Transcript
Automatically generated transcript. It may contain errors and includes testimony in languages other than English that is not individually marked up for assistive technology.
Jamie Dunphy
There we go.
Good morning.
I am now calling to order the Tuesday— gosh, March 3rd already, y'all— uh, 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.
Raymond C. Lee
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 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 had 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 6-on-6 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 in the proposed budget.
The council's strategic priority setting will also help direct some of the choices that will be made.
And 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 will 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 graphs for every service area about the source of funding, the number of FTEs, 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.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Raymond C. Lee
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.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, City Administrator.
Colleagues, it's my hope that we can get our teams to get through their full presentations.
The first one's only 14 slides, the next one's 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 it 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.
Stephanie Howard
Welcome.
Donnie Oliveira
All right, thank you, Council President.
Good morning, councilors.
Uh, 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.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Hi, good morning.
Donnie Oliveira
I'm Megan Cummings.
Unidentified speaker
I'm the finance manager for the service area.
Donnie Oliveira
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 the council president alluded to, we'll, we'll take your thorough questions afterwards.
Next slide, please.
All right, so today we're going to cover in high level these 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 think about budget cuts and a recalibration to our CSL, and also talk about generally the fund, how the service area is funded and how we spend our dollars within that.
Within the bureaus.
Next slide, please.
All right, so let's talk about the overview.
Um, so first of all, the city's Community and Economic Development Service Area focuses on economic development, housing, climate, culture, art, and urban development.
It's comprised of the Housing Bureau, Portland Permitting and 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 is 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 PSEF, CSETSA designs programs for Portland's future and invests in people.
Most of our budget goes directly to small businesses, nonprofits, artists, housing providers, and organizations that serve children.
Raymond C. Lee
Thank you.
Donnie Oliveira
Over 70% of CEDSA's budget goes directly to community in the form of grants, loans, or other forms of direct assistance.
For example, from last fiscal year, PCF invested $53 million in clean energy programming 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's 6 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, the heart of the work is getting those dollars out to community to, to grow our prosperity.
Next slide, please.
So what are we looking at in our development of the fiscal year '26-'27 budget?
It looks something like this.
Broadly speaking, the slow recovery of pre-pandemic development is really impacting Portland Permitting Development's budget.
Although we continue to see permitting levels increase, there are 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 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 a rebound.
I also want to acknowledge that given cuts from previous years, we also have just— PP&D 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 of that general fund programming 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 relying on general funds.
So we're working with PP&D 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 meet 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 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.
I'll also note that in general, when we're speaking about the service area, oftentimes we're coupled with this tension of money going out the door 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 thank you.
Thank you, Mayor.
This 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.
Good news is we continue to see improvement in 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 highlighting the work from Prosper Portland on this particular data point, but we also want to acknowledge that we have resources going out through PCEF and through other funds that help programs at large.
This is just another example where we're investing in our communities right.
And helping our small businesses stay, um, 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, um, have influence on.
For example, percentage of households, um, that have a housing burden.
While the Portland Housing Bureau has resources that provide that, this is obviously a multi-jurisdictional, um, 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 a— 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 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, I'm 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, um, our expenses by fund.
Most of the growth you see on this slide from '22-'23 to the projected next fiscal year is from, is from PCEF, 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 9 other smaller funds that make up 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 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 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 CEDSA budget is general fund.
A lot of this includes some one-time resources as well, and a lot of it— excuse me, but just this also includes one-time resources.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Donnie Oliveira
That will obviously roll off, such as money going to the graffiti abatement program out of BPS.
I think that the most important point to flag here is that a lot of— we're 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 federal dollars for housing, clean energy fund, solid waste fund, art 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 TIF or by restrictions from the fund type.
I think the other point to note here is that the general fund dollars, especially within the Planning and Development, like I mentioned, and the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, offers citywide support for things that may be behind the scenes that are really critical to our city's compliance with state law, whether it be building code, or, or land use code with the state.
The housing production strategy requirements that come out of the state are also managed through BPS.
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 programmings on top of that.
All right, next slide, please.
First, that's, um, it— 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 100— 1,104 FTE, um, in 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, those— although our our FT 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 PP&D.
Simultaneously though, we've been seeing a dramatic cut in PP&D, 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, PP&D 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 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, the highest funded program offers within the service area.
I think that the key takeaway here that I'd offer is 6 of the 10 are non-general fund sources.
So that's the Clean Energy Fund, Children's Levy, PP&D, Spectator Facilities, City Arts Program, Waste Reduction Recycling, and the 4 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 a couple of just notes just for your recognition and the public's awareness.
The spectator venue program had a high increase from '23-'24 to '24-'25 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 7.
And that's just a housekeeping element.
I just want to flag 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.
Dan Ryan
Thank you.
Donnie Oliveira
For example, like permitting fees, spectator venue charges, IGAs.
The Recreational Cannabis Fund is captured in other.
And then we obviously talked 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 largely coming from housing and BPS for the PCEF, but there is also some grants in there as well.
Next slide, please.
So how are we going to capture the, 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, 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 in the tree permitting program that came from Urban Forestry, and the remainder is just divisions within the bureau.
Right now we are relying on the reserve fund to get to 100% cost recovery within the service area— or excuse me, within the bureau.
And again, I can't stress this enough, 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 permit numbers look high, but the density of the work and the value of the work is low.
So we're not seeing that ability for the divisions to 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— 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.
Stephanie Howard
Thank you.
Donnie Oliveira
Relying on the service— excuse me, 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 fat in PP&D to cut.
Like, these are core services that would be—.
Bob Day
Thank you.
Donnie Oliveira
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 in PROSPER with one-time.
That'll obviously sunset.
That money has historically gone to workforce programs.
We can look at trade-offs with other grant programs, but that is a— maybe 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.
Dan Ryan
Yes.
Donnie Oliveira
So I just want to note that if we— this is on top of the $4 million service level gap that we have.
So as the mayor's guidance outlined, the bureaus produced 2 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 what we're talking about in planning sustainability is largely just reductions to existing programs.
Again, this is a death by paper cut 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 in data analysis could potentially be realigned with non-general fund resources.
Jamie Dunphy
So that's a good thing.
Donnie Oliveira
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 arts grants and event sponsorships.
And event sponsorships that I would argue are cultural beacons for our neighborhoods.
Things like the Winterlight Festival that just happened more 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.
Dan Ryan
Excellent.
Jamie Dunphy
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 Knoll.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you, Council President.
Thank you, DC Oliveira.
Thank you, Megan, for being here.
So I'm gonna start with some clarifying questions and starts with slide 5.
And I just wanted to understand the 3rd metric, the first of the 2nd category there, is that Portland-specific or nationwide?
And for the 2nd metric, what happened in September to December?
You have stats from the first 8 months of last year and January of this year.
But there's a 4-month gap there.
Donnie Oliveira
Julie, can we go back to the 3rd slide?
Thank you.
This—.
The, the first number is a Portland number, to answer your question, and I'm going to ask somebody else from my team to come describe why that, that okay, while they're coming up, I'll just note I would love to see you frame the second metric in the way you framed the first.
Sameer Kanal
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 next step in the process, what was the impact of it?
I can do.
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 10, and it's why is beginning fund balance such a large source of revenue for SETSA when you don't see that in some of the other service areas?
Donnie Oliveira
It's largely PSIF.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay.
Donnie Oliveira
Yeah, so because the fund has been collecting revenue over time and we have a 5-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.
Sameer Kanal
Okay, I'll just let you follow up on 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?
