The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2026-01-16
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (15,139 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Portland City Council Labor and Workforce Development Committee met on Friday, January 16, 2026. The session opened with roll call and a statement of conduct, followed by unanimous consent approval of November committee minutes. The committee then heard from rideshare drivers and representatives of a drivers' union regarding pay and compensation practices, including discussion of per-mile and per-hour earnings figures, deactivation policies, appeals processes, and a proposed driver resource center; figures cited for driver hourly earnings and per-mile pay in Oregon versus Washington were stated inconsistently across speakers. Ideas discussed included possible legislation, a windfall-profits-style fee structure, and translation/interpretation services. Next, representatives from the Bureau of Human Resources presented data on citywide staffing levels, turnover, vacancies, recruitment timelines, classification trends, base pay and total compensation changes over a ten-year period, retirement eligibility, internship and apprenticeship pipelines, and ongoing realignment and bargaining initiatives; some figures presented were later corrected by the presenters. No public testimony sign-ups were recorded for the public comment item. Closing discussion included references to an economic opportunity zone item from another committee, plans for a future report on police staffing costs, and a request to address workplace accommodations for employees with disabilities. Votes, where they occurred, are recorded in the vote ledger.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
0 Good morning. I call the meeting of the labor and workforce development committee to order. It is Friday, January 16th and we are now at 938. I apologize for the delay because we've played musical chairs. We sit in different chairs and they have to all of our inboxes have to repopulate in every computer. So that's more than you need to know. But my name is Loretta Smith. I'm the chair of the labor and workforce committee. This is our first committee meeting of the year of 2026. And I'm excited and I'm excited to to have the first committee meeting, talking about issues that help people solve real problems and get them on the record. Diana, will you please call the roll?
1 Good morning. Dunphy. Canal. Novick here. Green here.
2 Smith here. Thank you. Christopher, will you please read the statement of conduct?
3 Welcome to the meeting of the labor and workforce development committee to testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at ww. Agenda. Labor and workforce development committee, or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In person, testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The chair preserves order disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, state your name for the record. If you're a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent, and virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
4 Thank you christopher. Today's committee will approve the committee. Minutes for November. Discuss the current state of pay and compensation practices for rideshare drivers. We will receive a presentation from the city operations service area updating the committee on job loss and vacancies and workplace needs for the city personnel. And we will also hear lastly testimony on labor and workforce development issues. Diana, could you please read the first item.
5 Item number one October 9th, 2025 to November 13th, 2025. Labor and workforce development committee minutes.
6 The first item is the approval of the committee minutes for the labor and workforce development committee meeting held in November, and these minutes are available online as part of the meeting agenda. If there is no objection, the minutes will be approved by unanimous consent.
7 No objections.
8 No objections. Hearing no objections. The minutes are approved. Diana, could you please read the first item?
9 Item number two. Ride share. Driver compensation.
10 Could joe jackson from the Oregon driver's union step up? Sheila floyd from the Oregon driver's union.
11 We we have a few other folks that are going to be speaking. Madam councilor.
12 Would that be Eric staten? Stephanie king.
13 Stephanie king is out sick. I do have seth dilkash and ahmed al-shamrani who are here to speak.
14 Could you please come to the dais, please?
15 Thank you chair.
16 And thank you. Thank you for coming. And I appreciate the conversations that we've had over the last couple of months about some of the issues that are really important to you as you do your work in the city of Portland doing rideshare. And today you all don't have a presentation. But I invited you here today because we don't have a resolution. And I think some of our councilors are working on a resolution. And even state senator casey jama is working on a resolution. But what I wanted to happen today is I wanted you to tell me about your experience and what you're experiencing, the difficulties that you're experiencing in your workplace, and in how you believe that we can be helpful. You can start, joe.
17 Thank you. Chair Smith, vice chair, Green, members of the committee. I didn't actually prepare any testimony today, but I did put together a few slides with some information. Okay. And some of the gentleman to my right here have prepared some testimony. I'm mostly here. We're here to talk about fair pay for drivers and why we need it now, why we've needed it for so long. Recently, uber released a study that showed that drivers make, you know, $21 plus per hour after expenses. We reached out to james parrott and michael risch, who are economists leading in their fields, and they did a counter study, looked deeply into it, and determined that drivers actually make an average of $12.05 per hour after expenses in Portland. This is well below portland's minimum wage of $16.30 per hour and way far below a living wage. We do have the full study available, and I will follow up via email with the rest of that study. The full package. I also want to note that we are the founders of the fair rides Oregon coalition, and we have over 40 organizations listed here who have signed on to stand with us against the injustice of low pay for drivers. I also wanted to touch on the driver resource center. Drivers are often unfairly deactivated for singular rider complaint, and there is no current process in place for appeals aside from an internal process that oftentimes happens within seconds of submitting said appeal handled by ai and programed to deny the driver resource center that we want to set up would be, along with a a protections package for drivers to be able to to have the right to appeal their deactivation through a third party. The driver resource center would be a physical location in the city that is regularly open and has ample parking, full time office intake staff who can assist drivers in their time of crisis, a multilingual outreach and education team that can educate drivers about these rights and provide with ongoing case support, but also be able to provide support for the. For interpretation and translation for drivers facing the tnc. English speaking and ai chatbots support. We would also have legal staff on hand to help support unfairly deactivated drivers and so many more things. So the driver resource center does. I have a few more slides to share, but I would also like to give some time to these gentlemen to testify. These slides essentially just show some trip receipts. As you can see, these companies, they really like to rip us off. They take so much of what the passenger pays, all of this being funneled outside of our local economy and into a silicon valley company. And the chair, the ceo's pockets.
18 Which silicon valley company are you speaking of?
19 Both lyft and uber are guilty of this. There are way more where these came from. Okay, so I would like to invite ahmed al-shamrani to speak on behalf of deactivation.
20 Hi everyone. My name is ahmed. I'm a start uber 2014, in Portland. I think everyone now you know me. I have a special car is a car. I make everyone happy in my car five stars. People love my car so I work very hard 13 14 hours a day because I love the job. I love the people in Portland. So one day I get the activation for no reason. So that will be in the pandemic day. So I was on fox 11 news. I was in the page uber vip ticket. I have $10,000. Pay me over. You know, I am the top driver in Portland. You can anyone search you find me. So if you. I am the top driver in Portland. I have everything in the pandemic. I have a car 65,000 and he make me cry. No one say thank you, ahmed. We call you. How many brothers and sisters in Portland? Now we have a deactivation. And after that two years, what I do, I call and say I'm done. Done. So what they do? I share my story every single day. I was truck driver, but I'm never stopped every single day in the social media. Because if you are not go social media, I show them what I do. No one cares because the customer service zero no one cares. Company make $1 billion, get the driver and then you have a car. You have insurance, you have a gas. Many things we have, but no one cares about the driver. I am here today. I want to share my story to everyone to hear who is the company. If you today now work together, tomorrow you got to be your brother and your sister. You got to be patient. And I have a job. But many people here in Portland don't have jobs. You need to work. Maybe you have something in your family. You have a kids, everything. So after that was going on two years, I begged my account. But after what? I lose everything, so I don't have anything. So I go rent a car from uber. So I go drive everything correct, make money. One days I pick up customer from Vancouver, almost 1015 I don't know. So I have a one stop. I think you know everyone have one stop. You go big 7-eleven or big friends. So I stopped in mcdonald's in Beaverton. That will be inside the house. 1039 we have 15 cars ahead. To me, I was sleep. I speak very nice, sir, I am here, he say. Yes, go ahead, I said, what am I? Go ahead, say go buy the meal. I said, sir, 15 cars. I need almost 30 minutes to get that order over. I need to come back home. And then he he got an argument for me, I called uber, I follow the guideline. So uber was with me. He called the police. The police come in and then kick him out my car. I say okay, everything say okay, I might go home. But my day was very bad because I'm done. So I woke up morning. I find my my account deactivation. So I was follow the law in everything. Say okay, you got a 5 to 3 business days and then I, someone called me. Do you know what you say to me? Harassment. So I tell him how harassment I was in the support he say you done? And he removed my account 100% for rideshare for request. What do they do now? I go to driver union. So driver union, he get my case. And then I have some video and then back my account. So if you don't have a driver union, we have every single day people know the activation. So we are here. We need the support from you guys. We don't want money, we need the support. So today we got to be back maybe 15 16,000 people. The activation. How many families have now rent everything. So that's what I'm sharing. My my my situation. I hope you got to be helped to all the driver here. Thank you ahmad.
