The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2026-03-03
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (29,997 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
On March 3, 2026, the Portland City Council held a budget work session covering the Community and Economic Development and Public Safety service areas. City Administrator Lee opened by describing the format of upcoming budget work sessions, noting bureaus were asked to present scaled funding scenarios rather than balancing to a single target. The Community and Economic Development presentation covered the service area's bureaus, current service levels, funding sources, and potential impacts of 3% and 10% budget reductions, including permitting fee shortfalls, reserve fund drawdown, and effects on programs such as arts grants, workforce development, and graffiti abatement. Council members asked clarifying questions about performance metrics, reserve fund policy, PCEF staffing, the Prosper Portland relationship, one-time versus ongoing funding, and pass-through arrangements with Multnomah County. The Public Safety presentation covered the Police, Fire, and Emergency Communications bureaus, performance measures including response times and homicide/shooting trends, staffing and training pipelines, fleet conditions, and a $35 million current service level gap, along with potential reduction scenarios. Council members raised questions about fleet replacement funding, violence prevention program funding structures, Portland Street Response data, and requested additional follow-up information. Votes were not addressed in this session; the meeting was recessed with additional service area sessions planned in coming weeks.
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 There we go. Good morning. I'm now calling to order the Tuesday, March 3rd. Already, y'all. Budget work session this morning. We're going to be hearing from both the public safety and the community and economic development service areas. Colleagues, we will have plenty of time built in for q&a. We're going to start by hearing from community and economic development and then move to public safety. But first, I'm going to pass it over to city administrator lee.
1 Thank you. Council president, vice president and councilors. Today is an important time as we start the process of really going through one of the most important policy documents that you will be taking under consideration and deliberating and moving forward with the direction that the city will be heading in the next fiscal year. These work sessions will give you a fairly high level overview of the service area, budgets, and a sense of what the challenges and trade offs are for each of the bureaus and funds within them. These presentations are intended to set a common baseline understanding of how all bureaus operate across all of the city's funds and revenue streams. The service areas will also talk about what types of trade offs the city will face under constrained resources. These are options that the bureaus are bringing forward in response to the mayor's guidance, which directed them to think about different funding scenarios. This is different than what have been done in the past, when the bureaus each balanced a requested budget to a single target number. These presentations are intended to focus on the services that could be impacted, but not get down into the details like specific positions or locations that might be reduced due to service area reductions. Beyond these work sessions, cbo has scheduled some six on six briefings. At the end of March, the mayor and myself will be meeting with each of you to discuss your priorities and how those intersect with the choices and the proposed budget. The council's strategic priority setting will also help direct some of the choices that will be made in result to producing the mayor's proposed budget. Also, as you all discussed last week, there is a very full calendar of upcoming budget meetings, so you will have many opportunities to ask and to get follow up questions addressed. If we do not have an answer available today, we'll follow up with you in the coming days and weeks regarding any additional information. One last thing I want to point out is that the budget office responded to feedback from several of you who asked for consistent grasp for every service area about the source of funding, the number of fte, and the programs that are funded with those dollars. These presentations include those graphs. For the first time, we'll continue to work to improve those. Based on your feedback about what information is helpful or what might be more helpful in the future. As we go through more budget deliberations. Thank you for the time today, and we have a full room of staff from the service areas that are here to address any questions that you may have.
2 Thank you, city administrator colleagues. It's my hope that we can get our teams to get through their presentations. The first one is only 14 slides, the next one is only about 17, and we'll do some time for q&a after that. Colleagues, as we're going through, if you're welcome to stack in the queue here for questions, I'll call when the presentation is done. But otherwise I'd like to welcome deputy city administrator donnie oliveira and team to come up and give us a presentation on the community and economic development service area. Welcome.
3 All right.
4 Thank you, council president. Good morning. Councilors. Donnie oliveira. For the record, I'm the deputy city administrator for the community and economic development service area. And I'm joined by my colleague megan cummings.
5 Hi. Good morning. I'm megan cummings. I'm the finance manager for the service area.
6 All right. So councilors, as city administrator lee outlined, we're going to run through a few slides with you all. If you have any clarifying questions, please ask along the way. But as council president alluded to, will will take your thorough questions afterwards. Next slide please. All right. So today we're going to cover in high level these three few things. First we're going to just overview for the public recalibration. What the community economic development service area is our programs. We're going to discuss the current service levels budgets by bureau. Discuss some of the challenges that we're contemplating as we we think about budget cuts and a recalibration to our csl. And also talk about generally the fund, the service areas funded and how we spend our dollars within that within the bureaus. Next slide please. All right. So let's talk about the overview. So first of all the city's community economic development service area focuses on economic development, housing, climate, culture, art and urban development. It's comprised of the housing bureau Portland permitting, development, planning and sustainability, prosper Portland, the Portland children's levy, and the office of community and economic development, which includes the office of arts and culture and spectator venues. We work to ensure portland's future as resilient, sustainable and prosperous. Much of the work that this service area takes on takes place over decades, and not necessarily days or months. We are simultaneously planning for the future while we provide the tools to implement those plans, and as stewards of voter approved revenues such as the children's levy, the arts tax and PCEF sets the designs programs for portland's future and invest in people. Most of our budget goes directly to small businesses, non-profits, artists, housing providers, and organizations that serve children. Over 70% of budget goes directly to community in the form of grants, loans, or other forms of direct assistance. For example, from last fiscal year, PCEF invested $53 million in clean energy programing through their through their grant programs and direct strategic initiatives. The children's levy invested $27 million in local nonprofits dedicated to after school activities. Arts and culture invested 8 million in Portland, six school districts and charter schools to pay elementary art educators salaries and $1.4 million in small grants to 322 art organizations. And prosper invested $46 million in property redevelopment and 19 million in economic development activities, including small business support and workforce development. So the snapshot there is that while we do a lot of work in planning and policy development, really the heart of the work is getting those dollars out to community to to grow our our prosperity. Next slide please. So what are we looking at in our development of the fiscal year 2627 budget? It looks something like this. Broadly speaking, the slow recovery of pre-pandemic development is really impacting Portland development's budget, although we continue to see permitting levels increase, their lower valuation programs and permits that aren't meeting the demand of cost recovery in the bureau, we see the cycle starting to tick up in some places, which is is promising, but this is not a broader sense of a rebound. And so we continue to look at ways to to balance that bureau's budget. As a reminder, the permitting development budget is largely dependent on fees. It's about 98% at this point. So we are largely reliant on the development cycle for rebound. I also want to acknowledge that giving cuts from previous years, we also have just pnd is not taking a general fund cut. We're taking that off the table because we have gotten to the threshold where any cuts to that of that general fund programing will eliminate programs I think many would consider vital, including our compliance programs, our enforcement programs that are not dependent on permit fees but are reliant on general fund. So we're working with pnd to to recalibrate their structure of the budget. But the bottom line is we're cutting to the bone now for some of those services within that bureau. All right. The other challenge we're facing within the service area is we have limited options within general fund to reach our cut targets. So we're relying on other funds to to meet that that gap. This is also coupled with the fact that we are seeing demand for new programs, policies and projects within the service area. So there's a lot of interest in housing policies, looking at broader land use strategies through our zoning code, even within our building code and enforcement code, all good things, all things we support. So we're constantly struggling with maintaining the mandate of our existing service level, with increased workload of of new projects and concepts. So how we solve for that will be something we look forward to working with you all on at the development of this budget. At the end of the day, though, what we're doing is we're going to leverage other resources, such as federal grants and state grants to to help us bridge that gap, acknowledging that you can appreciate that those resources are unstable and not permanent. We're also prioritizing the frontline staff who are implementers, the the doers, if you will. The folks that are, you know, actually permit reviewing the folks that are out in community, working with, with our constituents to deliver services around housing, working with on our waste programs, working with arts institutions. Those are the staff that we're prioritizing in this budget cycle. And of course, we have staff have a lot of responsibilities maintaining compliance with city, state and local laws, and so ensuring that we have the staff to stay compliant with our regulatory responsibilities is a priority. Also note that in general, when we're speaking about the service area, oftentimes we're we're coupled with this, this tension of money going out the door versus versus staff cuts. And the reality is we often need the staff to help get the money out the door. So there's always this tension about we actually need people to do the work that our communities are asking for. Next slide please. I'll just say on behalf of staff, this was the most difficult slide to prepare for, mainly because I think we had no shortage of different ways to tell the story about how the community and economic development service area measures performance, so we thought we'd just give a couple of snapshots of things that we directly influence and things that we indirectly influence but represent. I think people, what you all and others would show are important factors for the city's health. So first and foremost, our portfolio is wide ranging. So when we talk about performance measures, we're not just talking about outcomes for our communities. We're also talking about outputs and how we're getting those dollars out the door. We balance everything from housing to community economic development, but also arts and culture. We ensure that our permits are getting done quickly and efficiently, but we're also thinking about how we're resourcing communities and development groups to help build housing. So there's a range of things we're contemplating. But for example, just to share a couple, the first one is permit review. Timelines permitting has been a big interest for the city for many years now, and we actually have a really substantial dashboard that's tracking our performance now. And good news is we continue to see improvement and our permit timelines review timelines, which is great. But we know there's more work to be done. And we want to be prepared for when that increase in volume returns to Portland that we're prepared to maintain our return review times as we see that return of volume. That's both procedural efficiency code updates, but also more reliance on software and technology to modernize our services. Another example where we see an uptick in support is through the number of small businesses that we've helped through technical or financial assistance. We're we're highlighting the work from prosper Portland on this particular data point, but we also want to acknowledge that we have resources going out through pcf and through other, other funds that help programs at large. This is just another example where we're investing in our communities and helping our small businesses stay. Stay in Portland and thriving. And then the second set that we shared is a really example of really important indicators for the health of our city that we support, but don't necessarily directly have influence on, for example, percentage of households that have a housing burden, while the Portland housing bureau has resources that provide that. This is obviously a multi jurisdictional data point that we want to work with the county on the state on. Of course, if we get support from the federal government, that would be awesome too. But the reality is, is that there's the housing burden that portlanders experience have several indicators that are impacting that. What we can do is support them directly. But obviously there's broader economic indicators and impacts that we have to solve for. And then another example of that is restoring a vibrant central city, another example of a data point that we can support. But getting foot traffic back into downtown is going to require both private and public investment to see a revitalized downtown. And just to make this point more clear, we look at a lot of different data points within the service area that we're tracking population growth. We're looking at overall health of our economy, looking at overall health of housing development, some things we can directly impact, and some things that we're tracking for the broader set of performance measures for the service area. All right. Next slide please. So this slide is capturing the our expenses by fund. Most of the growths you see on this slide from 2223 to the projected next fiscal year is from is from the Portland clean energy fund. Expenses have remained flat for the other funds which is general fund development services and that that tranche of other. I also want to acknowledge that the other funds category includes spectator venues, activities, tif reimbursements, tax increment financing reimbursements, the children's investment fund, the affordable housing development, solid waste management funds, and there's nine other smaller funds that that make up that that that blue. And I'm colorblind. So I'm just going to say that second tranche from the bottom. Ultimately, what we're looking at here is that the overall fund expenses by by the service area. Next slide please. And this is more granular to general fund specifically. Just want to flag a couple of things. First the the the Portland housing bureau. About 30 million of that was of that fund is the pass through to the county. So that's an outsized portion of the housing bureau's resources. And overall, just about 7% of the sets of budget is general fund. A lot of this includes some one time resources as well, and a lot of excuse me, but just this also includes one time resources that will obviously roll off, such as money going to the graffiti abatement program at a bts. I think that the most important point to flag here is that a lot of dependent on a lot of the work coming out of funds that are not general funds, whether it be the fees from permitting development, relying on on federal dollars for housing, clean energy funds, solid waste fund and our tax et-cetera those make up a significant portion of the service areas funding. So these dollars become more precious because it allows us to put resources into the community that are not restrained by either geography, like tiff, or by restrictions from the fund type. I think the other point to note here is that the general fund dollars, especially within the pruning development, like I mentioned, and the bureau of planning sustainability, offers citywide support for things that may be maybe behind the scenes that are really critical to our city's compliance with state law, whether it be building code or land use code for the state, the housing production strategy requirements that come out of the state are also managed through bts. So those sort of things are funded by general fund. And over the years, as general funds become more more scarce, those programs have taken reductions in a way that have pretty much taken us to the bare minimum to do the mandates. And so it makes it really tight to do new programs on top of that. All right. Next slide please. First that's our fte looks flat but I'll get to the the why that's not accurate. Also in that acknowledging that not on this is that prosper Portland has about 101,000 1104 fte and this adopted budget. Of course, they're not in here because they're technically not a city agency. But nonetheless, the thing I want to flag for you all, though, is although our our fte looks flat over the last few years, the reality is, is that we've had an increase in particular areas of the service area, specifically in pcf and in the the transfer of staff from tree permitting and public infrastructure into ppe. And simultaneously, though, we've been seeing a dramatic cut in ppe and the formerly bureau of development services and why this is material is that that level of development services is what was necessary to run the programs pre-pandemic when we were at the height of our development cycle. So if we have an interest in getting back to that level, that means we're going to probably see a huge gap in staffing capacity to get back to the point where we can be responsive to that, and that's just a challenge we're all going to work together on, like I said, ppe leadership's looking at software and technology to help us bridge that gap, but we are going to be working at a deficit from a staffing capacity to meet the demand of what I expect to be a short return to higher development cycles in the city of Portland. So that's just flagging that as a as a concern. And that's before we even talk about impacts to the next fiscal year. All right. Next slide please. This slide is designed to capture the highest funded program offers within the service area. I think that the key takeaway here that I'd offer is six of the ten are non-general fund sources. So that's the clean energy fund children's levy ppe and spectator facilities, city arts program, waste recycling and waste reduction, recycling and the for housing bureau items that are up. There are largely a mix of grants and igas and federal dollars. There is some general fund in the housing items. I think there are a couple just notes just for your recognition and the public's awareness. The spectator venue program had a high increase from 2324 to 2425 due to the veterans memorial coliseum renovation. So that was an uptick there from 8 million to 42 million. And within the housing bureau programs, there was a consolidation, as directed by the former government, to go from 17 program offers to seven. And that's just a housekeeping element. I just want to flag that that that changed the dynamic of the housing bureau. All right. Next slide please. Regarding sets of revenues. Once again, this is just a snapshot of a beginning fund balance and the ways we collect resources. You see there the list of other revenues that are collected for example, like permitting fees, spectator venue charges, igas. The recreational cannabis fund is is captured in other. And then we obviously talks about the taxes we collect like the clean energy fund surcharge, children's levy, short term rentals and the arts tax. The beginning fund balance, of course, is is largely coming from housing and bts for cf, but there is also some some grants in there as well. And next slide please. So how are we going to capture the gaps in our current service level. So as I mentioned the the thing that's mostly on our mind right now is, is permitting development. Right now with declining revenues, our cost recovery is not meeting the need for the staffing operations to the tune of about 6.2 million. And this is both a balance of 2.9 million associated with the tree program and the tree pruning program that came from urban forestry. And the remainder is just divisions within the bureau. Right now, we are reliant on the the reserve fund to to get to 100% cost recovery within the service area or within the bureau. And again, I can't stress this enough. It's it's not that staff don't have workload. In fact, their workload has remained pretty consistent. It's just that the permit types are smaller permits. So we're seeing more tenant improvements and alterations and not a lot of development. And so what that means is the the permit numbers look high, but the the density of the work and the value of the work is low. So we're not seeing that the ability for the divisions to make make their cost recovery numbers work. So because of that, we're relying on a reserve that has dwindled down to about 13 million. I imagine it'll be closer to 11 million by the end of the fiscal, which means that we'll be almost at based on their current burn rate. It could get down to zero in the next year and a half or so. That would obviously be very problematic. So the types of interventions that one would contemplate, if we're thinking about maintaining service level as it is today in the service or excuse me, in the bureau, would be increasing fees, obviously fte reduction. We would look at maybe some other support from the state. We could look at additional resources if they're available as a one time allocation. Of course, relying on the service, the service, the bureau's reserve policy, none of these are ideal. The perfect solution would be an increase in development to get back to 100% cost recovery. I'll just note that on top of the 170 positions that we've seen reduced, the next range of cuts are starting to cut into core programs that we would say we can't do the permit reviews. If we lose staff, we're at that point and there's no there's no fat in pd to cut. These are these are core services that would be impacted. So we have work to do there. Then a couple other areas just for situational awareness. If you recall last year we replaced $2 million $2.1 million of ongoing general fund and prosper with one time that will obviously sunset. That money is historically gone to workforce programs. We can look at trade offs with other grant programs, but that is a material impact to prosper's program. And then also about $2.2 million in planning sustainability, half of which goes to the graffiti removal program. That's one time resources. And then the more material impact would be 1.2 million in the planning, climate and community technology areas. So think about the staff that are working on our policies and plans related to our our land use. Obviously, our energy and building programs and our community technology services. Next slide please. And this is just another way to look at those cuts. So I just want to note that if we this is this is on top of the $4 million service level gap that we have. So as the mayor's guidance outlines, the bureau's produced two scenarios 3% cuts and 10% cuts. This is just the numbers for a snapshot. Next slide please. And that's what this and what that would really look like from an impact is something of this sort. What we're talking about in planning and sustainability is is largest reductions to existing programs. Again, this is a death by paper cut kind of type of model where we continue to see these cuts in these same programs year over year. So it's not about things going away per se. It's just doing less or not having the capacity to do more in the housing bureau, the reductions and and data analysis would, could potentially be realigned with non-general fund resources to, to float those positions. As we alluded to, the prosper Portland cuts would focus would be focused on workforce and small business programs. As a reminder, a significant portion of general fund that goes to prosper is for small business and workforce programs, because a large percentage of their other resources, like tif, are restricted. And then in office of arts and culture, we would largely see reductions to our our arts grants and event sponsorships and event sponsorships that I would argue are cultural beacons for our neighborhoods. Things like the festival that just happened recently is on top of mind. Those are the types of things that arts and culture invest in. All right. And I believe that's the last slide we have. Is that right? Yeah.
