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
This work session of the Portland City Council, it's— God, Saturday, May 7th.
8:35 AM, we're in session.
Good morning.
Steve Novick
Take it away.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
Is for us to really elevate the conversation and discuss kind of biggest Thank you.
So we're going to talk about the big picture.
Where do we want Portland headed in the long term?
You all are challenged every single day with solving those short-term or those current and necessary parts of city government, but what we want to do today is really kind of look at that higher-level, bigger picture to give some highest-level guidance and get some alignment between this new city management, city council, mayoral form of government.
A guiding document, not a restrictive document, so we're going to ask some big open-ended questions.
And you also gave us a lot of good information about the more specific things that you're really targeting or interested in and you think are value-add and/or important in the nearer term.
So the process today will be that we want this to be interactive.
We want to hear from you.
You're going to see cumulative reports that came from those pre-interviews that we did to get those conversations started.
Obviously, we want everyone to have a chance to talk.
We want it to feel a safe space.
Jamie Dunphy
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
So that we can express our opinions.
And we— it's my responsibility and my colleague Mike, who you'll meet here in just a moment, it's our responsibility to keep us on track today and to get through all of the agenda that we have set forth.
So for the purposes of today, the structure will be that we'll talk about sort of government dynamics, specifically in a city manager council form of government, how it works best, how we can reach alignment, how we can all be sort of moving in a similar direction so that we're maximizing efficiency.
Angelita Morillo
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
And effectiveness.
Then we're going to dive into some of those higher-level questions.
What is it that really inspires you?
What makes you want to do what you do?
What is going to take Portland to the next level and the next generation?
Y'all are playing the long game here today.
So we're going to elevate that conversation with some exercises.
But then we're going to drill down into what we heard specifically from you.
So I will detail for you the perspectives I received back as sort of the launching point for us to start the narrowing of what are our top priorities.
And once we get to that layer, we will be able to start talking more specifically about definitions of what those priorities mean to us as a group, but also what does success look like with each of those priorities.
Again, looking at the longer term, not the fixing what's broken right here today, But taking that longer view so that what we're doing today is actually adding toward what the future is that we're trying to create.
So it's a build over the day.
We will use some technology, and please bear with us.
We're hoping it's going to work the way we intend.
But really tools and instruments to help keep the conversation going and to help us sort of hone in on what it is that we're all trying to achieve collectively.
So with that, do you have any questions or thoughts or concerns about the day's agenda?
Loretta Smith
No.
Unidentified speaker
We plan to keep you right on time and not hold you a minute longer than we have to.
And so now I'm going to turn it over so we can get started with the first exercise and introduce my colleague, Mike Mowry, who you all met in the pre-interviews as well.
And he's going to get us kicked off with our opening exercise.
All right.
Thank you, Hillary.
Take one and pass it down, if you will.
Well, good morning, council.
Great to get to be with you.
And we have some high-tech exercises, but always with me, some low-tech exercises.
And Post-it notes are in that low-tech category.
I got to meet most of you on our phone calls, but I want to introduce you to our CEO who is here with us, former city manager in Fort Collins, Colorado, and now our CEO.
And he came in for this session because he so cares about Portland.
And so Darren, Darren Atteberry, share anything you want, say hi, come on up.
What a privilege it is to be here with you.
We get to work with hundreds of cities around the country in 42 different states and literally thousands of elected officials.
And I think with Mike and Hillary, you're in great hands.
I just wanted to say I lived here from '91 to '96.
We fell in love with the Portland area.
We're now in Colorado and get to travel all around the country.
Jamie Dunphy
So we love to visit here, and thank you.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
And thanks.
Unidentified speaker
All right, thanks, Darren.
Great to have you with us.
And I think I mentioned to you, I, I've not lived in Portland But I lived in the Northwest for a while, and I love the Trail Blazers.
I've gotten a chance to see Jimmy Buckets score 40 points one time when I was here, so that was exciting.
He earned that name rightfully.
And so I'm really thankful for this opportunity.
So one of the things we want to do to kind of get things started and going is, is help you without being too touchy-feely.
Open up that curtain a little bit about who you are and who's helped you become who you are.
And so I've got a little category here, 3 categories, and what I want you to do is on your fancy Post-it notes that I just handed out, I want you to write the name— you'll need to use 3 of these— The name of someone, it could be living or dead, who inspires you.
It could be a mentor that you didn't know, like let's say Abraham Lincoln, or it could be somebody that was a grandparent or an uncle, a coach or somebody like that.
And then somebody on another piece of Post-it note who you say they need me.
And as you're sitting in that seat and you're leading and governing, you're thinking, This person needs me.
And they may have a name that we know.
But then finally, somebody that challenges you.
Somebody that you may not even agree with, but they push the envelope some on you and they challenge you.
And so what I'm going to ask you to do is to write them down and then bring them up.
So if you got comfortably seated, I'm so sorry because now you're going to be uncomfortably seated and then you can go back to your seat.
But I'm going to ask you then after we do it to talk us through them, okay?
So you'll put the person who inspires you here, the person who needs you here, et cetera.
And you only have about 3 minutes each to say what you want to say about them.
Dan Ryan
Mike, do we only get one?
Unidentified speaker
Yes, just give us one and we'll do that, okay?
Any questions for me?
Need a pen?
I have a pen.
We've got some.
I think I've got one right here.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
And this is really in our counselor role?
Unidentified speaker
Just as a person.
Yeah, yeah, overall.
However you— actually, Tiffany, however you want to do it.
Anybody else need a pen?
Okay, good high-tech stuff.
That's all right.
All right, everybody got it?
Mitch Green
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
All right, then you can put them up here anytime you want to, but then we'll, we'll have you talk them through us.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Olivia has to check her TikTok.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I'm looking for my ID.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
Oh, we can't help with that.
Dan Ryan
Thank you, sir.
Unidentified speaker
Yes, put— yeah, one per sheet.
Put them all in the right category.
Loretta Smith
All right.
Unidentified speaker
You're welcome to do this if you want to, Raymond.
Anything you want to do and anything you don't want to do is— that's, that's all cool.
Raymond C. Lee
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
All right.
I think we got everybody's.
So, Hillary, be my timekeeper.
If we're getting out of line, call me back.
Let's start with the category inspires me, go all the way around, then we'll do needs me and then challenges me.
So, I've got this one I think was from Dan.
I think you were first, Dan.
You put mom.
Anything you want to say on that?
I think it's important.
Dan Ryan
Yeah, she had 14— we need to turn the microphone on.
Oh, the microphone.
I'm sorry, I keep thinking we're not formal today.
Um, so my mom was raised by 14 different caretakers her first 14 years of her life, and before we had systems.
And she went on to raise 8 children.
Unidentified speaker
Wow.
Dan Ryan
And went back to school after— I'm the youngest— when I was in middle school.
And, um, and then she died young of cancer.
And, uh, so she's been dead like almost 25 years, but she just keeps growing in my heart.
Sameer Kanal
Wow.
Dan Ryan
So she was a badass and ahead of her time.
And, um, yeah, she inspires me.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, I can see why.
Thank you.
Dan Ryan
Every day.
Unidentified speaker
For sharing that.
Uh, okay, somebody wrote Nick Fish.
Jamie Dunphy
That was me.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, Jamie, talk to us.
Jamie Dunphy
Nick was a city commissioner.
Uh, I worked for him in the old form of government.
Uh, he died prematurely of cancer in 2020, which ended my time in the city for a while and then inspired my decision to come back.
Loretta Smith
Wow.
All right.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you for sharing that.
Uh, Dalai Lama.
Who's that?
Olivia Clark
That would be me.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Olivia.
Olivia Clark
Yeah.
Um, I think just the inspiration for inner peace and joy, uh, an approach to life.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
All right, good.
Thank you for sharing that.
Bill James.
Is it James?
Steve Novick
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Steve?
Steve Novick
Bill James is responsible for modern baseball.
In the 1980s, he started asking questions about what really correlates with winning, and he discovered that walks were way undervalued.
Home runs were actually undervalued.
Hot pie batting averages were overvalued.
Wins for pitchers were overvalued.
Park effects were undervalued.
And as a result of his— largely of his work, the entire game has changed to emphasize on-base percentage and slugging percentage and defense and more sophisticated pitching statistics.
The result has been a more boring game than we had previously.
But it— but he— Has made every Major League Baseball team far more rational than they were 50 years ago.
Unidentified speaker
And that's the inspiration for the book and movie Moneyball, is that right?
Steve Novick
Right, although the movie, they don't mention Bill James at all, I don't think.
Mitch Green
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
All right, thank you.
Angelita, welcome.
Here's what we're doing.
We're asking you to write the name of one person that inspires you.
It could be alive or dead.
It could be somebody you know or somebody That you just looked up to.
Somebody that you think of that needs me.
This is something, you know, they're in your head, so to speak, and you're making decisions and doing life about needs.
And then someone who challenges you.
Maybe somebody that you disagree with or agree with, but they sort of push you in a way a little different than inspiring.
So when you get them, you can come put them up and we'll— we're just going through them.
We just started.
Okay.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Grandpa Avalos.
Did I say it right?
Candace Avalos
Yep.
Unidentified speaker
Is it Avalos?
Candace Avalos
Avalos.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, talk to us, Candace.
Candace Avalos
Uh, yeah, my grandpa, um, is my most single source of inspiration.
He is why I am the person that I am.
He, um, had a hard start to his life in Guatemala, raised by a single mom, and, um, they— she was the maid and they lived in a, you know, rich people's house in Guatemala.
He grew up to— and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life, or most of the first part of his life.
Came to this country in the 1970s to start the Avalos life.
My mom was already born in Guatemala.
My grandma was there.
And he was drunk on the streets of D.C. for many years until he could get it together.
And once he did, he brought the family over and built the beautiful life that I get to enjoy.
And so he is the single source of all of my Wow, what a story.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you so much.
And, and I have to say, you had me from the word grandpa because I have 8 grandchildren and 1 on the way.
So I'm pretty soon, Steve, I'm going to have a baseball team.
So thank you.
Steve Novick
One base per center.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you for sharing that.
Okay, sticking with that theme, My grandma.
Who wrote that?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I did.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Elana.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
You know, are we doing first names or councilor today?
Unidentified speaker
First names.
Yeah, thank you.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Dan said something about his mom inspiring him in part because she was ahead of her time, and I've always felt that way about my grandmother.
She had a master's degree, balanced work and raising kids.
And being very active in her community, was ahead of her time in terms of how she saw other people and social justice and making sure that she was building the type of community that, that she felt lived up to her values.
Unidentified speaker
Mm-hmm.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
And she also was tough.
She was tough, and she held you to her expectations.
And if you did not meet them, you heard about it.
And that balance of very high expectations, but also really working to make sure that everybody could meet her expectations and that everybody could succeed, is a balance that I strive for both personally and professionally in everything that I do.
Unidentified speaker
Wow, that's awesome.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Okay, um, is it Mary Lee?
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Yeah, sorry if this embarrasses you, Mary.
She's actually in the room.
Unidentified speaker
Oh my gosh.
But I, I was like, am I going to be honest or not?
Tiffany Koyama Lane
She really does inspire me.
I, um, Mary, I feel very lucky.
I had to beg her and convince her to come and be my head of staff and say the, the first Asian American.
It to be elected to Portland city government really needs you.
Please come help me.
And she's a beloved member in the Asian American community and is very humble and doesn't like to share that she, like, founded APANO, our big Asian Pacific Islander advocacy group, and Coalitions for Communities of Color, and has done tons of work over decades and is really brave.
And I know is also seen as a queer hero in Portland.
Her and her wife, when there was a small moment of time when they, in 2003, could get married.
Her and her wife didn't care about getting married but did it so other people, so she could stand up.
And when that was challenged at the state level, her and her wife sued the state.
And then shortly after, gay marriage was legalized.
And she, like, is a brave, strong person, but she also is, like, balances it with so much love.
Sometimes I'm like, oh, there's like so much revolutionary love.
