see us. And when they see us, they know it's possible. And but we are definitely if there are other places and spaces where we can show up and let people know that this is a real opportunity for them to make money, to have a career in their life. And because college isn't for everyone. So we know that and we are like dca, donna powell said, we welcome the partnership because if there are other agencies and groups we can work with, we would love to do it.
78 Thank you. Thank you so much for your work. I think we have about two minutes left. Dca donna powell, did you want to wrap this up?
79 Yes. Thank you. Let's go to the next slide. I so these are some of the quotes from our employee retention programs that, you know would say that employees are have a strong connection to the mission and benefit from understanding how their part in their system connects to the whole. And next slide please. In the interest of time, I'll move on to the next slide. And one more. We'll go to the one with the. So this shows the analytics dashboard from bureau of human resources that our public works bureaus and hiring managers use to inform, to make decisions about recruitment and outreach. And the point I want to make here is historically, public works roles have been male dominated. However, our bureaus continue to prioritize inclusive hiring and retention strategies in partnership with regional stakeholders to increase representation across historically represented groups in water distribution. The. The program that we just spoke about, 50% of the workforce identify as people of color, reflecting progress in workforce diversity within this critical operational unit. And as director williams mentioned at maintenance and operations, all but one division manager is a woman demonstrating strong leadership representation within within this traditionally male dominated field. And as you can see across this diaz over here, women and people of color are well represented in leadership roles across the service area. Beginning next Monday, we will have all all women, leadership and all minority represented women leadership in the service area. And that shows diversity is embedded at all levels of decision making and service delivery for public works. That being said, there's room for improvement and it's a priority for me and our bureaus to continue prioritizing inclusive hiring and retention strategies. And then I want to go to one more slide and next one, please. So these are the various workforce partnerships that we work with based on identity based organizations, professional organizations, youth organizations. Similar to what chair Smith you spoke about and other technical organizations. And we are committed to working with them to continue identifying opportunities to spread information about the work that we do, the opportunities for employment within our service area, and how we can partner with them to identify job postings and, you know, have outreach as much as possible. And looking forward to all of you working with all of you. In spite of that, there are some recruitment challenges. But I think together with this committee, we are looking forward to overcoming these recruitment challenges and preparing for vacancies and also retirement challenges. There were a few more slides that are on the record online, but I think this is the key message that I want to say. Let me go to the very end. You know, we are we maintain 60, $60 billion in assets. That forms the backbone of portland's daily life. And these assets are built, maintained and some in some cases transformed by 2400 incredibly skilled professionals over a three periods, which are over 70% union represented staff. So the expertise, the passion and the willingness to jump in and do whatever it takes with an appearance impresses me every day. And but we cannot take the resilience of our workforce for granted, even with even if we are stretched thin or our bureaus will deliver. So we want to be careful. So in the next five years, we want to prioritize how we can make sure during the years of budget scarcity and layoffs, we still focus on hiring and recruiting and have specialized technical expertise and stability. And as the public works employees retire, we focus on cross-training and redundancy and so on. So we and our thousands of public works employees, thank you for asking these important and good questions, and we thank you for your advocacy and the connections within your districts and communities, and look forward to working with you.
80 Thank you so much. Thank all of you for coming. Can I take one last question from councilor Kanal?
81 Thanks. And I'll ask it while if you can pull up slide 24, please. I just want to understand the pie charts a little bit better. What's the period. Is the is the word higher here. The right column here. The workforce that exists or is it hiring over a particular period. Is it the last year or the last five years? What what is the. Yeah. For the right the right column.
82 Thank you. That's a great question. I'm going to phone a friend here or call from a lifeline. Is jeremy or somebody here can speak to the statistics.
83 I keep looking behind.
84 Sorry. I was trying to see if julie was here because she put that out there, and I can see if I can find it online to see what it says the actual timeframe is. I'm not sure, but okay. Okay, okay.
85 Well then in that case, I would like to ask and I it's clear that you've done a lot in terms of everything actually. But but specifically hiring and in particular at the management level, diversity in both gender and race here. But I am curious as to the disparity between over the last fiscal year, in particular on gender, why, if you've done such a good job on the attracting people to apply who are from traditionally marginalized groups, why there's the disparity between the applicant pool and the hiring, because I'm noticing, for example, 42.6% of applicants are women, but only 33.7% of the hired staff are women. And similarly, there and I think you've brought up, at least within water, a couple particular programs that that don't have that, in fact, are the other direction. So I'm just curious if that's tailored to a specific bureau or if there's anything specific that that came up there that you'd like to kind of give context for that.