21 Thank you ahmad.
22 Ahmad had the benefit of living in Washington where robust deactivation protection laws exist and a driver resource center up in the seattle area exists to help him. So he was able to get back online.
23 Okay.
24 I would like to invite seth to speak now.
25 Jeff Smith, vice chair, Green, members of the committee. My name is seth and I've been driving uber going on seven years now. Growing up, I have never tolerated bullies in my life, and I don't think anybody in this audience should tolerate bullies. I want to ask a very simple question of each and every one of you. Imagine if your son, your daughter, your grandson, your granddaughter, your boyfriend, your fiancé, your wife came to you and asked you and told you, mom, dad, grandpa, grandma, I'm getting taken advantage of. I'm getting bullied. And in this case, these bullies are uber and lyft. What do you say to them? Let's wait, let's see. Or do we stand up to these bullies? My account was deactivated by uber and I had to take them to court. Like amit said, it took me almost four months to be able to get my account back to speed and all that, while not having any means of income to support my family. So we come here asking you to take a stand with us to help us in this fight so we can address this issue. How is it fair that a writer fulfills a write that pays $109.14? Lyft takes $95.04, pays a passenger, pays the driver $14.11. How is that fair? That is an 87% take rate for left. And these are the issues. It's like all across the board. These are the issues we come here to seek, recourse, to seek an address, to thank you.
26 Thank you so much, joe. Do you have you have another speaker?
27 Yes I do I would like to invite dilkash ahmadi to speak.
28 Good morning. My name is eddie. I've been a rideshare driver since 2018. These guys pretty much covered everything. But I'll. I'll talk to you about the pay. A lot of drivers are going from Oregon into Washington to drive because of the pay difference. Oregon pays about $71.73 a mile versus Washington pays about a dollar. I think it's $1.41 per mile. And it is just insane how many drivers are crossing the border. I personally know a driver that drives all the way from Salem to come into Vancouver, Washington, the surrounding area, just to make ends meet. You know, they they have no compassion. I was deactivated two years ago for about 18 months. If it wasn't for the driver's union, I wouldn't be reactivated. Till this day. We don't know why they surge. Prices go up at the airport or at a blazers game. Passengers think you know they'll come in the car. They're really upset. This is insane. Why are prices so high? They think we're getting, you know, $100 from the $120 they've paid. And once we get to talking, it just blows their mind. What really is the case, you know? And all it takes is an upset passenger. They'll call uber, they'll call lyft. My driver was rude, disrespectful. Whatever the case may be, there is no investigation. You can be a rideshare driver till from the beginning or a year end. They will deactivate you, no questions asked. They will not call. The driver will not investigate to see what their side of the story is. That's that's really scary for somebody that has, you know, rent, bills, car payment, a family to take care of. How how is that right for a company just to pull the plug with, you know, so we.
29 So dale, what would look like a fair process of appeals.
30 So a fair process I think we need deactivation protection. There should be some sort of some sort of accountability where, you know, hypothetically speaking, if a passenger says my driver was rude to me, well, they have to. They have to look at both sides. They can't just pull the plug. I mean, I get it, customer service customer's always right, but they need to investigate that. And then just the the the other thing is just going across the river, like from the airport to the waterfront. It's so close by. The columbia separates it. It's really sad that the drivers are, you know, are going to get paid 71, $0.73 a mile by airport way. And then when they go into Washington, it's like, double that, right? We just want we just want comparison. You know, we want accountability. And yeah.
31 Ahmed you wanted to say something.
32 I will say something when when we cross the bridge and and Portland to Vancouver we have benefits. We have a leave family sick protection. We have we have a monthly every weekend pay. So that's coming example every year when you work you have a three month pay you from driver union. So that's a very good protection for the driver. Why don't have in Portland just across the bridge. You know just across the bridge you have different everything. So look how how's the protection for for for the driver and everyone in Portland. You got to be happy about this, you know.
33 Thank you. Go ahead joe.
34 To to kind of just wrap up the question that you had, we believe that it is necessary for there to be an independent third party appeals process for an account deactivation. This is how it's done in Washington with full representation rights through a private right of action.
35 And how do you get that private right of action.
36 Through legislation? The the legislation in Washington gives drivers this private right of action, and it is executed via the driver's union through staff that we have on hand in Washington state.
37 Is that then through the legislature or through their city council?
38 It's done through arbitration with with our legal staff. That's that's on hand up there. Okay. It is an arbitration process.
39 So let me ask you this. And either one of you can answer this question for drivers whose primary language is in english, what barriers do they face during deactivation in the appeal process in terms of translation services, interpretation support? Is there is there anything like that currently available?
40 There are none. First party through these companies. And to be honest with you, you barely even talked with a person. Whether you can.
41 Speak english as your first language or not.
42 Whether it's english as your first language or not, you are speaking with an english only ai chatbot. And the goal of these chat bots, as I'm sure you all know, is to make sure that you never get through to talk to a person because people are expensive to pay for.
43 Okay, councilor Novick.
44 Thank you, madam chair. Is it true that drivers used to make more than like years ago? At the beginning, drivers got a bigger share of the of the fare and made more money overall.
45 So 2014 one start. We was very good pay. But after 2014 when we come to to the ceo and then came the pandemic, he played a games. He said, I'm going to help to the people to get paid less. But he's lying. He's reduced for the driver, but he keep the money from him, so he play the games. So and then now every time you see 2014 to 26 was the rent 300, the rent $600 we have a pay is almost $1.35. So now there are 1500. We pay now 71. So look how between 14 to 26. So I play the game okay.
46 And to expand on answering your question, when I started I was in my contract guaranteed no less than 80% of what the passenger pays for a trip.
47 Another question I had was in the calculation of the hourly wage. Is that just based on is that based on the hours that you have the app on or the hours that you're actually driving to and from and during trips.
48 Just driving to and.
49 From from? Yes.
50 Just driving to trips.
51 That's how it calculates it. You could sit around for 45 minutes, no ride sometimes or an hour. No ride.
52 Thank you.
53 To to that. So. During uber's inception, they used investors money to prop up driver pay to build up their client base. And when they reach a healthy balance, they decided, you know what? We can stick it to the drivers to where uber, uber, lyft, they were losing money year on year, year after year after year. And then they started hiking up their take rate to like 70, 75%, in some cases 87%, as I just gave you. So that meaning the driver gets less doing, more work.
54 Now, another thing I want to add that uber did over the years, we used to see receipts like you see here on lyft. They took that away. We used to able to see what the passenger paid and what our cut was just like this. And with their very, very expensive lawyers, they found a loophole to take that away. And we can't see on the uber platform, you know, as drivers how much the passenger paid is just if we get into that conversation and they seem upset and they feel like they want to share, then they'll say, this is actually how much I paid. And then when we tell them how much we're going to get, we end the trip and slide. You know, a passenger dropped off and they see that pay. They just their jaw drops. They're like, this isn't I mean, this is not right.
55 Right. Councilor Novick are you still.
56 I would just want to follow up so you can still see the breakdown for lyft but not for uber. Correct? Okay.
57 There is a way to download the receipt from uber. It's complicated. You typically have to for each trip you have to go to download a csv. It takes you to an alternate website where it always has you signed out. You go through the sign in process, it asks you to verify your id card and all of these things just to download one csv, and then you go to the next trip and start the rodeo over again. Uber has worked very hard to obfuscate obfuscate the difference between what a passenger pays and what a driver makes in order to increase that delta as much as possible for profitability.