Donnie Oliveira
Yeah, thanks for the question, Councilor.
So, um, if you recall in last year's budget, um, there was $2.1 million from ongoing funds, um, that would typically would have been going to Prosper Portland that was replaced with one-time funds.
Jamie Dunphy
Yes.
Donnie Oliveira
And largely in the, 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'll be a cut, obviously.
Or will council consider reestablishing that $2.1 back to their budget?
Sameer Kanal
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?
Donnie Oliveira
No, at that point it was just a switch of general fund to one-time.
Bob Day
Okay.
Donnie Oliveira
Last year.
Sameer Kanal
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.
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 it in 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 wanna 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.
Donnie Oliveira
Councilor, great question.
There are codes in, well, 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 queue.
I don't want to make excuses for or give examples there, but it's not as simple as us waiving a review.
In some cases, they still have to occur 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 Kooch is— I think that's a great question.
Is looking at those second and third review cycles that we're in and how to increase our efficiency there.
But it's not going to be as simple as us just waiving a review if we don't hit a mark.
Sameer Kanal
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 it is.
I would accept that answer.
I just want to know that that's been explored.
Donnie Oliveira
Yes, yes, yes.
Eric Zimmerman
Thank you.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you, Council President.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Kanal.
Councilor Zimmerman.
Eric Zimmerman
Thanks.
I'm also starting on slide 5.
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, shouldn't 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, um, we also didn't have a lot come in for multifamily development this year.
Donnie Oliveira
That's one type of— yeah, thanks for the question, Councilor, and a chance for me to just represent the bureau here, because I, 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.
Eric Zimmerman
Okay.
Donnie Oliveira
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 you look at total housing permits, okay, that's still very low, but we're seeing promising, you know, numbers.
Uh, yeah, but it's really only in single-family housing.
Eric Zimmerman
Got it.
Which are not really an indicator of economic health the way that development of multifamily is an economic indicator.
And that's why we care about that stat.
Donnie Oliveira
Correct.
And that's why—.
Eric Zimmerman
But staff stays busy is what you're trying to convey here.
Donnie Oliveira
Yes, staff stays busy, but the value of the— and 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.
Ruth Levine
Great.
Eric Zimmerman
Thanks for clarifying that.
That actually gets me to 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 area's contingency fund for those employees?
Because I would've expected that we would've 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 what reserves mean and contingencies, but I just want to get a clarification for what you mean here.
Donnie Oliveira
Thanks for the question, Councilor.
So the BDS, 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 the— at its peak, um, in the, in the mid-teens to where it's at today, to ensure that we have the staff capacity to do the work, um, to, uh, 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, and there is a reserve policy on the books for that fund, just so you, 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 PP&D.
Eric Zimmerman
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 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. Oliveira, in terms of how you explained it, it's helpful.
Um, so on slide 7, the first bullet point is about $30 million to PHB as county pass-through.
Can you just articulate for what?
Donnie Oliveira
Uh, that's the, that's the IGA that goes to either the former joint office and now the— it's HDS.
Bob Day
Yep.
Eric Zimmerman
Okay, so I just, uh, that is pass-through for what we asked the county to do and it relates to the Homelessness Response Action Plan.
Donnie Oliveira
And Councilor, there is an action proposed that would move those resources into Portland Solutions, so PHB would no longer be accounting for those dollars.
Eric Zimmerman
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 8.
And I think maybe this goes a little bit with your preamble before you started in, but, um, 55 PCF 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.
Donnie Oliveira
Yeah, so thanks for the question, Councilor.
So as a reminder for the public and generally, there's an admin cap on PSIF uses for the city.
So we have that cap that's in place.
The 55 staff in PSEF are really capturing several strands of work that the— 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 RFPs and contracts that are managed out of BPS, some are managed by other bureaus.
I'll just also offer that 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.
Uh, that, that requires staff capacity.
And I'll just say, from a, 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 55 staff and then we created the programs.
This has been responsive to the demand that the programs had put on it.
And certainly that with, as we're doing realignment, we're looking at things that that number may tweak a little bit down.
But I can tell you from a programmatic perspective, this is the demand that the fund has generated for that bureau.
Eric Zimmerman
Okay, so do they produce a kind of like a report on the outcome of every grant if they're the monitoring body?
Donnie Oliveira
We have a dashboard that's captioned at the high level, and we can certainly get back to you all about how we're reporting out as grants are closed.
Eric Zimmerman
Okay, thanks.
And then I am— quick statement of like, I'm seeing you talk about the graffiti here.
One of the big questions I've had for quite a while is I don't exactly get why graffiti is in BPS from a— here are your planners.
I don't want to go into it now because I want to get to my last question.
Nathan Leamy
Sure.
Eric Zimmerman
But maybe we'll 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?
Donnie Oliveira
Thanks for the chance to clarify that.
So that cut represents the general fund cut to that program.
That's not to say the whole program's cut, and that's not to say there's other resource-supporting grants.
That is— it's almost a way for us to tell you all this would be a scenario that you all will contemplate, the mayor will contemplate, and is proposed about how that office will meet its directed 3% or 10% cut.
Does that mean that the program's gonna go away?
Bob Causey
No.
Donnie Oliveira
Does that mean there's not other revenues such as the reserve that 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 bureau or that office were to take a, you know, 10% cut to general fund, it would result in reduction in grants.
Stephanie Howard
Okay.
Eric Zimmerman
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.
Uh, 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.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Zimmerman.
Councilor Smith.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you.
Eric Zimmerman
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
Councilor Smith, you still there?
We heard you say thank you and then disappeared.
Loretta Smith
Council President?
Jamie Dunphy
Yeah, while we were waiting for Councilor Smith, uh, Chabri, could you answer, uh, the question earlier from Councilor Kanal?
Chabri Vickers
Certainly.
Uh, good morning.
Uh, Chabri Vickers for the record.
Um, I believe I have the information, and if I don't have it fully, I can certainly get that for you.
So downtown's, uh, downtown Portland's pedestrian activity, uh, has entered a sustained recovery phase overall.
However, total foot traffic has not yet returned to the 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 2025, excuse me, up from about 30 million 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 So it's a significant improvement from 2024's 7 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 what I can tell you is that the month of January, this data comes from Placer AI, and so we can of course gather more insight to determine about those last 4 months of 2025.
The last 4 months, I think, is what you were specifically asking.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I'll follow up on the AI part of that.
That's interesting.
But the— yeah, just it notes January through August, and then it picks back up in January 2026.
So I was curious about that 4-month period particularly, but I'm happy to follow up later.
Chabri Vickers
Okay, sounds good.
Lauren Johnson
Thanks.
Donnie Oliveira
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
Councilor Smith, are you—.
Eric Zimmerman
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
Unfortunately, we're still not hearing you, Councilor Smith.
She may be double muted.
She, yes, indeed might be.
Councilor Smith, we'll come back to you in just a second.
Councilor Green.
Mitch Green
Thank you, Mr. President.
Thanks for being the first in these series of difficult conversations because we are going into a pretty grim budget outlook.
So I appreciate the presentation, Donnie.
I think just— 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 Kanal's question, you know, beginning your fund year balance as part of the program budgeting is an effort to make sure that everything is accounted for.
Mm-hmm.
But I think that while slide 7 kind of makes the note that some of, some of, uh, some money is passed through, uh, for PHB.
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, uh, what parts of the beginning fund balance are either pass-throughs, because I know some of it is— a lot of it's actually passed through via Prosper Portland TIF monies.
But then also, um, you know, PSF, you know, there's a 5-year plan there.