86 I would like to open it up for the bureau's to answer this question.
87 Well, there are a number of reasons why there is that disparity. As the applicants go through a process, when there are interviews, there are requirements that folks need to meet in order to be able to pass along. Sometimes, regardless as to how they identify, they don't make it to the next step. We do work really hard with our hiring teams, our hiring managers, to make sure that they're not going into interviews with preconceived notions about the way that people show up or can show up to do work. We do the bias training that's administered through bhr, but we also have a lot of conversations at our at the local level to make sure that people are not making assumptions about what someone can or cannot do. So I don't want to suggest that the data is flawed or that anyone is doing anything necessarily wrong, or in a way that would create greater opportunity for males to get the opportunities versus female. Sometimes it does come down to a skills test and their ability to perform a thing. I and this is not the best example, but parking enforcement officers, in addition to being hired and having to go through a process once there offer letters received. They do go through a series of tests. One of what tests? One of those is dexterity to make sure that they are able to consistently, effectively, accurately put in data in this small palm palm thing, palm device. And sometimes they don't pass that test. And so that is a blind test that we administer to make sure that we can get the goals met. So I think that there's a lot of there in that number. I mean certainly we can dig in more, but I would not want to suggest that it's because of a flaw in the process, as much as it's just an opportunity to councilor Smith's point, make sure that people are prepared for whatever it is that they're applying for, and that starts early. That starts with introducing young people to the trade. It comes with exposing people. I think a lot of I can speak for PBOT. A lot of our employees are related because they saw their dad do something, or they saw their uncle do something, or they saw their aunt do something and or their their son or daughter or their mother or father. And so you'll see some generational opportunities there. It's what people are exposed to. And then they begin to think about what they can do. And that I think this also spreads across not just the trades related work, but also the professional services as well. And often in those professional technical service areas, you see, you see the same disparity in terms of males versus females who are in those industry roles.
88 Yeah.
89 Just councilor Kanal.
90 We're like running eight minutes late. Can you wrap up your thoughts?
91 Yeah.
92 We can follow up later. My what I'd like to know specifically in the follow up, not now, is whether or not it's the eligibility review or the sm review that's cutting it out, or if these are if that disparity is existing at the interview level. So thanks for that.
93 We can follow up and get back to you.
94 Because for us, it's not that.
95 We send all of us that email when you respond.
96 Absolutely.
97 So that we can review that as well. I want to thank you all so very much for coming, and we appreciate what you've heard, and we will be following back up with you. Thank you.
98 Thank.
99 You, thank you, thank you.
100 We're going to agenda item two. Rebecca, would you please introduce item number two?
101 Item two a message from portland's labor leaders.
102 Lori wimmer. Rob martineau. Elliot levine. Do we have all of you up there at once? Aaron smiles and isaac mcclymont. Hi. All my favorite people on one panel.
103 Good afternoon. Greetings, councilors. For your record, lori wimmer representing the northwest Oregon labor council and a convener of this wonderful group of folks who are leaders of city unions. And we're here to talk with you a little bit about what we've been doing as it relates to building the 2526 budget and ways that we can partner with you. Great.
104 Before you go, we're going to have you introduce yourself, but I'm going to pass the gavel on to vice chair Green, and he's going to introduce everyone.
105 Thank you so much. I just wanted to provide some framing comments. We're going into this budget period. And thanks. Thanks for the partnership with the chair here. I thought it would be a statement of our values and a big missed opportunity not to hear directly from our labor leaders, because these budgets are moral documents. It's the workers who make this city run. And so I'm just really excited to hear what you guys have to say today. But I'm also just very grateful for you taking the time, lori, with your leadership and convening this, this, this council together. So I'll let you introduce your panel. But I just wanted to say the labor and workforce development committee wants to center labor. So I'll leave it at that.
106 Wonderful. Thank you, councilor Green and chair Smith and members, as I was saying about our coalition, the leaders represent that 80% of your 7500 city workers who are organized in our unions, and we have come together to come to try to help have a common approach to looking at the way to build the budget, that that will will do more than just cut programs or people. And the folks who were a part of that, I'd like to have stand and be recognized there in the room. Thank you. Our group delivered a letter to all of you and to the mayor on February 26th, anticipating the release of the city. Administrator's budget framework. And our approach was to take a look at offering you a different set of tools than, as I said, the typical, which is layoffs and program reductions. And we recommended in that letter use of general reserves, use of ending fund balance, elimination of contracting in favor of in-house work provided, and creative revenue sharing strategies. And additionally, after sitting through last meeting of this committee's public safety presentation, we additionally would support hiring enough public safety employees to significantly reduce the expense of overtime that's now racked up. We know that boec did that and were able to stay within budget, and we think that's a model to emulate, and our comments here today will touch not only on the points of our letter, but also respond to elements of that budget framework that I just referenced. We know that we agree with the city administrator's proposals in a couple different ways. I'd like to line those out for you. First of all, we recognize that he seems to agree with our recommendation to use current year savings. We refer to it as the ending fund balance, and you'll find it in his framework on page 19. We would all also call your attention to a document with my written testimony in your record that shows how the city forecasts in the past customarily exaggerated expenses and underestimated revenues, leaving too much on the table, which then gets deployed mid budget cycle. But in a year where we are facing down 274 position eliminations, we think that's a habit to break. The city administrator's framework also recommends bringing contracted projects in-house, as we do. And that's on page 21 of his framework. And we also note that he proposes the use of restricted fund revenues where there are surpluses. He looks at interest, for example, in psa funds as one possible budget balancing tool. We'd go a little further. Just a little fun fact to know and tell if the surplus were entirely applied to discretionary one time funds in the general fund, you'd cut your gap in half with just that one action. We also agree that rightsizing the management sector, accounting for appropriate span of control, could be a part of the efficiency hunt. But I want to make a point about that, because I just learned that in mr. Jordan's original budget emails to the bureaus, he reflected an intention to ensure that layoffs would be proportional to that 8020 split of represented versus unrepresented or management. But in a letter received just this week that listed the potential layoffs to employees, only 12% of managers, not 20%, were proposed for layoff. That's 32 positions instead of 52. And that puts a huge burden on the employees. So I wanted to raise that for you. All other recommendations in his framework that do concern us have, for example, raised a blood pressure as it relates to health care premiums. He he used to that fictitious 8% premium increase, which is mythical and not an actual increase. And then he recommends that we downgrade the provisions of health care benefits for employees. We strenuously oppose that. We would also urge that the final budget recognize the full preapproved rate raising level for all of those rate funded agencies and not that lesser amount that, under the previous mayor, was recommended in the original budget instructions, and that $0.49 a month? Hardly. It's minuscule to families. That's the $0.49 is the average rate of savings that's minuscule to families. But the cuts to programs would be tremendous. So we think that's a poor idea. And finally, we would urge the city, and I'm sure they're doing it already, to go to the legislature and seek state funding assistance for transportation and shelter services. We're grateful for the opportunity to address this committee, and we stand ready to assist you in any way we believe. We're well positioned to partner with you in problem solving in a way that does honor our workforce and also maintains services to the great extent possible for the people of Portland. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to my much more expert colleagues.