Like, um, but it's, it's really important for me as I'm in this work that can get, um, you know, I feel like where like the heart and the love and the humanity piece can be kind of an afterthought.
It is a really important reminder for me and my team and inspires me.
Unidentified speaker
All right, good.
Thank you.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
All right.
Here's another one that's a— what, it's our first— no, second mom.
Another mom.
It's Raymond.
Raymond C. Lee
Yes.
I put my mom on here.
And I think a lot of people already know kind of that's the reason why I'm in the profession that I am today is because of my mother.
But the reason I listed her on this, and I don't think anybody may know this on the council, my father is no longer here.
He was diagnosed with dementia 4 years ago.
And the reason why I say my mother, uh, the type of love and dedication that she put into my father until his last day on this earth just showed me a different level of love and admiration and selfless and unconditional love.
Uh, and it's something that I aspire to be able to exhibit Uh, as I continue through life.
But it was just something, even though you grow up in a house with someone and you see them on a day-to-day basis, to see that side of them when they're losing someone but they're still there fully for that person to the end, that gave me inspiration that nothing that we're going to be faced with is something that we can't overcome or a burden too heavy for us to carry.
So She has inspired me from that moment on to continue to push forward no matter what that burden is or that problem is in your life.
Things will be better.
Unidentified speaker
That's good.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, here's one.
The people who do outreach in our unhoused community.
Who wrote that?
That's Mitch.
All right, Mitch.
Mitch Green
Yeah, I know my mom's watching these, so don't worry, you're my true one.
True source of inspiration.
But, but I know you'd want me to talk about folks who do invisible work that's super important.
And so there are these people in our community who do every night, whether you're paid for it or not, or you do it for free.
They go out and they talk to some of the most vulnerable, the most vulnerable people in our community night after night.
It's scary work.
It's emotionally draining work.
And, you know, it's challenging.
So those people who continue to show up and do that, I don't know how they do it, and it inspires me to keep doing this work.
And these are also sometimes people who challenge me.
So I'd struggled— I think about Corinne, who does this work in Old Town.
She challenged me a lot.
I don't agree with her politics, but I'm so inspired by what she does for our unhoused community.
So yeah.
Unidentified speaker
Great.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
My godparents.
Who's that?
Oh, okay.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Angelita.
Angelita Morillo
Yeah, my— I think folks have— oh, can you hear me all right on this?
Candace Avalos
Okay.
Angelita Morillo
I think folks have probably heard this a million times already, but when I was homeless through part of college, my— I call them my godparents now, but they were my Constitution team coaches in high school.
They were my teachers, and they found out that I was homeless, and they took me in.
I hate that we're on camera for this.
Olivia Clark
That's it.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Okay, and one more here.
My ancestors, particularly my grandfather— it has to be you, Sameer, because everybody else is gone.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, so, um, my family's from India.
A lot of them are refugees between what is now Pakistan and India.
And all of them pretty much on my dad's side are immigrants.
But my mom's father, my grandfather, was a refugee who then became part of the faculty at a major boarding school in India and taught there for decades.
He taught me algebra when I was in like 5th grade, math teacher.
And when I— you think of math teachers in a certain way, but when actually getting to see him with The kids and the young adults that he had taught in the past and their devotion to him as he aged and coming to take care of him when he was in his 90s.
He passed away in 2024, right before— and part of the reason I decided to run for office is the conversations I had with him a few months before when I got a chance to see him in India.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
Sameer Kanal
So yeah, someone who The kindest person I've ever had a chance to be around.
So yeah.
Unidentified speaker
Good.
Thank you.
Thank you for sharing.
Steve Novick
I have to say this.
Who is not surprised that Sameer learned algebra in 5th grade?
Unidentified speaker
Loretta, welcome.
Did you understand what we're doing?
We'll get you, we'll get you folded in here when you're ready.
We're doing a person that inspires you, someone, and these can be alive or not alive.
Somebody that needs you, that you think of as you're leading and doing life and working as a counselor.
And then somebody who challenges you.
They may not be somebody you agree with, they may be, but somebody that pushes you to be your best.
So, okay, well, that was, that was great.
That was great.
Thank you so much for your transparency and vulnerability.
And you might not have learned anything new, but you might have.
I learned a lot.
We're going to learn a little bit more though about who are the people who need you.
So, um, I, I know that Dan finished first, so I guess I know this is Dan.
You put children.
Dan Ryan
I gave you that look because does that mean I always have to go first?
Unidentified speaker
No, not on the last one, just this one.
Dan Ryan
Okay, thanks.
Glad we covered that.
Um, I put children.
I could also have written The people I will never know that I serve.
Loretta Smith
Yeah.
Dan Ryan
So in this job, it's mission-focused for me, and I always think of children as the moral compass on how I should behave as an adult, as an elected leader.
They could be watching.
And as on the school board, we always said that, that we should remember that we're here for kids and our behavior should be something that we could be proud of.
Loretta Smith
Right.
Dan Ryan
If they're watching.
Raymond C. Lee
Yeah.
Dan Ryan
And then I always— I have something written on my desk that says, serve the person that you'll never know, because I do believe that the vast, vast majority of people never come to City Hall.
They don't write notes.
They're just trying to survive.
And I want to make sure that I'm listening to them.
Raymond C. Lee
Right.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
Very good.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
My dog Arthur.
We got Jamie.
Tell us about Arthur.
Jamie Dunphy
Well, you know, I thought— I mean, honestly, I got stuck on the word need and really thought about, like, my constituents.
Actually, no, they don't need me.
They appreciate that I'm here, but if I'm not here, someone else will fill this spot.
I am replaceable.
Um, I thought about my family, and, like, they desperately want me there, but, like, as everybody wants— but, like, but the reality is that, like, you know, we all have gone through tragedies.
We know that if a person you desperately love disappears, you do find a path forward.
So the only person I could really think of who would be truly devastated is my dog Arthur.
Unidentified speaker
Fair enough.
I, I probably would challenge that, but okay, it's your call.
Jamie Dunphy
The rest of them will be fine.
Arthur will have a pretty bad time.
Unidentified speaker
Oh, that's, that's good.
Okay, my family.
Who said that?
Angelita Morillo
That was me.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Angelita Morillo
I think it's self-explanatory, but, you know, I just had a call with my sister.
It was her birthday the other day.
We spent a long time gassing each other up.
Love her.
I think we need each other.
Unidentified speaker
There you go.
For sure.
Okay, we got another, my dogs and cats.
Who did that one?
That's Mitch.
Mitch Green
That was me.
You know, if you've met my wife, you know she doesn't need me, which is great because she chooses to be with me.
I don't have any kids, but I do have 4 pets.
For little, you know, fur babies.
So my dogs and my cats maybe need me a little too much.
So when I'm out late, they're really upset because then they eat late.
But I love, but I love my pets a lot.
Unidentified speaker
There you go.
Well, nothing wrong with that.
So I will say my wife and I have been married almost 44 years.
And, you know, when it says the two shall become one, we've decided what that means is as you get older, You really, between the two of you, you might have one good brain.
So we actually need each other more now than we ever did before just because of that.
Yeah.
Okay.
My son and grandson.
Who's that?
Olivia Clark
That would be me.
I would have said my cat, but he died.
So—.
Unidentified speaker
I'm sorry.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
He definitely needed me.
Olivia Clark
But I think my son and my grandson.
My grandson doesn't have a mommy, and we don't have to go into details as to why that is.
So I think— I guess I'd like to think they need me.
Unidentified speaker
Yes, I'm sure they do.
Thank you.
My brother Max Novacek.
Did I say it right?
Novacek?
Steve Novick
Yeah.
So I thought of my dog and then I realized, no, my dog is really disloyal.
He'd be perfectly happy to go live with Felicia Haynes and her dog.
But my brother He is much smarter, much funnier than I am, but he also tends to be isolated and he tends towards catastrophic thinking.
And one example— oh, sorry.
One example of that is last year I didn't get paid for the first 34 days I was here.
And at first I thought, okay, we get paid once a month.
And then it was like, wait a minute, it's been more than a month.
And then I was like, oh God, I wrote down the wrong routing number and it went to somebody else's account.
And I said that to my girlfriend and she said, you'll get it back.
Yeah, but what if it went into the account of somebody who was already planning to clean out their account and fake their own death and it's just gone?
And then I thought, that's exactly what Max would think.
And I called Max and told him that.
He said, no, for me, that would be the best-case scenario.
What I would assume happened is it went into the account of a sex trafficking ring, and I'm going to be arrested and thrown in jail for the rest of my life.
So, so he kind of needs me.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
That's good.
All right.
Milito.
Candace Avalos
Yeah.
Milito, or Eric, is my little brother.
He is 20— oh God, he's going to be 27 soon.
And the thing is, he doesn't need me, but not necessarily.
But I just think of him as so emblematic of like who I believe needs us.
Loretta Smith
Mm-hmm.
Candace Avalos
And it's just young people, young people who are just really trying to get by.
I've just watched my little brother, you know, as a young Guatemalan man, like when he was in middle school, long story short, got into some trouble that like in most scenarios wouldn't have been a big deal.
But because we have We live in a punishment bureaucracy.
They just continued to just take him down, take him down.
And, you know, I'm 11 years older than him, so I was just in a completely different stage of my life when he was going through that.
And so I felt, you know, I wasn't there for him in the way that I wish I could have, 'cause I was in college and I'm trying to figure it out as a young adult.
And just watching him go through life and is now married.
He got married a couple days after the election, actually, and we got to celebrate my election and his marriage.
Mitch Green
Congratulations.
Candace Avalos
And he got a house in North Carolina with his new wife, his dogs.
You know, he was a cook, a line cook, and went to like a boot camp for— what is it— programming.
And so now he works at Salesforce as a junior programmer.
Like, just watching him like build up his life, it just— it makes me think back to Grandpa, who— Emilito, it's short for Emilio, which is his middle name, which is my grandpa's.
And so there's just a lot of him, of my grandpa, in my little brother.
And I just see the way that, like, his trajectory has been difficult but has moved quicker because of systems and people that were there for him.
And I just— those people need me, but particularly my brother.
So thanks.
Unidentified speaker
Very good.
Yes.
Okay, Loretta, let's fold you in here.
I'm going to skip over here.
Your mom.
Candace Avalos
Tell us.
Loretta Smith
My mom inspires me.
I'm the oldest of 3 children, and I saw her work at General Motors, sometimes 2 shifts, to take care of 3 kids and then go back to school and get her junior college education.
And so She inspires me a lot because even when I think things are difficult, she'll say, hmm, how about this?
Raymond C. Lee
Mm-hmm.
Loretta Smith
This person is going through this.
I said, well, I guess I don't have any reason to complain.
So she always reminds me of, um, of things that could be worse, and she doesn't necessarily use herself, but she always tries to, to go to the positive.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
Loretta Smith
Of where, you know, how far I've come.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
Okay.
Very good.
Thank you.
Let's stay with you.
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
On the— this is yours, right?
Loretta Smith
That needs me, the grandkids.
Unidentified speaker
Yes.
Grandchildren.
Let's stay with you for that.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
My grandkids need me because I reinforce what their parents say.
And they need me to give them a history of their dad.
Did you do this with your dad— with your son?
So they need me as a historical checker.
And I was teasing my granddaughter.
She's a track athlete, and so was my son.
And he teases her all the time and says, you know, he's the best in this and that.
I said, let me tell you something.
Steve Novick
Yes.
Loretta Smith
I was there.
He was never an All-American at 9 years old.
He's always been good.
But you, you, you are very special.
You— he has never done some of the things that you have done at this early age.
So I have to be the checker.
Unidentified speaker
I feel you.
Saved my life.
That's good.
Thank you.
Okay, let's keep going here.
The Portlanders— this is somebody who needs us— who have given up on government and its ability to make things better for their lives.
Sameer Kanal
That's me.
Okay, so I'm fortunate I surround myself with highly capable people who do not need me in a direct subsistence kind of way.
But I think we have this fragile and amazing moment in time where people who may have given up on us as a government are willing to give us a second chance and And I think that's really, really fragile but really important and possible.