Mm-hmm.
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.
I do want to make a note here on— let's see, what slide is it?
Oh yes, slide 5.
You know, there's been a lot recently.
The Metro Chamber presented the State of the Economy presentation breakfast.
Yes.
And I want to say maybe the second highest priority or risk was affordability.
That was kind of the thing that everyone agreed is a major challenge, or Dr. 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 share of of rent burden renters increased from 47% to 53%.
That's a significant increase in income or in 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 struggle under the burden of rent increases and also the suite 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.
Um, I'm glad that Councilor Kanal asked the question about the $2.1 million of, of contemplated— um, I think we're starting to see a little bit of a, um, sneak preview of what we might find in the mayor's proposed or what's happening behind the scenes.
Um, 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 grantmaking whole.
Mm-hmm.
And I say that just because I think I think a lot of the things that are going to allow us to get 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 the inner— I keep talking about the inner Eastside 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.
Loretta Smith
I think that's a good point.
Mitch Green
Um, to level up our ability to, to move quickly in, um, in unlocking private sector activity.
Um, but that takes planning staff, and so I'm worried that they— we will cut down into that area to keep, um, sort of one-shot grants, grants whole, when I think that would be the wrong direction.
Um, and then finally, the graffiti removal.
Again, I— so when I think about the next budget, I'm going to thinking about in terms of, um, 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 BPS, I think that there was FY24-25 yes.
Staff allocations that were then carried forward into the current fiscal year as 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 getting rid of staff who have very scarce skill sets.
So just a couple high-level notes, and then, you know, 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 that money is allocated.
Like, there's already a good use for all that money.
If we're going to talk about the SIF in those terms, We need to talk about the PSF fund in those terms too.
So I know that 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.
Nathan Leamy
Thanks.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Green.
Councilor Smith, we're going to try again.
Loretta Smith
Can you hear me?
Jamie Dunphy
We can hear you.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Uh, thank you so much, uh, 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 '26-'27?
Donnie Oliveira
Councilor, I'm sorry, I didn't catch the part of that question.
How did the what?
Loretta Smith
Shared housing pilot.
Donnie Oliveira
Oh yeah, are you familiar with it?
Yeah, yeah, thank you for the question, Councilor.
Councilor, we just, we just launched that last week.
Loretta Smith
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?
Donnie Oliveira
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 through, which is, you know, ideally through the end of the calendar year.
Loretta Smith
Yeah, and so that— those are some of the encumbrances that I think confuse council when you don't use the money when you're— 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.
Um, me and my staff have gone to Oregon Budget Law trainings these past couple of months, and there is an expectation that budgets are given to us that have the previous 2 fiscal years.
Are you going to give us a budget that showed us what was paid for in the previous 2 fiscal years?
Raymond C. Lee
We'll have Ruth come up and address that count— that question, Councilor.
Ruth Levine
Hi, Ruth Levine, for the record, Budget Director.
Our adopted budget book does include prior year budget data in it.
I think maybe what you're asking about is this sort of carryover, potential carryover amount from the shared housing pilot that was funded in the current fiscal year with one-time dollars.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Yes.
Ruth Levine
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 the adopted budget for '26-'27.
And I think to your broader question around carryover, we can talk about this more as we get into the spring TAO 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 sort of be treated as an addition in the budget, in the proposed budget, and then if council adopts it, in the adopted budget.
Does that help answer your question?
Loretta Smith
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 7 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.
Raymond C. Lee
We will evaluate that, Councilor, and follow back up with you.
Loretta Smith
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.
Raymond C. Lee
I hear you, and we'll take a look at, as we have these type of programs, uh, 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.
Loretta Smith
Yeah.
And as committee member of 2 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.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Smith.
Councilor Novick, you are still on mute.
Steve Novick
Sorry about that.
I have 3 observation suggestions that folks can respond to if they feel like it, and then one leading question.
Um, one pure observation is that, like Councilor Zimmerman, I was surprised to learn that PCF had 55 employees.
I didn't realize that.
However, um, when I think about it, having 55 employees to manage a budget of $200 million a year sounds actually rather low.
Um, 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.
Um, let's see.
Uh, hang on, let me check my what else was I going to say?
Um, oh, here's my leading question.
Um, 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, um, 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's 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 3-year period you look at the overall survival rate of small businesses and then compare it to the survival rate of small businesses that seems to be, to be 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 a reasonable fear?
Donnie Oliveira
Thanks for the question, Councilor.
I'm going to invite Director Engstrom up to tackle that one.
Thank you, Councilor.
For the record, this is Eric Engstrom.
Sameer Kanal
I'm the director of the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.
With our land use planning, it is true that that's a very legally intensive line of work.
Donnie Oliveira
We write a lot of findings of fact with the help of the city attorney with all of our projects.
Eric Zimmerman
That's a significant share of the workload.
Donnie Oliveira
With reduced staff and budget, we will still strive to produce projects that are legally defensive—.
Jamie Dunphy
Defensible.
Sameer Kanal
I think it— the more likely outcome is, yeah, there's that risk, but we would probably end up just doing fewer projects.
Bob Causey
So you're not going to be able to do as many projects?
Sameer Kanal
As a result of that, to manage that risk rather than spreading the staff thinner.
Donnie Oliveira
Yeah, Councilor, and I alluded to this earlier and I'll just restate it just because Eric's more diplomatic.
The real impact isn't that we're not gonna be hitting our mandates, it's that when we have new concepts, whether they're generated by Council or our communities, our ability to be responsive to those is just, is not gonna be and I really want to stress this.
Oftentimes the excellence of the planning bureaus, 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 fast-track anything because we know how important these policies are.
So that's really the loss isn't necessarily the time, but necessarily the quality.
Mitch Green
Thank you.
Donnie Oliveira
The mandate work, it's the, the new ideas that we're contemplating that won't get done as quickly.
Steve Novick
That makes sense.
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Novick.
Councilor Ryan.
Dan Ryan
Yes, thank you, Council President, and hello colleagues.
Good to see you.
Pardon the look, I got in a little 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 is 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 businesses we're serving are new businesses.
And what I hear over and over again from those who have historically been in service for sometimes decades, they're all— many of them are struggling.
And I think some of them feel left out.
Loretta Smith
Right.
Dan Ryan
So I'm just going on a hunch from listening to constituents.
So I'd like to see a breakdown on who in fact we're 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's question and framing was also very important.
So that— I don't need a response to that right now.
I don't expect it, but I hope in further sessions I can get information on that.
That makes sense.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you.
Donnie Oliveira
It does, Councilor.
Thank you.
Dan Ryan
Okay, number 2, um, you mentioned big picture overall framing.
70% Of the investments go out the door, out to the community, and I, I think that sounds good.
It's, 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 3 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 and question?
Donnie Oliveira
Absolutely, Councilor.
Can do.
Dan Ryan
All right, thank you.
Um, the third one is— it's been mentioned now a couple times— graffiti abatement tends to get a lot of response from elected officials.
Um, I think my question is this, and I understand the old form of government, there were programs put in bureaus that you 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?
Donnie Oliveira
Great question, Councilor.
Dan Ryan
I'm not going to answer that today, but I hope that— oh, you want to?
Steve Novick
Okay.
Donnie Oliveira
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 quite effective both at managing grants, doing the community engagement, volunteer programming, there was actually a logical management oversight element to bring graffiti.
So graffiti actually is nestled within solid waste at BPS.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Donnie Oliveira
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 controlling.
But really BPS's 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 BPS.
But yes, is there another place where it might live in the future like Portland Solutions?