58 It's very complicated.
59 But sorry, but also those numbers could be more like what they're showing us for our portion. We don't know that right? Numbers could be more they could be less.
60 Councilor Green.
61 Thank you, madam chair. And also thank you for this format. You know, when I envision our new committee structure, I wanted to see this type of back and forth with members of the public to help us both understand directly from their impacts, but also help us figure out how to craft policy in this dialog. So I really appreciate that. Thanks for taking time out of your days. I know, I know, every minute you're not on the app. That's a potential loss fair. I know what it costs for you guys, but thanks for struggling together to stand up together. I wonder if you can go back to the first slide, please? For a moment I wanted to. I know some of those names. I used to be an economist once and so I want to look at the study. So it's January 2026. It's you said you'll send it out, but it's it's a relatively recent analysis, right, by michael risch and james parrott. So I'm just going to write that down here real quick.
62 Yeah I have the study available. And before leaving here I can make sure to email it to all of you.
63 Please do. Yeah. Email it to all the committee members. I think that'd be important. I just want to say a few things. You know, many of my constituents in southwest Portland are drivers. They are largely immigrants who are somali, and I know this impacts them. I talked to them when I have to take a trip in. And I think one of the big barriers and one of the things I've heard in the recommendations here is that we absolutely need a driver center, but we need to invest in that driver center with some robust translation services, because how do you know to fight back if you can't even engage in a sort of level playing field? If it were, as it were? I want to ask councilor Novick, because I understand you were working on something related to this. Can you remind me what that is?
64 Yeah. Zach ward and my staff and I have been working with folks in the driver's union and looking at what's going on in other states and sort of evaluating evaluating alternatives.
65 That's great. I just want to signal my support to help you with that if you're interested in collaboration. I think that as we're thinking about prioritizing for this next year, I want to make sure that maybe we can bring forward a piece of legislation that gets us to a much better place by ordinance. So I'll be a partner in that, if you'll have me. You know, one of the ideas and I'm just spitballing here, but, you know, one of the things I'm seeing is, you know, there's there's two buckets here. One is basically the power differential between the corporation and the drivers, recognizing that they can basically do whatever they want. And then it's up to you to overcome that barrier.
66 That's something wild west.
67 Yeah it is. But then the other part is just the basic economics of it. And so one idea I'm going to float here is, you know what? If we were to pursue legislation and I don't know if we can do this legally, but make the tax on the company relative to the percentage of the fare that the driver actually gets. So, for example, the city maybe takes 50% of any money not distributed to the driver after the first 25%. This both incentivizes paying drivers more and disincentivizes raising prices profits to increase prices to increase profits. Basically, you know, we would call this a windfall profits tax. Councilor.
68 Yes. You know what I mean? Yeah, we would probably have to put that through the city attorney's office. But it's a it's a very grand idea.
69 We do that with any with any piece of legislation. You know, you guys know my style. I like to kind of shoot for the moon here. Yes.
70 Appreciate a good spit spitball. So.
71 Yeah. But I mean, I think like because if we want a good, proper driver center, that's like a place where you can go. It's a bricks and sticks location with resources you have to figure out how to pay for it. And in my mind, paying for that. Should you know the person who causes the the entity that causes the harm ought to pay for the the resource to level that out. So just wanted to share that out as an idea and offer my my heartfelt I just want to acknowledge how how difficult it has been for, for many of these drivers to face this economic precarity because you might just be deactivated on a whim. So on behalf of the city, my office, I want to apologize for your experiences. And I think that's about all I need to say right now.
72 Thank you, councilor Green. Very observant and some very good options of ideas of how to correct the harm. And I just want to say we did get started a little bit late. We have two more minutes. We had 40 minutes for this particular session, joe. And go ahead and wrap us up okay.
73 Great. So vice chair Green, I just want to say thank you for your kind words and let you know that that some of the thoughts that we had had actually surrounds the fee that was passed last year during the budget cycle of $2 per trip, $0.20 of that could fund a driver resource center by our rough calculations. So just 10%. And I do see that councilor Kanal has his hand up.
74 Yes. Councilor Kanal.
75 Thank you, madam chair, and thank you for the presentation. I just wanted to very briefly signal my my broad support for everything that councilor Green just said, as well as councilor Novick proposal that is under development, have the chance to talk to the drivers union leadership a couple of times. I'm very interested in this. Obviously, my community also very strongly represented in the ranks of drivers in the city. And a lot of the folks that I speak to in district two who are drivers are experiencing the same things that we hear about in every other district, of course, as well. I last year we had a few different tnc fee change options, and I think in sort of the shuffle, we didn't have as much of a chance to really dig into the exact amount, not only in general, but how much would go to a potential center. I hope that with the advantage of not getting as late a start in the conversations on it this year as we did last year within the budget process, we'll have a chance to talk about that too. But I'm broadly supportive of independent legislation as well. Thanks.
76 And just and just to wrap this up, joe, it looks like I'm up very high on the volume.
77 I think we've got I think it's muted. Never mind.
78 Well I just want to say that ditto ditto ditto what vice chair Green talked about. And we have been in conversations about this for quite some time. And I support you and support working with this panel to come up with something that leaves you with something to to be able to have a living wage and so that you're treated with dignity and respect and that you can continue to help us. One of the things that I like, that you said to me, joe, that I remembered you said we're like a first responder. We actually take when it's cold weather and it's icy and snow. We take folks up on up on that hill. So we feel like we're helping to save lives. And yes, you do. You do help to save lives. So I appreciate you and I appreciate your drivers willing to take the risk that you take during really horrible weather out here and bringing people to work not just on the hill, but throughout the city of Portland. You have been amazing and outstanding. I have family members who who work for rideshare companies, and I know the the struggle, and I also know the success that you can have when you're when you're paid a living wage. So keep up the good work. I'm not going to keep you here because I know you need to get on the road. It's sunny outside. People need a ride. So thank you so very much for coming.
79 And thank you all so much for your time.
80 Yes.
81 Diana. Could you please read the next item.
82 Item number three. City of Portland workforce needs and personnel update.
83 That feedback is coming from.
84 As. Just a little too hot. So yeah. Yeah, great. All the way. Thank you. Yes.
85 Thank I'll just do this a little bit so it doesn't echo so much okay. Thank you.
86 Thank you. Diana. Is that working.
87 Yeah I think that's helped. I'll reread it again. Item number three city of Portland workforce needs and personnel update.
88 Thank you. City operations will present a presentation this morning on the update of the personnel report that they gave this time last year. And so we're welcoming ronald zito, director of the bureau of human resources. Tracy warren is not here today, but you have some folks with you. Could you please introduce yourself?
89 I sure do, councilor. Yeah, I'll maybe start to my right. Good morning council.
90 My name is christopher parra. I am the workforce recruitment and training manager with the bureau of human resources.
91 Reesa williams. I'm the city's classification, compensation and pay equity manager.
92 Thank you, thank you, thank you, mr. Clark. Thank you, miss williams. Go right ahead.
93 Good morning counselors. Happy Friday to you. It's a beautiful sunny day out there to start a long weekend. And we're here with you this morning to provide a snapshot of the city's workforce, as well as current trends and initiatives that are on the horizon. So we've got a presentation to walk you through this morning, and how we were hoping to use the time was first, I'll give a broad overview of the city workforce. Then christopher will move us through some recruitment and hiring data, and then lisa will share some information on classification and compensation as well as salary trends. And then finally, we'll wrap up with actions and initiatives underway impacting the city's workforce. We've got a lot of information to share with you this morning. Probably not everything you want to know. So as we go through the presentation, please feel free to stop us or just make a note that we'd like to see more information on this, or maybe trend lines on that. And we're happy to follow up with you after the presentation today as well.