And so trying to make that hope a reality is something that I think constitutes a need that people have from not just me but from this whole group.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
And can I just say, interject there, I shared with many of you that I watched some of your deliberations on choosing council president, and I know it was long and painful and hard for you, but to be honest, you won a lot of respect from me for it.
Because you stayed at the table.
And it wasn't easy, but you did it.
And it showed me a group of people who care a lot about this city, about its future.
Nobody's perfect, no person, nobody.
But I think Portland's fortunate to have a group of people that care as much as they do at this point in its history.
And I think for that and a lot of reasons, there's a lot of reasons to think that There's a bright future for this city.
So I just want to share that.
Okay, let's go on.
My children and other people's children.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
That's me.
The first part, the other people's children, is kind of like what Dan said.
I remember in my 3rd grade class we would talk about Portland history and talk about which identity groups have historically had more power, which ones have been more marginalized.
I remember the kids really telling me, like, you need to put kids on the marginalized group too, because kids don't have power necessarily.
And they're oftentimes an identity group that we kind of think is cute or we'll talk about, but really, that's— you're in a very powerless situation when you're a kid.
And so thinking about that and my duty as someone that's worked with kids for decades to be uplifting their voices.
And then the other piece there is reminding, like, I can easily fall into the role of like caretaker, mom, teacher.
Some people have even said like, oh, you're like the council therapist.
And I've had to be like, oh no, wait, that's not my job.
And I'm not the only mama.
I am is to 2 boys.
And those are the people that like truly need me.
My kids aren't teenagers yet, like Dunphy's kids.
So maybe in a couple of years they won't need me anymore.
But while they do need me, I try to remember my— that like that extra energy of caretaking, really, it should go to those 2 kids.
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, thank you.
All right, we've got my daughter.
Who put that?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Yeah, so I have 2 kids.
I like to think they both need me.
The reality is neither one of them need me.
They have another parent who's phenomenal, and they'd be just fine without me.
Um, but when I was thinking about this question and trying to decide if I wanted to move in the direction of personal or my role as a counselor, I felt like those 2 things really came together in my daughter, who is this amazing, powerful, uncontrollable force.
And she needs a world that has space for her.
Olivia Clark
Mm-hmm.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
And she lives in a world that does not always make space for amazing, intelligent, powerful women.
And she both needs me as a parent to help her find a way to make space for herself in this world.
But she also is the type of person who needs leaders to make sure that she lives in a world that is built for amazing, strong, powerful women like her.
And so I was thinking about holding both of those things, both as a policymaker, what world are we creating for our children?
And as a parent, how am I making sure that, that I am helping her learn how to navigate this world?
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, I love that.
Thank you.
All right, we're going to do one more.
We'll save the challenges for a little bit.
Somebody put children.
Oh, Raymond.
Raymond C. Lee
I put children on mine because it was interesting.
Most of my life, you know, I've gone through my life and I really felt like I was free.
I could do what I want to.
But the day that my daughter was born was the day that I realized, dang, this is no longer me.
Uh, anymore.
I have someone that is totally— you know, as I held her, even just a couple hours after she was born, I said, this is a new feeling to hold someone that you know can't do anything, uh, if you're not there.
And that I'm gonna have to be my better self all the time, and I can't have an excuse for not showing up.
And I'm going to have to be there for her even on her worst days.
So that just changed my perspective on really unconditional love and what does that feel like, holding someone that ultimately is going to need you at the infant stages before she becomes a teenager, probably won't remember me, but what she needs right now from me for protection, love, and security.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, that's good.
All right, well, thank you.
We'll come back.
I want to move us on.
We'll come back to that one at a break.
We got time?
You're good on time.
Okay, I want to make sure.
All right, well, let's just do the challenges then, and then we'll do something else when we come back from a break.
All right, we're not going to start with, with Dan, so let's start with this one.
My choice— boy, I can't— on staff, I think that's me.
Okay, I was like, say, what do you got there?
Tell us that.
Steve Novick
My chief of staff, Spencer.
Unidentified speaker
Oh, my chief of staff.
Choice.
Steve Novick
You know, he has not yet challenged me to fix my handwriting, but, um—.
Unidentified speaker
I thought you were my brother.
I was like, that looks just like me.
Steve Novick
Um, but Spencer pushes me.
He'll say, look, this is an issue that I know isn't automatically in your wheelhouse, but it's important and you're in a position to do something about it, so you should do something about it.
Or I'll say, I know you don't want to go to another evening event this week, but this evening event is important for the following 3 reasons that you should go.
Unidentified speaker
Ooh, yeah, that's good, that's good.
All right, Penny L.
Jamie Dunphy
That's my 14-year-old.
I mean—.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, no, enough said.
Jamie Dunphy
Yep.
Well, I will, I will say to the parents in the room, you will recognize this, but At some point, you raise your exact antithesis.
That you spend, you spend all these years with them and they learn your ways and they find the cracks and they're like, oh, this is how you want to operate?
I gotcha.
I'm going to operate this way and it's going to get under your skin in a way that nobody else possibly can.
You've genetically designed this thing to try and annoy you.
Unidentified speaker
Jamie, I feel you, man.
I got 3 of them, and yes, the only thing worse than that is when you're— when they hit a point where you think they're just like me in all the wrong ways.
That's the problem too.
Jamie Dunphy
That's, that's when my wife sees that and goes, oh, they're just like me, and there's 2 of us now.
Unidentified speaker
All right, that's good.
All right, uh, another, another son, Doran.
Or Duran challenges my son.
Oh, it's Jordan.
I'm sorry, can't read very good.
Loretta Smith
Yeah, my son— I only have one kid, but I feel like I have 10 because all his friends are my sons too.
So, but he challenges me when I was termed out as a county Commissioner, and I was thinking about what to do next, and he's like, well, Mom, you just need to do your own business.
And so I was like, oh, I gotta sign up and do all this.
But he challenged me because he had 4 businesses before that, and so he helped me sign up online and, and how to do it and get your EIN and all that.
And I was like, how do you know how to do all this?
How do you know how to do it?
Steve Novick
Yeah.
Loretta Smith
But every little Big or small thing that he's ever done, he's always had a business for it.
So he challenged me in that way that I could do it.
And so I just did it and it turned out okay.
Unidentified speaker
That's good.
Loretta Smith
Yeah, that's good.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you.
All right, let's hop up here, Dan.
God.
Dan Ryan
Yeah, that's always a risk in Portland, Oregon, to put the person that challenges you as God.
Higher power for those of us in the recovery community.
And I, I could say so many things about who challenges me.
I'm the youngest of 8 and I have 6 older brothers, so just start there.
But, you know, I remember when I was the first in my family to not get confirmed as a Catholic in 8th grade because I didn't like the way the priest was treating my mom.
So it doesn't mean I haven't challenged authority, and I don't see God as like people in those roles.
But I think it was during the time with HIV and there was no medicine and I had to find something aspirational.
And so I came back to that there's got to be something bigger going on.
So it's been a really great journey.
And then in recovery, it's become a loving God, loving higher power.
And yeah, it challenges me all the time.
And every day I have a practice ritual of meditating and trying to hold all of you in the light.
And that's really challenging, but God tells me to do it.
And, um, and so that's, um, what inspires me and challenges me the most.
Candace Avalos
All right.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Yeah, thanks.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you.
Um, okay, along those lines, my fellow councilors with a heart.
Go ahead, Olivia.
Olivia Clark
Well, okay, at the risk of really pissing people off, I have to say that my beloved fellow councilors challenge me.
It's not the politics that challenge me.
You know, I spent my career trying to influence people who are very different from me, i.e., Republicans, and I accomplished a lot.
I got money for transit.
I worked on affordable housing.
I got the state's Clean Air Act updated.
And I had to work with people who were very, very different from me, but I was able to do that.
But my fellow councilors here, although our politics are really not that far apart, I feel really challenge me.
And I can feel my heart, my blood pressure is going up right now.
I have to say that I don't understand that coming into this job, which I think we all want to do the right thing for the people of Portland, coming in with such what I feel is animosity.
And what I see on the council as the tit-for-tat and the defensiveness and the grievances.
And it just— it's heartbreaking to me and challenging.
And it challenges my calm and my— well, whatever.
And I have a friend who's staying with me right now from college who's Cuban.
And we talk about this.
And she says, you know, Olivia, you need agua de florida.
You need to sprinkle some agua de florida over all of us to try to maintain kindness, benefit of the doubt to each other.
So that's what challenges me on a daily basis.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you for sharing.
And one of the things I hope happens out of today, we take a step Thank you.
I think that's a great question.
And I think it's a great step towards just pulling that curtain back a little bit on our own selves because it's always easier to work with people we know a little bit better.
And, you know, it doesn't mean we have to all agree, but sometimes just knowing what's challenging us, what's in our minds of like this person, this group needs me, who's the people in the background that have really inspired, makes it a little bit easier for us to work with each other.
All right, let's keep moving.
Um, East Portlanders, who have I got there?
Candace Avalos
That's me.
Unidentified speaker
All right, Candace.
Candace Avalos
Yeah, yeah.
Um, I just feel like I had a really good year of being challenged by my constituents, and sometimes 1v1.
I mean, they literally sign up for my constituent office hours.
I offer these like 20-minute slots And I've been doing that all year.
I've met with dozens of Portlanders, and boy, they definitely put me to task.
And I think of one particular person who was really upset with me about something that I said, and, you know, they were hurt by it for various reasons.
And they came in and they were like, I'm going to shake your hand right now because, you know, this is the nicest I'm going to be to you right now.
I was like, okay, here we go.
Let's see.
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Angelita Morillo
Let's do it.
Candace Avalos
And, you know, just spent like 10 minutes just laying into it.
And but what I heard was shared experiences, actually.
What I heard was like, yeah, I also have family who've dealt with addiction.
My grandpa was a leader in Alcoholics Anonymous for 50 years.
Like, that's really personal to me, right?
I also have family who have dealt with poverty.
And, you know, so it was like— but so I understood that they took my words within that context.
And so once I was able to share back that I actually shared a lot of that context and, and we have mutual understanding, by the end of it they were like, I— maybe this is inappropriate, but I kind of want to give you a hug.
And I was like, let's do it.
So, um, I just feel like those are the moments where, you know, it really pushes me to think about how I say things, make sure that I am taking into account all of these to the best of my ability and do my best to represent Portlanders that are very different and the same from me in lots of ways.
And so I feel like I've really been challenged in the best way.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, that's good.
One of the early leaders in my life would say to me sometimes, in my— as a professional, he would say, don't ask if you don't want to know, which really was code for you're not asking and you need to, and I'm about to tell you.
I'm glad he did.
Okay, Kathy and Jenna.
Is it Jenna?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
So I've got about 4 friends, and I could have listed Kathy or Jen or Brittany or Elizabeth.
There's a few others who, they check me in this work.
They are the people who, when I am not sure if I am really moving in the direction that aligns with what I committed to Portlanders that I would do, or if I am not moving in a direction that aligns with my values, they are the people who will call me out on it.
And they're the people who I know I can get an honest answer from in a world where a lot of people don't want to give me honest answers in this role.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
And they challenge me in a good way.
I want them to challenge me.
I need them to challenge me so that I can do my best work in this job.
Unidentified speaker
That's good.
That's good.
Thank you.
Okay.
The kitchen cabinet.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
That's me.
I think a lot of you know that I really, really didn't want to run for this seat, and I had a lot of people really do work to try to convince me and ask me to run.
But what I did do is, after all the people— like, when I decided I was going to run, I went back to all those people that told me I needed to run and made them all help.
And so those folks really helped on the campaign.
And then a lot of them now comprise my kitchen cabinet.
And it's a group of people from, you know, I taught with them or I organized with them doing union stuff, or we protested together, or we, you know, work to get universal preschool on the ballot, or we've been raising our kids alongside each other.
And so it's a diverse group that kind of mirror a lot of my different experiences and circles that I'm part of.
And they will ask me questions and push me, and I can also bring, bring them questions and see what their thoughts are.
And they all have some different, different angles that they come at things.