That's a real contemplation.
Dan Ryan
That was very helpful.
And if it's not broken, you don't need to fix it in terms of productivity.
Hey, just wanted— we've had some chatter on the percentage of employees, for example, at PSEF, and I think Portland we should look at the 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.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Ryan.
Councilor Pirtle-Guiney.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you, Council President.
Just a couple of questions, and thank you, Donnie, to thank you, you and your team for putting together this overview for us.
I want to dig a little bit deeper on the PP&D reserves.
You said that there's $13 million left in the reserve bucket.
Is that accurate?
Donnie Oliveira
I'm going to ask Megan to give me the exact number because I said that just off the cuff, but it's in that range.
But yes, so let's— she'll get the number and we can—.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay.
Donnie Oliveira
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 we'll true up some of that in the spring TAO as well.
Angelita Morillo
Okay.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
How much has been spent out of the reserves this year?
Unidentified speaker
Uh, $6.4 million.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay.
And how many PP&D staff were laid off this year?
Did that save everybody, or did we have layoffs as well?
Donnie Oliveira
It, 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, get another job, whatever it is, we're just— we're rarely hiring except for critical positions.
Dan Ryan
Okay.
Donnie Oliveira
Hi everyone.
For the record, my name is Kyle O'Brien, the finance manager at PPMD.
We had actually, I think, 5 filled positions that were laid off on August 1st.
The rest of the positions that were eliminated in the budget were vacant.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay, so we're looking at a bureau that's had 5 layoffs, spent $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.
Are 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 wanna make sure that that's accurate.
Donnie Oliveira
Councilor, 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, you know, pull their permits and come in to pay those.
And then as you saw, maybe perhaps those of you who read it on Friday night, I sent over an update on the SDC exemption.
Mitch Green
Right.
Donnie Oliveira
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 permits are issued.
I would say there is a future where we have an increase in development.
Is it in '26-'27?
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.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
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.
Donnie Oliveira
Yes.
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 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 reserve draw forward.
And as Donnie mentioned, we have some school bond projects coming in, 3 high schools, the combined valuation.
We don't know the actual valuation, what that'll be, but it's close to $1 billion.
And those 3 projects coming in over a 2 to 3 year period in terms of when the fees are paid is worth $25 to $30 million and a substantial workload as well to the Bureau.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay, thank you.
You said on one of the slides, I'm moving away from PP&D, so I think we're good.
Thank you so much.
Loretta Smith
Thank you so much.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Donnie, you said on one of the slides that you were prioritizing frontline staff.
Donnie Oliveira
Yeah.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
We are early in the process.
I am sure you have conversations with your own teams to have about what that means you're deprioritizing.
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 provides support services?
What does that look like?
Donnie Oliveira
Yeah, thanks for the question.
And for— and not all bureaus are the same.
So for example, when we're talking about PP&D, um, it's their fund— their resources are largely staff.
Um, when we're looking at other bureaus that have EMS dollars that go out the door, what we're saying is, um, 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 can 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 know, 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 service area.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay, thank you.
I'll push a little more on that as we get later into the year.
On slide 16, On page 6, going back a little bit from where you are, the PSF bucket increases substantially, that purple chunk of the, the bar there, in years '25-'26 adopted budget and then '26-'27 CSL.
Is that PSF grant funding that will be going out the door, or is that PSF-funded city services and actual city employees being accounted for there?
Stephanie Howard
Okay, um, what you're seeing in FY25-26 is the adopted budget, and that is different than actuals.
Donnie Oliveira
So we would expect at the end of the year this would be slightly less.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Understood, but that's— there's a huge increase from the first 3 bars looking at '22-'23 and '23-'24 compared to '25-'26 and '26-'27.
So what I'm trying to understand is whether that's showing 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.
Donnie Oliveira
What you're seeing is an increase in the spend in other bureaus within the city in earnest.
That began last year, but that is is really taking off this year.
So that's also planned.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay, so that is— we're seeing a significant increase in the number of city employees who are funded by PSEF in those 2 throughout bureaus.
I'm seeing, Donnie, I'm seeing one of your staff members shaking their head no behind you.
Donnie Oliveira
Yeah, so the other element that's happening here—.
Mitch Green
So I—.
Donnie Oliveira
In the earlier years, a large portion of the money was just the grant program.
And when we get into really 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 a $140 million contract.
So these are actually expenses now, not the fund in 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.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay, so those are grants and contract dollars, not PSF-funded city employees?
Donnie Oliveira
No, it includes employees too.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
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 2 years, a significant increase in PSF-funded city employees?
Donnie Oliveira
Yes.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
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.
Donnie Oliveira
And would you like that for the service area or across the city?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Let's say across the city.
I'm seeing some of my colleagues say across the city.
Thank you.
Final question on slide 8, and if you said this, I apologize and I just missed it, but there are 58 FTE for public infrastructure.
What within CEDSA is public infrastructure?
Donnie Oliveira
Those were— thanks for the question, Councilor.
Those were the staff that came as a— in the creation of permitting development from— we had BDS Development Services, and then 58 staff from the Water Bureau, Environmental Services, PBOT, and Parks came over in the creation of PP&D.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
So that is an increase in PP&D staff.
It is not an increase in total city staff?
Chabri Vickers
Correct.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay, thank you very much for clarifying that.
Thank you, Council President.
Jamie Dunphy
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 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 in either trees or public works permitting?
Donnie Oliveira
Councilor, I think that there is still a lot of work to be done to true up the creation of PP&D.
It is very much a work in progress.
I want to thank the bureaus who have worked with us to make sure that we're getting to that point.
To figure this out.
We still have some troops 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 in PP&D.
I still think that PP&D 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 Kooch has already outlined that he wants to do sort of a level setting of fees across the bureau, which is long overdue.
That'll 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 PP&D's 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 gonna be constantly each year tinkering when we need just a wholesale like reset.
Jamie Dunphy
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 right-sizing that question specifically?
Donnie Oliveira
I'd love to get back to you on that and talk to some more folks.
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
Absolutely.
The arts and culture— Office of Arts and Culture, broadly because of some structural issues, saw a 44% reduction in the amount of dollars that went out because of the arts tax primarily, not because of general funds.
And colleagues, I won't surprise you all on this.
I'm actively trying to fix the arts tax right now and put these dollars in reserve to work.
But I just wanna 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.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
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 grumbly 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 so 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?
Donnie Oliveira
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 code improvement, process improvement is going to be part of this sea change.
Jamie Dunphy
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.
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 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 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 BPS 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 under Prosper Portland, I saw, you know, 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?
Donnie Oliveira
Yeah, Councilor, we can get that back.
And Councilor, can I use this moment just, 'cause I just wanna flag, and maybe this is for my colleagues as they come up, you know, this was, this exercise of just showing 4 performance measures and this level of granularity is unfair to staff, not to me, I'm just the messenger here, there is so much good work that's going behind all these, and we could have brought 50 different measures to share, and I'm sure my staff would love to walk through them.
We can absolutely 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 a lot— this is missing a lot of context for you.
Happy to get that to you and to any councilor that wants any of this information fully, you know, pulled up.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you.
That's a really good point, Donnie.
2 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 economy.
Mm-hmm.
When those programs began, That was because the city did not have any sort of internal infrastructure for economic development.
And we also recognized that historically economic development has been in many cities sort of arm's length because it takes more than 4 years to build a building.
And I'm only sitting in this seat for 4 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 thanks for the question, Council President.