94 Excellent.
95 All right. So let's just start by talking about who makes up the city's workforce. And these are some pretty quick slides. But big picture perspective here. The city employee is about 8677 total employees as of January 1st of this year. Of those, 6709 are non casual and 1968 are about 22% are casual or seasonal. It may be helpful to point out at the outset here that casual or seasonal staff are used for positions where work arises and ends, and then reoccurs periodically or seasonally, whereas non casual employees make up the ongoing workforce that delivers core services and is generally who will be referring to throughout the presentation. But we'll note as we reflect otherwise. Okay. This slide conveys the total employment number that's changed over the past ten years. It highlights trends both in non casual as well as casual employment. And again, generally it's worth noting that overall staffing levels are a reflection of service demands, funding levels and any hiring constraints in place at the time. But what you'll see here is that over the past ten years, our non casual workforce has hovered around about 6000 employees, while our casual staff has had more fluctuations. So you'll see a dip starting in 2020, followed by a slow buildup after that and then peaking this January here. That dip in casual numbers in January of 21 and 22, likely the result of programs put on hold due to the pandemic. Maybe parks funding uncertainty, as well as the great resignation taking place across that that period of time there. Okay.
96 Mr. Zito, could you explain to us what a casual employee is?
97 Yes. In general, a casual employee is someone who is generally limited to about 1400 hours per year per our hr hours. But casual staff do are represented by various unions. So there is some differences there. Generally that work is is brought on for a specific need for a period of time ends, and then reoccurs again the following year.
98 Thank you.
99 Of course. All right. And this slide provides a gender identity breakdown of the workforce and includes casual staff. It's a snapshot of January 1st of this year. And you'll see roughly a 6040 split here with some employees also identifying as x or preferring not to provide an identity in our sap system. Okay, this next slide shows racial and ethnic diversity across the city's workforce. Again, this is just a snapshot in time. It does include that casual staff. And it's as of January 1st of this year. And what I might highlight here is that while while the us census data that we would compare to it shows that we're a workforce that's slightly above the portland's general population, we still have a lot of room to improve here in. This continues to be a focus area in our organization. That's where we sit today. Okay. Next is a look at the breakdown between managerial staff and non-management staff. And what you see here is that managers and supervisors make up about 16% of our employees. And that's a figure that's been relatively consistent since about 2019. So that's where we stand today. And then these next few slides kind of break down where staff sit throughout the organization. So what it shows here is that the largest concentration of staff, just under about 60% of our employees, can be found within two service areas. That's public safety and the public works service area. And continuing on with that, this theme, this provides a more detailed look at staffing levels within individual bureaus. It does not include casuals and therefore reflects that. Police, fire and PBOT are our largest bureaus in terms of employee population. If we were to add in casuals, you'd probably see, depending on the time of the year, that Portland parks would rise to the top of those counts. But that's where we would stand as of January 1st, without casuals across bureaus. And this next slide is just a continuation of that breakdown because it couldn't fit on one slide. This shows some smaller teams, mainly a collection of bureaus under the executive offices, auditor's offices and council offices that you see here. And as you're aware, most city employees are represented by a labor union. And this slide shows how many employees are distributed across our 15 current bargaining units, the largest being liuna recreation. That's currently in negotiations, followed by afscme and then protech as well. Okay. And now that's kind of the broad overview. We're going to get into some more trends and themes here, starting with turnover in general. And this slide shows the city turnover rates excluding casual employees and elected offices. And what may jump out at you here is that the overall turnover trends tend to move in waves that you see over the years, largely influenced by voluntary turnover. And so you'll see spikes in 2018, 22 and 24. But more recently we're seeing fairly low turnover comparatively, with fiscal year 25 being the lowest since 2020. Okay. And just to to reiterate, involuntary turnover is typically initiated by the employer. And it's due to reasons such as performance or organizational restructuring. Whereas involuntary is generally I'm sorry, voluntary turnover is generally a decision by the employee chooses to leave the organization, maybe for personal reasons or for other advancement opportunities.
100 Okay.
101 So here's another look at the recent turnover within our bureaus. It's risen above the citywide average, which is about 7.2%. And you'll see here the highest rates are in public safety areas as well as fleet and facilities and Portland parks. And this data does not include casuals, which would make a difference in the numbers here. So that's where we stand in terms of those those highest collection of areas with turnover. And now if we were to double click on those areas you'd see specific job classifications that make up those turnover rates. And so these roles often overlap with difficult to fill or highly competitive labor markets. So you'll see here positions like facilities maintenance techs, boec dispatchers and even civil engineers that lead the pack. And this includes only regular employees and as well as excludes classifications with very small numbers, which would kind of impact the rates that you see here. The percentages. And this next page is just a continuation of that. These are the remaining seven of the top 15 highest classifications with turnover. And this includes roles such as manager ones, utility workers as well as parking enforcement officers. And finally, in February of last year, bhr brought to this committee retirement data. And we broke that detail down in terms of service area and how that played out in different bureaus. We won't revisit all of that information today, but we do want to give you an update on the fact that as of this calendar year, of about 455 total staff that were eligible to retire, we only saw about 76 or about 16% actually take retirement. So not the wave that we would have expected.
102 And mr. Zito, would that be for folks who are eligible for full retirement?
103 I believe that reflects folks that would be eligible eligible for full retirement under pers. Yes.
104 Thank you.
105 Okay. And lastly, in terms of vacancies, we had about 741 non casual vacancies as of the first of this year. And approximately 386 of those have recruitments that are taking place right now. Now that's the total number of positions currently. If you were to open our neo gov web page, you'd see about 32 openings that are posted as recruitments and those account for those number of positions underneath them. Vacancies is a pretty good segue into some information on our recruitment and hiring throughout the city. So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to christopher parra, who's going to walk you through what he and his team are seeing from a recruitment standpoint.
106 Good morning. So I'd like to start with some common key metrics we use to monitor the effectiveness of our recruitment program, as well as some just general metrics on on recruitment activity. Volume. One of the first things is we use is time to fill. So with time to fill, essentially we use that metric. And it's defined as at the time we receive a requisition to the time of verbal offer is made. Our goal is 85 days. This average excludes police bureau and casual recruitments, essentially because those are police bureau recruitments are a lot more comprehensive, require more time and casual recruitments. A majority of those are, for example, in parks and rec bureau. They tend to hire a lot more mass hiring for seasonal hires. But for the average five year fiscal year over between, excuse me, between 2021 and 2025, it's been an average of about 86 days that we're we're we're just slightly over our goal. We did note that over last fiscal year, there was a drop in 79 days. I do want to indicate here that part of the the management of meeting this goal includes are working closely with our internal customers as we manage a decentralized hiring program in human resources. Our our primary objective is to establish an eligible list. And then beyond that, the selection process is administered with the bureaus at the bureau level. Second, for we for the requisition volume, that is important for us to track in terms of distribution and efficiency with our resources to deliver that service. Average requisitions received over five years is 1285. All requisitions include those used to open a recruitment and those requisitions used to as an to use for either for an eligible list too. So those are the kind of common strategies we use between 2021 and 2023 fiscal year records. We observe requisitions steadily increasing as as a result of kind of seeing a pattern coming out of the pandemic, things started to pick up. However, it should be noted that the last two fiscal years, we started to see a decline. Requisitions received about 32%. The last two years were below the five year average. And our our estimation is, is you could interpret that based on just the shorter or less budget availability, budget authorization. We're going through serious transformation and reevaluating the use of resources and positions across the city. And then last year, the average number of requisitions received just an initiate, a an open competitive process. We received well. We initiated 792. And again, between 2021 and 2023, the initiating a competitive recruitment was active and positive. And then again, things started to drop. Over the last two fiscal years, the trend opening recruitment showed a decline in 37%, and the last two years were below the five year average. Next, I'd like to talk about pipelines. Some of the things we our recruitment services provides. And it really starts with not just with recruitment services, but some focused, community outreach focused outreach. We have a small team responsible for coordinating in participating in outreach programs for traditionally underserved community populations. Organized marketing. This includes organizing marketing activities such as coaching, networking events, community organizations, event presentations, school visits including local school districts, the community colleges, high schools, and excuse me, higher education as well coordinating workshops and informational sessions and then attending career fairs as well. So as you look at this, this table here in front of you, the the our small team manages a list of clients. We help those clients get opportunities to make an eligible list of civil service eligible lists. And then we also try to monitor the number of hires from those eligible lists. So here in front of you, we have about a four year trend. We've been monitoring. And the total we have the total there in front of you of the average as well. But I do want to note, you know, some possible explanation as to why is there such a low or a decline, particularly in 2025? Again, that could be attributed to just a competitive market right now with a strong labor supply that could be attributed to fewer hiring opportunities. And as well as folks who do make the eligible lists, are not necessarily getting interviews. We have large eligible lists as well.