7 Excellent. All right colleagues, please go ahead and line up in the queue if anybody has any questions. Thank you for the presentation. We're gonna start with councilor Kanal.
8 Thank you council president. Thank you dca oliveira. Thank you megan, for being here. So I'm going to start with some clarifying questions and starts with slide five. And I just wanted to understand the third metric, the first the second category there is that Portland specific or nationwide. And for the second metric what happened in September to December, you have stats from the first eight months and from of last year and January of this year, but there's a four month gap there.
9 Julie, can we go back to the third slide? Thank you. The first number is a Portland number to answer your question. And I'm going to ask somebody from my team to come describe why that that that number is like that okay.
10 While they're coming up I'll just know I would love to see you frame the second metric in the way you framed the first. What I mean by that is the first measure talks about whether or not people got their permits on time. It's a this is an outcome versus output situation. Whereas helping small businesses thrive has to do with what staff did as opposed to what the effect of that was. So I would love to know how many small businesses stayed in business. How many did we did we lose fewer than we lost before? Just that, that next step in the process? What was the impact of it? And I have another big picture, one that's on a different slide while we wait for someone to come up. I don't want to take up too much time here, but it's about slide ten and it's why is beginning fund balance such a large source of revenue for sets, when you don't see that in some of the other service areas.
11 It's largely PCEF. Okay. Yeah. So because we because the fund has been collecting revenue over time and we have a five year climate investment plan, the fund is budgeted for transparency. So you can see it even though we know it's going to be spent in out years. Okay.
12 I'll just let you follow up on the the previous one in writing. But for slide 11, can you explain what contemplate $2.1 million in ongoing funds to replace one time funding loss. It's the top of prosper Portland. Can you can you give us a little more on that?
13 Yeah. Thanks for the question, councilor. So if you recall, in last year's budget, there was $2.1 million from ongoing funds that would typically would be going to prosper Portland. That was replaced with one time funds. Yes. And largely in the budget note was we'd have to contemplate reconsidering restoring that or not. And that's the contemplation. Is that was that a cut that would become a cut, obviously. Or will council consider reestablishing that 2.1 back to the budget?
14 Okay. And where did that contemplation include the 50 million, which I know is a little less now dollars sitting in the strategic investment fund?
15 No. At that point, it was just a switch of general fund to one time. Okay. Last year.
16 I just note that when we talk about this 16 million, I think that's going there. There is $40 million as of last year, sitting in a fund that everybody should know about that at prosper called the strategic investment fund. Last question and this is kind of several slides have what what is the status of the conversation that I know has been brought up in the past for permitting around instituting a if we don't get a reason to deny an x number of days, it's just automatically approved. That's been discussed a few times as a way of reducing the administrative burden and wait time. I understand the wait time has had massive improvements, so I want to just contextualize with that. And I appreciate the good news as well. But I just wanted to know if that conversation had progressed last year. It came up a few times in these exact work sessions.
17 Councilor great question there. There are codes in there are codes that we have in our system that aren't just because we like them, that they're sometimes life and safety requirements. So sometimes reviews just take a little longer and maybe it's q I don't want to make excuses for or make give examples there, but it's not as simple as us waiving a review. In some cases, they still have to occur for, for for legal reasons. But I think to answer your question, are there places where we can improve that response time? Yes. And I know director couch is is looking at those second and third reviews cycles that we're in and how to, to increase our efficiency there. But it's not going to be as simple as us just waving a review if we don't hit a mark.
18 Yeah, I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. I just wanted to know what the status of the conversation was. And if you came back and said literally everything we have is required by law. And so there's no way for us to say it's it's too complex for us to or too much time. So we're going to let it go after 30, 90, whatever days. I would accept that answer. I just want to know that that's been explored.
19 Yes, yes. Thank you.
20 Thank you, council president.
21 Thank you. Councilor Kanal counselor Zimmerman.
22 Thanks. I'm also starting on slide five. And so the first metric there about meeting our goals, 95, 94% of the time, I guess I sorry. That's okay. I'm just it's also our lowest permits in I don't know how many years that we saw for multifamily. I guess should I expect that we'd be hitting well above, you know, or we should be in the a category, which it sounds like we are, but yeah, we also didn't have a lot come in for multifamily development this year.
23 That's one type. Yeah. Thanks for the question, councilor Chance, for me to just represent the bureau here, because I hear this a lot. I'm guilty of saying asking those same questions. Those multifamily permits aren't coming in, but there are a lot of permits coming in on people trying to improve their bathrooms. Do adus. So the volume of permits are still up.
24 Okay.
25 So the overall number, you really won't see a change. Just if you just look at the number, the data. But if you start to like we do with housing, right. If we look at total housing permits, okay, that's still very low. But we're seeing promising numbers. Yeah. But it's really only in single family housing.
26 Got it. Which are not really an indicator of economic health. The way that development of multifamily isn't. It's an economic indicator. And that's why we care about that stat.
27 Correct. And that's.
28 Why staff stays busy is what you're trying to convey here.
29 Staff stays busy. But the value of the in our fees are derived from the value of the projects. The project valuations are just much, much lower. We're not seeing those larger multifamily projects or institutional investments.
30 Great. Thanks for clarifying that. That actually gets me to my my my next question. And it was on slide 11. You talked about the reserve is down to 13 million. Could be to zero in the coming year. So the way you describe that, it sounds like you have been tapping into the reserve. Is it more appropriate that we think of this as this is the service areas contingency fund for those employees? Because I would have expected that we would have come back. If we're going to reauthorize tapping a reserve, we would have been coming back. So is this actually you tapping into the contingency and moving from there? And I know that this body is going through a language growth moment between reserves and contingencies. But I just want to get a clarification for what you mean here.
31 Thanks for the question. Councilor. So bts now permitting development. They budget based on their forecasted revenues for the next year in years where their revenues outpace their costs. All those resources roll into a reserve fund. At one point it got as high as over $80 million. And that is there for literally moments like we're in right now. So in the event that we have years where our revenues don't catch our operating costs, we tap into the reserve, and that balances out the budget. Over the last few years, we've become reliant on that resource, drawing it down from its peak in the in the mid teens to where it's at today to ensure that we have the staff capacity to do the work. To to meet the need that we're still experiencing, even if those permit valuations there. So to answer your question, it's not a reserve policy and there is a reserve policy on the books for that fund. Just so just so you know, it's probably a little outdated. We have to update that. But it's designed for the permit review side of of bpnd.
32 Okay. I just highlight this for mr. City administrator. I think this is one of those areas where we need to spend a little bit of time in this budget season, talking about how we will tap into reserves and contingencies, and that from my seat and from my years of doing this, I don't generally see it be an automatic thing. So I would just highlight this. And this is one of those important moments. And just for, you know, this idea that we have we have folks who their fte count is reliant on permit fees that come in. And so there is this direct connection. But we also I think we have some room for some transparency in how we use those funds, because I appreciate it, mr. Olivera and her, in terms of how you explained it, it's helpful. So. On slide seven, the first bullet point is about $30 million to fb is county pass through. Can you just articulate for what.
33 That's the that's the iga that goes to the former joint office and now the hds.
34 Yep. Okay. So I just that is pass through for what we asked the county to do. And it relates to the homelessness response action plan.
35 And councilor. There is an action proposed that would move those resources into Portland solutions. So fb would no longer be accounting for those dollars.
36 Yeah, I bring it up because that's what I thought it was. And in a time when I'm reading articles about the county stopping what I thought we were paying them to do, which is their sheltering, this is a concern. So if there is a move to bring it back into the city, since we're going to have to pick up that part of the mission. Thanks for highlighting. Like we have a $30 million pass through to the county that is up for discussion. My next question is the next slide number eight. And I think maybe this goes a little bit with your preamble before you started in. But. 55 PCEF employees. Is that how I'm reading this? Yeah. So. I guess I am feeling a little bit lost here in terms of what they do, because I kind of thought that this was a put money out into the community program. Not these were not the folks who were installing the solar panels, so to speak. So if I'm applying kind of the nonprofit standard, what would be our admin cost here? And. I hope that when we get into it, we can have a discussion about what 55 employees do for what sounds like a funding foundation to me.
37 Yeah. So thanks for the question, councilor. So as a reminder, for the public in general, there's an admin cap on piece of uses for the city. So we have that cap that's in place. The 55 staff and PCEF are really capturing several strands of work that since the program's evolved, it's not just a grant program, although there's a lot of work that goes towards that. There's the other strategic initiatives, some of which are in contracts that are managed out of at a bts, some are managed by other bureaus. I'll just also offer that the the scrutiny that that fund has requires a lot of finance and accounting staff to support and ensure that we're all the information coming in from grantees is accurate, because we know we're going to get audited. There's no there's going to be performance audits that that requires staff capacity. And I'll just say from a program that has grown very quickly, you know, this is the staff capacity is based on the demand. We've been building it as the need has come in. It's not like we we hired 50 staff and then we created the programs. This has been responsive to the demand that the programs had put on it. And certainly as we're doing realignment, we're looking at things that that number may may tweak a little bit down. But I can tell you from a programmatic perspective, this is the demand that the the fund has generated for that bureau.
38 Okay. So do they produce a kind of like a report on the outcome of every grant? If they're the monitoring body.
39 We have a dashboard that's captured at a high level. And we can certainly get back to you all about how we're reporting out as grants are closed.
40 Okay. Thanks. And then I am. Quick statement of like, I'm seeing you. You talk about the graffiti here. One of the big questions I've had for quite a while is don't exactly get why graffiti is in bts from a. Here are your planners. I don't want to go into it now because I want to get to my last question, but maybe we can talk about that later. You highlighted the office of arts and culture and reduction of arts grants and event sponsorship. But that's in the shadow of reporting. Last week, about 9 million unbudgeted dollars from the arts fund. And I'm feeling like we're in one of those moments again, where one half of the story doesn't match the other half. And I need a little clarification there, because it's hard for me to take that bullet point seriously when it sounds like there's a $9 million bag of money somewhere around. So what's going on in that?
41 Thanks for the chance to clarify that. So that cut represents the general fund. Cut to that that program. That's not to say the whole program is cut. And there's not to say there's other resource supporting grants. That is it's almost a way for us to tell this, tell you all this would be a scenario that that you all will contemplate. The mayor will contemplate in his proposed about how that office will meet its directed 3 or 10% cut. Does that mean that the program is going to go away? No. Does that mean there's not other revenues, such as the reserve that was was shared publicly recently through the press? Sure. That's a possibility. We're not contemplating that at this particular moment. We're just sharing if that if that bureau or that office were to take a 10% cut to general fund it, result in reduction in grants. Okay.
42 Thanks. I just want to say, if this is the start of our budget conversations, I think this is a great start. I appreciate it is hard to cover so many programs from a service area perspective, but I think that this is a good stage setter, so to speak, and something that in the way that we did it last year, where committees were the main audience, this is welcome. So just appreciate everybody who contributed to this. You you let your dca come up here and be successful. So thank you to those in the background I know you put work into it. Thank you.
43 Thank you, councilor Zimmerman, counselor Smith.
44 Thank you.
45 Counselor Smith. Are you still there? We heard you say thank you and then disappeared.
46 Council president.
47 Yeah. While we were waiting for counselor Smith, could you answer the question earlier from councilor Kanal?
48 Certainly. Good morning. Shabrie vickers. For the record, I believe I have the information and if I don't have it fully, I can certainly get that for you. So downtowns downtown portland's pedestrian activity has entered a sustained recovery phase. Overall, however, total foot traffic has not yet returned to pre-pandemic 2019 levels, so the data does show consistent year over year growth, particularly on weekends and among visitors. Approximately 32 million pedestrians visited the downtown Portland clean and safe district in 25 2025. Excuse me, up from about 30,000,000 in 2024, about a 5.5 to 5.6% increase. The momentum is sustained. About 18 out of the past 20 months saw year over year growth, and in 25, 11 of the 12 months recorded higher foot traffic than the same months in 24. So it's a significant improvement from 2020 for seven consecutive months of growth. This pattern driven is again primarily by visitors weekend activity and strong turnout during cultural events holidays, which obviously underscores that downtown's recovery is durable and not necessarily just episodic. But you were asking about a few different months in there and a variance. And so this data comes from placer ai. And so we can, of course, gather more insight to determine about those last four months of 2025. The last four months, I think, is what you were specifically asking. Yeah.
49 I'll follow up on the ai part of that. That's interesting. But the yeah, just in notes January through August and then it picks back up in January 2026. So I was curious about that four month period particularly, but I'm happy to follow up later.