107 Just for a second. Let me have councilor Novick speak.
108 I was just curious when you talk about allocating the surplus, what surplus are you talking about?
109 We are speculating that there will be some restricted revenues that bring in more dollars than were anticipated. And we think that those could be creatively applied to other areas of the budget.
110 Like like what more dollars than anticipated in what which dollars.
111 Can we get? The general fund forecast? We haven't gotten that.
112 Yet.
113 But so that would be an example.
114 Okay. But PCEF is supposed to be for a particular purposes. Are you saying that if more money comes in in PCEF that was expected, then it should be diverted to purposes other than those it was established for?
115 I suggested that there be a creative approach to finding out how some of those, those excess reserve monies could be used for aligned purposes in the general fund.
116 I okay, I would caution and miss when you and I have had this conversation about budgets for a long time, I would caution against using the term excess when we all know that there are constructive ways we could do that. There's no public money, there's just lying around with no good use for it.
117 Fair point.
118 Also, I apologize, I'm jumping ahead. But on the I think that the use of general reserves was not something that the administrator you listed as one that the administrator agreed with you on.
119 No, I, he he was talking about the current budget extra dollars. We call it the ending fund balance because it becomes the beginning balance in the new budget.
120 On the topic of reserves, I might be wrong here, but I kind of think that the city budget people will say, well, you have to have a certain level of reserves for a bond rating. Et cetera, et cetera. And I was wondering if it's I actually was emailing the chair of the finance committee earlier today saying I think it might be useful to have a robust conversation about that in the finance committee, where your folks could go sort of toe to toe with jonas beery on what exactly reserves we need. Does that sound like something that might be worth exploring?
121 Absolutely. Councilor Novick. We'll be happy to testify anywhere. We are welcomed. And we do. We did say in our letter that we met the credentials. We met the criteria for using those general reserves that are in your in your ordinances.
122 Thank you.
123 And I just want to be clear about what you were talking about, because there's interest that was made off the principle of the PCEF account, which they they forecast it to be about $18 million, just so that folks know what what you're talking about. And there was a big conversation about using PCEF funds with the previous council and the mayor, and it was turned out that the interest was something that could be used by anyone in the, in the bureaus and for the specific funding of PCEF that that that main principle was not that they have a five year plan on how they're going to spend those dollars, but that the 18 million in interest that comes in every year, that it is up for grabs of sorts. So I do. I knew what you were talking about.