107 So we don't have to choose folks from the eligible list. We can they can do a direct application, correct.
108 A direct appointment. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Yes. That is that is an option as well. I mean, we do want to ensure we're demonstrating a competitive process, but that is an option if, if, depending on the criticality or the urgency of the need, we could consider that.
109 Councilor Green. Do you want to wait until the end or would you like to ask your question?
110 Yeah.
111 Thank you. I'll just ask a couple questions from earlier in the presentation. Director, you had a you had a slide that gave a pie chart of sort of span of control metric and said that that was roughly that proportion was roughly stable. It was about 17% manager to. Yeah. This one, you said that that proportion has been roughly stable since 2019. I don't know if there's the ability to speak to the 2019 data at this time, but I would appreciate maybe even a follow up later to get a sense of a trend over time of that proportion. I'm curious if there was a pandemic effect or I know there was over the last 5 to 10 years. We do have a pretty considerable growth in our ftes and total costs. And so I'm just curious how that proportion holds up between 29 before 2019.
112 Absolutely. Councilor we can provide you with a breakdown by year from 2019 to date, as well as a breakdown of classifications. So, you know, is it an executive manager or is it a frontline supervisor and the changes between those.
113 Yeah, I'd also be interested in pre 2019 data if you have it.
114 Okay.
115 Thank you. And then the other piece is there was a slide where you've got let's see if I can find it and help you out here. It looked at the total ftes across the service areas by bureau. It was slide 11. And the office of the chief financial officer. It's the next slide after that one. Yeah. Office of the chief financial. It clearly doesn't have 200 ftes under jonas bieri directly. So I'm just curious, are those just financial analysts or more or less embedded throughout the organization?
116 We have some of the staff that pulled this data for us here today. Not sure if they're able to speak to that, but my gut would be that that 208 reflects a number of departments under that, that office of the cfo. So revenue accounting, those teams I think would be what makes up that number. Is that correct?
117 Yeah. And it really is that, that that number.
118 Okay, okay.
119 Because when I think about the reorg that put the cfo kind of up at almost sort of a direct report level, and I think about what's necessary to support jonas's work. I want to make sure this reporting roll up doesn't get muddled because, I mean, I know that he needs more help to kind of help us through budget stuff. So just a little more clarity there would be helpful.
120 Absolutely. We can break that out for you. What makes up that 208.
121 Thank you. And then finally on the turnover rate I think that's really interesting data that's helpful that you kind of broke it out by bureaus and classifications with higher than average turnover rates, with some suggestion that, like for instance, facility maintenance techs, that's a pretty competitive and tight labor market. And, you know, it's easy to hire good people away when those conditions occur. But do we do exit interviews? Is that a standard practice to get a broader sense of why people leave?
122 Councilor yes. Currently, exit interviews can be performed at the bureau level. I'd say it's an inconsistent practice across the city, as we do look at realignment in the future. I think that is a practice we'd like to have standardized across the city.
123 I think that'd be great. Thank you. I think that's it for me for now. Thanks.
124 Thank you. What I'm going to what I'm going to do is have mr. Clark finish his presentation, and then we'll take questions from all the councilors. I see the councilor, Novick and councilor Kanal are in the queue, but I want mr. Clark to to finish his his presentation. I'm sorry about that. Thank you.
125 Quite okay. So on slide 22, I believe with recruitment pipelines continuing there, I do want to highlight the the effectiveness of the summer internship program. The this is a program that provides paid internships as well as learning, learn and earn unpaid opportunities to youth ages 16 to 24 who face barriers to employment, including disability, justice and system involvement, immigrant refugee status, houselessness or experience in the foster care system. We partner with work systems incorporated to lead this early career program for the Portland community. And here in front of you is some figures showing our our just city of Portland placements. Again, some research does support the Portland community, not just the city of Portland. So we have work experiences which are essentially the paid internships. We have learning opportunities, which we call basically learn and earn opportunities. These include job shadowing, getting an intern, getting experience with job shadowing, interview preparation, coaching, and just some general professional development. So we have information here from 2022 fiscal year through 2025, fiscal year. And the on average, we per year, per fiscal year, we get about 29 placements in the city. I do want to acknowledge we had a nice budgetary support last year to get the the the program continued and to invest in community here at the city of Portland last or this fifth fiscal year. And we had about 26 placements just for the work experiences. I'm still working with work systems to get some more data on on ongoing placements outside the summer season. So but I do also want to point out one factor there, in case you're curious, under the learning opportunities. The police bureau did commit both 2023 and 2024 for those learning, earn opportunities that here at the city. So those fortunately they were they they committed to that. And we're still working on preparing for this coming summer. Just as an fyi working partnering closely with wsi. Just some other pipelines that we manage in recruitment. This could that I want to highlight that I feel like are have been some value to the city. This includes the in the public works service area bureaus. They annually hire engineer interns through university cop cop program. This is the multiple engineering cooperative program. Civil engineering cooperative program. We average about two per public works bureau bts transportation, water. And they do a really solid job working closely with us. We also coordinate paid internships in general, and we open up competitive recruitments. We do some direct placements across the city. And then last, I do want to highlight the continual use of our fellowship program with Portland state university, the hatfield program, and the Oregon summer fellowship program. Typically, we aim for six hatfield placements per year and two summer placements, and this is a steady annual goal annual program that gets support throughout the city and leads to ongoing career opportunities and placement for for interns and fellows. I do want to highlight the water distribution worker trainee program. This is a a program that was led. I really want to give credit to water bureau interim construction and maintenance director charles Smith. Smith. Excuse me, who implemented this approximately 2022. This program develops qualified journey worker professionals serving the community. Trainees learn how to about the water system infrastructure installation and maintenance program, including using tools, equipment, learn about the water facility, site maintenance, and receiving safety training. This requires about 4000 hours and it's about up to a two year program. I really feel like this has done an exceptional job, because they've hired at least 30 trainees over since 2022. They've promoted 24 to the journey worker level, and they have are currently have five trainees enrolled in the program, and they're planning to hire five more. So this is probably one of the more successful great success stories. They have the infrastructure to support it and meaning resources, team and connections and partnerships with local community colleges to get the the trainees well educated and prepared. Okay, last, I want to talk about some of the challenges we may be seeing. And traditionally, like any employer, we there are some difficult to fill jobs. And these are some of the common jobs here. Before I I start going into greater detail, I do want to point out a couple corrections. This is a typo on my behalf. You can see here under electrical engineer number of recruitments. That should be a five not an eight. My apologies. And then correction for engineer three. The average number of eligible applicants per recruitment should be seven not six. Again my apologies. That was my typo mistake there. But I want to highlight some, at least some of the common jobs we see that are difficult to fill. You can see a pattern here. For example facilities maintenance technician again, in ron zito's presentation, he talked about the the high turnover and fmt. This is a difficult job to fill simply because it is a tight labor market or and there's competition regionally for with other organizations that hire this kind of work that require a limited maintenance, engineering or electrical electrician, excuse me, license. That is a challenge. And like a lot of these jobs listed here, we've had to explore and promote different strategies such as trying apprenticeships, trying traineeships, working in invoking some of the the opportunities within union contracts for trainee opportunities. Like I said earlier with the water distribution worker traineeship, that is a perfect example. I constantly say model this right here. What director Smith has is implemented. If you have this, the budget authorization, if you have this support system to do it right.