Donnie Oliveira
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 really are 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'd 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, BPS, 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 in the sequencing, the impacts, the, the opportunity costs that we can't even see yet because we haven't really thought about it.
Um, however, having said that, um, 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 of the 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 and no judgment on procurement, just city governments move a lot more deliberately.
Jamie Dunphy
Undeniable.
Absolutely.
I do 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?
Donnie Oliveira
Thank you for the question, Council President.
Raymond C. Lee
I'm going to maybe I would say they probably will reach out to council, uh, 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, uh, 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.
Thank you.
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.
Jamie Dunphy
I appreciate that.
And 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, 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 being— 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.
Mitch Green
Thank you.
Raymond C. Lee
We'll agree with you 100% on that.
Angelita Morillo
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
Colleagues, that was the first round.
We have 5 minutes left in this section and we have 4 colleagues in the queue, and then we're going to take a 10-minute break at 11 o'clock.
Councilor Kanal.
Sameer Kanal
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 neighborhoods.
Bob Day
Yes.
Sameer Kanal
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 Zimmerman's question about the arts fund and the $9 million.
I'm concerned that when we present 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 no— there is a fund for some others.
And I want to just see that.
I think this relates to PROSPER and the SIF as well.
Councilor Smith.
Councilor Novick and Ryan built off my question around metrics.
I agree with both of what they said.
I wanted to mention that they related to each other as well.
And just when we're talking about what our outputs are, just look at those in the context of each other as well.
And finally, just building off of what Council President just asked, DCA Oliveira, you said that they're the ones pointing us in the right direction about thank you.
I think that the work that Prosper does is excellent.
The quality of their work is not in question.
It's a question about 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.
Um, 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, uh, I just wanted to flag that for, for future.
Thank you, Council President.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Kanal.
Councilor Green.
Mitch Green
I'll be very brief and just say ditto to your comments, Council President, on the, um, distinguishing the permit time with staff versus the applicants.
I just think that PP&D 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.
Sameer Kanal
Thanks.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Green.
Councilor Smith.
Loretta Smith
Thank you, Council President.
Just a quick question, um, Donnie.
When bureaus, uh, use reserve funds, uh, do bureaus need council approval to do that?
Donnie Oliveira
That's a great question, Councilor.
Every—.
Just, I can only speak for my service area.
So the— and I alluded to this— PP&D, 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 ensure that we're doing that.
But yes, ultimately any dollar a bureau spends has to be allocated by, by council, to answer your question.
Loretta Smith
And can Ruth answer that question for me from the City Budget Office?
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 yeah, it's a good question.
Ruth Levine
So, I mean, 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 '26-'27 budget.
Right now, the PP&D reserve funds are not in a separate fund.
They're in the PP— the Development Services Fund, Fund 203.
Some of it's budgeted in contingency, some of it's budgeted in expense.
And so the— I think that's a good point.
But 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.
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 would be perfect.
Water does that with their construction— water construction fund, as an example of how that could work.
So it would, you know, obviously because these are operating expenditures, they need some sort of flexibility within their expenses.
But, you know, I think the bulk of the kind of quote unquote reserve funds probably ought to be moved to a To a designated reserve fund.
Loretta Smith
And, and, and that's the reason why you, you hear some of the councilors 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, um, 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 why we're in 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.
Stephanie Howard
Thank you.
Loretta Smith
And I notice many times in past councils when we have to cut budgets, uh, the Reimagine 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 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 affirmed by the administration, we shouldn't start there.
We should start in other places.
So 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, uh, technical assistance, um, capital, and opportunity at the city, um, I would really appreciate if you would think of other ways in which off the thank you, Councilor Smith.
Jamie Dunphy
Councilor Pirtle-Guiney.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
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 PP&D, 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.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Pirtle-Guiney.
Councilor Clark, take us home.
Olivia Clark
Thank you, Council President.
Just, I'm not going to get in the way of our bio break.
I just wanted Councilor Smith.
Loretta Smith
I just wanted to say that, well, thank you, Deputy City Administrator Oliveira.
Olivia Clark
I think you've done a great job kicking off the 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 the continued evolution that we're going through as a government because we've talked about not just structural changes, 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.
Chabri Vickers
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
Excellent.
Thank you both for being here.
We're going to take a 10-minute break, colleagues, and we will come back and hear the Public Service Safety Area— Public Safety Service Area.
Please, everyone back here at 11:50.
We'll be right back.
Donnie Oliveira
Do you like a regroup with your staff?
Dan Ryan
No, no thank you.
Donnie Oliveira
Yeah, I was, uh, going around the office today.
Everybody was talking and looking at it.
Yeah, I mean, the story about what the grand pub and spending is about is there's some—.
Dan Ryan
What school was that?
Donnie Oliveira
Tiger High School.
Jamie Dunphy
Tiger High School.
Sameer Kanal
It's about staff.
Donnie Oliveira
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Dan Ryan
What order would we like to have you in?
Bob Causey
Um, would you like me in the middle, or do you want, uh, what do you think?
Nathan Leamy
It makes sense to have you at one end and the other.
So did you hear one of us to respond?
You can turn both of us at once.
Donnie Oliveira
Yeah, I won't have it rather than having to smirk.
Mitch Green
I like that.
Unidentified speaker
Are you guys making me sit in the middle?
Bob Day
Yep.
Bob Causey
Well, that way I'm just— I was like, no, maybe either way I'm just turning left if I need an answer.
Donnie Oliveira
I don't have to swing my head to the other corner.
Bob Causey
I'm going to the restroom.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Yeah.
Donnie Oliveira
You mean so much.
Unidentified speaker
No, I just mean like, like, I feel like that is precisely what I— but it's kind of gross to say, but—.
Lauren Johnson
All right.
Unidentified speaker
I just added it.
PBIM's general fund overhead was not in there, so I'm giving them a, giving them a shout out.
Donnie Oliveira
Added in a space.
Went to my underground prom together.
Chabri Vickers
Yeah.
Jamie Dunphy
And we're back.
Welcome, DCA Causie.
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.
Um, DCA Causie, take it away.
Bob Causey
Thank you.
Uh, good morning, Council President, Vice President, Councilors, Mayor, and CA Lee.
I'm Bob Causey, Deputy City Administrator for the Public Safety Service Area.
I'm here with Nathan Leamy and Ginger Damron 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 24/7 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.
Stephanie Howard
Nathan.
Nathan Leamy
Thank Thank you.
For the record, my name is Nathan Leamy.
I'm a district— I'm a resident of District 3, 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 area's mission is to deliver a safe Portland for all.
To frame our conversation on budget, we will highlight 5 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-2010s, 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 persistent 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 3rd performance measure reflects the percentage of time a 911 call is answered by the Bureau of Emergency Communications call takers in 20 seconds 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 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 4th measure tracks when— whether a needed ladder truck arrives on scene within 4 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 has 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 5 of dozens of performance measures our service area tracks.
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 want to provide details about the service area's current and historical budget.
I'll hand it to Ginger to provide that detail.
Unidentified speaker
Good morning.
My name is Ginger Damron, Public Safety Budget Manager, resident of District 1, 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.
In our largest expense category, personnel, we've seen an increase in personnel by 26% over the last 5 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.
In FY22, we averaged 291 vacant positions, which was a 12% vacancy rate.
And then 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 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 in Multnomah County contributing to the overall budget.
Then 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 include SPYRE's 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 PBIM is a— you may be looking for that line.
PBIM 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 5 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 PS3s, 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 7 core services realignment functions.
So while the position count has stayed close to the same over the last 5 years, there's a few notable changes to mention.