124 Thank you, madam chair.
125 Chair Smith, vice chair, Green, members of the committee. My name is elliot levin. I'm with protect 17. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about the impacts of proposed budget cuts on the city workforce. Protects 17 represents approximately a thousand city employees across most city bureaus. We design and maintain the city's infrastructure, guide and assist building and development, provide internal services to city government, and help those in need on our streets. Our members have watched as city services have been winnowed away over the decades. Positions that are cut, go unfilled and require maintaining, I'm sorry, require remaining employees to pick up the slack. Cost of living adjustments have fallen far short of inflation benefits and retirement no longer draw new employees to the public sector as they fall behind competitiveness with the public sector. Simply put, city employees have been in a state of cuts and scarcity for years. This is not the time to make these problems worse. One of the recommendations that we've provided is the need to take a hard look at the city's use of contracted services to do work that could be done in-house. Contracted services are much more expensive than city employees. Right from years of asking for information, we've learned that bureaus don't adequately cost track the cost of contracted employees, or the cost of redoing work that's done by contractors and must be either redone or reviewed to meet the standards of city work. Additionally, there are significant costs associated with managing and paying these contracts that are not taken into account. For example. City. The city currently pays senior construction managers on contract, more than double the rate for a project 17 capital project manager two working at top step, including benefits and overhead right. However, contract employees themselves may be earning less than their city equivalents, even though the city is paying much more due to high profit rates that are written into these contracts. This is to say nothing of the costs of extensions. Change orders and review. That's often necessary with consultants. Additionally, open ended staff augmentation contracts, where consultants agree to provide employees as needed rather than on a per project basis, can lead to significant inefficiencies. These aren't short term or project based assignments. They can continue for years, costing the city ongoing premiums. The city should audit and audit the usage of all such agreements and contracts, and make reductions here before cutting city employees. One reason for the city's overreliance on contractors is the requirement for this by the city budget office, that all ftes have demonstrated funding for five years before they can be approved for the creation of a new fte right. This, in conjunction with slow city hiring processes, means that it's often easier for a management manager to bring in a consultant rather than hire a new city employee, even at a higher price. Simply put, this is an incentive structure that produces the opposite outcome for what would be cost effective, right? So we believe that it's imperative for the city to examine contracted positions before considering cuts to city jobs as a means of providing the most effective, efficient, cost effective services possible. The other thing that I'd like to talk about just briefly here, is the assumptions being made in city budget documents around the cost of health care and cost increases. So, as you may know, the city is experiencing significant growth in the cost of providing health benefits to employees. This is largely due to reasons outside the city's control, but the estimates are around north of 13%. To maintain current city benefits, city health benefits however, current budget documents only account for an 8% growth in health benefits by contract. Changes in health care plan design are recommended by the labor management benefits committee, or lmc, which is made up of equal numbers of labor and management representatives. These recommendations then go to council to adopt. The lmc is currently working to limit the increases in health care costs. However, bringing these costs from the projected 13% to 8% is highly unrealistic. Without making dramatic cuts to benefits, this would require a significant reduction in choice of providers under the city core plan, more than doubling the family out of pocket maximum for the kaiser plan, and significantly weakening the sustainability of the current system that offers employees a choice between ppo and hmo plans. The lmc is unlikely to make recommendations that would so fundamentally degrade the city's health benefits, dramatically increasing costs for workers, and further reduce the city's competitiveness in the labor market. City needs to realistically budget for significant increases to health care costs in this budget. So thank you very much for your efforts on this committee to save city jobs for hundreds of working portlanders. Project 17 welcomes the opportunity to partner with you and help avoid cuts to staffing and services to our community.
126 Thank you. Thank you.
127 Elliot councilor Green.
128 Thank you, madam chair. And I just wanted to let you know, elliot, and I'm taking to heart the question about the cost, the hidden cost of contracting. I've heard from your members directly that not only is it twice as expensive for some of these roles, but you have to go back and do the work again anyway. You have to do their work that you paid for again in any way with an fte. And so that's obviously a waste. That's obviously an inefficiency. And so I think as we have these discussions, that's what we'll be asking bureau heads to kind of be frank with us about and the cbo as well. So I just wanted to make that comment. I'm done.
129 Thank you. Councilor Green. Councilor Dunphy.
130 Thank you. Trying to be brief, building on councilor Green's comments, have you identified if there are specific policies or code that need to be updated in order to address this contractor versus full time employee issue? I'm concerned about it in the context of the budget. But, you know, we are also a policy committee, and I would love to have folks who have actually done the work and looked at, you know, where the code lies so that we could update it. Is that something you, you, anybody has identified specifically yet?
131 Thank you. Councilor Dunphy, chair Smith, members of the committee. So one issue that I raised was the five year requirement on on new employees and new ftes. I think that is something that should be looked at.
132 Is that code, do you know or is that just an admin rule?
133 It's actually a really good question and I don't know the answer to that. Thank you. I could I could look into that. Outside of that, I think what we need to get our heads wrapped around is the scale of some of this contracting. Like I said, we've asked for we've asked these questions many times at the bargaining table in the context of collective bargaining, trying to figure out just how much is being done out there and why it's being done. And frankly, the answer is all over the place because it's different for every manager, right? It's different for every project that's coming up. And so I don't think I don't know if there's a unified approach to this that I could recommend right now. But, you know, to the extent that we can shift the incentive structure, right, to make it easier to bring in a city employee to use the city hiring process in order to bring in qualified, diverse applicants, rather than rely on these contracting companies, which are often some of the biggest contracting companies in the world. You know, these are huge engineering firms, right? Multinationals, you know, we can be doing better in-house to bring folks in.
134 So I'm definitely interested in this as an ongoing conversation. Specifically, I've seen how that that plays out differently in the rate paying bureaus water versus bts. It's not getting a good service to our employees. It's not getting a good service to our ratepayers, to our taxpayers. This is something I would love to dive in on. So thank.
135 You, thank you, thank you. Councilor Dunphy.
136 Councilor Kanal.
137 Thank you. I think there's I'm going to say the opposite of what my point is sort of the exception I should say first, which is that there are some times where, you know, in particular around community specific outreach or some of the I'm thinking of the violence prevention contractors, where there are really good uses for contracts, and those are narrow exceptions. I really welcome this focus, though, on on looking at it, because and I'll speak very specifically, I have been a manager at the city where I have been unable to hire a staffer for a job that needed to be done that we had the money for and could not get it approved and had to hire a contractor myself. And it. I don't know the answer to councilor Dunphy's question, but I know that I was because when you're a manager at the city, you don't get the whole citation of code or whatever. You just get told you can't have this position because you don't have the, you know, whatever the particular reason is. And as a result, you know, and the contractor in question here did a great job. So if you're listening, it's not a knock on you. But, but, but it would have been better to hire someone to do that work in-house that we could talk to, that we could hold accountable and that we would save money on. Because I can also speak to that aspect of it as well. It cost more money. And so this is something where the overhead is not even included in your double figure that you mentioned the overhead on, on, on at least the city side of it. We're paying for the overhead on the contractor side as well, which is often ignored as well as the profit aspect of it. I'll also mention that there's for many of these contracts, and you mentioned the multinational component of it. There's the issue that we are not seeing the multiplier effect of putting our city dollars and tax dollars into our local economy. Do you have any info or have you received any info on that aspect of it from either the city or from independent sources? As to the sort of impact of spending money elsewhere versus locally?