126 Mr. Clark, could you tell me the scope of work of these electricians that you're having a hard time filling the jobs? What is the actual scope of work that they do?
127 They do a lot of maintenance and repair. The facility maintenance technicians in our buildings and our facilities, our city properties. And under state law, they do require that that license. That's just essential, unavoidable.
128 Right. And we have this conversation with with tracy, who was the head of, of, of human resources last year. And one of the reasons why I worked so hard with the the mayor to put another $1.2 million in summer works, because I wanted to figure out a way, how do we make sure that apprenticeship programs are married with the summer works program so that we can actually grow our own and build our own folks who, in those hard to fill positions, particularly in underserved communities, we're going to have a brain drain. We're in the middle of a brain drain. Baby boomers will be retiring. And with this retirement, every local government is going to be looking for those hard to fill jobs and looking for folks to fill them. They're going to go to the same normal, usual place. The only way that I see that we're going to be able to get ahead of the game is we have to go to places where we haven't gone before, we have to go to those underserved communities, those underserved students that have not had an opportunity to have an opportunity at the city of Portland. And we have to go after those folks and create those programs and have those pipelines so that we have folks to go into these positions so that they know what it is all about. And while we don't lead programs here anymore, I have been very supportive of summer programs, internship programs to make sure that as those folks who are 450 deep who can retire fully right now, that we have people that can fill those spaces and come right behind them. And I'm not saying that all those, those 450 are those hard to fill spaces, but I imagine that some of those folks that are not retiring is because we don't have folks to take their place. And so they're staying they're staying here a little bit longer until we can actually make that transition. I would imagine, mr. Zito, that that is a little bit of why many of those folks are not retiring fully in the way that we had expected them to. So I'm go ahead. I'm sorry.
129 Go ahead.
130 No, thanks for the feedback. Thanks for the kind of direction of what you intend for the use of summer works funds. And I can certainly explore new strategy and make more effort to connect with our public works and our facilities leadership team.
131 Yeah, because for some of this, I wanted to mean something. It's not just, okay, here come the summer works interns and it's, you know, we check it off the the box. It has to mean something. It has to be taking you to a particular place that these folks, they get an opportunity to see what government is like. And how are we making sure that these folks are on a list that get an opportunity to come back and rejoin our workforce in a way that's meaningful? So they know that when they're here, they're not. It's just not a summer job. It is it is an opportunity to have a career. So college to career, high school to career, a pipeline. That's that's along the lines that I'm thinking about. Got it.
132 Thank you. Thank you.
133 And, counselor, if I may, I love the idea of when we bring in the summer work staff, perhaps part of that curriculum that they're here is learning about the areas that are hard to fill, learning about the certifications or experience necessary to step into those roles as a part of their their time here with us.
134 As a part of their orientation. I would love to have that happen. We have to we have to do a better job of making sure that they understand what the opportunity is here. It's not just to to make some money over the summer to pay for your school clothes. It is also building a career opportunity, a ladder, and actually you're getting a you're getting a heads up on folks because you're here, you're making connections. We did some some data on this. Underserved kids and kids of color don't have the same opportunities that other kids have, because more affluent kids, their their, their parents have more affluent friends and associations, and they place them in places that the underserved kids don't have an opportunity for. So our opportunity as a public city, public agency, we have the opportunity to expose them. And of all the career types and those hard to feel career types and good paying, living wage union jobs, that's what we do here. So I would really love for us to really make those connections. And we'll work on this over this year. And I'm so happy that Tiffany pinson is back with the city of Portland, because while I may not be able to lead some things, I'm going to ask sylvester if I can ask her to work with you all again to because she understands the importance of making sure that these connections are made. So thank you so much for for keeping this around.
135 That concludes my section and hand over.
136 Okay. Thank you. Good morning. The information that we're going to highlight today are the trends that we've seen over time in the city's classification and compensation structure.
137 Reintroduce yourself.
138 Certainly. My name is risa williams. I'm the city's classification compensation and pay equity manager. And I work within bhr.
139 Thank you.
140 If we move to consider. Yes.
141 I'm sorry, I am not doing my due diligence, but I want to go back to councilor. Novick is this. Is this a legacy hand or a question that you had of mr. Clark?
142 It actually, it actually is. It was a question about a retirement eligible folks. I heard recently that in one water, maybe it was just the water bureau. 30% of employees are eligible for retirement. And I was wondering, I mean, is that a big worry or is that, like, always true? And you had the the statistic that in one year, 16% of people were eligible for retirement, retired. And so I was just wondering if, you know, both in that organization, across the organization, are we looking at a eligible for retirement slash retirement cliff, or is this kind of business as usual?
143 Councilor in full honesty, I am. That number does scare me a little bit, but I we haven't had much discussion and it's something I think we'd leave this meeting and do a little bit of digging into that data. Yeah. And I'm so sorry. Just for the record, our workforce recruitment and training manager is christopher parra. I think there might have been muffled when we did the introductions.
144 Oh, I'm sorry.
145 Christopher, I was calling you mr. Clark, because.
146 I okay, I.
147 My, my my microphone was really reverberating. I couldn't hear. But thank you so much. Councilor Kanal could you state your question? I don't know if you're still here. You left the meeting. Okay, miss williams, go ahead.
148 Okay. Thank you. Yeah. The the city's classification structure currently contains more than 738 classifications. It's the framework that we use to categorize the different types of work at the city. We highlighted today, those top ten classifications. This excludes casual positions. But what you'll see from the graph is that of the top ten, police officers and firefighters are the top two. They have the most significant numbers compared to the rest of the classifications in the top ten. Moving on. When we take a look at trends in classification, there are two factors that we notice have impacted trends over the course of ten years. One, we've seen an increase in upward reclassifications at the city over time. Higher classifications generally require a higher level of skill, knowledge, and ability to fulfill the work that's needed here at the city. With upward classifications. That also means that the compensation for those classifications also increases with time. And so, for example, in 2017, 88% of the city's classifications had a maximum salary that was less than $100,000. As of January, that percentage has decreased to 58%. That means that at this point in time, 42% of all of the city's classifications have a maximum pay range of at least $100,000. So next, we'll take a look at trends in compensation that we've observed over time. So factors to consider are total personnel costs since 2017. Some of those factors might be increased numbers in city in the number of city employees on the payroll over time. Again the use of higher classifications that have higher pay ranges. Increases in employer benefit contributions, merit increases, and also cost of living adjustments. The next slides will provide more information about salary trends and compensation. But again, just to just to highlight and and provide an overview, we we have seen that the total personnel costs do continue to increase. We took a step back and said let's at least look at base salary. So over a ten year period snapshot from January 1st of 2017 and January 1st of 2026, we evaluated changes in base pay. That means the minimum rates of pay used to compensate employees. That excludes additional pay types such as overtime differentials and premium pay types. By January 1st of 2026, the average hourly base rate of pay for casual employees has increased more than 76%. The base rate for represented employees has increased by more than 46%. That for non-represented employees by more than also 46%, and then for former formally non-represented employees who are now represented. That increase in base pay has been by more than 50%. So considering inflation, which has been about 38% over that same time period, the salaries of city employees have outpaced inflation. Next, we'll take a look at the total cost that include benefits. So, for example, in January of 2017, if we were to provide a one hour per $1 per hour raise to an employee, it would cost the city $1.22 in 2026, a $1 per hour increase cost the city $1.39 per hour. And so, as displayed in this graph, the most notable change from 2016 to 2026 has been the cost of pension contributions. They've increased significantly from about $0.08 on the dollar to $0.24 on the dollar. I will also note in this data that this includes considerations, excludes considerations for fpg. This is mostly focused on op serp, which is the majority of the city's workforce right now.