Unidentified speaker
That's good.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay.
My old friend and sergeant in the Army, Tom.
Mitch Green
Well, Eric's not here, so it's got to be me.
So my buddy Tom Hughes is— this, I might get emotional, so stay with me here.
He kind of, he's like kind of my older brother when I was in the Army, and he kind of challenged me, and he never really let me, never really make excuses.
He saved my life.
And to this day, when he calls me, I pick up and he immediately just starts being like, what are you doing?
Sameer Kanal
Why are you doing this?
Mitch Green
And so I love him to death.
He's the person I go to if I need to hear the straight truth.
Dan Ryan
Thanks.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you very much.
Okay, my friends.
I'm not sure who wrote that.
Angelita.
Angelita Morillo
That was me.
Yeah, I think I took a very positive approach to the word challenge, actually.
I like it.
I think it's good.
I think it's healthy.
And I think I have— I had a lot of people that came to mind.
The first people that came to mind were my staff, and particularly Andre, because I think that he pushes me to be better in many ways that I wouldn't be otherwise.
Candace Avalos
Yes.
Angelita Morillo
And— but I also think I have a strong community outside of work that it's folks who care a lot about politics.
We are mostly— we think about this work a lot all the time, and it comes from a deeply personal place of being directly impacted by it oftentimes.
And I don't really surround myself with people who are yes people because I think that can be very detrimental to your work.
They challenge me privately, I think, in ways that are necessary and important, and I think have made me better over time.
And I still have a lot to learn, but I'm very grateful to them.
So I, I think it's positive and good, and I'm very grateful for their feedback.
Unidentified speaker
All right, thank you.
Okay, um, myself.
I think that's Raymond.
Raymond C. Lee
Yeah, that's me.
I guess You might not know this, I'm a very competitive person.
So I even put that to myself.
So I always feel like, you know, even if I achieve something, yeah, that wasn't good enough.
Somebody else has already done that.
You can do better.
And always just trying to push myself to the next level for growth and trying to be a better me.
So I always say I'm probably my worst critic with the work that I produce and the things that I do every day.
And that's just my own self-motivation just to be better.
Unidentified speaker
All right.
Olivia Clark
Good.
Unidentified speaker
Now, did I leave anybody out?
Everybody got it?
Sameer, did you?
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I think it's the bottom one.
It's one of the light-colored ones.
Unidentified speaker
What's it say?
Sameer Kanal
It says the same people that need me.
Unidentified speaker
Oh, okay.
Go ahead.
I didn't think we'd heard from you.
Sameer Kanal
To be needed is to be challenged unless you're perfect.
We're not.
So because if people need you, they need you to be everything they need you to be.
And so, you know, because I'm not perfect, I get challenged to be a little bit better at doing the thing that I'm trying to do for people.
And I think that's really healthy.
And I also viewed it as a very positive thing, a challenge.
Unidentified speaker
So, yeah, that's good.
Very good.
You know, in, in leadership development, You know, I'm a real sports nut, and I know not everybody is, but one of the things sports teams do, they watch film.
You play a game, win or lose, you're studying the film.
And it occurred to me probably 15 years ago, we never do that in leadership.
Not enough, right?
Where we look back and we say, okay, how'd I handle that?
How could I have handled that better?
What was I thinking?
What was I expecting?
Etc.
But that's how you get better.
That's how you get better.
And so I appreciate what you're saying.
And I'm curious, we don't have time to go too far into it, but any takeaways from this little exercise that you want to share?
Any like, oh, I hadn't thought of this, or whatever?
Mitch?
Mitch Green
I'll just say that, I mean, I think it's pretty clear to me that All of my colleagues up here are deeply caring, emotional, and committed people.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
That's true.
Anybody else?
What's the takeaway?
Candace?
Candace Avalos
I think the spread of the answers is the takeaway for me to— for us.
Yes, we're all caring people and we all come from really different backgrounds, who we believe You know, needs us, challenges us, inspires us is part of our strength.
And so I think it's important that we look at that list and understand that everybody has, you know, their people that are pushing them, that are guiding them, and we should honor each other's differences in that way.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, that's a good point.
You know, I, I say sometimes if anxiety goes up too high, good judgment comes down too low.
And when we push people into a corner, sometimes that causes their anxiety to go up too high, and that means their good judgment goes down too low.
So a wise part of leadership is learning, you know, not to push people into corners that's going to diminish their good judgment.
All right, speaking of leadership, let's change gears a little bit.
Oh, I'm sorry, Elana.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Oh, that's okay.
I was— interestingly, I was, I was going to jump in and then Councilor Avalos did to say almost the opposite thing, which is I noticed a lot of themes through there and a lot of similarities in what people pointed to.
And yes, there were differences.
We were pointing to different people, but there were a lot of people pointing to our constituents and how we're serving our community.
There were a lot of people pointing to their family and what that means.
There were a lot of people pointing to really key people who, who hold us accountable.
And so I noticed a lot of themes and similarities through what we all put up there.
And even if it's different individuals, a lot of commonality in who we hold ourselves to.
Unidentified speaker
Right.
That, that's one thing, Hillary, we'll get into the interviews a little bit later, but we noticed there's a lot of common themes when we talk to you.
You have a lot for sure.
So let's talk a little bit about the day.
Oh wait, one more.
Okay, Tiffany.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Oh, one of my takeaways is just that Jamie Dunphy is hilarious.
Unidentified speaker
He is.
He's got a sense of humor there.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I kind of knew that, but I— he was really cracking me up.
Jamie Dunphy
I'm constantly competing with Steve.
Unidentified speaker
Ah, I can see that.
That's good.
Okay, let's talk about roles and responsibilities and kind of frame the day.
So we created a diagram, I guess, that I would say about how this form of governance, strategic visioning, works.
And I know that in a lot of circles we use the term strategic visioning interchangeably with strategic planning, but if you think about it, there's really a significant difference between those 2 things.
Because a strategic vision is about direction and priorities, and that is largely the role of elected officials to determine.
A strategic plan is really about how and budgets and timelines and—.
Timing.
Allocation of resources or alignment of resources.
And that's largely the responsibility of the city administrator and staff.
Now it doesn't do any good to have a great strategic plan if you don't first have in place what?
A strategic vision.
Because you need to know where you're going.
What are your priorities?
And that's what we want to take a step towards doing today.
So you can kind of see this diagram, and it's not perfect, I'll tell you that for sure.
But, you know, we could start at the top and talk about citizen input.
And one of the flaws in this diagram is that it sort of seems to indicate you only get citizen input at one point, at the top of the cycle.
And we don't really mean to Yeah.
But just for simplicity's sake, we put it there.
In truth, there should be another circle going on on the outside that shows you're always getting community input from surveys, from one-on-ones, from meetings at the Starbucks or whatever it is.
And that's right, you need both of those things.
But you get that input.
Then you get input from staff.
Now, you You are free to take some, none, or all of the input that staff gives you.
I obviously would say you'd be wiser to take at least some, but that's your prerogative.
But you're good that you get that input.
But then comes that point, which is where we are today, where you say, okay, collectively we think these should be our Overarching strategic priorities that we focus on.
Our goal today is to help you identify what those are collectively.
We don't want to move into a thing where, okay, Olivia has her 2 priorities and Alana has hers and Dan has his, because that's really hard for staff to follow because you don't have any cohesiveness.
What we want is to get collectively— what do you collectively feel like these are the big rocks of our strategic vision?
From that, then we will help you establish some what we call objectives or milestones that give a little definition to what that means.
But then Raymond and his team will take that and And we'll begin to create a work plan, a strategic plan that's in alignment with that.
And, you know, we had some talk from you like, oh, we have— some of us have some concern that this might be a document that's used to beat us up or leverage.
And that's not the case.
That's not the intention at all.
It's got to be a living document.
It's got to be a guideline.
It's really to give, as much as anything, it's a direction for staff to know here's what, where we need to go.
And you have opportunity to affirm that because they'll come back to say this is where we're headed.
No, no, that's not quite it.
And there's a lot of give and take that goes back and forth there.
I was in Davenport, Iowa last weekend and new city manager, And the same kind of dynamic.
Council had previously with a different administration said this is what we wanted, but there was some misunderstanding from the previous administrator on what they meant by that.
And one of the things we were able to do last weekend was help them to clarify it so that the new manager could go, oh, I actually did not understand it that way.
I'm glad we had this.
So we hope that we can do that.
But then it's largely, not exclusively, but largely staff that executes on this vision, this plan.
That's not to say you don't have your part, because absolutely you do.
But in great cities, I hear this same thing comes up over and over.
We'll be celebrating some great achievement and council members will say, yeah, but really it's the It's the staff that did it.
Really, the staff could— but then when that happens, I almost always hear staff say, well, yeah, but we couldn't do our part if elected officials hadn't first done their part.
That's what we're here to do today.
Now, this is never a once-and-done thing.
There has to be evaluations, check-ins, you know, not for me to say what that cadence ought to be for you.
But you need to determine what that check-in cadence needs to be, and then staff adjust, and then we're kind of right back at the top.
So you may see Hillary or me saying, raise it up, get higher, 30,000 foot, not 3,000 feet.
It's not that we don't think what you're saying is valuable, but at this task, we got to get up there.
Now, I saw your hand, Tiffany.
I'm sorry.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
No, I I just wanted to name something that I'm really excited to see this, anyone that, that loop.
It's something that many of us have been talking about for over a year, and I think it's healthy.
I think it's what constituents overwhelmingly want.
They want to see us moving in, in a direction.
And I also just want to name half of us are running for reelection, and I have learned the reality of electoral politics really is— doesn't connect to that.
There is a piece of you need to show that you're winning, why you are better than others, and that's not anything that any of us have done, but that is also just how politics has tended to be set up.
Hopefully that shifts, and we're shifting that here in Portland with this new form of government.
But I just wanted to name where those things come up against each other and where there's pressure to sometimes be like, well, I'm, I'm different, or here's my wins, or it's about me as a one councilor that really contradicts and conflicts with what I do think is also healthy for the body.
Unidentified speaker
It can be, there's no doubt.
And what, what I've found in doing this for 15 years is that we want to— we do best by the city, like you guys were talking about, when we can guard The integrity of the process.
Because if we can say this process has integrity, then people can get along and support it.
And that's also the best way for you to get some of those— I'm going to call them secondary things that you really care about.
You want to get them achieved, understandable.
But it's usually better if we get the basics done to the— Sameer, did you have your hand up?
Sameer Kanal
The integrity of that process or the integrity of the process that we're coming up with here?
Because I haven't seen that before in a way that we've agreed to here.
Unidentified speaker
No, no, I mean the way you develop it.
Steve Novick
Yes.
Candace Avalos
Okay.
Sameer Kanal
Because I think that there's a— I would love to have the conversation not only about what you brought up, because I really appreciate where community input fits, and it's everywhere, as you put it, but also about Council of firms, we've been dealing with rubber stamp expectations for a year now, and I think this is very staff-driven, this process.
So that's been laid out here, and so I have a lot of concerns about that.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, and when I say council of firms, I mean that.
Like, there's a lot of— in our perfect world, there's a lot of give and take from the time staff creates that work plan and Council says, yep, that's it.
There's a lot of give and take there.
And that's not, I would say, bad governance.
It's good governance because what we're trying to create is true alignment, not rubber stamping, for sure.
Very, very important comment.
Okay.
So just kind of keep in mind that we may be saying, okay, is that a strategic priority or is that a tactic or an initiative?
Steve Novick
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Because if it's a priority, let's talk about it.
If it's an objective, let's talk about it.
But if it's an initiative or tactic, let's write it down.
Staff can consider it, not consider it.
But today we want to push you up a little bit higher with those things.
So again, not because we don't think what you might have to say is valuable or helpful, but where we're at in this process.
Mitch Green
Councilor Smith.
Unidentified speaker
We got to know where— what's your what and, and the why.
Okay, Hillary, let me turn it over to you and let's get started with hopes and fears.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
All right, so we started—.
Dan Ryan
Before we go, could I just— with that loop that you had up, let me flip back to it.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Dan Ryan
The only part that—.