138 Councilor Kanal chair Smith that's an excellent question, and one that I would think would be, you know, just as I'm thinking about it, self-evidently true. You're right. I think I don't have any information specific to that. What I do just want to say, if I may very quickly, is many of the people that work as contractors alongside city employees are excellent engineers or technicians or whatever they're doing alongside our members. Right. There may be an opportunity to convert some of those positions into in-house positions, and I think that should be explored as much as, as much as possible. Right. As you were mentioning, you know, a position that you were related to. I mean, these are good people doing good work. And I want to be clear that we support that. So but yeah, sorry, I don't have anything specific.
139 That's okay. I don't.
140 I don't think that it's your you shouldn't I should not be asking you. Ideally we would have this information already and you would be able to ask us, but I figured I'd at least give it out there. Thank you, madam chair.
141 Councilor Kanal.
142 Maybe we can get some information from the city administrator on how this works. And we'll have a better understanding when we're talking about these issues. All of them. So very important, I. Rebecca, could you tell me, how many people do we have in the queue for public testimony?
143 Two people are signed up.
144 Okay, perfect. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to continue with this panel. And, isaac, could you introduce yourself?
145 Thank you. Yeah. Was it rob?
146 Okay. Thank you.
147 Thank you. My name is rob martineau. I am the president of afscme local 189, representing nearly 1100 city employees and an employee in the Portland water bureau since March of 2000. So 25 years now, and I would like to emphasize the need for a values based, fiscally responsible approach to balancing our budget within the current economic and political climate. It's clear that previous assumptions and budget strategies have failed our city. As a 25 year employee, I've experienced a narrative of always being broke during times of economic growth or contraction in labor negotiations, during major infrastructure projects, in in the needs of the most vulnerable, in just doing what we all know is the right thing. The one constant message is broke, broke, broke. I hope the committee will break the broke assumptions, scarcity narratives, and the entire playbook for that type of a narrative. The ever increasing ending fund balance and other available bureau reserves provide the most viable solution to the projected shortfall. By strategically utilizing these existing resources, this council can prevent cuts to essential services and personnel who deliver them. There continues to be no reasonable, justifiable explanation for the outsourcing of jobs through the use of contracted labor and project management, while often viewed as has been discussed, the only path forward eliminating this costly and shortsighted path of least resistance to the furthest extent possible is imperative. This change on its face generates immediate and long term cost savings, as well as increased operational efficiency. The refusal to meaningfully address this is quite literally an affront to ratepayers, taxpayers, and portlanders who rely on the services and infrastructure that we deliver. A culture of stewardship is critical. It's a critical component in the delivery of a better Portland, and in some ways, it's the secret sauce to effective functional programs and their management. The overutilization of temporary positions to create a transient workforce erodes this culture, builds silos, and is antithetical to both best practices and the city's values. I know our leaders will fund their values, and I don't question this committee's alignment of our shared values. And because of these truths, we expect that both value and values will guide your recommendations to council. I have something additional that I wanted to share. This is a letter that I will also provide as testimony, but it is a letter signed by about 20 of our public works inspectors and myself around some of the current things that are happening in PBOT. They are proposing to lay off eight permanent city employees in this classification. Many of them are in are inspecting capital improvement projects, and that cip work is, through our contract, allowed to be contracted out. So it results in these contracted inspectors. Currently, PBOT is proposing to eliminate eight full time city employees in favor of keeping six temporary employees at twice the rate. That is what PBOT is actively doing today, and so I'll be entering this letter. I'm not sure that that even meets with the collective bargaining agreement covered. We have a request. We'll take that up through the proper channels. But I just want to say that this the keeping of people on temporary rollover contracts for years is problematic for the city. And it results in in worse outcomes. Many of these folks are inspecting the very complex requirements of the ADA ramps going in as part of the creek settlement. That is part of these programs that would be very directly cut. So again, I will enter that. Thank you all for your time today.