149 Miss williams, I don't see health care in this equation. I can imagine we've had double digits, 16% plus increase in our health care benefits. And I don't see that in this in this circle. Why is that? Because I can imagine this is a little bit more than $0.39.
150 You're correct. This does not show those health care costs. We did make just some assumptions. But when we go to the next slide okay, we will be able to see total compensation. That does include health benefits. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. So in general as I wrap up this section trends in total compensation. As mentioned this slide shows based on hourly rates of pay, the spending we have highlighted for non casual and casual positions, and the graph does show or these graphs do show total compensation which includes wages, overtime premiums, wave driven wage driven benefits and also the cost of health benefits to the city per hour. So this is an average total cost per hour of both pay and benefits for city employees.
151 Thank you.
152 Okay, I'll turn it back over to ron zito now.
153 And before we go on, councilor Greene has a question.
154 Till the end.
155 You'll wait till the end. Okay. Go ahead, mr. Zito.
156 Thank you. And thank you. To close today, we thought it would be important to also share that there are a number of initiatives underway that will influence the information we shared with you this morning. So just to briefly give that some attention, specifically, we have two class comp studies that were recently completed and that's for cpp and protech. And and both those studies are now being employed in our current collective bargaining process. And we have two more getting ready to launch this year. And that includes a long awaited study for non rep staff as well as for afscme staff as part of a byproduct of those negotiations. As you know, we've been in a hiring freeze since October 1st of last year, and all hiring has been through an exception process to this point. We're moving through a major realignment planning effort to centralize core services and hr technology and procurement, among other areas. And then we've seen recent reorganizations and others that will continue on, including citywide communications equity and the shift to the one water approach in our public utilities. And then finally, we've got nine open collective bargaining agreements going through negotiation process today, and likely at least two additional more coming online later this year. So in all, there is a lot of initiatives underway that will have an impact on our workforce and this current calendar year and beyond. And I'm going to stop us here and just open it up for any questions you might have or any additional information you'd like to see as we wrap up today.
157 Thank you, councilor Clarke. Councilor Green.
158 That's all right. She's.
159 Councilor clarke's a highly respected member of the Portland city council, so I don't take any offense. Thank you so much for the. Thank you so much for the presentation today. I think I just wanted to make two observations and maybe ask a question. I really appreciate the wage driven benefit slide. I know we've talked about that sort of internally. You know, maybe in in different venues here to try to get a handle on it. But when I look at that, I see essentially I see a situation where we have we have an external cost driver that's outside the control of the city of Portland. You know, our contribution to the state pension system is determined by the state pension system. And so there's not much we can do about that in regard. But then the other piece is the well, maybe there's not much I mean, I assume there's nothing we can really do about that, but but to the question of the total comp and to the chair's observation, our healthcare contributions have really driven a lot of that as well. And. It's going to continue to increase, I think, because we have a healthcare industry that has I'll just say it, no cost control guardrails whatsoever, because it's not it's not a competitive industry. There's regional monopolies in here. But the point I'm trying to make here is this is not something we can do on a dime. But I think as we think about what can we do to bend the curve on some of those outside cost controls. And I think about healthcare is pursuing perhaps, you know, a public sector driven internal in-house clinic or healthcare institution, which we've seen in some other municipalities, I think. Well, maybe not, but but I know that there's models in which, you know, I'll just go back 100 years when you had these, you know, mining companies or steel companies that would create a company town and they would basically in bethlehem steel is a good example. They would vertically integrate hospitals and clinics. I know that's a very high cost proposition, but I think as we think about the long run here, maybe engaging in some sort of partnership with any of our healthcare facilities in the region, to say if there's a portion of the health care delivery system, we can provide for employees, that we have a lot more control over the costs. That might be something that we can really do as a lever, and I'm interested in exploring that as a potential policy idea. Anyway, if anyone wants to respond to that, I'm just sort of like thinking out loud here. Thanks.
160 Absolutely. Councilor Green, I would just respond to that, to say that that is definitely an initiative that we've talked about within our labor management benefits committee. It's one that I think is among many other options, but one that I think we would see as both an investment as and as a cost reduction strategy in the future. I am pleased to report that just last week we brought on our first eap onsite support for city staff within the Portland building. There's some other bureaus that in public safety that have eap support, but mental health and wellness is a cost driver for our benefits as well. And so having that new resource available on site today, I think will also be a really positive benefit for staff.
161 It's encouraging to hear and I think like as we think about when we bargain contracts, being able to say, okay, we've done something internally here to control this piece of the cost. So that's that gives us more space to bargain with our unions around the other pieces of the economic package. I think everyone benefits from that. And when I worked at bonneville, we used to have a there was an office, there was a nurses station right inside the building. And that was really helpful because you had a cold or whatever. You just you get that dealt with and you didn't have to. This is pre-pandemic. So people came to work with colds. But anyway, I think it was a really nice, nice resource for our employees. I'll leave it at that. Thank you.
162 Thank you, councilor Green. Councilor Novick.
163 Thank you, madam chair. Mr. Zito, remind me what eap means.
164 Employee assistance program. And it's it's a complement of offerings, but everything from counseling to resources and tools to deal with personal mental health. Familial challenges, a whole host of resources.
165 And also, just wanted to say that my instinctive reaction to councilor Green's comments is to be fully supportive, that I would, and I'm glad that you're looking into the idea of having an internal health clinic. It seems like a logical thing to pursue.
166 Thank you councilor.
167 Thank you so much. Thank you for giving us this kind of broad overview, a comprehensive look at where we are. I remember last year when we were here in January, I was given a report from a public records report that said we had 850 vacant positions. And so thinking about that and thinking about how to fill those positions, and we're in this budget crisis at this point. And I want to remind our councilors in the in the board, I want you all to come back, chris, because we passed something, we passed an ordinance maybe a couple months ago, a few months ago, and it was for facilities maintenance. And it was to do the, the, the apprenticeship programs at pcc. That was in the same ordinance that we passed to move our, our fleet from, from one place out to sauvie island. And so in in that particular ordinance, it has money and I believe and I know somebody will correct me if I'm wrong about this. I think we put $10 million to create so that pcc could help to create an apprenticeship program. Do you remember that? We kind of talked about it. Maddie came talked to maddie. Maddie was really good. And she came before us and she talked about the facilities. And then there was a piece there was a small piece in that same ordinance that is going to, you know, help is on the way. You all I just want to say that to you, because we have partnered with pcc, it has not been created yet, but we have the resources and we're going to get folks and get you a pipeline of folks for the facilities maintenance area. You may want to talk to maddie, chris, about this because this is this is really exciting news. We had some money that was I believe that it was left over and we put it into this area. And so for me, I'm always trying to figure out I can't take credit for it because the previous council actually identified it and we approved the ordinance in 25. But this is this is a way that you all can look forward in your human resources globe and say, okay, we're going to have a pipeline for this coming. So just know that we're trying to do the things that we can do to to give you the resources so that we can have the infrastructure to to have those jobs out in the community.
168 Thank you.
169 I believe I have an idea of what you're talking about. We recently hired an organizational development analyst to help maddie souders, director, souders team to analyze the the work force gaps and talk about like strategies of what you were just describing in terms of how to support and prepare for succession planning and these deficiencies.
170 That's a that's a different one. There is a specific mark that we partner with pcc, and I think we we authorized $10 million to create an apprenticeship program. That's this is very specific that to help in the facilities maintenance area. It is it like I said, the bigger issue was where we're going to move our fleet office. And so it kind of overshadowed that that process. And it was just a little thing and I brought it up. But I appreciate it because it's going to give you some help.