50 Okay. Sounds good. Thanks.
51 Thank you. Councilor Smith. Are you.
52 Thank you.
53 Unfortunately, we're still not hearing you, councilor Smith.
54 To maybe double muted she.
55 Yes indeed might be. Councilor Smith will come back to you in just a second councilor Green.
56 Thank you mr. President. Thanks for the being the first in these series of difficult conversations because we are we're going into a pretty grim budget outlook. So I appreciate the presentation, donnie. I think just I'm I'm understanding the slides. This is all making sense to me. I think I just want to offer a couple comments. I think what you're doing and this gets to councilor Kernels question, you know, beginning your fund, your balance as part of the program. Budgeting is an effort to make sure that everything is accounted for. But I think that while slide seven kind of makes the note that some of some of some money is passed through for fb, I think it might also be useful as we get into this conversation a little further down the road to distinguish, even if it's just a bullet point, what parts of the beginning fund balance or either pass through. Because I know some of it is. A lot of it's actually passed through via prosper Portland tif monies. But then also, you know, PCEF, you know, there's a five year plan there. We want to make sure that we're not confused, that that beginning fund balance is not something also that we can just allocate away, especially for the public looking on. So that's just a sort of a suggestion and presentation. Do you want to make a note here on. Let's see what slide is it. Oh yes. Slide five. You know there's been a lot recently the metro chamber presented the state of the economy presentation breakfast. And I want to say maybe the second highest priority or risk was was affordability. That was kind of the thing that everyone agreed is a major challenge. Or doctor mike wilkerson agreed was a major challenge in our next, frankly, the decade ahead of us. It's very alarming to see that. And I know we have indirect control over this, but hopefully we can have more direct control over this that the the share of of rent burden renters increased from 47 to 53%. That's a significant increase in income burden. So when we talk about affordability, I want us to make sure we're thinking about not just people who are exposed to the top marginal tax rate in this community, but frankly, the half of portlanders who who struggle under the burden of rent increases and also the suite of of cost of living pressures, because that's going to continue to be a drag, I think, on our economic growth. So thanks for for flagging that there. But I just needed to elevate that piece for for everyone else looking on. I'm glad that councilor Kanal asked the question about the 2.1 million of of contemplated. I think we're starting to see a little bit of a sneak preview of what we might find in the mayor's proposed, or what's happening behind the scenes. I'm a little concerned that we might propose trans filling that csl gap with ongoing of 2.1 million to prosper, if I've read that correctly, because I think what I don't want to do is cut into the administrative capacity that we have in the city to do things that are. Sort of thoroughgoing structural changes to then kind of make some grant making whole. And I say that just because I think, I think a lot of the things that are going to allow us to get some, some wind in our sails are going to make sure that we're not cutting down the capacity for planning staff to move very fast on zoning and code changes. We've got a number of issues, like there's just the I keep talking about the inner east side for all, but that takes planning staff to do that kind of work. And I think that we've still got a significant amount of work that we can do to level up our ability to to move quickly in, in unlocking private sector activity. But that takes planning staff. And so I'm worried that we will cut down into that area to keep sort of one shot grants, grants whole when I think that would be the wrong direction. And then finally the graffiti removal again. So when I think about the next budget, I'm going to be thinking about in terms of are we are we investing in capacity or are we spending money on an annual basis that is just exhausted? And so graffiti removal is another one of those categories where it's like we spend it. You might you might remove some graffiti and paint over it, and then it's just right back up there. And that continues to be a cost. And in that specific line item in baps, I think that there was fy 24, 25 allocations that were then carried forward into the into the current fiscal year as an encumbrance carryover. And I don't think I don't know that we've spent that either yet. And so if we're going to continue to think about keeping that as a budgeted priority, I don't want us to continue to just roll forward this graffiti program that is extremely costly when we're when we're getting rid of staff who have who have very scarce skill sets. So just a couple high level notes and then, you know, just have to just have to reinforce this point. We're increasingly talking about the strategic investment fund. I'm not the only one talking about it anymore. Me and councilor Dunphy, I think talked a lot about it last time, but now councilor Kanal is talking about it. The response I've gotten for prosper Portland is that, well, all of that money is allocated like there's there's already a good use for all that money. If we're going to talk about the siff in those terms, we need to talk about the fund in those terms too. So I know that there's there's contemplations for large new allocations of that fund that were that are going to come at the expense of things that were already allocated. And so let's keep that in mind as we go into this budget and then make ad hoc mid-year budget adjustments. I think that's all I have. Thanks.
57 Thank you, councilor Green. Councilor Smith, try again.
58 Can you hear me?
59 We can hear you.
60 Thank you. Thank you so much, dca oliveira for the presentation. And I couldn't see it, but I wanted to find out how did the shared housing pilot work this fiscal year. And if you're planning to put it back in the budget for 2627.
61 Councilor, I'm sorry I didn't catch the part of that question. How did the what.
62 Shared housing pilot.
63 Oh, yeah.
64 Are you familiar with.
65 Yeah, yeah. Thank you for the question. Councilor councilor. We just we just launched that last week.
66 Okay. And so I'm sorry, I didn't see it in the press. Are you planning to put that in the budget for this coming year.
67 I think great question. Councilor. The the hope would be to, to use the dollars that were allocated by council this fiscal year to see that program program through, which is, you know, ideally through the end of the calendar year.
68 Yeah. And so that those are some of the encumbrances that I think confused council when you don't use the money, when you when you say you're going to use it, and then your expectation is to bring it over to continue it. And that's, that's not a way to, to do business. Me and my staff have gone to Oregon budget law trainings this past couple of months, and there is an expectation that budgets are given to us that have the previous two fiscal years. Are you going to give us a budget that showed us what was paid for in the previous two fiscal years?
69 We'll have ruth come up and address that. That question. Councilor.
70 Aye, Morillo ruth levine, for the record, budget director, our our adopted budget book does include prior year budget data in it. I think to I think maybe what you're asking about is the sort of carryover potential carryover amount from the shared housing pilot that was funded in the current fiscal year with one time dollars. I, I, I think certainly it would have to be included if that were to be funded for next year, it would have to be included in in the adopted budget for 2627. And I think to your broader question around carryover, we can talk about this more as we get into the spring time conversation on Thursday. But because of our deficit situation in the current year, the carryover, we don't have the funding available in the current year. And so it would it would sort of be treated as a an addition in the, in the budget, in the proposed budget. And then if council adopts it in the adopted budget, does that help answer your question?
71 Yeah, I understand that. And I'm on my way in. The problem that I have with this, we can't do an effective assessment on how the money should be spent. If bureaus wait seven months to implement a program. And then they hold up the budget by using money that they had previously putting it back into the budget again.
72 We will evaluate that council and follow back up with you.
73 Thank you. Administrator lee. I was trying to figure out how do we defend against that? Because if every program is going to, then we're just going to be rolling over the same money.
74 I hear you, and we'll take a look at as we have these type of programs coming up in the future of giving council, kind of a timeline of what we're looking at as we look at the thought process that goes into the development of that pilot program, the implementation of that, that evaluation period. Then in that report back to council, of the outcomes that we've seen come out of those pilot programs. So we'll be more transparent related to those timelines that we'll be rolling out for these type of programs and initiatives.
75 Yeah. And as committee member of two of these committees, I'm going to be asking all the committee members if they have any pilot projects in their in their budgets this year, have they used the money and are they planning to put that money and have it requested for the next year? Thank you.
76 Thank you, councilor Smith. Councilor Novick. You are still on mute.
77 Sorry about that. There you go. I have three observations suggestions that folks can respond to if they feel like it, and then one leading question, one pure observation is that, like councilor Zimmermann, I was surprised to learn that PCEF had 55 employees and didn't realize that. However, when I think about it, having 55 employees to manage a budget of 200 million a year sounds actually rather low. On the permitting speed and the permitting budget deficit. I recall that a couple of years ago, the chamber was saying that they had a lot of developers who were prepared to pay higher fees if you could simply speed up permitting. And so I'm kind of wondering, given that we have speeded up permitting and I've heard that not just from the bureau, but from folks in the business community, maybe people would, you know, wouldn't be too resistant to a fee increase to maintain that high level of service. Let's see. Hang on. Let me check my what else was I going to say? Oh, here's my leading question. Is it true that since land use is a law bound, rule bound process and we get and which can result in getting sued if we keep on cutting the number of planning staff, does that raise the risk that we'll make mistakes that result in our getting sued and forced to do things over again so that that, you know, with with the continued amount of having no money. And then finally, on councilor Kanal question about small the survival of small business that received prosper funds, what I was wondering is, I mean, obviously small businesses fail all the time. I was wondering if you could do a metric where over a three year period, you look at the overall survival rate of small businesses and then compare it to the survival rate of small businesses that have received prosper funding. That seems to me to be the the appropriate metric if we had the information. So let's return to my one actual leading question is what I said about the danger of reducing personnel and land use reasonable fear.
78 Thanks for the question, councilor. I'm going to invite director engstrom up to to tackle that one.
79 Thank you, counselor. For the record, this is Eric engstrom. I'm the director of the bureau of planning and sustainability. With our land use planning, it is true that that that's a very legally intensive line of work. We write a lot of findings of fact with the help of the city attorney, with all of our projects, that's a significant share of the workload. With reduced staff and budget, we will still strive to produce projects that are legally defensible, defensible. I think it the more likely outcome is, is, yeah, there's that risk, but we would probably end up just doing fewer projects as a result of that to manage that risk rather than spreading the staff thinner.
80 Yeah. Councilor and I alluded to this earlier and I'll just I'll just restate it just because eric's more diplomatic, the real impact isn't that we're not going to be hitting our mandates. It's that when we have new concepts, whether they're generated by council, our communities, our ability to be responsive to those is just is not going to be as quick. And and I really want to stress this oftentimes the, the, the excellence of the planning bureau's land use groups are that they write such quality policies that are defensible in courts because they take the time they do the additional outreach, engagement, stakeholder inputs. And that just takes staff capacity. And we want to do that. Well, we don't want to, you know, fast track anything because we know how important these policies are. So that's really the the loss isn't necessarily the mandate work. It's the the new ideas that we're contemplating that won't get done as quickly.
81 That makes sense. Thank you.
82 Thank you. Councilor Novick councilor Ryan.
83 Yes, thank you, council president. And hello, colleagues. Good to see you. Pardon the look I got in after midnight from a 16 hour journey. Anyway, first of all, thank you, councilor Oliveira. That was a very well done report. I want to acknowledge the time you and your team put into it. And thank you to all the employees in your practice area. You're all adapting to very challenging times. I'm going to start with the small business services. I know it's come up a few times at prosper Portland. It's obviously because we're listening to our constituents and also because the support we have to keep moving forward on the storefront program. This has a dot connection. Clearly. I think what I would like to know, and you don't have to answer this today, is break down who we're serving. There's an assumption out there that many of the that businesses were serving our new businesses. And what I hear over and over again from those who have historically been in service for sometimes decades, there are many of them are struggling, and I think some of them feel left out. So I'm just going on a hunch from listening to constituents. So I'd like to see a breakdown on who in fact were serving. Is it predominantly new businesses, or is it actually those who have been in business for some time and not having a measurement on that? I also thought councilor Novick question in framing was also very important, so I don't need a response to that right now. I don't expect it, but I hope and further sessions I can get information on that that make sense.
84 It does. Councilor thank you.
85 Okay. Number two, you mentioned big picture overall framing 70% of the investments go out the door out to the community. And I think that sounds good. It's an output. I think what I want to hear more of on that is what is our focus strategy outcomes we expect. For example, are there three big key areas that we hope this 70% is all in collective impact type focus on. And and then we can see what kind of outcomes we're getting from that 70% of those investments that are going out to the community, as opposed to spraying and praying, a bunch of investments out there and hoping that we're getting the outcomes that we would like to see from those investments. So I'm kind of giving an extreme case there just to make the point that it would be helpful in upcoming sessions if I could hear a little bit more about that. Is that fair framing in question?
86 Absolutely. Councilor can do.
87 All right. Thank you. The third one is it's been mentioned now a couple of times. Graffiti abatement tends to get a lot of response from elected officials. I think my question is this. And I understand the old form of government, there were programs put in bureaus that kind of would scratch your head about sometimes based on circumstances that I don't need to go into. But I think with this one, it's more of a geeky organizational development moment that I'm having, which I tend to have, and that is why is it in planning and sustainability and not in Portland solutions?
88 Great question, councilor, because.
89 I hope, I hope. Oh, you want to okay.
90 It's been asked twice now. So if I may just offer this up this goes back. This is pre charter reform. The graffiti program is actually in civic life. And yeah. Yeah. And so what happened was there's actually quite a bit of similarities between how the graffiti program is run and our solid waste program. And because our solid waste program is is quite effective both at managing grants, doing community engagement volunteer programs, there was actually a logical management oversight element to to bring graffiti actually is nestled within solid waste at bts. So that's the way it's trued up, right. And then of course we partner with pema, which is in Portland solutions on sort of the air traffic control. But really bts work is functioning and helping get volunteer programs, the cleanup programs out that way, and also resourcing where there's need in the community. It largely functions as a sort of like a contract management team coordinating amongst all the bureaus, like convening all the bureaus and the state to do that. So there is method to the madness from how it's nestled in waste within bts. But yes, there is there another place where it might live in the future, like Portland solutions. That's a real contemplation.
91 That was very helpful.
92 And if it's not broken, you don't need to fix it in terms of productivity. Hey, just want to. We've had some chatter on the percentage of employees, for example, at PCEF and I think Portland, we should look at Portland children's levy. They have a mandated 5% admin, which is actually very low in philanthropic and nonprofit standards. I'd say the sweet spot is usually 12 to 18% in admin, so I just offer that as something I've known for decades in my career that I came from before this. Thanks.
93 Thank you. Councilor Ryan councilor Pirtle-guiney.
94 Thank you, council president. Just a couple of questions and thank you, donny, to you and your team for putting together this overview for us. I want to dig a little bit deeper on the pmd reserves. You said that there's 13 million left in the reserve bucket. Is that accurate?
95 I'm going to ask you to give me the exact number because I said that just off the cuff, but it's it's in that range. But yes. So let's she'll get the number and we can okay.
96 As of today it's 12 million or excuse me, 11 million. And we're projecting about 7.1 by the end of the year and will true up some of that in the spring. Tao as well.
97 Okay. How much has been spent out of the reserves this year?
98 6.4 million.
99 Okay. And how many staff were laid off this year? Did that save everybody or did we have layoffs as well?
100 It has. This fiscal year, it's largely been an issue of hiring freezes and attrition. So after the budget settled there were a few layoffs. And I can see if kyle can come up and answer the specific number after the budget. But where we're at today is largely when people, whether they retire in their job, whatever it is, we're just we're rarely hiring except for critical positions.
101 Okay.
102 Hi, everyone. For the record, my name is kyle o'brien, the finance manager at pmd. We had actually, I think, five filled positions that were laid off on August 1st. The rest of the positions that were eliminated in the budget were vacant.
103 Okay, so we're looking at a bureau that's had five layoffs since 6.4 million out of reserves so far this year, and we're expecting another 3 to 4 million in spend by the end of the fiscal year. 7 million will be left in reserves. Our revenues picking up at all at this point. And what I'm getting to is it sounds like there will be a $3 million hole if we rely just on reserves at the level that we have this year, going into next year, unless revenues pick up or we have additional layoffs. And I want to make sure that that's accurate.