148 Thank you.
149 Good afternoon, I think. Yes.
150 Thank you so much. Introduce yourself.
151 I appreciate this opportunity. Chair Smith and vice chair Green. This opportunity. My name is isaac mcclymont. I'm a president of the Portland firefighters association. And I'm here to speak on behalf of the professionals in the city of Portland who keep us all safe, the public safety workers. So I appreciate this time. The Portland firefighters association and the Portland police association represent portland's first responders and public safety professionals, sworn police officers, sergeants criminalists detectives, ps3's dispatchers, call takers, dispatch supervisors, all sworn firefighters, lieutenants, captains, battalion chiefs. As you know, we represent hundreds of firefighters as well as the emts who work on the community health assessment, street and Portland street response. Our public safety professionals are all facing staffing crisis and the reality without enough employees, overtime is being used at a rate that is not sustainable. We urgently recommend that we look at boec and how they were able to lower overtime costs by utilizing aggressive hiring posture. This effort must be repeated with the police and fire in hopes of returning overtime to a, to a to an emergency expense rather than an operational expense. We also join our partners here in raising concerns around health and wellness of our members. We recognize that health care costs continue to go up, but we view the health of our city workers and their families as a top priority, ensuring that our health benefits remain effective is essential. Lastly, we'd like to highlight the necessary, the necessity, the necessity of partnership, connectivity and weaving together public safety system and infrastructure infrastructure and clearly identifies the work being done that puts our public safety professionals in a in a positive to be in a position to be effective. Police, fire and dispatch have always been connected, well connected, and we all have seen the challenges that come when we subcontract work. We enthusiastically welcome chat and psr to new partners in this first response system, and we hope that this committee and council recognizes how growth and stability within our system moving forward will ensure that portlanders have access to public safety services that they need to be safe.
152 Thank you, councilor Dunphy.
153 Thank you, chair isaac, do you if we were to do a similar hiring pattern to boec with with fire and police, how quickly do you suspect or have you all looked into how how how quickly would we meaningfully impact our overtime costs right now and our staffing shortages? How how what's our timeline for trying to implement something like that?
154 Well, yeah.
155 Thank you for that question, councilor Dunphy. As you may have heard from our interim chief jackson, it takes it takes some time to train firefighters and put them out on the front line. You know, once we hire them, there's a year long training process before they don what we call a yellow helmet. And they are no longer a trainee, but they're a full they're full, full featured firefighter. Not to mention the fact of recruiting, the part of recruiting and testing. So that's, you know, it takes some time. That's why that pipeline can sometimes take almost two years before you have somebody who's fully fledged ready to go out and do all the jobs of firefighting. And what I've seen in my time, especially since the last 5 or 6 years, is we have not done a good job at hiring to backfill vacancies. But also what you've seen is changes in how many people are off for various reasons, whether it be military leave, sick leave, vacation. Paid leave, Oregon. You know, you know, when we talk about health and wellness issues, if our children are sick, we need to be home with them because both spouses and both our spouse and ourselves are working. So it exacerbates the issue. And what I've found is we just have not done a good job. And if you look back in time at hiring enough ftes to backfill those vacancies. And so that exacerbated a couple years ago when we reached that $25 million, you know, price tag of overtime. Staffing our stations is, you know, is paramount. So we do that at our own peril. We are some of our firefighters over the pandemic were working well over 100 hours a week. That's continuously like, we're not going home when we work 48 hours, 72 hours, and we're ready to go home and then we get a call, no, you're staying at work for another 24 hours. That's it was last minute, so we'd have to call our spouse, try to figure out childcare, you name it. So it's a long winded question or answer to your question, but the reality is we as a city have not hired effectively. And now we're short. So now we come to you saying, hey, in an economic economic downturn, when you were $100 million shortfall, we actually need to hire more people. It's counterintuitive to decrease costs. So that's what we've done. And you may have seen that in slides from the fire department. But we need to do more of that. And that's the reality.
156 Thank you.
157 Councilor Novick.
158 So one thing that frustrates me about being in this job now is we have to turn around and approve a budget in a couple of months, and we've only been here for a couple of months. And some of the things you're talking about, I think that all of us here would love to reduce contracting out and save money, but I worry whether we've got enough time to like, you know, dig into the issues and figure out exactly how much we could. How much we could do with changes in the next couple of months. And as you're just saying, stepping up, hiring to reduce overtime will take time. So I'm going to ask a very dangerous question, which is. People are telling us rule out any kind of tax increases. Do you think that there might be room to consider small temporary tax increases to tide us over while we dig into these ways of saving money? That might take some time.
159 Yeah. Councilor Novick, that's a great question. Obviously, you've heard the you've heard the term tax fatigue. I think, you know, you've also heard we also know that Multnomah county is one of the highest tax regions in the country. I certainly think that people are tired of paying, you know, taxes and especially when they're asked to pay more and, you know, but at the end of the at the end of the day, it's our job as firefighters. It's our job as city leaders to articulate the need in order to keep people safe and the cost that comes with that. And so to answer your question, simply yes.
160 Isaac, I have a question for you. Then a follow up to councilor Novick and I'm going to get to you. Councilor Kanal. Where would you suggest that we increase the tax?
161 Well, that's a great that's a great question, madam chair. And, you know, obviously myself, I'm not a tax expert. I'm a firefighter. However, you know, there's different opportunities for I know there's different opportunities for levies and bonds, which are opportunities that could arise if we articulate what those will be used for. And I also know that we're surrounded by fire districts and fire districts operate differently, and that they're not part of a general fund where people's fire protection is at at odds with the same folks we just heard last hour who are trying to provide the firefighters the water we need to do our jobs or to keep our, you know, sanitation clean and keep our streets clean, so on and so forth. Or the work that my labor partners to my left here do. It's all important stuff. And so what we've what we've seen in these fire districts is that it allows for a specific request of, of a group of people or a, you know, a boundary that, that that is not in competition. So that's another option. I certainly know that the previous council was considering something like that, and we've been kicking around the idea. We obviously, as I can speak for myself, I enjoy being a Portland firefighter. I don't have any. But at the end of the day, like, you know, this taxing is a complicated thing. And the mindset of a voter is another one that I don't fully understand, but I'm certainly happy to articulate the need on behalf of myself and our union to, you know, ensure.