171 Thank you.
172 You're welcome. Any other any other issues you need to bring forward?
173 I don't think so, counselor. We just really appreciate your time this morning and the opportunity to present some of this to you.
174 Thank you. And I appreciate you. And I look forward to seeing you later in the year and any updates that you may have during the budget process. Thank you so much. Thank you, miss williams. Thank you chris. Thank you. Appreciate you. I have a question before you leave because I had one question that I wanted to to leave with, given the the projected deficit, how is the city approaching workforce planning to ensure reductions are strategic rather than across the board? And what criteria are you going to use to determine where those cuts may occur?
175 Councilor that's a difficult question to answer because typically through the budget process, those cuts are determined at the either bureau or service area level. And in the bureau of human resources, we generally receive that information as a part of the budget process and then plan notification a timeline, bumping rights and processes that we'd play out under the rights within the collective bargaining agreements. I would I would say that this year will likely be very unique in the sense that there are several realignment projects happening along with the normal budget process. And so as we move into the, you know, the months ahead, February likely would be when we begin to really sort of harmonize that information into an overarching strategy. So there's sufficient time to carry all out all of those decisions out.
176 Right. And and I noticed in the, in the presentation it showed a shift towards the higher level classifications and then the rising personnel costs that miss williams was talking about. And I was I was thinking I said, okay, what is the long term plan, as you were talking about, to rebalance the workforce so we can maintain service level without trying to figure out the some of this growth is not sustainable, and we have to figure out how to do that and how to balance things out. And I think that that's probably one of council's bigger challenges that we're going to have in 26 and 27. How to do that. I don't envy the job that you have because it's a it's a huge challenge. The struggle is real. But I think that listening to you all today, that you're aware of the issues. I don't have to go. I have a whole list of things of questions that my staff gave me to ask you, but you covered those in the presentation. So I appreciate you and thank you for coming. And we'll see what what 26 holds.
177 Thank you so much, counselor.
178 So it looks like we have some public testimony. Do we have people waiting?
179 Let me read the item into the record first.
180 Okay. Thank you. Diana.
181 Item number four public comment on the labor and workforce development committee. Councilor Smith. At this time, no one has signed up.
182 Thank you. So what I'll do is put it out to my colleagues. If there are any things that you think that we need to discuss, I will talk about what what we're planning to do this next month. But I want to open the mic to you all to give some closing remarks.
183 I if I may, I already closed zoom, so I didn't raise my hand. But the arts and economy committee advanced a piece of legislation out this week that expanded the economic opportunity zone at the airport, and there was a good discussion around the requirements of living wage jobs. Councilor Dunphy had asked the question of what is a living wage job mean? What is your definition? And so prosper Portland said, well, we'll come back and we'll explain that a little bit nuanced. But I think one of the pieces of that that I did not catch in that meeting was that my understanding under state law is there's no requirement to to use prevailing wage or, or union labor when you build the new expanded facility. So what they're doing is they're expanding their American airlines hub. So there are requirements for folks who will work at that new expansion, but not the construction thereof. And so I raised that because it's relevant for this committee for us to think about whether we want to engage with prosper, because this is this is it's a it's a weird the way it works, colleagues, is state law says your economic development agency can manage and propose a enterprise zones, but that they need to be authorized by the local jurisdiction by resolution to do so. But then they but it's like prosper Portland that manages the community benefit agreements and all that sort of thing. So we have a bit of a jurisdictional boundary issue on this. So I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to reach out to andrew fitzpatrick at prosper Portland and say, do you guys have any interest or willingness to adjust your community benefits agreements ahead of those bids going out? But I think there might be some interest with some councilors to see if we can put something in the resolution before it comes to the full council to to maybe put some teeth to that. So I wanted you guys to know that that was flagged for me yesterday after we advance that. And.
184 Interesting in that committee. Yeah.
185 Yeah I know, but then someone caught me after the committee and said, hey, did you know that there's this gap? And so now I'm sharing it here with you guys and in the public that I think we might want to work on that if we're serious about our labor value.
186 So I think we are and I appreciate you bringing that up because that's so important and so critical. Councilor Novick, could you take the floor?
187 Yes, and my remarks aren't really specific to this meeting today, but I just wanted to let you know that over the past year, I keep on intending to bring two items to this committee and keep on failing to do it and do it. So assuming the committee still exists, I want to bring them up in the next few months. One is that I've heard from some of our labor allies that there's some concerns about exceptions to it, administration of it, and sort of adherence to the regional workforce equity agreement. Yes. So I hope that we can have a session on that in the not too distant future.
188 I believe. So we have scheduled and we will send you out the full schedule. We have scheduled the labor and workforce committee all the way up to July.
189 Okay.
190 So we were getting ahead of the game, but we can we can move some things around. I'm glad you brought that up. I think that's a very important topic and I think that we already have it. We have that on our schedule, as a matter of fact, already, because I think you have brought it up before and we put it on the schedule. I don't know what the date is, but the other thing that's going to be new, and I know we talked about it because we sit on the community and public safety committee together. But as I was sitting here thinking yesterday that I talked to you about the number of police officers that we may think we need to bring into the city of Portland, and I wanted to find out specific numbers. How much money would it actually take? Because I've heard several different numbers, from 400 to 800. More police officers need to be brought into the city of Portland. And I do think that we need more police officers. But instead of I think I'm going to start with this committee and I'm going to ask dca causey to do a report, because I want to know a true accounting of the costs related to increased police funding. There is a proposed ballot measure to take money away from PCEF to fund the police. There were no costs associated with it. It was just brought out. So I was like, okay, so they need to tell me the cost and the time frame that it's going to take to hire 4 to 800 new police officers, and we're going to put it on our agenda. We're going to add it to our agenda for the 29th of January. I read the article in opb in the Willamette week, and with huge operating gaps that we have in our budgets, I want council to have a clear understanding of the data because that makes a difference. We we can all get caught up in our feelings. But councilor Zimmerman said it correctly. Now we have to have facts, not feelings. And I'm going to ask director cozzie to give us a report that he brings back just before the budget cycle so that we have a true, true, true understanding, because we throw around a lot of numbers in terms of how many police we want. But I mean, from the standpoint of training, education, the time that it takes you to go from the police academy, actually into the city of Portland, which is almost two years, I want them to give me a specific number. I mean, for a pencil, I need you to give me a budget, accounting for every single thing, marketing, advertising, everything. And so I had a good conversation with dca causey, and he said that he liked that idea. And I'm going to drop that resolution asking him to do that on on January 29th. So for all you all who are listening still, it's going to be pretty exciting. And I know you had a packed agenda for the community and public safety committee, but I think it's more appropriate, as we're talking about numbers of employees and the police department, whether some people believe it or not, they are a part of the city of Portland. So we definitely have to include projections in our understanding of of our budget and what what the gaps are. So thank you so much. I wanted to let you know that and I appreciate you trying to squeeze, but we needed to give enough justice to this issue and have enough time on the, on the, on the calendar to be able to have the conversation. So I look forward to that on the 29th of January. And if there are no councilor Novick do you have another comment?
191 Yes, actually, and I really appreciate the work you're doing to address that issue, and I'm glad that you think you have space in this committee to address it. Another thing I wanted to mention is that maybe this is on your long term calendar too. Employees in the city with disabilities have come to me saying that they feel like that there's flaws in the way the city deals with folks with disabilities in terms of, for one thing, just sort of how accommodations are dealt with and how much people are aware of their rights when it comes to accommodations. And there's probably a bunch of other things I sort of wanted at some point to have a discussion with those folks about how the city can be a good employer for people with disabilities.
192 I will have elijah connect with spencer and we'll see where we can put that on the agenda.
193 Thank you.
194 And if there are no other issues, diana and chris, I think we're going to adjourn.
195 Thank you, thank you.
196 For three to get in.
197 Did cheney actually break the gavel? I think you did.