104 Councilor it's it's risky business trying to guess which projects are actually going to pull their permits. I can tell you that what we're seeing in the system right now, we are seeing institutional investment projects like our school districts and universities contemplating larger scale projects, which would be substantial. We can't guarantee when they're going to actually pull their permits and come in to to pay those. And then, as you saw maybe, perhaps as you read it on Friday night, I sent over an update on the sdc exemption. And just from an enrollment perspective, we're seeing an uptick in apartment level investments, which is developments, which is really exciting. But again, those aren't real until those those permits are issued, I would say we there is a future where we have an increase in development. Is it in 2627? That's harder to pinpoint, but we do know that there's projects coming in that could alleviate some of that burden on the reserve.
105 So if those don't come in, we are looking at being about 3 million short in reserves for what we need without layoffs. But some of those projects you're talking about may come in and offset that for us.
106 Yes.
107 Yeah. I think one thing to point out is that our revenue is seasonal, and we're kind of at the tail end of our down period. February would be our one of our lower months. And then as we head into the spring, we typically have higher revenue months. So it's not quite as simple as just a straight line projecting the the reserve draw forward. And as donnie mentioned, we have some school bond projects coming in three high schools. The combined valuation, we don't know the actual valuation, what that will be, but it's, you know, close to $1 billion. And those three projects over coming in over a 2 to 3 year period in terms of when the the fees are paid is worth 25 to $30 million in a substantial workload as well to the bureau.
108 Okay. Thank you. You said on one of the slides I'm moving away from pad. So I think I think we're good. Thank you so much, donnie. You said on one of the slides that you were prioritizing frontline staff. Yeah, we are early in the process. I am sure you have conversations with your own teams to have about what that means. You're prioritizing. But I never like to be told. Here's what we're prioritizing without understanding what that leaves. What does that mean as a service area? You're deprioritizing is it grants? Is it some of the staff who provide support services? What does that look like?
109 Yeah, thanks for the question. And for not all bureaus are the same. So for example, when we're talking about ppe and it's they're they're resources are largely staff. When we're looking at other bureaus that have ems dollars that go out the door, what we're saying is we're looking at programs that if we cut those programs, if we cut those staff, will we even be able to run a program? We have all the ems, but if there's no staff to implement. And so largely we're saying we need to keep the staff in the seats so that they can actually do the work that you all expect and our communities expect. So it's bureau by bureau. It's a little bit different, but we're really just saying that we're trying to focus on the people that are doing the core services of our of our service area.
110 Okay. Thank you. I'll push a little more on that as we get later into the year. On slide six, going back a little bit from where you are, the pcf bucket increases substantially. That purple chunk of the the bar there in years 2526 adopted budget and then 2627 csl. Is that pcf grant funding that will be going out the door, or is that pcf funded city services and actual city employees being accounted for there?
111 Okay. What you're seeing in fy 2526 is the adopted budget, and that is different than actuals. So we would expect at the end of the year this would be slightly less understood.
112 But that's there's a huge increase from the first three bars looking at 2223 and 2324 compared to 2526 and 2627. So what I'm trying to understand is whether that's showing that there's been an influx in collected pcf dollars that we're showing, which are going to be going out the door in grants, or whether that's showing that there's been a significant increase in pcf funded staff within bureaus within the service area.
113 What you're saying is an increase in the spend in other bureaus within the city in earnest, that that began last year. But that is really taking off this year. So that's also planned.
114 Okay. So that is we're seeing a significant increase in the number of city employees who are funded by pcf in those two. Throughout bureaus. I'm seeing I'm seeing one of your staff members shaking their head, no.
115 Behind you. Yeah. So the other element that's happening here. So I in the earlier years, a large portion of the money was just the grant program. And when we get into really this, this fiscal year that we're in now is when we started to see an increase. We had larger like sp, the apartment one was $150 million contract. So these are actually expenses now, not the fund and contingency, but actually what the bureau expects to spend this fiscal year. So the dollars not just fte but actually resources going out the door in grants and through contracts.
116 Okay. So those are grants and contract dollars, not pcf funded city employees.
117 No. It includes includes employees too.
118 Okay. So we're seeing a big increase on both sides. It would be helpful for me to understand whether we have seen over the last two years, a significant increase in pcf funded city employees. Yes, or just a significant increase in grants going out the door. And there are employees there too, but it's a much smaller amount. If we could see that broken out at some point, I'd appreciate it.
119 And would you like that for the service area or across the city.
120 Let's.
121 Say across the city?
122 I'm seeing some of my colleagues say across the city, thank you. Final question on slide eight. And if you said this, I apologize and I just missed it, but there are 58 fte for public infrastructure. What within said is public infrastructure.
123 Those are thanks for the question, councilor. Those were the staff that came as in the creation of permitting development from. We had bts development services and then 58 staff from the water bureau, environmental services, PBOT and parks came over in the creation of ppe.
124 And so that is an increase in ppe and staff. It is not an increase in total city staff.
125 Correct.
126 Okay. Thank you very much for clarifying that. Thank you, council president.
127 Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney colleagues. I put myself in the queue next because I get to donnie, I'm looking at this building off of what was just discussed, tree permitting and public infrastructure permitting moved to rp and it doesn't look like ratepayer dollars have followed those staff. Is that accurate? Am I looking at this that we're not at full cost? Recovery from the staff transition? And I mean either trees or public works permitting?
128 Councilor, I think that there is still a lot of work to be done to true up the creation of rp and I it is very much a work in progress. I want to thank the bureaus who have worked with us to to figure this out. We still have some trips to do in parks and PBOT. It was a very complex system that we pulled staff from in their bureaus, and we landed them in a very complex system, and I still think is a very young bureau still. And we have a lot of old systems that we're trying to update both in how we do permitting, but also how we finance and budget. And I think our fee structures are off as well. Director couch has already outlined that he wants to do sort of a, a level setting of fees across the the bureau, which is long overdue, that also start to tease out how we pay for our staff. And the last thing I'll just say, it's been mentioned here many times. I've said it many times. A complete overhaul of pads financing structure is necessary. It's very difficult to do those sorts of maneuvers in a budget climate that we have, but that is until we do that, we're going to be constantly, each year tinkering when we need just a wholesale reset.
129 I definitely appreciate that. Is there more work that this body can do, either as part of the budget process or ahead of the budget process legislatively, to help start rightsizing that question specifically.
130 I'd love to get back to you on that and talk to some more folks. Thank you.
131 Absolutely. The arts and culture office, office of arts and culture, broadly, because of some structural issues, saw 44% reduction in the amount of dollars that went out because of the arts tax, primarily, not because of general fund and colleagues. I won't surprise you all in this. I'm actively trying to fix the arts tax right now and put these dollars in reserve to work, but I just want to put out there that the arts dollars are not nice to haves. They are a vital part of our economic development, in my humble opinion. And further cuts from the general fund would be a pretty hard red line for me. Just noting that with regard to permitting timelines, we're seeing that the permitting timelines are improving a lot. And I understand also that sometimes our staff do their job and say, here's your checklist, go back and do it. And it takes however long it takes to get back. And then that feels part of the grumbling process where we see, like long waits, appear to be on the applicant is there is the burden of meeting code requirements causing them to have a harder time meeting their own timelines? Is there are there ways that we can help make this through the budget process or again, legislatively and like either through technology or other code improvements, are there ways that we can help fix some of these things, make it easier for the applicants, make it easier for staff to continue to track? Are there other things that we should be thinking about?
132 Councilor every detail you just noted is a yes. Yes. We can improve our processes. Yes, we can use technology. Yes, there's probably some ways that the council can intervene and support staff doing their work. Yes, we need to ensure we have the bodies to do the work. We need staff, but yeah, all those things are true and I think there is a lot of work being done with recap, which will be coming to council this spring. Another cap 2.0 that your office is leading. Continual improvement. Process improvement is going to be part of this, this sea change.
133 I also recognize that you're going to need a capital investment of some sort in order to buy the systems, to make us get better financial long term outcomes. So I will be looking to the experts on how to do this, because I don't know how to run a permitting bureau, but obviously there's work to be done. I just want to make a statement that the act of getting money out is not itself a goal. It's a means to an end. And I also want to note that I have a little bit of concern the about the not the work, but the optics of the bureau of planning and sustainability. For a long time, the office of civic life was the island of misfit toys. If a the city wanted to do something and hire staff, but it didn't neatly fit in anywhere, we stuck it in civic life, and that created its own problems, and the city has been diligently trying to undo some of that. I worry that planning and sustainability is becoming our new island of misfit toys. I recognize that there are some management advantages to how bts runs themselves and why it makes sense, but I worry about the impact, and I worry about bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake. And I want to make sure that we are thinking about that, especially as we are unfortunately cutting in every direction. Under prosper Portland. I saw it said on the slide that we increased support to businesses or the number of businesses supported by 55% do when we are giving dollars to prosper, who, as you noted, are not part of the city of Portland government structure. Do we have specific deliverables for what that looks like a phone call to a single business one time is not itself valuable to me, and but it would look like we are increasing the number of supports. Do we have more detailed metrics about what those dollars are used for?
134 Yeah, councilor We can get that back. And councilor Can I use this moment just because I just want to flag and maybe this is for my colleagues as they come up. You know, this was this exercise of just showing four performance measures in this level of granularity is unfair to staff, not to me. I'm just the messenger here. But there is so much good work that's going behind all of these. And we could have brought 50 different measures to share. And I'm sure my staff would love to to walk through them. We can actually get that data in any, you know, higher detail that folks would like on these and everything we're doing. Happy to share. But you're right, there's there's a lot there's this is missing a lot of context for you. Happy to get that to you and to any counselor that wants any of this information fully, you know, pulled up.
135 Thank you. That's a really good point. Two more questions and I apologize, colleagues, a lot of the money that the city gives to prosper Portland goes directly through to support businesses or to support the inclusive business resource network or the office of film. Some of these things that are sort of direct service to our, our, our economy. When those programs began, that was because the city did not have any sort of internal infrastructure for economic development. And we also recognize that historically, economic development has been, in many cities, sort of arm's length because it takes more than four years to build a building. And I'm only sitting in the seat for four years as far as I know. So I understand that part of economic development having an independence. But why are we sending general fund dollars as a pass through to an outside entity at this point, when we have a community and economic development service area?
136 Thanks for the question, council president. I would offer this. There are talented people at prosper who are directly connected with the communities that we're serving, our small business communities, our film and events networks. So they're really are our stewards of those relationships, and they're the ones that are pointing us in the right direction, how to move things forward. So to answer your question, they're there because that's where the resources were to establish that architecture for those programs. Yes, we have a service area now that's focused on economic development. But I would also offer we work. I work very closely with the prosper team. I talk to them every week. I engage with them every day in some cases. So I would say that there's a real close connection even between the arts and culture. Office. Prosper bts the service area works really well together. If council was going to contemplate some change to that structure with prosper, I'd really love to sit down and talk about the steps and the sequencing, the impacts, the opportunity cost that we can't even see yet because we haven't really thought about it. However, having said that, I think we can do a better job of communicating how prosper and those particular programs you mentioned have been incredibly impactful and see what that would look like if they were in the city. There is some value, and this is kind of like just being honest about our structure as a city. Prosper is more agile than the city of Portland, just they can move dollars more quickly. Their procurement systems are faster. And when we're talking to film and events, you know, groups coming into the city, there's there's value to that, right? Our partners are excited that we that prosper can move a little faster than our procurement process can, for example. And no judgment procurement, just city governments move a lot or deliberately.
137 Undeniable. Absolutely. I do not want to have that further conversation. This is something that I have been talking about for a very long time. Specifically, as you were mentioning, the film industry and events industries, the value of that office is permit issuance and prosper cannot issue city permits. And so I continue to have concerns about the placement of that office. My last question is, you know, obviously this is a cut year budget and all parts of the general fund are going to experience cuts. And that includes programs that we care deeply about. Last year, we got heavily lobbied by prosper Portland and the folks that they fund in response to those cuts. I found it deeply unfair to the small businesses who were being paraded out in a way to protect a pot of dollars against other pot of dollars. Do we have any expectations about the role of our recipients of these dollars independently lobbying this body?
138 Thank you for the question, council president. I'm going to maybe call on my my phone a friend to the city administrator on that one.
139 I would say they probably will reach out to council as just some of them have their own lobbying arm of what they're doing to try to get all the dollars that they can to get funneled to their area. One thing that we will do on our end is make sure that we're transparent regarding how we're moving in, any considerations that we're making as it relates to prosper Portland, that may impact that as a whole. We may also want to make sure that we're having our own kind of stakeholder meeting with key stakeholders as we're rolling out the budget, because this won't be the only group that will be lobbying council as we go through budget deliberations, one thing that we will be doing on our end is making sure that we're having those conversations with these individual groups. As the mayor's proposed budget is being developed and being presented to council, that they are aware of why certain decisions were made as it relates to what was in the proposed budget and what was not in the proposed budget. We'll do that due diligence on our end.
140 I.
141 Appreciate that, and.
142 I will just note that I think that I think everybody on this body would agree that it would be deeply inappropriate for the housing bureau to reach out to hacienda cdc, to rose community development, to reach cdc, to in order to say hi, you all need to now reach out to city council independently, or else your jobs and funding will go away. I don't imagine that we would see city employees doing that, so I want to make sure that that is the expectation more broadly. Of course, the community should come to us and fight for the things that they want, but that is not what our public dollars should be spending to try and advocate back towards us.
143 We'll agree with you 100% on that.
144 Thank you.
145 Colleagues, I was the first round. We have five minutes left in this section and we have four colleagues in the queue. And then we're going to take a ten minute break at 11:00 councilor Kanal.
146 Thanks. I'll be as fast as I can. I just wanted to say I agree with the conversation about graffiti. I think that there was a police mission on February 16th that did more to address the scourge of graffiti in our in our neighborhoods than all the money we've been spending here, and I think was probably a lot cheaper as well. So I think there's times where we're using the wrong tool here and having because there's PBOT too, that has graffiti in its wheelhouse. I want to make sure that we're not just managing a problem, we're actually addressing the problem. I wanted to follow up, and I think this is more for the mayor and administrator. On councilor Zimmermann's question about the arts fund and the $9 million. I'm concerned that when we present the impacts of potential general fund cuts, we're not saying that for some of those bureaus that might take a cut, there's a reserve fund or a fund that could be used to backfill it. And for others, there's not. We're just saying if you cut a penny, the sky will fall for all the bureaus, and for some, the sky might fall, I think fire. We're going to talk about that in a minute. But for others there's there's no there is a fund for some others. And I want to just see that. I think this relates to prosper and the cif as well. Councilor Novick and Ryan built off my question around metrics. I agree with both of what they said. I wanted to to mention that they related to each other as well. And just when we're talking about what our our outputs are, just look at those in the context of each other as well. And finally, in just building off of what councilor Council president just asked, dca oliveira, you said that they're the ones pointing us in the right direction about prosper, but the challenge here is about the democratic accountability and who's the direction setter. I think that the work that prosper does is is excellent. The quality of their work is not in question. It's a question about what who's deciding what we're asking those staffers to do. And I think that's a conversation that we want to that we haven't really had. We've had a year since there was some high profile disagreements on this dais during the budget last year, and I was personally very torn between a lot of those and not on either side of those. But I want to make sure that we're having a conversation about economic development, being democratically accountable in terms of direction, setting on it. And I just wanted to flag that for for future. Thank you, council president.