162 That you councilor Kanal, I appreciate that.
163 Thank you. A question on a comment. So the question with relation to aggressive hiring for fire specifically, we were told by fire bureau leadership that they can hire 16 firefighters in a class two classes a year. That's right. And that's basically due to the needs of station two and the training division or the unmet needs there. And so I'm curious as to your thoughts on the need for investment into that, which is something I personally have have floated a couple of times here into that facility to enable larger classes to go through to be able to do that and what you think the timeline would be and the impact on when we could start hiring more aggressively if council were to pursue that for the fire bureau specifically?
164 Absolutely. Thank you for that question and comment. Councilor Kanal. I you know, it's been a moving target how many people they've been able to hire over the years. One factor, of course, is the physical location. Like you mentioned. The other factor is span of control. We've we've through previous years budget cuts had to cut folks in training. And when you do that, you limit the number of people we can safely. Our folks at training are excellent professionals, but there's a limit to what their ability is in that span of control. I know at times we've had classes of 20 plus and, you know, it's just you're you're you're cramming into the facilities. And at the time, at that time, you had more people assigned to training. We can certainly divert resources from our front line to training. So the bodies are there, but that's going to create a hole in the front line, which we'll have to staff with overtime. So you can see that would be a cost. So it's kind of a ripple effect. Which one do you want to do first you can hire more faster if you have the proper space which we have. I know we've talked before in previous councils or the commission form of government earlier. And you know, we do need new facilities. Ours are outdated. They're not they're not they're not big enough. And we need to hire we need to restore the training staff we once had so that we can produce, you know, the number of firefighters quicker.
165 Yeah. Thank you for that. I think this is something I'm interested in, in pursuing with my colleagues. Having gone to station two for the one of the swearing ins swearings in, I don't know where the s goes.
166 Swearing in.
167 Yeah. Recently that's of interest to me. The other thing I just wanted to flag is, and this is the comment that the when we say we're understaffed, it's the gap between the staffing levels and the and the need and the need is something, sorry, the staffing levels are objective. We can look at what we have and you can see it, and the need is something that is reflective of perceptions but also of policy. And so I want to understand for each of the bureaus that we're talking about here, what the policy decisions are that we're going to have to make over the next three months to understand what those needs are before starting to develop a plan for how to fill a gap that may be different in size than we are currently anticipating. So just wanted to flag that for colleagues, and then we can pursue that over the next few months.
168 Thank you.
169 Thank you councilor Kanal and quickly, councilor Green, could you answer your question? Ask your question.
170 Yeah, I was just oh, thank you, madam chair, because councilor Novick already opened this up and will draw the attention any however negative on the tax question. I feel like I can talk about it now too. But I think when we talk about public safety, you know, I think most people in this city want public safety. That's what I hear everywhere. But then if you take that out and you're just talking about taxes in isolation, people say, no, I don't want that. And so I'm encouraged to hear us think about thinking about the investment decision. We need to get to a lower overtime level, because that's a big priority. Priority for me. I don't know whether it's fireworks going off in the back of my zoom call, but. It is. We'll remember that. But I think there are prudent uses of temporary taxes, and we have done that before in the history of this city. It we've got a lot of things that are at their stress levels, like in terms of systems. You talked about your members, isaac, not having a day off when they thought they would. And that's devastating. Right. And then you get fatigue and then you get costs that are associated with that. And so whether it's the use of general fund reserves or whether it's use of a very short term time limited surcharge that we might conceive to make an investment to get us to a place where we have more productivity and less cost. That is something that I would encourage that we talk about in our communities, but also on council. And it's extensible across the city as a whole for any bureau. But I'll leave it at that.
171 Thank you. Councilor Green, I appreciate your comments and I appreciate councilor Novick for opening that door because as elected officials and that is something that we don't like to talk about too much in public in regards to, to increased taxes. And just so that you know how this chair is feeling, I think we have enough money in the budget to operate this city effectively without any additional taxes. And I and I do like. The idea of using that beginning fund balance for some of those things that you talked about. Elliot, in regards to health care, because that that fund is real and it is rolled over year after year after year after year. I saw it, it didn't decrease. So for those very important things like health, health care and making sure we get the very best employees, career folks who want to have careers at the city, I think we need to take a look at it. I'm not pronouncing anything, but I'm just saying I heard you loud and clear, miss rebecca. We got ten minutes left, and so I want to be able to take these two calls. I don't know if they're online or if they're here personally.
172 Item three a message. Oh, excuse me. Public comment on labor and workforce development. And our first testifier is jeanette de castro.
173 And before jeanette comes up, laurie, thank you so much. Do you want to wrap up what you said? Because I just got, like, a 30s for you to wrap this up.