Fire has added 33 FTE to alleviate backfill overtime that 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 FY24 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 8 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 3 years, the average number of trainees and recruits has nearly doubled.
It currently takes 9 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 in public safety.
I can't do math in my head, but that's a high percent of our 2,300.
Each bureau has a staffing plan that takes into account hiring targets, separation trends, 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 FY27, due to the size and scale, you're only seeing our top 10.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
10, And it's missing some notable programs such as Portland Street Response, Ceasefire, Office of Violence Prevention, Planning and Mitigation, and Emergency Operations, just to name a few.
I am going to run through these top 10 program offers which are focused on supporting the city's emergency response capabilities.
Also mention that we published the program offer narrative, and so you can really dig into what all 40 of them do.
Thank you.
So for Portland Fire and Rescue, Emergency Operations is responsible for ensuring that there are 171 responders 24/7, 365 days a year.
This budget includes 603 FTE and the overtime required to maintain staffing targets.
Police's Precinct Patrol includes the nearly 500 FTE that staff the city's 3 precincts, providing 24/7 emergency response to calls for service.
And then police's 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 too far.
BOEC's operations include 131 dispatcher call takers and 14 supervisors that staff 911 operations 24/7.
For BOEC, we've not had a specific training program offer in the past, but we are creating one this year.
That'll be reflected, um, in a later state of the budget to sort of standardize how we look at training across public safety because it has such an impact, um, 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.
Um, so that one is a consolidation from previous years.
It includes 131 FTE dedicated to investigating major crimes The Specialized Resource Division was also formerly known as 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, K-9 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: Equity and Inclusion Office, Office of the Inspector General, Professional Standards Division, Criminal Intelligence Unit, Internal Operations and Communications.
It also includes the bulk of the bureau's BTS budget.
Bob Day
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
And then the records program provides— this is in the police bureau— valuable accessibility to the bureau's 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, uh, 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 OPSERP pension system.
And then intergovernmental is predominantly from BOEC.
Lauren Johnson
I'm sorry, what is that?
Unidentified speaker
Where 40% of their revenue comes from state shared revenue and local cost share.
It also includes some smaller IGAs that FYRE 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 FYRE's prevention program, Police's secondary employment is the bulk of what's in the other revenues.
And then that green that shows up in the FY 26-27 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.
Bob Causey
Thank you.
Nathan Leamy
As Ginger shared, the service area's general fund current appropriation level is inadequate for the current level of service.
A meaningful portion of public safety programming 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 2 years, which means we're carrying significant overtime and coaching costs right now that won't go away in the foreseeable future.
Angelita Morillo
Thank you.
Nathan Leamy
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 retire-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 level gap of $35 million.
Eric Zimmerman
Thank you.
Nathan Leamy
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 3 categories.
First, internal support reductions, things like technology, fleet, and training, which over time degrade the bureau's ability to operate.
Bob Day
Thank you.
Nathan Leamy
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, are potential reductions to emergency response itself.
This includes cuts to overtime, changes to minimum staffing level, and slowing siring.
Chabri Vickers
Thank you.
Nathan Leamy
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's options center on 3 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 will 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 in 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 DCA Cossi.
Bob Causey
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.
Jamie Dunphy
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.
Mitch Green
Thank you, DCA Kazi, uh, can you go to slide 14, please?
Thank you.
So, um, it's hard to tell.
There's, 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.
Um, 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 '26-'27 relative to the current adopted.
Is that fair to characterize?
Is my math correct?
Nathan Leamy
Crucially, this is only showing the top 10 largest programs.
So we have 40 programs in total.
So this is showing the increase in those 10 largest programs.
Bob Day
Okay.
Nathan Leamy
Between years.
Mitch Green
That explains why we're only looking at $420 and $400.
Dan Ryan
Okay.
Mitch Green
Yes.
I think that part answers my question.
It 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—.
Bob Causey
That's correct.
Stephanie Howard
Okay.
Mitch Green
I've never seen it presented the way where you add in a little gap called miscellaneous fund allocation to describe what the revenue would need to look like to not— to make all that whole.
I didn't see that in the last presentation.
I'm not sure if we're going to see that in other thank you.
I know we're going to get into 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?
Um, I know we're in early days here, but, um, I think those were my 2 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 10.
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.
Unidentified speaker
I mean, I, I could 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, uh, 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.
Um, 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.
Mitch Green
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 $613, which is still above $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, so if you're not looking at just in terms of dollars and cents, but you're looking in terms of service, you would need to see that roughly $35 million in revenue growth, right?
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Mitch Green
I think that's helpful for me.
Thanks.
Nathan Leamy
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 in 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.
Mitch Green
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.
Thank you, Councilor Green.
Jamie Dunphy
Councilor Morillo.
Angelita Morillo
Thank you, Council President.
Thank you all so much for this presentation.
I just have a few questions.
For the training within PPB, obviously there are going to have to be cuts.
Have we identified what trainings would be cut?
Bob Causey
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 looking deeper into that.
Bob Day
Gotcha.
Angelita Morillo
Do you know when we will have more specifics on that?
Bob Causey
I know that they have a number 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 okay, I will hold off and wait till we get more details on that.
Angelita Morillo
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're all very eager to help with that if we can.
I think that we're going to be yeah, thank you.
Bob Causey
That's a great question, and Director Howard is here.
I believe she can, she can answer that.
Stephanie Howard
Good morning, councilors.
For the record, my name is Stephanie Howard.
I'm the Director of Community Safety.
Um, thank you for the question, Councilor Murillo.
Uh, 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 slide.
Next big milestone is 24/7 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.
We'll know if I'm lucky enough 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 been part of the conversations.
We welcome support from any offices who would like to join us and continue to have those conversations.
Angelita Morillo
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 24/7 program so that we can unlock those federal dollars.
Is that accurate?
Stephanie Howard
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, 24/7 coverage for that program is a requirement.
Angelita Morillo
Gotcha.
Okay, thank you.
Those are all my questions on Portland Street Response, though.
Thanks.
Thank you, Councilor Smith.
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 2 and and how that impacts us.
Bob Causey
You know, I know the— this is from my days at BOEC, which has been 9 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 has 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.
Stephanie Howard
Yeah.
Olivia Clark
Okay.
Angelita Morillo
Thank you.
Those were all my technical questions that I had.
That's very helpful.
And I think that some of 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 dollars.
Thank you.
Deployment of police to those places to make sure that if they're there, it's actually beneficial or useful 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 stint.
So that's just something that I think we're gonna have to tighten up in the coming year.
But thank you so much.
Appreciate your time.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Morillo.
Councilor Novick.
Steve Novick
Um, oh, whoops.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Um, first of all, Councilor Morillo, I should tell you that I thought that last week I was going to have a super— a kind of, uh, um, uh, an opportunity, um, to, um, 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, 2 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 2-person medical vans.
Which I think still exist.
And first of all, that's a question.
Do we still have 2-person medical vans aside from the trucks and engines?
And how much money are we spending on those?
Bob Causey
I'll ask Chief Johnson to come up.
Lauren Johnson
Hi, Council.
Lauren Johnson, for the record.
Thanks, Councilor Novick, for that question.
We do still have 3 rescues that are in service.
Those are the 2-person responders.
They— each one of them responds to over 2,000 calls per year.
Ginger, do you happen to have the cost?
Unidentified speaker
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 6 firefighters cost, but I'm just gonna give you this number.
Um, $3.4 million was what the, the change, um, would be if you, like, redeployed those resources, uh, from the rescues, if that makes sense.
Steve Novick
Yes, thank you.