147 Thank you. Councilor Kanal councilor Green.
148 I'll be very brief and just say ditto to your comments. Council president, on the distinguishing the permit time with staff versus the applicants. I just think that ppe and staff are a convenient target in our community. When we talk about who to blame for it. And I think they're doing excellent work. And I think I just wanted to raise that up. And if we need to have a deeper conversation about how we might do programmatic support to get the applicants to move faster, I'm here for it. Thanks.
149 Thank you, councilor Green. Councilor Smith.
150 Thank you, council president. Just a quick question, donnie. When bureaus use reserve funds, do bureaus need council approval to do that?
151 That's a great question, councilor. Every just I can only speak for my service area. So the and I alluded to this ppd, for example, has a reserve policy that has certain triggers that kick in that are in the policy. That policy needs to actually be updated to, to ensure that we're doing that. But yes, ultimately any dollar bureau spends has to be allocated by by council to answer your question.
152 And can ruth answer that question for me from the city budget office to is that something? Because I was listening to the conversation with councilor Pirtle-guiney about the money that's being moved, and I was like, okay, I don't see those those requests.
153 Yeah, it's a good question. So and I think there's honestly a gap between how it's being budgeted right now and how it probably ought to be budgeted. So I think this is a helpful conversation because we can fix it in the 2627 budget. Right now, the ppd reserve funds are not in a separate fund. They are in the the development services fund fund 203. Some of it's budgeted in contingency, some of it's budgeted in expense. And so the for they can you know draw down. They can spend expenditures obviously without further council approval. The contingency in order to move contingency they would typically do that in a supplemental budget process. And that would be part of that conversation. So likewise, if it were budgeted in a completely separate reserve fund, they would have to come through a supplemental budget process to move it between funds. That's for example, that would be water. Water does that with their construction water construction fund as a as an example of how that could work. So it would you know, obviously because these are operating expenditures, they would they need some sort of flexibility within their expenses. But you know, I think the, the, the bulk of the kind of quote unquote, reserve funds probably ought to be moved to a to a designated reserve fund.
154 And that's the reason why you hear some of the councils talk about some of the strategic planning, the $40 million. Because if you're putting everything in one pot and you're not coming back to council like you're supposed to and do a budget modification as directed through Oregon budget law, we don't know the difference between the two. All we're doing is looking at the big amount of money that councilor Green talked about. Councilor. Dunphy talked about, and so that we really got to get this thing under control. And that's and that's why we're in the the problem that we're in right now. Last week, me and councilor Avalos passed the george floyd resolution to reaffirm the city and the mayor's commitment to racial justice and honoring the black community. As a result of his death in may of 2020. And I notice many times in past councils when we have to cut budgets, the reimagined Oregon economic opportunity investment fund grant, those funds are usually slated to be cut first. And I'm just asking y'all before we go through this, because we had a unanimous vote last week on how we do that. This is one of the ways that we continue to support the resolution, the idea of racial justice here at the city. Don't start with that program first, please, because it is always a big, big deal. And I don't mind nonprofits, businesses calling me about things that are before the council because I need to know what their what their views are in general. But that is going to stir up a lot of bad feelings. And we know that if we pass resolutions like the george floyd resolution and we all say that and it is it is affirmed by the administration, we shouldn't start there. We should start in other places. So I'm I'm just it's not really a question, but it is just a statement. And I guess for me, that is a way for us to use somewhat of a diversity tool that we don't have to put out in the public. But if if we truly want to reaffirm what happened and what has happened to small businesses, particularly businesses of color, and their lack of access to technical assistance, capital and opportunity at the city, I would really appreciate if you would think of other ways in which off the top to to balance your budgets. Thank you.
155 Thank you, councilor Smith. Councilor pirtle-guiney.
156 Thank you, council president. Colleagues, I agree with all of my colleagues who have pointed out the need to be vigilant about how reserves are used, but I do want to point out that as it relates to ppe, and we passed a budget note in our last budget directing them to dip into their reserves in order to stem the layoffs that they were otherwise facing. We were operating under the, I will say, somewhere between a hope and an expectation that things might pick up in development this year, because we knew that we were going to be looking at opportunities to help to spur development in our community. So that direction did actually come through council through a budget note that we passed, I believe, unanimously.
157 Thank you. Councilor pirtle-guiney councilor, clerk. Take us home.
158 Thank you, council president. Just I'm not going to get in the way of our bio break. I just wanted to say that. Thank you. Dc olivera, I think you've done a great job kicking off this season. The budget season, great presentation and really kudos to my colleagues for the kinds of questions. All my questions were certainly asked by others, and I really appreciate that. But I think that this conversation also demonstrates that the continued evolution that we're going through as a government, because we've talked about not just structural changes, management, management changes, vocabulary changes, we have a lot more to go, a lot of work. But I just I think this has been an exemplary conversation today and I just wanted to appreciate everyone. Thank you and especially you guys.
159 Thank you.
160 Excellent. Thank you both for being here. We're going to take a ten minute break, colleagues, and we will come back and hear the public service safety area, public safety service area that way please. Everyone back here at 1115. We'll be right back.
161 Do you like a regroup with your staff? No, no thank you.
162 Honestly, I don't know what that's about. Getting started, I know you, I don't need you to hold that here. We'll be back. Yeah. For sure. I promise you. Quite a long time ago. Yeah, I see me as a person. Come on over. And. Yeah, that was going around the office today. Everybody was talking and looking and seeing. There's some. Yeah. I mean, the story about what the ramp up in spending was about is there's something about what school was that tigard high school about stafford brown. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's not the other bureaus because they would relate to me in would you like to leave in the middle, do you think or do you want we can rethink it makes sense to have you at one end and I the other. So if you want one of us to respond, you can turn both of us at once rather than having to smirk, I like that.
163 Are you guys making me sit in the middle?
164 Yep. Well, that one.
165 I was like, no.
166 Either way, I'm just turning left. If I need an answer, I don't have to turn my head back and forth. I'm going to the restroom. Okay? No one.
167 Just.
168 You mean so much?
169 No, I just mean like. Like I feel like that is precisely what I. But, like, who's to say it? Yeah.
170 Yeah. Okay.
171 All right.
172 Yeah.
173 So I just added it. Pbem general fund overhead was not in there. So I'm giving them a giving them a shout out handed in a sentence. Yes. Oh, yeah.
174 Yeah. We're doing it to you. So that was what I wanted okay. Yes. Okay. Yeah.
175 Whatever. Mardi gras and prom together. Yeah. Yes. No no no I know, so whatever. You know, we're ready. We're reimagine.
176 And.
177 That. Oh these are.
178 And we're back.
179 Welcome dc. We are now going to turn it over to you for a presentation on the public safety service area colleagues. Again similar situation. There's only about 17 slides. We're going to ask you guys to get through the whole presentation. Colleagues will line up in the queue and we will jump in from there. Dc take it away.
180 Thank you. Good morning. Council president, vice president, councilors, mayor and kaylee, I'm bob cozzie, deputy city administrator for the public safety service area. I'm here with nathan lima and ginger dameron to provide an overview of the service area. Current service level budgets by bureau and from a high level review options and trade offs of reductions. As you can see, our task is to ensure 24 over seven emergency response to fire medical, law enforcement, behavioral health and disaster incidents in the city of Portland. Through the bureau of emergency communications. We operate 911 and emergency dispatch for the city, as well as for the entirety of Multnomah county. We coordinate citywide emergency management, including disaster preparedness, mitigation, and recovery. Additionally, the service area advances prevention, resilience, and recovery efforts to reduce long term demand for emergency services. The current service level budget for the service area is approximately 648 million. As is the case for most bureaus in the city, the public safety service area is facing budget challenges. As a result, service area bureaus have prioritized preserving core emergency response capabilities and sworn staffing. The service area budget is 80% personnel. We crafted a total of 32 reduction scenarios submitted as scalable options, grouped by program. From a high level. The scenarios reduce or eliminate operational overtime, administrative support, and one time and ongoing programmatic services. And as we might expect, depending on funding and reductions, there could be a significant impact on emergency services. And now I'll hand it off to nathan and ginger to cover performance measures, program expenses and options for closing the funding gap within the service area. Nathan.
181 Thank you. For the record, my name is nathan lima. I'm a district, I'm a resident of district three, and I manage the team that does budget, strategic planning and performance management for the public safety service area. Much of this presentation focuses on dollars and staffing, but ultimately, what matters is the community experience of safety, response and recovery. Our service areas mission is to deliver a safe Portland for all. To frame our conversation on budget, we will highlight five of our key performance measures. The first performance measure counts all homicides within the city of Portland in a given fiscal year, reflecting the most serious violent outcomes in our community. Historically, Portland saw lower homicide levels in the mid 20 tens, but starting around 2020, there was a substantial increase. While the absolute number remains higher than the pre-pandemic averages, total homicides have declined by almost 50% since their peak. This measure provides a key lens on the severity of violence in our community and informs deployment of prevention, investigative and response capabilities. The second measure tracks the total number of reported shootings within Portland, offering a broader view of community gun violence beyond homicides alone. We paired this measure with homicide data to get a fuller understanding of gun violence. The long term patterns reflect that gun violence has remained persistence and more persistent than prior to the recent surge, underscoring the need for both response and upstream prevention strategies. Continued collaboration across enforcement, community partners, and violence prevention programs is essential to driving sustained reductions. The third performance measure reflects the percentage of time a 911 call is answered by the bureau of emergency communications. Call takers in 20s, or less a foundational component of emergency response performance. Improvements in this measure help shorten the time to dispatch, which can improve outcomes in medical, fire, and public safety emergencies. In the most recent period, we're observing a notable increase in the percentage of calls meeting this benchmark, driven largely by increased staffing. Thus far this fiscal year, boec has reached this benchmark 67% of the time. The fourth measure tracks when whether a needed ladder truck arrives on scene within four minutes, a key national benchmark tied to life safety and fire containment outcomes. This is a portion of the national fire protection association standard for the fire response that reflects the performance of the primary apparatus needed at structure fires. Performance reflects deployment strategy, staffing levels and geographic coverage. Sustaining strong results requires ongoing investment in personnel apparatus readiness and system capacity. The final measure we wanted to share is around calls dispatched to Portland street response, assisting people experiencing mental health and behavioral health crises. As coverage is expanded, dispatch volume has grown, reflecting increased integration into the 911 system. This helps ensure behavioral health calls are handled by the appropriate responder, while preserving police and fire capacity for higher acuity emergencies. These are only five of dozens of performance measures our service area attracts. You can find more on the citywide performance Portland dashboard. While we wanted to lead our presentation with information about our performance outcomes, we also wanted to provide details about the service area's current and historical budget. I'll hand it to ginger to provide that detail.
182 Good morning. My name is ginger damron, public safety budget manager, resident of district one. Since we're doing that, this first slide looks at our program expenses by fund. But I first wanted to highlight the makeup of our public safety expenses. As was already mentioned, 50%, 80% of our personnel expenses. Thank you. Personnel is our largest expense and makes up 80% of our budget, followed by internal materials and services, which is 13%. And then less than 10% of our budget is external materials and services and capital and our largest expense category personnel. We've seen an increase in personnel by 26% over the last five years. This is due to rising wages, premiums and health benefits that all bureaus are experiencing. But we've also experienced improved staffing. Since 2020 to 2022, we had higher than normal separations, and the bureaus have been hiring back from there. And fy 22, we averaged 291 vacant positions, which was a 12% vacancy rate. And in this year we're averaging 174 vacant positions, which is an 8% reduction. So we have more staff available to respond. We're also seeing over overtime costs that are driven by a combination of changes in work schedules and a large number of trainees, while recovering from large numbers of separations. And that's going to take a while to to rebuild from. So looking at the funds, the majority of public safety expenses lives in the general fund, with the exception of boec, who is in its own 202 fund. This is because it has a blended funding model with state shared revenue and other jurisdictions at Multnomah county contributing to the overall budget. We also have the police special revenue fund, which includes asset forfeiture and other designated resources that can be used for approved purposes. In the past year, the service area has applied to 33 grants, 25 have been successfully awarded for $12 million, which is what you see in the grant fund. Many of those grants cross fiscal years and could be multi year. And so when they're awarded may not quite align with what we're going to see in the budget each fiscal year and how the expenses come through. Other funds includes fire special revenue fund that was recently created to manage things like wildland deployments. And Portland street response, has a cannabis fund allocation. Moving on to the general fund. With the exception of boec, public safety bureaus are 85 to 95% fully funded by general fund resources and public safety has the largest share of the general fund. Discretionary resources expenses have outpaced revenue increases over the past few years, resulting in a reliance on one time funding to bridge structural deficits. I also wanted to take the opportunity because pbem is a you may be looking for that line. Pbem has a small bureau budget compared to the other bureaus, but it's also in the general fund overhead pool. And so it has a mix of funding where you're not seeing their full budget here. This is just looking at general fund discretionary that is unique because they have citywide services that they provide in a way that's different than the other bureaus. On personnel. You can see that the our authorized staff numbers have stayed mostly flat over the last five years. I just wanted to kind of walk through what the makeup of the positions are. We have 70% of our staff are sworn responders. That's in police. We have 877 sworn responders. And in fire, there's 711. The non-sworn responders includes dispatcher call takers, Portland street responders, violent chat and ps3's and mental health crisis responders. And then in the professional and program staff. It includes programs such as gun violence prevention, victim services, emergency management and support staff that manages functions like apparatus and building, repairs, training and recruitment. And there's 121 positions in there that are in the seven core services realignment functions. So while the position count has stayed close to the same over the last five years, there's a few notable changes to mention. Fire has added 33 fte to alleviate backfill overtime. The increased as a result of their shortened work week in the last contract. This has led to a reduction of 45,000 overtime hours from fy 24 to 25, and we're seeing that trend continue as they've added staff. Portland street response moved from fire to the office of the dca, and last year, 26 limited term positions were converted to ongoing positions with ongoing general fund dollars. Chat has 24 limited term positions that have been funded with a mix of grant funding and one time resources, and boec has eight limited term dispatcher positions that have been funded with a training pipeline that was vacancy savings they were able to preserve and allow them to overhire. While boec fire and police have been increasing their hiring over the last three years, the average number of trainees and recruits has nearly doubled. It currently takes nine months for firefighter training, 18 to 24 months for call taker dispatcher certification, and 24 months to complete police officer training. There are currently 160 fte that are in some stage of training and public safety. I can't do math in my head, but that's a high percent of our 2300. Each bureau has a staffing plan that takes into account hiring targets, separation trends, the duration of training, and the impact of staffing on overtime. The current service level budgets were built, taking those factors into account. So the service area has 40 total program offers, and we did go to great lengths to ensure that the fte and expense and revenue is budgeted in all of those program offers in fy 27, due to the size and scale, you're only seeing our top ten and it's missing some notable programs such as Portland street response, cease fire, office of violence prevention, planning and mitigation, and emergency operations, just to name a few. I am going to run through these top ten program offers, which are focused on supporting the city's emergency response capabilities. Also mentioned that we published the program, offer narrative, and so you can really dig into what all 40 of them do. So for Portland fire and rescue, emergency operations is responsible for ensuring that there are 171 responders, 24 over seven, 365 days a year. This budget includes 603 fte and the overtime required to maintain staffing targets. Police precinct patrol includes the nearly 500 fte that staffed the city's three precincts, providing 24 over seven emergency response to calls for service and then police enterprise support includes the quartermaster and the majority of the police's facilities and fleet budget. This supports the whole enterprise within police and then in training. This includes the police's staff that support training, but we also have budgeted and then you see the expenses. I think this is one where like a mismatch of what the budget versus where the actuals post while police officers are in training, that's where their expenses are going to post. And we have over 100 right now and anticipate over 100 next year to be in training. I went down to far boec operations include 131 dispatcher call takers and 14 supervisors that staff 911 operations 24 over seven for boec. We've not had a specific training program offer in the past, but we are creating one this year that will be reflected in a later stage of the budget to sort of standardize how we look at training across public safety, because it has such an impact on on our budgets. The detective program was consolidated with person crimes investigation and property crimes investigation to better align with the budgetary structure, with the organizational structure, so that one is a consolidation from previous years. It includes 131 fte dedicated to investigating major crimes. The specialized resource division was also a formerly known as a tactical emergency response. It includes 70 fte that staff specialty units that respond to critical incidents. It has the special emergency response team, the rapid response team, crisis negotiation team, metro explosive disposal unit, k9 unit, and the air support unit, and then similar to police's enterprise support. Portland fire and rescue has a logistics program that supports the building and apparatus maintenance and also supports the capital replacement schedules of the apparatus and the turnouts, and then the chief's office directly supervises and guides the work of the following units the equity and inclusion office, office of the inspector general, professional standards division, criminal intelligence unit, and internal operations and communications. It also includes the bulk of the bureaus bts budget, and then the records program provides. This is in the police bureau. Valuable accessibility to the bureaus data for multiple applications internally and externally. Internal service provision allows for analysis of reported crime data and records processing makes information available to respond to public records requests. So then looking at all of it in a different way, the here's our general fund discretionary revenue you can see is the bulk. It's 85%. And then I'm going to kind of walk through. There's been a growing amount of one time in there, but I'm going to walk through the other revenues. So interagency revenue comes from fpd and our levy which reimburses police and fire for retirement costs of sworn staff that are in the pension system. And then intergovernmental is predominantly from boec, where 40% of their revenue comes from state shared revenue and local cost share. It also includes some smaller igas that fire has in partnerships with Gresham and burlington water, and then includes some traffic enforcement programs within police and some federal reimbursement programs, and then other revenues. Is mostly services and fees that some programs collect, such as fires prevention program. Police secondary employment is the bulk of what's in the other revenues. And then that Green that shows up in the fy 2627 csl budget. The miscellaneous fund allocation is our $35 million gap in the current service level next year, which I will let nathan talk about.