174 I think I'm going.
175 To pitch it to rob martino, who had one final comment to make for your record.
176 Okay, perfect.
177 This is going to sound maybe perfect or in line with what you would think a unionist and union leader would say, but human resources needs as an organization enough people to do the job. Ask how long it takes to hire an employee, not I mean, we know it takes 18 months, a year or more with police and fire, but it takes a long time to run recruitments and actually get somebody from filling out an application to their first day on the job. And if we can shorten that time, that throughput is critical to making sure staffing can be handled aggressively or appropriately, you know, succinctly in line with the city's needs. So if they need more staff, they need more staff. I'll I'm advocating for all workers in this case, ask human resources, what are the barriers to getting bodies in the door to do this work?
178 And that may be something that we can do policy wise.
179 I know that at one point, it was taking over nine months to hire a person, one employee, not not backgrounded, not police, fire regular city employee.
180 As a former small business owner, that would not be sustainable for.
181 Me. Here either.
182 So much for having us.
183 Thank you. Thank you all for coming. I really appreciate your comments. I heard all of you loud and clear. Becca, can we call up our testimony?
184 Oh.
185 Jeanette, you can impress the table. Perfect.
186 Thank you.
187 Good afternoon, chair Smith and vice chair Green. Good afternoon. Committee. My name is jeanette de castro. And most importantly, for the record, I'm off the clock right now. I want to share. I've had several roles with PBOT in my seven and a half year tenure, and currently work as an engineering technician, supporting capital improvement contracts. I used to hold one of those hard to fill positions, and that's a different conversation. I support elliott's report. That or information that that working with contracted employees can be tricky, and it is heartbreaking to me that we still have folks who are engineers who are getting layoff notices, and we have contracted engineers, and I'll share that. I am tired, we are tired. Emails are coming in from the city administrator, from the dca, the director. Their goal is transparency and that's noble and appreciated. We get a link to the eap in each email, but right now, the words I'm hearing from fellow pro tech members are disingenuous and brinksmanship and callous. I'm also deeply concerned about worker safety. Pbot has about a thousand employees for now. Of the five person safety team, I've learned that a manager and a risk analyst are also slated for potential layoff. Three three. That is not rightsizing. I ask that you take a serious and holistic look at these challenges. We know the work is there. Fortunately, pencil sharpening is pretty low risk, low exposure. But please consider my colleagues who are up in scissor lifts, repairing structures, working in short excavations, responding to signal outages, flagging in live traffic and projects. These capital projects that are on our high crash corridors, cutting safety and experienced workers does not help morale. And I know you've seen the chart. With the six years cut over cut every year, and it does not bring us better outcomes. I am convinced of that. Thank you all for your time today. I'm sorry. It's a bummer.
188 Thank you. Take care. Thank you. Thank you.
189 Next is Ryan sotomayor.
190 Chair. Smith, vice chair.
191 Green councilors. Appreciate your time today.
192 My name is Ryan sotomayor. I'm a city of Portland employee. I'm on unpaid leave from the city to work for labor's local 43 as a business manager and secretary treasurer. So today I'm here to represent those workers. We have folks at the city of Portland at every level. When we talk about apprenticeship programs, when we talk about training programs, city employee training programs start with Portland parks and recreation that employ people as young as 16, training them for the skills that they need to move into every aspect of every position that we have in the city. I want to talk about the intersections between public safety and parks, and all the bureaus in the city, because when we talk about those things, we're not always talking about it in a holistic way. So I do not envy any of you having to look at the budget as someone who looks at a budget every year and has to make decisions about where priorities are, where needs are, and what we have to do. Appreciate your considered. Look at looking at every level, and you've heard from all of our labor partners and colleagues that contracting out is a problem. You will hear from plenty of the public individually. I know that our members plan to come out to your listening sessions. We appreciate you holding those, both for our members and also for the committee. And everything that we're talking about. Cutting in the city budget right now is things that workers implement, front line workers implement. And so I really hope that as we're looking at the budget and we're talking about span of control and right sizing, that we're looking at that from the ground up. The folks that work in Portland, parks and parks and recreation, the folks that work at PBOT, the folks that work at bts are committed and will continue to be committed and to drive those services. But we need services to continue. We need public services, like some schools, to continue, because if those services go away, not only do we lose members and people in positions at those cities, we lose resources for working people to be able to have a safe place for their children to go. When we look at safe routes to schools and all the different things that PBOT does, when we talk about all these connections and holistic connections, we need to look at it in a new and inventive way. So I appreciate your time, appreciate your consideration. We will be around. So anything that we can do to help you and provide additional information, we're happy to do. Thank you for your time.
193 Thank you.
194 That concludes testimony.
195 Thank you rebecca, I appreciate everybody coming here today. This is so important when we're talking about city government in our communities. I truly do believe that we cannot succeed as a city government without a solid, a skilled and effective workers and workers who are safe. You certainly contribute to our efforts to improve portland's various and extensive workforces. All of you who testified today, and we'll look forward to having you back in a few months. And some of you may get a call from me about further taxing and, and what that would look like. We are not proposing that from this, from this seat at all, but we're just trying to gather information on behalf of the larger council of ideas that we can move forward. But I'd like to say thank you, and I want to keep on time. It's 2:00. I don't know if any of my other colleagues have anything to say quickly, but it's 2:00 and we're on time.
196 Thanks, everybody.
197 Thank you, thank you.
198 Appreciate it.