Unidentified speaker
Oh yeah, it was built in in 15 minutes, but if you need it now, that's totally fine.
Yeah, let's take it.
Let's take 15 and we'll be back at 10.
And we'll take that question, Dan, if that's okay.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Before Hillary comes and we start talking about Hopes and fears.
I inadvertently cut off Dan, and you had a comment or a question, maybe back to the cycle of strategic visioning?
Dan Ryan
Yeah, the cycle had— let's see, I can't— it was the second one, was it goes to staff after being— after the people?
Unidentified speaker
Citizen input, staff input, then council.
Loretta Smith
And I—.
Dan Ryan
For me, the way I experience governance is that I would flip those 2, that I'm inspired by being out listening to the people, and then I share that with staff.
Yes, as a, as an elected independent and nonpartisan leader, I think it's just so important for me to constantly be listening and, and be inspired by what I hear on the streets.
Unidentified speaker
Well, you're touching on something that's really important, and that is part of the role of council is to be a Sort of a thermometer back to the staff on the mindset of the people.
And we need that.
We talk about that.
We're not doing that today.
Dan Ryan
That's that 30,000-foot level that you're talking about.
So that's how I kind of—.
Unidentified speaker
Both.
Yeah, that's right.
But we talk about that in governance, that you are— you do have your ear to the ground, the people, in a way staff sometimes doesn't.
So they need to hear from you.
No doubt about it.
You're right.
Okay, Hillary, where are you?
I'm going to turn it over to Hillary, and we're going to try something technology-wise, and if it doesn't work, we'll, we'll make an adjustment.
But let's give it a shot.
Okay, so we started kind of close in as individuals, as people.
We looked at a system that is made up of individuals or people, and now we want to take a step Yes.
A slightly wider view of kind of big picture from our individual perspectives, what are our greatest hopes and dreams for Portland?
And then we want to look at what our greatest fears are.
So we're going to look at— or we're going to use this tool.
And so if all of you will pull out your smartphone and click this link right here, we're going to see if this is going to work.
It should take you to a page where you can enter the answer to what is your greatest hope for Portland.
Big picture, long-term, big think.
A sentence is good.
A paragraph is probably too long.
Is everybody contributing?
Yeah, it's coming up.
The vote hasn't started until they've all contributed.
Candace Avalos
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
I don't need it yet, but—.
Thank you.
Not yet.
Candace Avalos
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Shows we have 9, so I think we're still waiting on just a couple.
Olivia Clark
There's 10.
Unidentified speaker
Still waiting on one more, I think.
Steve Novick
I hit submit and it's just getting Like a spitting ball type thing.
Unidentified speaker
Oh no.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Is yours not up there?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Um, no.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I'm gonna copy it and then reload it.
Unidentified speaker
Looks— 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.
Something just— there went 11.
Yes, so there's more.
Yeah.
Okay, so all of you have submitted.
Do you feel like they— okay, now what we're going to do— oh, is yours still not there?
Oh yeah, we're there.
Okay, so now what we're gonna do is you all are gonna vote on these.
So we're gonna hit start voting.
Yes, you have 3 options.
So just what are the top 3 that you see on that list that reflect your greatest hopes for Portland?
So you can vote for your own.
They should show up in your— and then you should be able to vote for them.
It's when the voting is done, we're going to put it up there so that others can't.
3.
You can do up to 3.
The next round will be easier, I hope.
So, Oh, is it programmed for just 2?
Okay, so then it's 2.
I apologize.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Oh, you don't?
Unidentified speaker
You can.
Probably more than you're comfortable with.
Jamie Dunphy
Oh, I'm good.
Dan Ryan
I'm well aware of my hometown's trade.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, getting close.
Mitch Green
One more.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, I think we're.
We're waiting on one more.
Okay.
Can we show results?
There we go.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
So here we are.
The top 3 had multiple votes and then the next ones.
Was there anything on the list that any of you was just absolutely not— this is not a hope and dream for the future of Portland?
Candace Avalos
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
That one's a bit bigger.
Yeah, sorry.
So a city that embodies the opposite of the worst stereotype of late-stage American capitalism.
A safe and welcoming community with meaningful jobs and affordable neighborhoods.
A city where everyone's needs are met, families see a future, great jobs are abundant, and equity and sustainability are at the core of how we build.
And then next, individuals and businesses come back to Portland.
Build our policies around the people who actually need the most support.
And unwavering faith in Portlanders that this will be a city that can be a refuge for anyone who wants to come here, can afford to age in place here, free from discrimination and displacement.
Do we all as a group feel like that is our collective aspiration?
Elements of those things?
Raymond C. Lee
No.
Dan Ryan
I would need someone to explain why a city that embodies the opposite of the worst stereotypes of late-stage American capitalism— and no one's surprised that I said that.
And I think I'm speaking for a lot of Portlanders to ask that question.
Jamie Dunphy
I'll define it more.
Dan Ryan
Yeah, you could define it and then explain how it'll all pencil out.
I realize that my hometown's changed.
Jamie Dunphy
That was me.
Angelita Morillo
Oh, I thought it was Mitch.
Jamie Dunphy
Hey, yeah, Mitch is the socialist economist, but I still have a lot of thoughts.
Dan Ryan
Um, you know, no, I had to speak for me and a lot of Portlanders.
Jamie Dunphy
This is why I live in Portland.
Yeah, you know, I got— I was a touring musician.
I got to go see the world.
I got to go see how other cities live.
And the reason I stay in Portland is because we are in many ways the opposite of what people think about this country.
In a lot of ways, we are embracing our identity as a small business town.
We don't pride ourselves as only being catering to the Fortune 500.
We embrace identities of persons that everybody brings to the table.
And we don't, as a city, capital C and lowercase c, tolerate intolerance.
We don't, as a city, allow for bullies.
That's not— you know, we American— in my American stereotypes are that we are a bully nation that cares about corporate greed over the little people.
And I think that everybody at this dais and the people who sent me here don't agree with that being the way that we choose to live our lives.
And that is what gets me up in the That's fair.
Dan Ryan
I don't think we're a city that's full of many Fortune 500 companies.
You know that, right?
Jamie Dunphy
Exactly.
Dan Ryan
So we have the least amount of any city our size.
Jamie Dunphy
Yeah, I think that's a brilliant thing.
Yeah, I think that it is an amazing thing that we're able to lean into our identity as not being reliant on, on corporate overlords.
Dan Ryan
Then why are so many small businesses leaving?
Jamie Dunphy
I mean, you know, 90% of small businesses fail in their first year, and 90% of those fail in the second year.
Dan Ryan
These are ones that have been here for like 10, 20, 30, 50 years.
So that's what makes me ask that question.
Jamie Dunphy
I mean, the economy everywhere is collapsing right now.
So small businesses are not doing well anywhere.
And, you know, there's a lot of—.
Dan Ryan
I just had to name that because it's true.
We're leading the pack in terms of the exits around that.
Angelita Morillo
Sameer.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah.
So literal definition, late-stage capitalism characterized by globalization, Dominance of multinational corporations, broad commodification and consumerism, and extreme wealth inequality.
That's what's happening.
That's what we're all seeing the result of.
And so to move away from that, continue to move away from that, is to save small businesses.
So it's not surprising to me that that got to the top of the list.
Dan Ryan
And I see that for a lot of American cities.
I just don't see that here in the same way that I see it in other American cities.
Sameer Kanal
The absence of social housing means The number one expense on everyone's balance sheet is commodified.
Dan Ryan
Are we going to be a welcoming place for entrepreneurs anymore?
Sameer Kanal
Well, not as much as we could be, no.
Dan Ryan
No, that's fair.
That's the dialogue we need to have, because I like it when ambitious people move here and build companies and hire people and provide for our economy.
Jamie Dunphy
And this is about hopes for Portland, not what is on the ground now, but what do we What do we aspire to be?
Unidentified speaker
And I think that that's where we're sort of getting— we're not gonna necessarily solve the economic woes here today, but I think that it's important that we have a collective understanding that we want a mix, that we want something that is value-add to Portland and does not exclude or include only this or that.
And so I think that's the perspective, is I believe that The understanding is that business is important.
We haven't defined, and we probably aren't here today going to define what those businesses should be, but ultimately we need to have the vision that business is part of our economy and we need to figure out what the right path is.
Dan Ryan
That's true, Hillary.
I'm just not hearing that— would— if I was watching and I worked at Adidas or I worked at Nike or if I worked at Columbia Sportswear, would I think that our company should be— have a footprint in the Portland market?
If I listen to this conversation, that's my question to my colleagues.
Candace Avalos
But you said that small businesses was what you cared about, and you named not small businesses.
So could you tell me what you mean?
Dan Ryan
I care about having revenue in our budget, Candace, and I know a lot of other revenue comes from our business license taxes.
It comes from property taxes.
It comes from people being successful here.
And I also have friends that work in some of those big companies are wonderful people.
You'd probably all like them very much.
But I think they wouldn't feel welcomed perhaps in this conversation.
Unidentified speaker
That's all.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
So for what it's worth, and this conversation just changed a little bit with the introduction of some of those larger businesses in our community, I actually think that what happened at the beginning of this conversation was a bit of talking past each other because what I heard Jamie talk about was a place that cared a whole lot about our small businesses and wanted to be a community that was built around those small businesses.
And then I heard Dan say, but what about the small businesses?
And when I read that first item, a city that embodies the opposite of the worst stereotypes of late-stage American capitalism, what I read is a hope that we are a city that in fact leans into those small businesses, among many other things in the definition that Sameer read.
But I think that we often have this conversation about pro or anti-business, and there may be a place for that, and there may be some, some conversation we need to unearth about whether people really support a business community or not and what that takes.
But I don't think that this thing on the list is anti-business when we are talking about small community-driven business Councilmember Herbold.
I think that this is a very different conversation.
I don't think that this is a fight around businesses that keep their profits in the community.
I, in fact, think that what that first thing on the list is saying is that what we want are those small community-driven businesses that keep their profits in our community.
So I just— I think there's 2 conversations to be had about business, pro or anti generally, and then corporate or not.
But this one doesn't— this one doesn't create a fight around that first That first question, I don't think at all.
Unidentified speaker
And ultimately, when we get to the priority level, that's when we start to determine what are the conversations we need to have moving forward about what that looks like.
So right here is really, we're just trying to establish kind of the aspirational parts before we drill down into the more practical application of that moving forward.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I appreciate that Dan spoke up and shared what he thinks.
I think that just watching this is what we see play out Um, on the dais often is that we kind of feel put into 2 categories or 2 different camps.
We're kind of pushed to be like, which side are you on, or which endorsement, or which group are you with?
Which sometimes there's more to that too.
Which leaders do you get along with?
And it also made me think about— um, I mean, Dan and I have talked about this, that sometimes we're not as far apart as we think, but there are certain trigger words that come along with different things like seeing late-stage American capitalism.
If it was written differently, that might not have triggered the same thing.
Or hearing even the words like economic development or public safety or corporate interests, like, like it all— they connect to different people and lobbyists.
And this is just making me think about kind of what Olivia— where Olivia started too, is there are times where we can We can think we are farther apart in how we get somewhere, and we might have some different ideas, but certain language or ideas will push us kind of and think that we're farther apart than we are.
Unidentified speaker
Mitch?
Mitch Green
Yeah, I'd like to enter this discussion by kind of making an observation that there's an interesting Yes.
It's not a coincidence that we have 3 categories that emerged, and in any of our districts we elect 3 councilors.
And oftentimes, I think speaking for my district, you'll have maybe 2/3 of the population that thinks or frames a certain set of questions in a very common way, and then there's another third that maybe has the same objectives, the same desired Yeah.
— But frames it in a very, very different way that just comes from different lived experiences.
And so if I look at each of those 3 categories, I can pull out inclusivity, I can pull out affordability, I can pull out safety, I can pull out abundance and infrastructure and all those things, small businesses.
That's all there.
But I know that the people maybe who voted for me understand it through the language of avoiding the worst stereotypes of late-stage capitalism.