Um, well, I'm just— uh, my bias would be that we keep the— we keep the trucks and engines, um, 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, And if, 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 2-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 a 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, uh, what percentage of patrol and detective time is spent responding to or investigating violent crimes as opposed to other stuff?
Uh, is that something that we think that we can create?
Bob Causey
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?
Sameer Kanal
Yes.
Bob Causey
Okay, and, and then we would need some clarity on defining violent crime because a lot of people might have different there's 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 that would require a little bit of work just to determine the right nuance in that report.
Steve Novick
All right.
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.
Bob Day
Yeah.
Steve Novick
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.
Lauren Johnson
Yeah.
Bob Causey
That one I'll definitely need to phone a friend.
So Chief Day is here.
He can come up and answer that.
Bob Day
Councilor Bob Day, uh, I, 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.
Steve Novick
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 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 at, you know, from an average.
Bob Causey
Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to step over you.
Um, from my experience at BOEC, PSR was around, uh, 2% of the total workload from BOEC's perspective.
I believe that number has increased to about increased 4% of the total workload.
Thank you.
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%—.
Steve Novick
That there is a 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 PSR represent 2.5% of the responders?
No, they do not.
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 or fewer calls per person than PPB does.
Bob Causey
Yeah, I'm sure we can figure out what the average number of calls for service for Portland Police Patrol and PSR is.
We can come back with that.
Unidentified speaker
I think I'm just gonna 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 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'll just sort of— we'll bake that into what the answer is.
Nathan Leamy
Yeah, I'd say to echo Ginger's point, the time on scene is really the relevant component.
And there, if you're looking right.
It gets complicated because the call types are very different.
You know, the time on scene for a homicide is generally very long with a lot of people.
Raymond C. Lee
Right.
Nathan Leamy
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.
Steve Novick
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 in its most theoretical form.
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Novick.
Councilor Zimmerman.
Eric Zimmerman
Thanks.
You know, some of the, some of the numbers in terms of stats are looking good, and I think that the, you know, the capacity building that's in a variety of places, PSR in particular, is showing up.
Where I'm left wanting a little bit, and I'm going to start on slide 9.
So fire response time.
Now we've identified 44% are on scene within 4 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 5:20 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 one hand, the saturation and the number of calls of 13,000+ for PSR is nice to know, but I want response times as well.
Olivia Clark
Mm-hmm.
Eric Zimmerman
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.
Councilor 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're 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 in how to convey those 3 big buckets of what I'd call our emergency services.
So I hope we can see more of that.
Bob Day
Thank you.
Eric Zimmerman
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 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, we don't have that data.
Bob Causey
Thank you.
Eric Zimmerman
The only one I got that one was from FYRE.
So, um, that would be helpful.
Bob Day
The—.
Eric Zimmerman
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.
Mitch Green
Yes.
Eric Zimmerman
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.
Bob Causey
Thank you.
Eric Zimmerman
To know that if you are considering something a revenue gap, it's because it's related to one time only.
And yeah, I'll leave it there.
It just, it was not clear to me entirely how we're capturing that.
Nathan Leamy
And we may, to be able to help with that, provide the direction that we received from the City Budget Office and how to define those components.
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.
Eric Zimmerman
Yeah.
Nathan Leamy
And they tried to put boundaries, which we think we followed.
Eric Zimmerman
Yeah.
Nathan Leamy
That said, you know, there are some programs, you know, 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.
Eric Zimmerman
Right.
Nathan Leamy
They were considered ongoing in this manner, that they are our current service level.
They're what we're currently doing and it's 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.
Stephanie Howard
Okay.
Nathan Leamy
So some of it was art, some of it was a science, and Ruth wrote—.
Eric Zimmerman
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 an exasperated number, a larger number if we apply one-time-only funds to that deficit.
I think it is perfectly acceptable, and almost every budget office in the state of Oregon would disagree on this, but So 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'd 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— I think that's a different issue.
Bob Day
Considering—.
Eric Zimmerman
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 more articulated, like, this was funded one time.
It has been for the last 6 years.
Loretta Smith
Yeah.
Eric Zimmerman
But 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.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay.
Eric Zimmerman
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 gonna— this is where I'll prioritize my, um, my resources, my programs, given the financial situation that we're facing.
Um, that is more helpful in the decision-making process, um, rather than, you know, it's, 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 where— what it gets into, what it achieves, what it solves, what problem we are helping the community with.
And that's where leadership at 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 got to figure out the narrative.
So thank you to the team, appreciate it.
Bob Causey
And if, uh, if you don't mind, Chief Johnson's here to talk about Lauren Johnson again.
Eric Zimmerman
Tell me where I'm wrong, Chief.
Lauren Johnson
No, I wanted to say thank you for your knowledge of that detail.
Ruth Levine
You're right.
Lauren Johnson
So this is 4 minutes.
The 5 minutes and 20 seconds that you're used to and the 1 minute and 20 seconds is for turnout time.
So to receive the notification at the station, get onto the rig and get en route, and then it gives 4 minutes of travel time.
So your concept, the knowledge of that is correct.
Okay, thank you.
Eric Zimmerman
I, 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.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Zimmerman.
Councilor Pirtle-Guiney.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you, Council President.
Um, 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 2 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.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, we also have a Tableau dashboard that has going back 5+ years.
That would be fantastic.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
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 investment, 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, it's a very different type of reduction that we might be asked to take.
So can you help me understand where we currently sit?
Bob Causey
Yeah, I'll ask Chief Johnson to come back up for fire and then Chief Day.
Nathan Leamy
I'd say for just a context piece, the fleets for the city the of Portland are about 1,000 vehicles.
2 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.
Angelita Morillo
Okay.
Lauren Johnson
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 5 more, for a total of 20.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay, so what I'm hearing is we are maybe not quite in dire situations yet, but close to it.
Nathan Leamy
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 5 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 2 weeks back, we submitted the requests that we would have for each service area, which included needing to have replacement of those apparatus.
Olivia Clark
Fantastic.
Nathan Leamy
So that could be a lifeline.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay, thank you for that context.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Pirtle-Guiney.
Councilor Kanal.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I've got a couple more questions, and I think Chief Day was going to answer that one.
I'll try to be quick, Council President.
Jamie Dunphy
Apologies.
Bob Day
Ginger, can you tell me what we pay fleet?
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, well, um, 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 zero.
Bob Day
So we've been historically borrowing from the future 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 them costs associated with repair.
And any of our major vehicles like a 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 2 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, um, Our fleet is, as mentioned, we're billed 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.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
It sounds like there's 2 sides to the fleet.
There are those major units and then the daily fleet.
Bob Day
The daily fleet.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
The daily fleet is in okay status but not great status.
The major units were in a pretty problematic place.
Is that accurate?
Bob Day
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, um, wasn't calculated appropriately, and so we're behind.
So we continue to stretch out even the regular okay, thank you.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
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 3 categories, many of the proposed cuts were to the police department.
I think that some of the proposed cuts were policy choices that led in a different policy direction than what I have heard both DCAU and the chief talk about wanting to go.
So things like cutting training, things like cutting non-response 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.
Bob Causey
Yeah, when we were diving into this budget process early on, I had conversation with the chiefs and directors and said, look, we are facing a cut year for our budget.
And anytime 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, 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, all of the directors and the chiefs were very creative in that approach.
So what we're looking at, at a 10% cut, most likely would be nuclear options.
I'll be very upfront 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 the first thing on their list might be to cut the 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 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 with a 3% reduction and then the full 10% reduction.