183 Thank you. As ginger shared, the service area is general fund. Current appropriation level is inadequate for the current level of service. A meaningful portion of public safety programing has been held together with one time dollars over the past several years. Those one time funds are expiring. In addition, the service area is still recovering from the staffing disruptions of 2020 to 2022. The pipeline to get a trained responder on the streets takes upwards of two years, which means we're carrying significant overtime and coaching costs right now. That won't go away in the foreseeable future. The gap was exacerbated by a handful of contractual and programmatic changes over the past few years that have created new, recurring costs that the base budget simply doesn't account for, including retiree rehire programs and wage misalignment. In addition, costs for centrally provided services like fleet facilities and risk have grown faster than general fund inflation. This all leads to a total current service level gap of $35 million. There is a range of reductions bureaus would need to consider if the current service level gap is not addressed, and the bureaus were additionally asked to make a 10% reduction. These are real operational choices for our public safety system. The Portland police bureau cuts fall into three categories. First, internal support reductions, things like technology, fleet and training, which over time degrade the bureau's ability to operate effectively. The second category includes the elimination of programs that aren't direct patrol response, but are central to the bureau's relationship with the community, including victim services, unarmed response positions, and partnerships with the district attorney's office. Third, and most significantly, our potential reductions to emergency response itself. This includes cuts to overtime changes, minimum staffing level, and slowing hiring. All of these choices would have lasting impacts on the bureau's ability to serve Portland for the years to come. Portland fire and rescue options center on three things. The first is a fee increase for fire prevention services, inspections and plan reviews, which is actually a revenue solution rather than a cut. This update would bring portland's rates more in line with those of peer cities. The second is a reduction in apparatus replacement, which may seem technical but essentially means that older, less reliable fire engines would be in service for longer. The third and most consequential is a reduction in on duty emergency staffing that translates to longer response times and reduced ability to handle simultaneous incidents. The cuts proposed for our other bureaus and programs would be felt acutely by portland's most vulnerable residents. The violence prevention reductions would significantly scale back programs like ceasefire and the office of violence prevention, programs that specifically are designed to interrupt gun violence cycles and communities that are disproportionately impacted. Portland street response, which handles mental health crisis calls, would lose responder teams and aftercare capacity, meaning slower response times and fewer clients receiving follow up support each year at boec, cuts to the dispatcher training pipeline and overtime would directly threaten the gains we've made in 911 answer times. The city's gains in public safety will require sustained investment in order to maintain them. This summarizes the options for closing the gap for the service area. To conclude, I'll hand it off to casey.
184 Thank you. Nathan, what you're seeing across all of these packages is a difficult truth. There are no cuts that don't have real consequences. The potential cuts represent fundamental reductions in the city's capacity to protect its residents. We want council to have a clear picture of that spectrum as we work together on the path forward, as the mayor considers a proposed budget. And now we're all happy to answer any questions you might have.
185 Thank you very much, colleagues. Go ahead and jump in the queue. If anybody is interested in asking some questions, we'll start with councilor Green.
186 Thank you. Do you see a cozy. Can you go to slide 14 please? Thank you. So it's hard to tell. There's a lot of shading going on here. But I think what I'm looking at in the next slide is a different look. So there's there's the expense look. And then there's the revenue look that both describe. What I see are a gap or at least there's a delta in on slide 14. It looks like there's roughly $50 million of increase in the csl for the 2627 relative to the current adopted. Is that fair to characterize? Is my math correct?
187 Crucially, this is only showing the top ten largest programs. So we have 40 programs in total. So this is showing the increase in those ten largest programs between years.
188 That explains why we're only looking at 420 and four. Okay. Yes I think that part answers my question. I was a little confusing. So I'll just go to the next slide then. This is the fuller this is the full picture right. This is the okay. So. Nothing's changing except for basically cost of living adjustments. Is that right. In the csl there's no new programs here. There's no.
189 That's correct.
190 Okay. I, I've never seen it presented the way where you add in a little gap called miscellaneous fund allocation to describe what the what the revenue would need to look like to, not to, to make all that hole. I didn't see that in the last presentation. I'm not sure if we're going to see that in other presentations, but I just want to flag that if I was a casual observer of this and not in the weeds, if we were to contemplate a reduction in that, it's going to look like we're cutting the public safety area by not validating that gap. That looks a little misleading here. So I just I just needed to name that here. I'll be very curious to know what trade offs we're going to have to contemplate. If we were to fill that 35 million. I know we're in early days here, but I think those are my two questions I wanted to start with. I think the first one was answered because I, I guess it wasn't clear I was looking at the top ten. I couldn't I couldn't reconcile 50 million on one slide versus 35 on another. So I think I'm good now. Council president, we can we can go on and maybe I might have other questions as we go forward.
191 I mean, I, I could just I don't know if I'll give the answer that ruth would give, but on the I think it existed because all of the bureaus budgeted where their gap into the miscellaneous fund allocation. I think our gap is bigger. And so that's probably why you noticed it. I think it probably did exist in the last one, and you'll see it in other that this is a new budgeting to current service level and where our expenses are outpacing our revenue. I think one thing too that's in there is, you know, there's a combination of police and fire and gun violence prevention programs have had one time resources. So some of it is right now we're assuming we don't have those. It was one time. And then also compensation set aside is something that because health benefits are going up so much next year, it was like we really need to account for that number and make sure. And then there's a couple of other like internal service charges that went up. But I think. That is I just wanted to clarify why it's there. Yeah.
192 That is helpful I guess. I guess, you know, my baseline approach would be to say, well, let's just roll forward the nominal dollar amount and it should be looks like $613 million ish. No, it's it's 600. Yeah. No, it is 613 which is still above the 602. If 35 million is the gap. What you're basically trying to say though, is there are other cost escalators built in. And so if you didn't want to lose any service, if you're not looking at in just in terms of dollars and cents, but you're looking in terms of service, you would need to see that, that that roughly $35 million in revenue growth. Right. Okay. I think that's helpful for me. Thanks.
193 And I think to the city administrator's introduction, one of the goals this year was to provide standardized slide formats. So all these slides were developed by the city budget office and a standard template so that you would see the same information. I think calling that out in the Green was intended not to assume it's going to happen and show a cut, but instead to not have it be buried in the purple where it could have been otherwise totally lost.
194 I appreciate that. I would suggest maybe relabeling miscellaneous fund allocation to be like required gap funding or something like that. So it's just very clear to the public that we don't have a source for that.
195 Thank you. Councilor Green. Councilor Morillo.
196 Thank you, council president. Thank you all so much for this presentation. I just have a few questions for the training within pbb. Obviously, there are going to have to be cuts. Have we identified what trainings would be cut.
197 At this point? This is very high level. There's nothing specific that I can provide right now, but I know chief day and his team are are looking deeper into that.
198 Gotcha. Do you know when we will have more specifics on that?
199 I know that they have a number of of ideas in mind already, and they've notified the bureau already of a number of potential cuts that could occur if there were a 3% or a 10% reduction.
200 Okay. I will hold off and wait till we get more details on that. Appreciate that. Another question I had is, I know a few months ago we had a discussion about using medicaid to help pay for Portland street response, and I was just wondering if there was any progress made on that discussion. If there's anything that council or the mayor can do to help with that, I think that we are all very eager to help with that if we can.
201 Yeah. Thank you. That's a great question. And director howard is here. I believe she can she can answer that.
202 Good morning. Councilors. For the record, my name is stephanie howard. I'm the director of community safety. Thank you for the question. Councilor Morillo. We are continuing to press forward with our efforts. One big milestone that was reached this spring is that a large section of training that was required in order to meet the definition of mobile crisis response under the cahoots act, that training was established through a partnership with Portland street. I'm sorry, Portland state university and our teams went through that first round of training. So that's a huge milestone. Next big milestone is 24 over seven hours to gain full eligibility to that particular type of medicaid funding. In the meantime, I have worked with ogr to submit some proposals for potential federal grants that could help us stand up. That billing infrastructure, which is one big barrier, will know if I'm lucky enough to with that in a couple of months, I would expect, and we continue to work with the county to try to find partnerships. I know they are working right now also with some consultants to quantify exactly how much medicaid billing is available to their programs, and have agreed that they would include Portland street response and chat in that analysis. So that will also help us really quantify exactly what it is. But we're continuing to press forward. Right now. Councilor, Novick and others have have been part of the conversations. We welcome support from any offices who would like to join us and continue to have those conversations.
203 Gotcha. Thank you for that update. Really appreciate councilor Novick. I know you're online. If there's anything we can do to support your efforts there, let us know. So I think what I would just flag for my colleagues, based on what you said, is that it sounds like we're going to if we want those medicaid dollars, we're going to have to maybe pay an upfront cost to help Portland street response become a 24 over seven program so that we can unlock those federal dollars. Is that accurate?
204 It is true for the cahoots act medicaid dollars. It may not be necessary for other configurations, but for the cahoots act dollars, which is specifically intended for programs like Portland street response 24 over seven, coverage for that program is a requirement.
205 Gotcha. Okay. Thank you. Those are all my questions on Portland street response. So thanks. The other question I had was for Portland fire. I mean, I think a lot of our constituents are pretty concerned that people in a medical emergency are going to be facing longer wait times if those service levels are reduced. Do you know where Multnomah county and emergency management and amr are with changing the paramedic model from the one emt to two and how that impacts us?
206 You know, I know the this is from my days at boec, which has been nine months ago. It's hard to imagine it's been that long, but I know that the county has a different model now. They are allowing one paramedic on their rigs, which is certainly helped their response times. One thing that is on our radar for the future is the renewal of that contract with amr, and we as a city and Portland fire in particular, are wanting very strongly to be active in that process so that we have more of a voice in what that new ambulance service agreement looks like.
207 Okay. Thank you. Those were all my technical questions that I had. That's very helpful. And I think that some of the the comment that I have here is just that as we've been managing some of the federal responses in our public safety system, we've paid a lot of money in overtime costs for police having to respond. And I think sometimes we have to just be very strategic with our deployment of police to those places to make sure that if they're there, it's actually beneficial or useful to to the community and that people aren't standing there if they're not needed or that they're there for a de-escalatory purpose. And I know that folks are trying to be strategic with that, but it's been a huge part of our cost for a very short and brief stints. So that's just something that I think we're going to have to tighten up in the coming year. But thank you so much. Appreciate your time.
208 Thank you.
209 Thank you. Councilor Morillo councilor Novick.
210 Whoops. Thank you, mr. President. First of all, councilor Morillo, I should tell you that I thought that last week I was going to have a super kind of. An opportunity to indirectly and surreptitiously push oha to help us out with the medicaid billing that I missed out because I was out of town. But I'm going to try to recreate that surreptitious opportunity. So one question I have, I mean, on my assumption is that when you're looking at proposed fire cuts, two things you might look at are closing low volume stations during low volume time. And another thing I suspect you might be looking at is shutting down the two person medical vans, which I think still exist. And first of all, that's a question. Do we still have two person medical vans aside from the trucks and engines? And how much money are we spending on those?
211 I'll ask chief johnson to come up.
212 To that. Aye, Morillo council. Lauren johnson, for the record. Thanks, councilor Novick for that question. We do still have three rescues that are in service. Those are the two person responders. They each one of them responds to over 2000 calls per year. Ginger, do you happen to have the cost?
213 Yeah, I'm looking it up. I mean, I will say when we costed what it would be to reduce them, it was more in a sense of if if we reduced this and then it would offset overtime and what would that cost be. So I mean, I could tell you what six firefighters cost, but I'm just going to give you this number three, 3.4 million was what the the change would be if you like redeployed those resources from the rescues, if that makes sense.
214 Yes. Thank you. Well I'm just. My bias would be that we keep the we keep the trucks and engines because even though I know that there's some really low volume stations, if you close a station, even part of the time, you're basically telling the people in that neighborhood that if their house catches fire, it's going to burn to the ground. So I tend to prioritize that. On the other hand, if I if we're going to be presented with those kind of choices, it might be worthwhile to sort of look at how many lives we think those two person rescues save by responding to heart attacks, etc. And how does that compare to how many lives might be lost if we shut down station part of the time? So I don't know if it's possible to do that kind of grim calculation, but if it is, I'd like to see it. And on police, one question I have, which I assume nobody can answer right now, but based on work we did in the public safety committee last year, I think might be possible to come up with is what percentage of patrol and detective time is spent responding to or investigating violent crimes, as opposed to other stuff. Is that something that we think that we can create?
215 I believe we would be able to create almost any report that you're looking for. Help me understand exactly. When you say a percentage of violent crime, just compared to all of the other calls for service that police handles?