But as Samir noted, it's really about making sure that we've got opportunities to grow our native kind of organic culture, cultural production and economic production, while also feeling safe in our neighborhoods, while also knowing that we can stay here and we're not being pushed out.
And so I entered into this conversation today hoping that we can see those types of things and get past the sort of like hyper-triggering kind of framing language and tease out those nuances.
And so I actually think it's a kind of a blessing to see these things emerge and then have this kind of a dialogue.
Unidentified speaker
I think just sort of bringing it up a level, as I'm doing my hands, sorry, this is going to happen, but bringing it up that level is economy or business or economic development, however you want to call it, may look like a grocery store in this district because there is a food desert existing, right?
But in this district, it may look like some opportunity for increased tourism.
So it's not— they're not exclusive of one another.
It's where do we come together and say these are the highest level things that we hope for and fear for.
And like Mitch was pulling out, it's those themes, those themes that come up that say we don't want We don't want business development at the expense of safety.
We don't want safety at the expense of inclusivity.
We don't want inclusivity at the expense of insert whatever.
So really, the purpose of this exercise is not to solve the issues, but to sort of get in each other's heads a bit before we start really trying to define what those top-level priorities are.
And I appreciate the interchange, and I— there's no pressure point here.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Which is what I like.
I like that you're able to have a dialogue without a decision necessarily having to be made, because I think it can be fruitful in understanding each other's perspectives a little more fully.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Yeah.
Angelita Morillo
Thank you.
Um, I just have a request of my colleagues for this discussion that the, the word capitalism or anti-capitalism, they describe different systems, um, and they are not inherently triggering.
They are different political systems that we might be Working under as a values framework or as an economic framework.
So if we don't understand what a term means, let's approach it with curiosity so that the discussion doesn't escalate, because I think once we tease those things out, we actually end up realizing we want the same things, right?
You're talking about a grocery store food desert.
I think we all want affordable housing in Portland so that people can afford to live here.
We have different ideas of how to get there, but if we don't understand what a term means, Let's just ask each other rather than make assumptions that there is an underlying threat or attack, because the reality is we only have 4 socialists on City Council right now.
We have others who are progressive and others who are— have different perspectives, but I think those are all different just economic political systems that have to be addressed, and there are ways to achieve the same goal.
So I'll just leave it at that.
Unidentified speaker
I'm going to come back to you, but you've already gotten to go once, so go ahead, Steve.
Steve Novick
Personal question.
Who put— oh, sorry.
Who— I want to know who wrote down the thing that started with joy in our streets, because I voted for that and I didn't see— and apparently they didn't vote for themselves.
I just want to know who that—.
Raymond C. Lee
Who had that.
Dan Ryan
I thought I voted for myself.
Sameer Kanal
You did not.
Steve Novick
Okay, well, thank you.
Unidentified speaker
There could be more 2s down below.
Dan Ryan
It's there somewhere.
Steve Novick
I also wanted to say that I realize that I'm among younger people because nobody put up, I want Portland to be a city where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, Sameer.
Anyone else first?
Okay, go ahead.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I just wanted to mention Nike was a small business here in the region, right?
Unidentified speaker
Very good.
Sameer Kanal
And so was Columbia Sportswear.
Even though Adidas wasn't— its North American presence was small when it first came here, taking over an old hospital.
Shout out to Adidas because I was born there in that hospital.
Anyway, I actually think that that's a really good list of businesses because that's— I think the people that are supporting small businesses are inherently wanting everybody else to have the same type of opportunity to grow, thrive, and become successful.
Successful in the way that those 3 did in this area.
So I actually think that that's actually a fantastic list of examples of what everybody here who wants small businesses to succeed wants them to be able to get to.
Unidentified speaker
And you all have an opportunity in your seats to create the circumstances by which that is possible.
It may not be desirable for every business, but at least have the conversations where it becomes possible for those things to exist and thrive in other businesses and whatever the correct balance is.
Again, policy decisions you all will come back to at some future date, but thank you for indulging that process.
Now we're going to go to the opposite—.
Dan Ryan
I had my hand up.
Unidentified speaker
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Dan Ryan
I just need to say that it was coming from— on a little— it was coming from curiosity.
That's why I asked the question.
I needed a clarifying question on what that means.
I hear those terms But I've never had a chance to have you all really explain them.
And so that's why I wanted this exercise.
And I continue to say it'd be great if we weren't on our phones texting, because I just want to continue to have authentic dialogue with all of you about these concepts.
And when you say those terms, I'm like, okay, what does that really mean?
And so I appreciate that we had an authentic dialogue about it, because I'll tell you, my friends that are trying to build companies here They don't feel like it's very friendly to build that company.
So will we ever build another Nike?
Will we ever build another Adidas?
That came here, sorry.
Columbia Sportswear.
And there's numerous others.
Will they ever be able to build that type of company in Portland going forward?
That's what I'm concerned about.
Unidentified speaker
Go ahead.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Proportional ranked choice voting got us a very diverse group of people up here.
And so we're going to keep having to do that and ask each other, what do you mean?
What's your definition there?
We did not understand Steve's joke, and then Olivia said prairie home companion, and we're like, oh, okay, yeah.
It's like we're gonna have to keep being curious and asking.
Unidentified speaker
But again, this— it demonstrates that there are— you all represent differing perspectives.
You all represent constituents with differing perspectives.
And so if we are able to bring all of those to the table, then perhaps we come with an outcome that is going to be more Representative to the community as a whole while also representing our own constituencies.
So next, we're gonna switch to the opposite end of the spectrum and say, what is your greatest fear?
So let me get that.
Are you— oh, yes.
Adam's gonna help me.
What is your greatest fear for Portland?
And then we'll do this same exercise and have just a quick conversation about it.
Raymond C. Lee
There you go.
Loretta Smith
Woo!
Unidentified speaker
We should have one more.
There it is.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
That should be our 11.
And so now the same rules apply where we're going to click the vote.
And then we'll talk about those top-level—.
Sameer Kanal
I couldn't see what that one was.
Unidentified speaker
It's on your— it's in your— you'll be able to read it to vote on it.
Yeah, I believe it's 2 again.
Councilor I'm glad we got that on the official record.
Finding commonality.
I promise I'm really present.
I think we have one more.
Jamie Dunphy
What did he say?
Dan Ryan
He just dissed anyone that's in ballet.
Unidentified speaker
And we have just one more.
Jamie Dunphy
Yeah, who's—.
Unidentified speaker
No.
Oh, there it is.
Okay, now we can look at the results.
Finish.
Oh, you're doing it from that computer.
That's right.
Steve Novick
Sorry, we're working 2 different Hey, everybody, maybe everybody heard this, but we've solved the ideological divisions of the council because Angelita and Dan agree that Timothée Chalamet is a douche.
Unidentified speaker
Finally, unity.
All right, so we have tipped the scale.
We have 4 on one of these.
But what I noticed as soon as they started popping up was some of them were Yes.
So I think that's what you're going to find as we work through the rest of today.
But just for the purposes of this discussion about sort of what it is that we are— we were talking about what it is we're trying to move toward in the first question.
This is what we're trying to guard against in the second question.
So we don't ever want to pursue something with such vigor and such force that there are these fallouts on the other side.
We want to make sure that we're considering those things that we, we hope to never see arise as part of that discussion and not as a, a spot where we're not clear or we're not concentrating on it.
So the city will become poorer and poorer, no economic opportunity, streets crumbling, and will be mostly gravel in 25 years.
Experiment of a new form of government fails to deliver results.
We saw that in a couple of different Yeah.
Political violence inflicted by the feds, neighbors getting snatched up, and not fighting for someone we don't know.
I can't see what's behind that one.
Oh, thank you.
We lose our identity and look like every other mid-sized American city.
Greatest fear is families will be priced out of living in the city.
And have to move, and too afraid of our differences and don't use them as our strength to make policy that truly impacts and serves Portlanders.
Anybody disagree with any of those as being fears of the future of this community?
Raymond C. Lee
Right.
Unidentified speaker
So, so just in the, the, the, the broader context, these are thoughts that we want you to carry through the rest of our discussions today.
Because again, there's give and take.
There will be give and take, and it's not all or nothing, particularly in a city that's this diverse in all of its ways.
And so we want to make sure that we are not turning away from these and instead encouraging or having them in suit.
Yes, go right ahead.
Candace Avalos
Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with anything that's up here.
I just think the one that got I think it's a little much.
Like, the streets are crumbling in 25 years.
Like, I don't know, that actually concerns me if that's what people think we're headed, because that trajectory is incredibly bleak.
And I think that we have shown that that is not where we're going.
So that vision, that type of fear actually does concern me, and I just needed to name that because it just— the way it's written, like, I saw that and it was— I was immediately repulsed By how it was written, I was like, I'm not voting for that.
So to see that it got 4 actually surprised me because I don't— I think, yes, we're allowed to have our fears, and of course, you know, the underlying fear in it makes sense, but the way it was written concerns me.
So I just had to name that.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, Steve.
Steve Novick
I wrote that, and actually, at our current trajectory, the streets will mostly be gravel.
Maybe not 25 years, maybe 20, maybe 30.
And this is one of my hobbyhorses, but I asked PBOT about 6 months ago how much additional money will it take per year to keep our major streets in their current mediocre condition.
And they said they never looked at it that way.
They always look in terms of what it would take to make them good.
But they looked at it and came back and said without an extra $45 to $50 million a year just on pavement, the major streets will continue to deteriorate.
So either we come up with $45, $50 million a year just for pavement, or we start saying which of our major streets are going to be gravel in the next decades.
So that's like a— that's a literal fear.
I mean, that's the most specific thing that I had to say.
Candace Avalos
That's helpful to hear.
I mean, I did not take it as literally as I guess you meant it, but because when I read it, I was just like, Jesus, like, that just felt so dystopian.
Like, yeah, I know our streets suck, but it was like, In 25 years we're going to be a crumbling society.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I mean, we could.
Candace Avalos
I mean, with where it's going, it could happen.
But I just, I have more hope for Portland.
I think the rest of the world is to be determined.
But so helpful to know it was quite literal.
I agree with the maybe literal sense, but I think the way that it was written really worried me about if people were feeling like we have some imminent deterioration and decline philosophically.
And I think again, we're all worried, right?
We're leaders and We have a financial crisis and we have all these other problems, but I would hope that we don't, like, enter the conversation with that level of fear.
I would hope that we have a little bit more optimism for what we've already created and what is the potential in front of us.
Unidentified speaker
Olivia.
Olivia Clark
I just want to riff on this, that I was triggered by other things that I didn't vote for, but I see the commonality between all of them.
The things that I didn't vote for kind of showed up in a different way, spoken in a different way.
So just interesting how we react to the way things are written, because it really is a bottom-line commonality.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, yeah.
Mitch?
Mitch Green
Yeah, I just want to acknowledge that I immediately knew who wrote that question because Steve has a very specific style of rhetorical play.
That I was like, that's jumping off the page.
I did think it was literal, but I, you know, I don't think anyone else at this dais would describe that state as the Appalachia of the West Coast, except for Steve.
Sameer Kanal
Exactly.
Mitch Green
But I think— I didn't vote for it, but I see it connected to some of the things I did vote for, which was like this loss of faith in the government and our ability to build administrative capacity under the The duress of the federal government, all leading to this situation where we can no longer deliver administrative infrastructure services.
And that, that's like that doom loop for me.
So I, I feel that.
I didn't vote for it, but I feel it.
Unidentified speaker
And I think that this is something you're going to see in the next section that we're going to get into, where I've actually compiled the results of our interviews together.
But there is a strong concern for being the council that does not push the buck again, or doesn't push the buck, right?
So if we know infrastructure is something that is so necessary to the future of our community, infrastructure in a lot of city governments is one of those things that, well, we can wait a year, or we'll just do this piece, or we'll just do that piece.
And so really it comes down to what am I willing to invest in now and put off, and what, what are the trade-offs, right?
So what, what can we do To be that effective council that makes those changes, even though we have to realize that in our seats we are going to take 100% of the blame today for none of the credit tomorrow.