As far as some of the specific things that PPB is looking for, I know Chief Day had sent a message out to his team.
And again, this is high-level information, but I have some of that information right here.
Eliminating an entire retire-rehire program.
Okay.
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 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 PPB is not able to hire someone So that's, that's one example.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you.
Yeah, Chief, anything to add, or—.
Bob Day
I think that covers it.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Move on.
Bob Day
Thank you.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay, thank you.
Thank you, Council President.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Pirtle-Guiney.
Councilor Kanal.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you, Council President.
Uh, 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 Councilor Pirtle-Guiney did, for the use of similar templates.
That's, I think, more of the administration side 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 PPV records thank you.
I wanted to ask, as we go through the slides, on slide 3, and this is in general, I would love to see that PSR, OVP, all the sort of the work that's more direct 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 thank you.
I think the DCA's office will help us in the future.
Slides 6 through 10, really appreciated the good news on the results.
I really like the first 4 metrics.
I wanted to ask that over the course of the next year that we look at different metrics for that 5th one.
I don't think it's— PSR's number of calls is helpful, but I think it's helpful to, similar to what I asked for SEDSA, to look at outcomes, behavioral health crisis calls resolved peacefully, which may be the same thing with a different branding on it.
But I also think a 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 24/7, it relates to staffing levels and all of that.
But I think it's one place that you might capture many of those when you're only giving us a top 5, which I think is fair for how broad of a service area PSSA 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 inflation in the same buckets of work?
Unidentified speaker
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 have the humans doing the work.
But 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 our actuals come in copy that.
If that makes sense.
Sameer Kanal
Thanks.
For slide 17, I did want to just quickly state, I wanted— you mentioned non-response programs.
You mentioned a couple of them, but one, like the victims advocates, which I have concern about potentially losing them.
But I also wanted to ask, PS3s were not mentioned either way.
Are they included in that bucket or not?
Bob Causey
I'm sorry, you said PS3s or PSR?
Steve Novick
PS3s.
Bob Causey
I heard PSR, so I was a little bit confused.
There is, as I recall, there is a mention of PS3s in the document.
Of the PSR program as a whole as a potential cut.
Sameer Kanal
PS3 program.
Bob Causey
Yes, I'm sorry, I'm doing it too.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you, thank you for clarifying.
I am 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 BOEX as well.
And we don't get to talk about BOAC 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's question about non-follow-up calls and getting data on that, I really appreciate it.
I think 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 they're unlikely to receive a follow-up.
Jamie Dunphy
Mm-hmm.
Sameer Kanal
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 future question, and I'm rushing because we're low on time, so sorry.
I would love to get 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 event thank is true for PPB as well.
Bob Causey
You.
Olivia Clark
Thank you.
Sameer Kanal
I think it's important to have that 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 I think there was a premise given by a colleague of if you're looking, 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 has, I think, tripled in calls in the last 10, 15 years while losing an apparatus, and therefore, and the company that goes with that apparatus.
Raymond C. Lee
Thank you.
Sameer Kanal
So the staffing has reduced as well.
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 2.
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 Station 8, 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.
I know, DC Akazi, 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.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Kanal.
Colleagues, I will note that we are at 12:27.
We are only scheduled for 12:30.
Scheduled until 12:30, and there are a few more folks.
I will go ahead and take myself out of the queue for now.
Councilor Ryan, go ahead.
Dan Ryan
Yeah, thank you.
Um, thank you, uh, DC Acazi, Nathan, and Ginger.
Really well done.
Why I'm on the— 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.
They're half of this.
We're first response.
They're 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 6 started with year '15-'16, 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 from— 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 '15-'16, so we can use that more 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.
Um, 2, I think that it's really important that we continue to look at, and it's been touched on, the, just the portion, the correlation between Portland Street Response and then calls, responses from police and fire.
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 thank you.
I think 517 really gets at the emergency response, and I think the very grim 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 and so I need to hear what the creativity is about where those revenues would come from, from leadership.
And I will just end with slide 4.
Actually, since slide 3, I had trouble finding the Community Safety Division.
I know Stephanie came up, and so I was thinking about Office of Violence Prevention.
Olivia Clark
Yes.
Dan Ryan
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 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 and again, really good report.
It's very dense.
And also, we didn't have much time.
I wanted to give you those overall questions so when I meet with you one-on-one or in further sessions, you could 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.
Bob Causey
Yeah, thank you, Councilor.
And we're taking notes, so we'll be able to provide responses to the many questions.
Dan Ryan
Um, I might dialogue like earlier, but we just ran out of time.
Bob Causey
Thanks.
Um, I do want to say the, uh, Community Safety Division includes Portland Street Response, OVP, or Office of Violence Prevention, and ceasefire programs.
Dan Ryan
Okay, thank you.
I assumed that, but I wanted to hear you say that out loud.
Appreciate it.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Ryan.
Vice President Clark.
Olivia Clark
Thank you, Council President.
So just a couple things.
I wanted to echo, um, what Councilor Pirtle-Guiney said and getting more detailed information.
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 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.
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Olivia Clark
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, yes.
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 would be more helpful for me.
And I think Councilor Kanal said something that triggered my memory.
There was a study done.
Yes.
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.
Citygate.
Citygate, particularly in District 4, because we've got the geographic problems.
We got the hills, we— well, we have the river, and I think they noted in that report that we were already woefully inadequate.
So 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.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Vice President Clark.
Councilor Smith.
Loretta Smith
Thank you, President Dunphy.
Question about some of the ceasefire programs where we do intensive case management through those 6 programs.
Can you tell me how those programs will be impacted yeah, I believe Stephanie is here.
Stephanie Howard
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 staff's pretty much just personnel, the handful of— I think there's a total of 3 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, um, and the folks on those caseloads would not have access to those services at all.
Loretta Smith
Okay, so it's like a hand in hand.
You need both, you need both the ceasefire employees 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 really concerned about how we pay for that, and it's in one-time-only funding.
Stephanie Howard
And I totally appreciate the, the, the commentary, share your concern, Councilor.
And I think, um, 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, um, 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.
Loretta Smith
And I don't think our, um, my colleagues know that we have like 6 programs.
We have the HELP program, the Nurturing program, The— what is it— GIYA program, the program, um, and then we have the, the Healing Hurt People, the PLHC program, and, um, 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, uh, service area.
I think they're very important.
I think it makes a difference.
Stephanie Howard
Thank you.
Loretta Smith
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 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, Councilor Smith.
A lot of these programs work with immigrant refugee and communities of color.
And 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 was at the county 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, uh, your money, uh, 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, we don't have the capacity.
And if you, if you change those, then you're going to have to reduce it with, with the one-time only money you're going to have to have.
You have to divide that by 3 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 Wheeler did with the public safety area, that we added these new programs to our public safety system in addition to PSR.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Yes.
Loretta Smith
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.
Thank you.
Bob Causey
Will do.
Yep.
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you, Councilor Smith.
Vice President Clark, last word.
Olivia Clark
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 thank you, Vice President Clark.
Jamie Dunphy
My last comment to, well, to DCA Casi 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, you know, as District 1, we have fewer fire stations.
We have some challenges with police.
We are a very diverse community.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Jamie Dunphy
My district is divided between North Precinct and East Precinct, and sometimes call times are different because of that.
I just hope we continue to keep that as 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'll be having many, many more of these in the coming weeks.
Thank you all.
That is it for today.
Nathan Leamy
Thank you.
Donnie Oliveira
Great job.
Mitch Green
Good job.
Nathan Leamy
That makes it so much—.