216 Yes.
217 Okay. And then we would need some clarity on defining violent crime, because a lot of people might have different opinions of what violent crime is. Of course, we know homicide is a violent crime, but there's other crimes such as, you know, a cold burglary where someone may feel that they're violently offended because their house was broken into. So. So that would require a little bit of work just to determine the the right nuance in that report.
218 Understood. I mean, yeah, my intuitive reaction is a cold burglary is not a violent crime, but other people might not see it that way. Yeah. Another question I have, which I apologize for not having asked at some point in the past year, is can we identify a number of police calls in response to a crime that is a cold crime, for which there is no follow up investigation? Like they took the call, they went out. But because we don't have the resources to investigate a category of property crimes, there's never an investigation. And a reason I'm interested in that is that I think, I mean, there's a trade off between investigative resources and patrol resources, and one in making those kind of decisions. I think one thing you should look to is how often do the police respond to something, but then can't do anything about it?
219 That one. I'll definitely need to phone a friend. So chief day is here and he can come up and answer that.
220 That councilor Bob day. I echo what was earlier said. I mean, we can we can put all that information together. I don't know specifically what I can offer you right at the moment. I have an idea about where you're going, if you want to flush that out a little bit more. But we'd have to, you know, take a look at the numbers and and get that back to you.
221 Yeah. I didn't assume anybody would have that off the top of their head. And again, I should have asked it a year ago. But it would be interesting. Another random question I had is for psr, what's the ratio of calls per person? Calls responded to per person, per psr employee compared to PPB. And again, I don't assume anybody would have that off the top of their head, but I think it'd be interesting to look.
222 At, you know, from average. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to step over you. From my experience at boec, psr was around 2% of the total workload. From boec perspective, I believe that number has increased to 2.5 roughly. So there is incremental increases when we look at police calls for service. Off the top of my head, it's usually between 75 to 80% of the overall workload. Certainly from the dispatch perspective. And I would guess then that because psr is increasing in terms of their from 2% to 2.5%, that there is a reduction elsewhere, most likely in police calls for service.
223 Actually, what I was wondering though, is that per psr employee, how many calls are responded to as opposed to per PPB employee, like if we if psr is taking 2.5% of the calls, are the csr, represent 2.5% of the responders, maybe you'd want to, you know, try to figure out whether you're counting, just patrol police officers in that calculation or not. But I'm just wondering if psr personnel respond to more, more or fewer calls per person than PPB does.
224 Yeah, I'm sure we can figure out what the average number of calls for service for Portland police patrol and psr, as we can come back with that.
225 I think I'm just going to also chime in because I love these kind of math formulas. But the challenge is the calls are different. And so I think we can give you we can give you the number of fte, number of calls, how that's trending. But then the time spent on calls can be really different and what the outcomes are of the calls. So I, I I'll just sort of will we'll bake that in to what the answer is.
226 Yeah. I'd say to echo jinja's point, the time on scene is really the relevant component. And there if you're looking for a sort of cross comparison, it gets complicated because the call types are very different, and the time on scene for a homicide is generally very long with a lot of people. Right. It is a very important crime to be at. Whereas for lower priority calls, the police bureau tends to spend less time on scene compared to Portland street response, in part because of the longer, more in-depth response that psr is designed to be doing and providing mental health calls.
227 Yeah, I mean, I'll follow up with you guys on this, but it would be interesting to sort of do comparisons with particular police calls like, do we does the average psr call involve more time, psr employee time resources than the average burglary call, for example. So okay, that to be continued. But just wanted to raise the question. And it's most theoretical form. Thank you.
228 Thank you. Councilor Novick councilor Zimmerman.
229 Thanks. You know some of the some of the numbers in terms of, of stats or are looking good and I think that the. You know, the capacity building that's in a variety of places, psr in particular is, is showing up. But where I'm left wanting a little bit and I'm going to start on slide nine. So fire response time. Now we've identified 44%. Are on scene within four minutes. Now I'd like a little help there in the future. But I thought that we were shooting for I thought the standard that we were shooting for was 520 with the national standards, but whatever the number is, I guess let's make sure we're nested with that. But I say it with it's 44% of the time we hit our goal. So this is a very helpful slide for me. Right. And so I appreciate that the fire bureau has put that in, because this is the only city that I've been a senior official in where we aren't always talking about response times. It comes up so infrequently in Portland that I am worried. It's because we don't want to admit we have a problem. And so if I go to slide 10 in 1 hand, the saturation and the number of calls of 13,000 plus for psr is nice to know, but I want response times as well. I need to have a better understanding. For how long does it take for different types of emergency services to reach the call? I would also say that while I think it's important that police bureaus address or always be able to talk about our number of homicides with respect to response times, it's somewhat of an unhelpful graph for me. So I like seeing things go down in that world. Right. Violent crime going down is a good thing. But having an understanding for where we meeting the mark or not meeting the mark with respect to response times is something that would make this. If we are trying to have all presentations be somewhat uniform in terms of how we convey information, we have opportunities here and how to convey those three big buckets of what I'd call our emergency services. So I hope we can see more of that as the bureaus come forward. It helps. It helps make decisions about, you know, some of the questions that were asked earlier by my colleagues. It helps make decisions about placement of stations, whether we put our resources into patrol or our specialty units. Those are the types of things that that are helpful, and they are always choices like this. And I recognize it, but we can't do that without the data presented in front of us. And right now, the only one I got that one was from fire. So that would be helpful. The I want to ask a clarifying question on how we are taking a look at the. How we are articulating our one time only programs, or one time only things we paid for. I'm going to use words differently here because the city has different language for program offers than I'm used to, but it seemed to me in the way that your conversation with councilor Green went. I was having a tough time tracking. I guess what I would expect from bureaus coming forward would be we had x number of dollars in ongoing programs, and if there is a service gap, it sticks to the ongoing aspect of that. I think it's okay to say or note councilors. I also just want to, you know, highlight that the a, b and c programs that we had for x, y, and z neighborhoods were funded with one time only. And so that's why you don't see them reflected here. But I don't consider one time only programs to be a structural deficit in the, in the in the way that we identify. It is certainly a capacity and a and a community benefit deficit. But structurally I'm worried mostly about what are our ongoing programs. So I was having a little difficulty following that conversation in how the service area or how the bureaus are trying to capture that information. So that would be helpful as you further develop in the proposed. To know that if you are considering something a a revenue gap, it's because it's related to one time only and and I'll leave it there. It just it was not clear to me entirely how we're capturing that.
230 And we may be able to help with that, provide the direction that we received from the city budget office and how to define those components. They they understandably were worried that bureaus would try and sort of overreach and say, lots of these things are ongoing, really, or they represent my current service level. And they tried to put boundaries, which we think we we followed. That said, there are some programs like our gun violence initiatives. They were funded year after year with one time dollars, in part because those were the funds that were available. They were considered ongoing in this manner, that they are current service level. What we're currently doing and what we'd want to maintain doing. There are other one time dollars we've received in the past that were to buy a thing or accomplish a task, those we didn't include in our current service level, because that's done, we were finished with it. Okay, so some of it was art, some of it was science. And and ruth wrote.
231 It conveys it conveys a difficult decision making point for us because we have, on the one hand, we have our structural revenues coming in. Are not meeting expenses going out? I think that is a an exasperated number, a larger number. If we apply one time only funds to that, to that deficit, I think it is perfectly acceptable in almost every budget. Office in the state of Oregon would disagree on this, but they get what we do. I think it's perfectly acceptable at some point to fund programs that we as a community have generally said. We like to see year in and year out on the back of one time only fund, knowing that that's not a great practice, but it's a deliberate decision by all elected bodies every year. That's different than. The. Considering in in considering that if they aren't included, that it is another part of the deficit. I just think there's a, there's a part of the narrative here that's important. And I think that I've been a person who's written one time only programs, because that's what we had in that year to keep a thing that the community loved afloat, but to then see it reflected the next year as part of the structural makes it seem like we lost more ongoing money than we truly did. It's not a judgment on any of the programs. It's more about trying to have a good estimate of the the size of the problem is what I'm trying to help get to a little bit here. So as we articulate those, I'm, I'm perfectly fine having my articulated like this was funded one time. It has been for the last six years. But in in an ongoing revenue perspective, it's not included unless in this case, unless the administration includes it, or thereafter, if the council includes it, either through ongoing or one time only. But it's getting a little gray, and I like less gray in that area. Yeah, I think I think that is the conclusion of my questions or kind of clarifying. I'm I'm looking at this, you know, this was very heavily presented from the financial side. I think that as we go forward, I'll be looking to see more of the leadership side in terms of what are the things that we, I, whomever, want to accomplish with what we're going to. This is where I'll prioritize my my resources, my programs. Given the financial situation that we're facing. That is more helpful in the decision making process rather than, you know, it's a funny thing. I think I often say that budget season is narrative season. It's only a little bit number season, and that seems backwards. But it's actually the narrative goes to the numbers. But I can't actually do the job with just the numbers. I need to know what it gets into, what it achieves, what it solves, what problem we are helping the community with. And that's where the leadership of the dca level, the leadership at the bureau level, will be really important as we keep moving forward. So we now have the harsh reality of the numbers, and now we've got to figure out the narrative. So thank you to the team. Appreciate it.
232 And if if you don't mind chief johnson is here to talk about this slide in particular fire response times.
233 Lauren johnson.
234 Tell me where I'm wrong.
235 No, I wanted to say thank you for your knowledge of that detail. You're right. So this is four minutes. The five minutes and 20s that you're used to in the one minute. And 20s is for turnout time. So to receive the notification at the station, get on to the rig and get in route. And then it gives four minutes of travel time. So your concept, the knowledge of that particular statistic is right. We just labeled it differently okay okay. Thank you.
236 I thank you for clarifying. It doesn't change the fact that we don't want to be at 44%, because in any school that's a failing grade, not that our service is failing, but we have room to improve. Thanks, chief.
237 Thank you, counselor Zimmerman. Councilor pirtle-guiney.
238 Thank you, council president. Mr. City administrator, I want to thank you for ensuring that we have some common ways of measuring things across service areas. Just with these first two presentations, I think there's room for improvement. As some of my colleagues have pointed out, on making sure that we are using the same words and the same numbers in the same way. But there is a lot more consistency, and I really appreciate that. I have just a couple of questions about the presentation we saw today. The first is there were a lot of staffing numbers run through at the beginning, and I was not able to follow all of them. It would be great to get the information from your notes about staffing levels in all of the different areas within the service area, all of the different bureaus, excuse me, within the service area as some of the follow up to this.
239 Yeah. We also have a tableau dashboard that has going back five plus years that we can share with it as well.
240 That would be fantastic. Thank you. There was a note on both the reduction lists for fire and police about maintenance, fleet updates, things like that. And I am wondering what the condition of our current fleets is. If we have treated our fleets the same way, we have much of our other asset management in the city. Reductions in investments there would be very concerning to me. On the other hand, if we have made some important investments over the last few years where we might be able to pause for a year, that's a very different type of reduction that we might be asked to take. So can you help me understand where we currently sit?
241 Yeah, I'll ask chief johnson to come back up for fire. And then chief de.
242 I'd say for just a context piece, the fleets for the two bureaus are handled differently. City code carves out that the apparatus within the fire bureau are managed by the fire bureau, whereas the fleet for the police bureau is managed by the bureau of city, fleet and facilities.
243 Okay.
244 Thank you, councilor, for the question, lauren johnson. For the record, I'd say that over the past several years, that capital fund for apparatus and equipment has consistently been one that's been reduced year over year, so that we're not able to adequately maintain our apparatus. And if you ask me about the status of our fleet, you know, it's not uncommon for us to be staffed with only the number of trucks out on the road, so that if we had days last week that if one of those trucks needed to come out of service because it wasn't working anymore, we would not have a reserve truck to put those firefighters on, which is a reduction in service when we don't have a replacement fleet. So traditionally, we keep our fire engines and trucks for 15 years, and then they transition to a reserve status for five more for a total of 20.
245 Okay. So what I'm hearing is we are maybe not quite in dire situations yet, but close to it.
246 I'll put a caveat on that. Looking ahead, the city of Portland had a general obligation bond 15 years ago that paid for a lot of our fire apparatus. As chief johnson said. A lot of those are about to shift. So we do see a wave that's going to continue over the next five years of apparatuses that were purchased. With that bond going out of service over the next few years. So it will be an increasingly dire before it is a less dire. There have been conversations internally within the city about going out for another general obligation bond. Just two weeks back, we submitted the requests that we would have for each service area, which included needing to have replacement of those those apparatus, so that could be a lifeline.
247 Thank you for that context.
248 Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney councilor Kanal.
249 I've got a couple more questions, and I think chief day was going to answer that one. I'll try to be sorry. Sorry. Council president.
250 Apologies.
251 Ginger, can you tell me what we pay fleet.
252 Yeah. Well, so the overall fleet budget next year is almost 16 million. And included in that is nearly 6.5 million for vehicle replacement. And maybe you were going to say this, but right now that fund the value of the vehicles is $30 million. And so one would think there should be $30 million in there to replace as they come due, or somewhere in that ballpark for police. It's we're we're zero.
253 So we've been historically borrowing from the future to, to keep up. So we're not in a position where it's properly funded. Many of our vehicles are past date. We keep them years past date. We see an increased amount of then costs associated with repair and any of our major vehicles like new bomb truck or new mobile precinct. We've been relying upon asset forfeiture, a new traffic crash van. We've been relying upon asset forfeiture to make some of those purchases because, for example, our two mobile precincts over 25 years old, we got ready to replace them. The replacement fund wasn't appropriate to be able to do that. So our fleet is, you know, as as mentioned, we're built differently. And so we're sort of beholden to what fleet tells us we do and don't have. And we are definitely at risk of continuing to struggle to have an outdated fleet that more costs and more safety risks.
254 It sounds like there's two sides to the fleet. There are those major units and then the the daily fleet.
255 The daily.
256 Fleet, the daily fleet is in okay status, but not great status. The major units were in a pretty problematic place. Is that accurate?
257 Certainly the major units are are more problematic. But to ginger's point, we don't have the adequate money to fund even the daily fleet. So the cost replacement that we've been doing, we were advised this year wasn't calculated appropriately. And so we're behind. So we continue to stretch out even the regular patrol cars and non investigative cars out longer.
258 Okay. Thank you. Just one additional question. And chief if you stay up here I suspect that our dca may turn to you on this one as well. It appeared to me that in the cuts listed especially for the police bureau, but actually across all three categories, many of the proposed cuts were policy choices that led in a different policy direction than what I have heard. Both dca and the chief talk about wanting to go. So things like cutting training, things like cutting nonresponse programs. I know that sometimes those types of cuts are easier cuts to put on the table, but I also know that if we don't stick to what we've said, our policy direction is during budget times, we never actually make progress there. So I'm wondering if you can provide us a little bit of color commentary about why those are the types of cuts that we're looking at, as opposed to those being things that we are working desperately to try to preserve.