You're playing the long game.
So we have to just sort of resolve ourselves to understanding that we're going to have to make some of those choices if we are going to be that council that changes the trajectory or sets the new course.
Or establishes this really successful new form of government.
We may never get credit in 5 years.
We may not be here in 5 years.
But we have to have the resolve to say this is what we have to do for the future of this community.
So big kind of broad strokes that we wanted to get into with this before we start into the perspectives that I got from you all.
So we can move to that section unless there's anything else on these.
So if the PowerPoint were on— I think we have to share the screen.
Angelita Morillo
Where'd—.
Olivia Clark
There you are.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
While we're sharing, I just want to say, for Portlanders who came here from Appalachia, we mean no disrespect to where you're from.
We just have a different vision for Portland.
Unidentified speaker
All right.
Should come up in just a second.
I apologize.
Mitch Green
There's a proud tradition of militant labor union activity from Appalachia, so I see you.
Olivia Clark
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
So we thank you all for committing your time ahead of this retreat.
What we wanted to do was the discovery process there so that we didn't have to We would never have gotten through it probably all the way today.
So this is cumulative.
This is what we heard from you all individually, and then we'll start to narrow in on what sort of bubbled up as the priority.
So I just want you all to have this.
So the common themes that we took from all of the interviews that we did is that each and every one of you cared deeply for those you represent.
There's no question about that.
You care deeply about being part of this Thank you.
So I think that's a great question.
And I think that's a great question for us to ask as we think about this new form of government and making change in this community.
There was a feeling that we needed to have this broader, higher-level discussion about what we want Portland to be.
We're busy dealing with issues.
We're busy, you know, sort of making decisions in the nearer term and not necessarily zooming out enough to have the space for us to have conversations like this.
So I felt like we were coming in here with an open-minded group.
Thank you.
We want to understand the why.
Why is that so high level for you?
Why is that so important for you?
Why does that bother you in a way, or why does that inspire you in a way?
So some of what we've been doing today is just sort of opening the curtains a little bit and letting us understand each other a bit better.
We want to know what our collective values are.
What is it that we're really aspiring to be?
So what is our— what is that Hope that we're trying to achieve, or what are our, our non-negotiables kind of as we move through decision-making.
We want alignment on top priorities to take the time to do what we're going to do today, and that's where we'll spend the bulk of our time this afternoon.
There was also this feeling that we really need to deliver on core services, and so we're going to spend a moment to define what we believe those core services are, give some direction to Your management team so that we can make sure that we're investing in those core services and that they're not being depleted with other things that we find or that we have priority for.
And there are trade-offs.
We talked about that just here.
It's like business may look one way in one district, it may look different in another district.
And so we have to be willing to have those open conversations about what we're willing to give and potentially give up.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you.
In order to start moving the ball forward.
There was a general agreement that we need to enhance our government governance procedures.
What does that look like?
What are our— what are our— you know, what's our rulebook?
Where do we draw the lines?
How do we work better as a team, as a unit, and give more— be more effective in moving policy decisions forward?
Understanding roles and responsibilities.
Responsibilities, because we ultimately, we want to be most effective in our roles.
And so if we all can come to a common playbook, and then perhaps we can be better, more effective in our roles.
We want more respect and trust.
That was not just amongst the body, which is very important, and I think that hopefully today we're getting a little bit of that started, but also, and you saw in the fears That we want— we don't want people to not trust their government, right?
So the respect and trust was also we want to be operating in a way that the public can respect and trust that we're doing the right thing with, with the services that we're providing and that we have their interest at heart.
And we want to communicate more effectively, both internally— there was some engagement conversation in some of these— but ultimately being more So open, bringing the right voices in, and then speaking, you know, whatever it is out to the public that we need to in a more effective way so that people feel more engaged, more included, and more informed.
Anything there that needs more definition?
Okay.
So we asked you, what do we want to be known for?
What do we want this team that you are serving with right here, right now to What do you want Portland to be known for?
Establishing a successful form of government was number one.
I heard that from many of you.
We want to be looked at as the ones who took this opportunity in time to build the system that is going to be most effective for the community moving forward.
We want to be smart in the decisions that we make and using data to the degree possible.
However, we are representing people.
We are representing needs.
So data being part of the conversation, not necessarily the decider.
Good stewards of public dollars.
Respecting each other, employees, citizens, sort of setting the standard here that this is how we expect decorum to look and how we're going to hold ourselves accountable to that.
Working together to solve problems, being open to having these conversations and having the give and take that is necessary.
Necessary to ultimately hopefully get to the, the best solution we can.
Delivering on core services, investing in infrastructure— the, the road's crumbling, I think that was part of that.
But, but again, you know, really trying to take whatever next steps we need to, knowing infrastructure is foundational to the community.
Being innovative but also being implementers.
So not just having big ideas, but, but having big ideas and then actually carrying them across the lines.
A great place to visit and invest.
Setting Portland on a successful path.
So really kind of making it go in whatever direction you all determine is the right direction.
Taking action in difficult times.
That was both with the change in government and the dynamics that exist, but that was also with economic issues and then federal practices that are happening right now.
Setting the course for the next 100 years, thinking long game, really trying to, to, to make decisions or have the clarity and vision for long-term in the future, next generations type thinking.
Protecting from federal overreach.
Democracy, having a very democratic system where all people can be represented and heard.
And then equity.
Equity in the services that we provide, equity in the way that we treat each other, equity in the way we treat the organization, and ultimately the way that we engage our community.
Any of that need more?
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
So then we asked you, are there strategic questions that need to be answered?
Sameer Kanal
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
These are not going to get answered today.
I will tell you that right up front.
But these are the things that we want to have in our minds that we can establish as we start saying, if this is a priority area, we need to determine what this strategic question's answer is.
And that may be one of your success markers, that it says we're going to start moving in this direction.
So these were, these were the question, or the, the questions that you all gave to So how can we institute a better governance system, putting the practices and procedures in place that will allow us to be the most effective and give the greatest service to the community?
Are our committees effective and aligned with whatever our priorities are?
What are our priorities, which is what we'll do here in just a moment?
What are we willing to give and give up?
So that's one of those questions that probably will be asked in every single decision that you make.
It's not just what are we willing to give and give up just in the, you know, general sense, but really we have to start looking at what is it that we will prioritize now and what can wait?
What do we— what are we doing that we shouldn't be doing?
What are we doing that we should be doing more of?
Having the openness and willingness to consider all of that.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Councilor Smith.
Unidentified speaker
As organizational improvement or policy improvement.
At what level should we deliver core services?
So again, we'll define core services, but are we serving at the right level?
Infrastructure came up a lot.
That comes up here in just a moment.
And so if that's considered a core service, are we investing in it appropriately?
Big question, and that will come up in all of those areas.
How should we handle our assets?
So asset management.
Maintenance, replacement, all of those sorts of things.
Managing infrastructure, how should we be doing that?
Should we be doing it differently than we are for different results?
Limited revenue, considering the revenue that is not available but the service level that we expect to give.
So we've got to have conversations about how we close that gap.
Over time.
And then, are housing and homelessness efforts separate?
So that came up quite a bit, and some of you felt that they were completely intertwined, and some of you felt that housing was sort of different and homelessness was sort of different.
And so I think coming to a resolution about whether or not those are— of course, they, they probably intersect at certain points, but are we treating them in a way that's diluting one or the other, or are they helping or Can we define public safety?
Differing opinions on what that means and what success in that category looks like.
What quality of life are we trying to offer?
And then to what degree are we pursuing climate resilience?
No pun intended.
Right, I know, I just read that and I was like, oh, sorry.
And so again, big picture things that are on the tops of your minds, you're thinking about these things, and we don't want these to get pushed aside.
And that is not the intention.
The intention is for these to be parts of these future conversations and not exclusive of the policy decisions you're making.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Yes.
Olivia Clark
Hillary, are you going to make these, um, this available to us?
Unidentified speaker
Absolutely.
You're going to get every bit of this back in a report.
Yes.
And all of the things we worked on today, I want you to have that at your fingertips so that you can utilize it moving forward.
Dan Ryan
Including the ones before those?
Unidentified speaker
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, it comes out in a report.
Yeah, please, Sameer.
Sameer Kanal
On this list, I think there's one thing that maybe got framed differently, but I think is missing, which is, is homelessness a behavioral health issue or an affordability issue?
I think we spent a lot of time talking around that question.
Unidentified speaker
I think that's where— that's where are they combined?
Is it about housing?
Right, or is homelessness—.
Sameer Kanal
That's a little different.
So I wanted to make sure it was said the way that we actually talk about it.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, and there was a little bit different.
So some people had them more closely connected and some of them had them more clearly defined.
Yes, please, Candace.
Candace Avalos
Well, on the last slide it said equity, but I'm not seeing that in these strategic questions.
And I think that that's a big gap because if If how we're structuring our questions, our strategic questions, isn't around how we're ensuring that people who are left behind by government, communities that are being attacked by our federal government, that those are not part of our strategy, then I don't think we're going to serve Portlanders well.
So I just want to note that's a big gap that I hope we include in some way in a strategic question.
Unidentified speaker
I keep getting moved.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I'm sorry, y'all.
Unidentified speaker
I like step out of frame.
No, I think— I actually think that that's a great point because oftentimes those conversations and/or those expectations are outlined in values.
So equity being something that is a non-negotiable for all of us and that every single thing should consider whether or not we are equitably distributing resources, we're equitably engaging our publics, those kinds of things.
And so sometimes those even elevate above, but I think you're absolutely right If we're not looking at what we're delivering through that lens or asking that question, then we may be missing serving, serving that overlooked population or our service area.
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
And I just want to put a finer point on that and talk about like a racialized lens and being able to isolate race.
It tends to be kind of shift it when and how systems school districts are talking about race, and when things are pulled out and just talked about like equity, but we're not really isolating it and focusing on it, it can get lost.
Steve Novick
Yeah.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
And so I think that's a reason for it to be really part of strategy also.
Candace Avalos
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Anybody else?
Dan Ryan
The part where it says, how can we handle limited revenue, and then it says, what are we willing to give What are we willing to give and then give up?
I don't know who did, so I'm trying to figure out if those are connected.
Unidentified speaker
Somewhat, yes.
They were said separately, and some were by a couple of people and some were by a couple other people, but I would think that yes, I would think that the— that that would be a conversation about if we only have this much revenue, what are we willing to invest it in now and what are we willing to wait on Okay.
So I do think, I think the two communicate with each other, and a lot of these would communicate with each other, but these were just sort of those higher-level questions that we wanted to have an awareness of as we started looking at priorities.
None of them mutually exclusive, and I think that's a great point that, you know, some of them are interconnected in a way that we want to make sure we're getting the full representation of that answer.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
So then we asked you short, mid, long-term goals.
So sort of just individually, what are— what's on your wish— wish list— your goal list of what you would want to deliver to your constituents and ultimately the community?
And so improving governance, meaning the system that you all are building currently, public trust and accountability, improving the council dynamics.
Yes.
Trying to work better together.
Better community engagement and engagement with each other.
But community engagement came up quite a few times about how can we be the most effective in getting out in our communities and really understanding and delivering messaging to them in an effective way.
Budget and revenue strategies.
Asset management.
Putting a system in place.
Really understanding core service delivery so that we can deliver on what we say we're going to to do in the most efficient and effective way.
Partnerships for services.
So that was— that came in different ways, so this is generalized, but basically what are those things that we're doing that other places are doing, organizations, governments, whatever, and how can we work more effectively understanding that we have maybe limited resources or they have limited resources, but could we work together in a way that is effective?
Alignment on public safety.
Again, trying to just Yes.
Understand we have different ways of getting there, but what is the ultimate goal with public safety?
Protecting from federal overreach.
The Keller Auditorium plan, having a plan for its future.
The Trail Blazers came up a few times.
Sidewalks.
Housing policy review revision.
Homeless response strategies.
And bike and pedestrian corridors.
So again, all maybe a little different flavor from different individuals, and not everyone said the same things, but all of these were kind of on the list of the, you know, 1 to 3 year head— you know, whatever that word— timeline.