259 Yeah. When we were diving into this budget process early on, I had a conversation with the chiefs and directors and said, look, we are facing a cut year for our budget, and any time resources are constrained like they are, it's relatively easy to send a message. That would be I called it the nuclear option. A lot of people refer to it as the Washington monument. And I was very clear. I said, I'm not looking for nuclear options. What I'm looking for is very creative approaches to how we might be able to balance the budget for next year. And in that process, the all of the directors and the chiefs were very creative in that approach. So so what we're looking at at a 10% cut most likely would be nuclear options. I'll be very up front with you, but if it's a much smaller cut, then it wouldn't necessarily be an example that I can provide would be an idea from bureau of emergency communications where, you know, the first thing on their list might be to cut the security overnight security, which is something that was added a number of years ago for good reason, because the facility was broken into a couple of times. And, and that fund or that funded security over overnight for boec, for pbem as well as for bts. So looking at cutting, that is kind of the first step. If there's a minor cut, then it might be something like that. Police, fire pbem all of them have kind of taken that approach. Looking at this incremental look which lines up certainly with the 3% reduction and then the full 10% reduction as far as some some of the specific things that pb is looking for. I know chief dade sent a message out to his to his team. And again, this is high level information. But I have, you know, some of that information right here. You know, eliminating an entire retiree rehire program. Okay, that's bringing folks on who are retired, which helps with staffing. That helps with response times. But that's something that can be cut because it is a little more expensive than having a, you know, an officer who is not retired and coming back. So it's those types of things that there's an impact. There's an impact to staffing. When pb is not able to hire someone when they're retired, bring them back on board. So that's that's one example. Thank you chief.
260 Anything to add or.
261 I think that covers it.
262 Move on.
263 Thank you.
264 Thank you thank you council president.
265 Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney councilor Kanal.
266 Thank you, council president. Thanks everybody for being here. Fairly obvious. I'm biased. I've worked with a lot of the folks up here for a long time. I have a lot of faith in the numbers you provide and appreciate the work that you do, and not just the folks up here, but everybody in the back as well. I also wanted to say thank you as as councilor Pirtle-guiney did, for the use of similar templates. That's, I think, more of the administration side on on standardizing huge for the city of Portland. Finally, I think this is the first time we're talking about the budget. We probably won't spend a ton of time talking about one group of people, which is the non-sworn that do work later on. So I wanted to take the chance to shout them out. In particular, the pb records folks who are way more records requests go to pb than anybody else in the administrative side. So I wanted to ask as we go through the slides on slide three, and this is in general, I would love to see that psr ovp all the sort of the work that's more direct get gets pulled out in the future. This is partially a need for the bureau designation to help with that. But separating that from the other things in the dcas office will help us in the future. Slides six through ten. Really appreciated the good news on the results. I really liked the first four metrics. I wanted to ask that over the course of the next year that we look at different metrics for that fifth one, I don't think it's it's psr number of calls is helpful, but I think it's helpful to similar to what I asked for the to look at outcomes, behavioral health crisis calls resolved peacefully. You know which maybe the same thing with a different branding on it. But I also think reduction of the failure to locate metric would be really, really helpful for us to look at, which is right now a very high percentage of that. And it relates to resolving response times. It relates to 24 over seven. It relates to staffing levels and all that. But I think it's one place that you might capture many of those when you're only giving us a top five, which I think is fair for how broad of a service area psa is. A couple questions. Slide 11. It talks about the cost difference from 2022 to now. It's 35% of an increase in the last few years. Which seems on the higher side. Is any of that because of work being moved in still over the course of that time from other parts of the city, or is that just in inflation in the same bucket buckets of work?
267 It's it's inflation in the same buckets of work with an asterisk on all of those personnel stats I rattled off, like we have more filled positions. And so that costs more because we we have the humans doing the work. But it's not it's not different programs shifting. And I will say also, you know, when you're looking at actuals versus budget, hopefully the budget is not we're going to end right at zero because that's scary on January on June 30th. So I think, you know, whether or not actuals come in quite the same would be another piece. Copy that if that makes sense.
268 Thanks for slide 17. I did want to just quickly state I wanted you mentioned nonresponse programs. You mentioned a couple of them, but one like like the victims advocates, which I have concern about potentially losing them. But I also wanted to ask ps3's were not mentioned either way. Are they included in that bucket or not? In terms of that second bullet point on the leftmost column there?
269 I'm sorry you said ps3's or psr.
270 Ps3's.
271 I heard psr, so I was a little bit confused. There is as I recall, there is a mention of the psr program as a whole as a potential cut.
272 Ps3 program.
273 Is it? Yes. I'm sorry, I'm doing it.
274 Thank you. Thank you for clarifying. I'm very interested in updating the fee schedule for fire. I think that I'm grateful for you talking about revenue here as well, and specifically cost recovery for fire alarm responses for sorry, false alarms for fire alarms would be really great to look at more of there. I know that's a hassle not only on fire's end, but on boec as well. And we don't get to talk about boec much. But thank you for all the work that you and I see Steve back there, and the whole team have done, and the violence prevention stuff we'll talk more about there. I did want to get into a couple other things. Councilor Novick question about non follow up calls and getting data on that. I really appreciate it. I think the the constituent feedback I always get are things like bike thefts, for example, and I'm not endorsing that. But that's an example of one where people say we got the response, and then there's an unlikely to receive a follow up. I do think comparing calls per responder across bureaus is not a good way of measuring, especially when you're asking one group to deal exclusively with behavioral health, which are by definition more complicated calls and will likely take longer. Once you're on scene, it's a little different, and, you know, other bureaus will fluctuate and vary in the type of response that is needed. Future question. And I'm rushing because we're low on time. So sorry. I would love to get a the full amount spent on protest response by PPB, not just overtime. I want to understand the straight time portion of that as well, because I think the similar thing about psr being the right responder to the right type of call, but also understanding that sometimes you have to invest in creating that alternative, whether it's hiring within the same bureau, police and fire or separate entities can actually be an upfront cost that saves money in the long run. And I'd also love to see it separated from just that ice facility versus not. And then the last thing I wanted to this is more of a statement, but I am pretty concerned about the conversation around fire. I think there was a premise given by a colleague of if you're, you know, when we're looking at cuts to fire and I can just stop the sentence there and just say, don't, I think there's always little places we can look. But I'm concerned about we've already reduced in our district. There's the station at lombard and interstate, which is I think tripled in calls in the last ten, 15 years while losing an apparatus. And therefore and the company that goes with that apparatus. So the staffing has reduced as well. We're we're facing a lot of the greatest level of growth in calls, in particular around those behavioral health calls and overdoses, which fire takes on in district two. I imagine every other district has their own stories, and I don't. I'm not comparing, but I know ours better and wanted to understand for later how we can ensure that we're not merely not getting worse on that, but actually helping to reduce the workload by restaffing that second apparatus at at station eight, for example. I know there's a lot to do in east Portland as well, not just the training station, but in terms of the station density out there. So I wanted to just kind of make that pitch here in public while we have the chance and talk about asking for info on how you can do what you did in terms of presenting the budget for boec, for fire and police, in terms of having that separate bucket for training. I know you've done a great job with this at boec, and I think that'll help both make the public understand what we're doing, and also help protect the dollars needed to staff up both of these bureaus, because staffing up does require more money up front, and I don't want that to get caught up in an overall cut year conversation. Thanks, council president.
275 Thank you councilor Kanal colleagues, I will note that we are at 1227. We are only scheduled until 1230 and there are a few more folks. I will go ahead and take myself out of the queue for now. Councilor Ryan, go ahead.
276 Yeah.
277 Thank you, thank you, dc, nathan and ginger. Really well done. Why I'm on this call. I want to just acknowledge that the mayor you're in this meeting. I believe we really need a joint city county session, just like we do around homelessness for public safety. There half of this were first response there, the other half. And the public doesn't know that. And much of our challenges are with that lack of coordination. I'll do I'll try to be quick because there's not much time left. Clearly, we need more time for this topic and I know there'll be more opportunities. But overall, the trends that you did on slide number six started with year 1516. And so you were able to see what it was like when I think portlanders were much more content with our public safety responses. And what what the slides do after that is, is I think all the slides after that actually start around 2021 on. And I really would hope that as we go forward, we can look at a better lens where we look at what success looked like in in 1516. So we can use that more as, as where we want to be, as opposed to just feeling satisfied that we're doing better than 2021. So that's just one big picture. Comment two I think that it's really important that we continue to look at and it's been touched on the the portion, the correlation between Portland street response and then calls responses from police and fire. The the Portland street response value proposition that everyone got behind is that it will take calls that are inappropriate, for example, for a police response. And so I really need to see more information about how, in fact, the increase in Portland street response calls has provided more capacity for police to focus on more sophisticated criminality and investigation, for example. And let's see, number slide 17 really gets at the emergency response. And I think the very grim and information we received about if we have more cuts there, I don't think that's the Portland anyone would want to live in. I think what I'd like to hear going forward from the leadership is what ideas do you have in new revenue? Because what I can see this year and going forward with the current revenue streams that we are looking at, is that reality of that third bullet just continues to get more and more concerning. And so I need to hear what the creativity is about, where those revenues would come from, from leadership. And I'll just end with slide four. It actually in slide three, I had trouble finding the community safety division. I know stephanie came up. And so I was thinking about office of violence prevention, for example. And I'm trying to figure out again, back to being an organizational development geek. Where did the community safety division go? Is it all incorporated into the public service area? And so that that would be an example of that. And for example, I'm not exactly sure where chat is in this system, and I think it's all included under fire, but I believe it deserves a little bit more attention. And again, really good it's very dense. And also we didn't have much time, but so I wanted to give you those overall questions. So when I meet with you one on one or in further sessions, you can see what I was thinking about. I appreciate all your time. And if if my suggestions and overall suggestions didn't make any sense, please give me an email and I'll follow up.
278 Yeah. Thank you councilor. And we're taking notes. So we'll be able to provide responses to to the many questions I.
279 Like earlier, but that we just ran out of time.
280 Thanks. I do want to say the community safety division includes Portland street response ovp or office of violence prevention and ceasefire programs.
281 Okay. Thank you. I assume that, but I wanted to hear you say that out loud. Appreciate it.
282 Thank you, councilor Ryan. Vice president Clark.
283 Thank you, council president. So just a couple of things I wanted to echo what councilor Pirtle-guiney said, getting more detailed information that ginger, you rattled off a lot of information. That's not here. I would really like to get that. And I would like to be sure that all of the questions that we ask of all the bureaus, the answers come to all of us, by the way, and on. And I do appreciate the standardization of this approach, but I think we need to have a discussion about the internal service fee. It's noted on page 11 as rising internal services fees. Maybe that's going to come up in the city operations, but I think we need to know more about what those have been and why they're there. So that was one comment on slide 11 on the performance measures. I understand you only picked the top 4 or 5, but I guess riffing off of what councilor Zimmerman said earlier, I don't find this really helpful because when I talk to people in the community, it's they want to know how long it's going to take for the thing to get there. So if we could have some different charts that don't show, you know, how we stack up against the national average. But how long does it really take for the officer to get there? How long does it really take for a fire truck to get there? That that would be more helpful for me. And I think councilor Kanal said something that triggered my memory. There was a study done and the fire bureau externally a few years ago that talked about the density that you were mentioning. And we are woefully inadequate right now. City gate, city gate particularly, and in district four, because we've got the geographic problems, we've got the hills. Well, we have the river. And I think they noted in that report that we were already woefully inadequate. So I just want to make sure that we go back and take a look at that too. But if I could get that more information on what the real response times are or average, I would really appreciate that. Thank you for the presentation.
284 Thank you, vice president Clark. Councilor Smith.
285 Thank you, president Dunphy, question about some of the cease fire programs where we do intensive case management through those six programs. Can you tell me how those programs will be impacted in the new cuts?
286 Yeah, I believe stephanie is here.
287 Thank you, councilor Stephanie howard, for the record. So it's because these programs are funded on one time dollars year after year. Right now, there's a very small ongoing budget that staffs pretty much just personnel. The handful of I think there's a total of three positions, the rest that funds all of the contracts, all of the street level outreach contracts, all of the intensive case management contracts. And everything is all funded by one time dollars. So if if those one time dollars were not replenished, those contracts would end, and the folks on those caseloads would not have access to those services at all.
288 Okay. So it's like a hand in hand. You need both. You need both the cease fire employees and and the materials and services budget to pay for the street level. You do a lot of mentoring and through several different programs, healing hurt people. And so I'm I'm really concerned about how we pay for that in it's in one time only funding.
289 And I totally appreciate the the commentary. Share your concern. Councilor. And I think as we look towards what kind of systemic changes are possible, and this is not a great year to talk about systemic changes in our budget, but this is one of those areas where, as councilor Zimmerman was mentioning, if we're funding something year after year, we should probably talk about whether it should have ongoing funding. And frankly, the communities that depend on us would really appreciate knowing what funding is going to be available to them through both ceasefire contracts and through the office of violence prevention grants.
290 And I don't think our my colleagues know that we have like six programs. We have the help program, the nurture program, the what is it program. The program. And then we have the healing hurt people, the plc program, and the participants who are in the trauma and violence families. I mean, these are real programs that we actually do that I don't think people know that. We do this through your service area. I think they're very important. I think it makes a difference in terms of what is happening on our city streets and the intelligence that we get on how to keep more than just a perimeter safe. We're talking about keeping neighborhoods in a community safe. And that's that's what I value these programs. And I don't know how we make it work, but I think that we need to make sure that as we're talking about those things, and I'm going to say it again, a lot of these programs work with immigrant, refugee and communities of color. And if we're if we're going to be serious about, you know, the resolution that we passed last week, I'm going to keep saying it. We have to make sure that these programs are not the first programs cut. And it may be I mean, we don't have enough ongoing money to put all the programs in ongoing money. And I, I was at the county for, for years, and we had programs that had been in ongoing money for 15 years. I mean, it's just that's just the way it happens. You know, when you get your, your money of ongoing versus one time only. So I don't know that we can put all of our ongoing programs that we've done multiple years. We we don't have the capacity. And if you if you change those, then you're going to have to reduce it with the one time only money, you're going to have to have divide that by three to put it in, and it's going to reduce the amount of money that you have available for other programs. So I think that they're they're working and that you need to push those more, because we didn't hear about those programs last year. And I know that that was a part of the whole thing that mayor willard did with the public safety area, that we added these new programs to our public safety system in addition to psr. So I, for one, would like to hear some of the successes and how those programs have been effective and what impact do they have? Because it's like out of sight, out of mind. Yeah, they're there. And but I don't think people know what we actually do with those programs.
291 Thank you, thank you.
292 Thank you, councilor Smith. Vice president Clark, last word.
293 Just a quick comment. Councilor pirtle-guiney brought up asset management, and I think nathan mentioned bonding. I hope we forestall any conversation about that until we have our asset management plan and an asset management finance plan, so that we don't have a bureau in this new form of government hopping out in advance of anybody else going to the public for additional resources that we're going to evaluate that, you know, come the fall when we get that report back. Just a little caveat there. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I think we need to wait till we get the full citywide asset management report back. Thank you.
294 Thank you, vice president Clark, my last comment to to dca specifically as you are considering all of these things and all these parade of horrible outcomes in which we have to potentially cut and make hard decisions, I ask you to also please think about geographic representation. And we know that as district one, we have fewer fire stations. We have some challenges with police. We my district is divided, is divided between north precinct and east precinct. And sometimes call times are different. Because of that, I hope we continue to keep that as a a focus as well. Colleagues. With that, we are over time. I apologize to the staff. Thank you for letting us stay late. Thank you to everyone for presenting today. This was the first service area level work session. We will be having many, many more of these in the coming weeks. Thank you all. That is it for today.
295 Thank you. Good job, good job. Thank you so much.