Loretta Smith
There we go.
Unidentified speaker
Kind of in that range so that we could start not just looking at, okay, we want this big grand thing here, but also what are the iterative steps?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
Steps that we should be considering that are going to start moving us toward that, and these were the things that popped up as important.
Anything there that— yeah, go ahead.
Sameer Kanal
This is just about how it was described, because better engagement also means moving away from the idea that engagement is communicating outward.
Yeah, oh, absolutely.
So just the way that the description of that was included how we tell a story outward, and that's not engagement, that's communications.
And that's part of why we have been, I think the city as a whole, as someone who worked in community engagement for multiple years at the city, we are not good at it as a group.
So I think that first definitional aspect of it, which is that communication is communicating outward and engagement is actually having people shape what we do.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Right.
Candace Avalos
So it's the—.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
It's the conversation.
I was talking to a couple of you sort of in the break and explaining how in a governance system, when we don't have sort of clearly defined processes and procedures, it becomes more difficult for the public to understand where they plug in and when they plug in.
And so I even look at it through that framework of what are we doing to make sure that our systems create the opportunity for engagement, and engagement being that, that sort of back and forth or the two-way Because again, when you looked at that spiral or that circle that we looked at, the citizen input to council is what should be driving a lot of what you're trying to do.
I mean, ultimately, that's who you're serving, right?
So I think that's a point well taken, is it has to be the taking in of information as much as it is the putting out.
Go ahead.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Sometimes this can get lumped in with bike and pedestrian corridors, but the goal of Vision Zero and eliminating traffic deaths and traffic safety is— can be connected but is separate.
And I think that's missing from up there.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I think these are all really important goals.
I want to make sure that having this slide that says goals, some of which are really high level and some of which are very specific, doesn't— if this is where we're starting the conversation on priorities at, I want to know that because I think these are all really important I think these are important goals, and I think there's a lot missing if this is what we start with as the breadth for the priority conversation.
Angelita Morillo
It's not.
Unidentified speaker
This is really just your kind of individual— the things that you're trying to move, but not, not holding us accountable to any list.
No votes are being taken.
No one's saying that these are our official goals.
This was just to give some context to the bigger categories of Strategic priorities, which is where we're going to focus our time.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Because this has a lot of the good government stuff we need to do and some specific programs.
But if I think about what we put up as our hopes and dreams for Portland, I don't actually see very many of the things up here that will get us to those hopes and dreams.
And so I think there are some mid-level goals missing in between those really important structural, like, can we actually deliver government and earn public trust And very specific, we need sidewalks and Vision Zero and to make sure that we have our major sports teams and venues in good working order.
Unidentified speaker
Right.
So yeah, this was really just to add sort of flavor to what's important on people's minds as we start to make sure that all of these would plug into somewhere.
Future conversations, future votes, future determinations, but would all of these fit within those broader categories that we're Thanks.
Mitch Green
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
All right.
So now let's do one more of these exercises with our cell phones where we're just going to kind of set the baseline with what we believe are Portland's core services.
And this one you can put as many as you want, and it's a heat map, so it will start to bubble up which ones are the most important.
Said—.
There we go.
And it'll just populate in real time here in just a second.
So feel free to add as many as you want.
Oh yes, go ahead.
Is this Portland or the city government?
Sameer Kanal
Port—.
Unidentified speaker
What the city government of Portland provides to Portland.
Yes, thanks for the clarification.
Vibes cultivation, love it.
Who did that one?
Whoever submitted it, I liked it enough that I put it.
Steve Novick
I like it.
Unidentified speaker
It just popped.
It was like a little beacon of light.
It just caught my attention.
Love it.
Steve Novick
All right, who wrote Passive Aggression?
I assume it was you.
Loretta Smith
Oh boy.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Oh boy.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
That's right, just make them bigger.
That means we're working together.
Okay, about there.
Loretta Smith
Oh, we—.
Unidentified speaker
I still see a couple of fast typing.
All right.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Olivia Clark
Devices down.
Unidentified speaker
I'm just kidding.
Candace Avalos
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
So we've got a pretty good list here, pretty broad list, obviously.
But some of them are the same, they're just said a little bit differently.
But let's start with the one that's in the middle.
Community safety.
Again, we're not necessarily defining what the tactics are to deliver on these.
We're just saying we all feel this is a core service that we have to deliver and we can determine in what capacity.
Olivia Clark
Do—.
Unidentified speaker
Let me just ask this question first.
Do any of you believe that you have the resources necessary to deliver on all of these things to the level that you expect?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
No.
Unidentified speaker
Exactly.
So part of this is really trying to narrow in on those areas that either require additional investment or the things that we think are most important.
Not to be repetitive, but this city does have the resources to meet people's expectations on passive aggressiveness.
We've got that, we've got that in droves.
Okay, so, so let's start with the biggest one.
So community safety, do we all agree that that is a core service?
We disagree probably on the way it's delivered, but is community safety inclusive of public safety to some degree, emergency response to some degree, Fire safety.
Okay, so we, we all think that is one of our essential services that we provide is community safety, and we're not trying to define, you know, sort of in what— yes, go ahead.
Dan Ryan
Actually, I think we need more dialogue on that because we have community safety, then we have public safety.
So if we're going to do this, let's figure out what the distinction is between the two.
My hunch is— hi, Sameer— is that parks is included in community safety and Not in public safety.
Police is more of an old guard public safety definition to your brain.
And so I just think it's important that we have that dialogue.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, A, I agree we should have that dialogue.
B, I agree with your definitions.
Actually, I think that those are the 2 distinctions that I think in the way that this building has historically used these terms, and I put both.
I put both personally.
Unidentified speaker
Community safety and public safety?
Yeah.
Sameer Kanal
So I think that community safety— the 2 distinctions are the degree to which old guard, I think is the way you put it, approaches are in public but not in community, and the holistic nature and breadth of the services in community safety, aka parks, community centers.
So I personally put both, yeah, because I do think that we've used it as 2 separate ideas, and that's why our committee is community and public Public safety.
Like, we've, we've had them both in our committee name.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, Jamie.
Jamie Dunphy
You know, it occurs to me that in my head at least, and I'm interested to hear how people think about this differently, community safety feels far broader.
Public safety feels interventionist to me.
It's that there is a situation that requires a trained professional to do a thing versus— I think an activated park is part of community safety.
I think a business district with people walking around in it Yes.
So that is part of community safety.
But there's no intervention that we could do to make a park more safe if there's an unsafe situation outside of the public safety system.
We're not going to send in— I mean, I think that like the maintenance crew who are mowing contribute towards community safety.
But if there's an unsafe situation happening in a park, we don't send in the lawnmower.
Sameer Kanal
What about park rangers?
Jamie Dunphy
That would be part of— in my argument, I would say that they are sort of part of the public safety.
Sameer Kanal
Interesting.
Jamie Dunphy
Okay, because that's been a—.
Sameer Kanal
And I don't want to get too granular, but that's been a distinction in the past.
Unidentified speaker
But I think it's— I think that's important to have an understanding that we, we at this point in time view those as, as separate, connected in some ways, but also we want to treat them in a way that respects Oh, hold on.
Oh, wait.
Olivia Clark
Who was—.
Unidentified speaker
Were you next or were you next?
Mitch was next.
Mitch Green
I also put both of them.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Okay.
Mitch Green
I think of public safety as a very discrete set of activities that rely upon the sort of like— it's what makes a city a city and not just a collection of people doing volunteer activities.
Like we used to Yeah.
We used to just have fire brigades or volunteer systems.
Now we have fire bureaus.
We have a police bureau.
That's an institutionalization of like a certain type of intervention.
I think that's the right language.
Community safety to me is like a systems-level thing that if you've got— I mean, if I look at all the top-ranking pieces on the list, if you've got all that coherent and integrated in an efficient system, it produces community safety.
There are discrete activities under community safety that have like a very explicit commitment, but like if all these pieces are in harmony, I think you've got very safe communities.
Vision Zero, community safety, that's only achievable if you've got your infrastructure bureau set up to enable it and so on and so forth.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
It was Elana next.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I want to ask my colleagues who are differentiating here 2 questions because I, I don't know if I have 2 questions.
Unidentified speaker
Yes.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I'm not sure if we all answer them the same or not, and I think it's important to actually understand what our words mean as we have conversation.
The first is, for folks who are defining community safety and public safety, do you define public safety and emergency response the same, or do you define those 2 things differently?
And the second question is, is public safety a circle within community safety, and we're talking about Or is this a Venn diagram and there's a significant amount of overlap between public safety and community safety, but part of public safety is also outside of community safety?
I don't know, to be honest, because I have not talked about these things at that 30,000-foot level.
I try to often stay at the 15,000-foot level in between the tactical that you talked about and this high level.
Because I don't always know that the words at the high level mean what— mean to me the same thing that other people hear them as meaning.
So I don't know that I have answers to those because I've talked about services and bureaus more than these big buckets.
And I want to make sure I understand what you all mean when you say the big buckets.
Steve Novick
I just want to add I actually don't draw a distinction.
I mean, I said public safety, but I think my definition of that is as broad as that of anybody who said community safety.
And my assumption, although this might not be true, is that part of this is just sort of a matter of generational word choice.
And people my age are used to using the word public, and younger people are more used to using the word community.
So that's my assumption, that it's not a substantive difference, it's just a linguistic difference.
Unidentified speaker
Tiffany.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I tried to write community and public safety, but there was a limit on how long your, your response could be.
Um, but something that I am, am surprised and interested in is how this conversation of definitions and what do our words mean, and it continues to come up, and I'm just seeing how important that is and find that curious and interesting.
Raymond C. Lee
Yeah.
Sameer Kanal
I hate to disagree with my Community and Public Safety Committee co-chair.
Raymond C. Lee
I, I do—.
Sameer Kanal
I actually think that you're partially right, that there is a linguistic comfort with one or the other.
But to answer Alana's questions, I do not think emergency response is the same thing as public safety because I think there are a lot of first response dispatches that are not for emergencies but that are for things that people want a response to.
So just in a practical sense, I think it's a subset.
And then I would say it's a Venn diagram With a much larger community safety, of which mostly it's a subset, but there's a little piece of it that's outside of it.
And I think that has to do largely with how we view— and the way I interpreted old guard is, is parts of policing and fire specifically.
I personally think fire's in the overlap, but I've heard that expressed differently as well.
Dan Ryan
You don't think police is?
Sameer Kanal
I think some of it is.
Um, I think it kind of depends.
Like, like, for example, There's a lot of different services under the police bureau.
PS3 is victim advocacy.
There's your classic patrol, neighborhood response teams, investigation.
So it's really hard to just lump everything.
These are very broad bureaus, same as parks, PBOT, and fire.
They're all very broad bureaus.
I think it might take some digging into there.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Councilor, is this when you say small and big and a lot of overlap like that?
Okay, thank you.
Unidentified speaker
I will draw that here for everyone.
Probably not to scale.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I think there's a lot more overlap and the little circle is just a tiny bit outside of the big circle is what I think I heard Sameer say.
Dan Ryan
Closer.
Unidentified speaker
Sorry, closer but not— still not great.
I tried.
Loretta Smith
Go ahead.
Mitch Green
Yeah, I appreciate the discussion.
I think the distinctions are important.
That's probably how I would draw the Venn diagram.
I think of it kind of like these systems of like inputs and outputs and like the black box or the function that generates the outputs given the inputs can produce a whole range of different types of conditions that then affect the other part of it.
And that's a little academic, but I actually wanted to kind of speak to Councilor Steve's kind of distinction of the generational thing.
Like, I— the way I think about the distinction is—.
Unidentified speaker
Yes.
Mitch Green
Public safety, by just the default standard, is sort of almost paternalistic.
So it's like our safety is being provided to us by an institution or set of institutions.
Community safety pervades space for like direct involvement.
This sort of we keep us safe slogan that is in my community a lot is a critical input.
And so there's like this sort of direct democracy element to it as well.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you.
Mitch Green
Well that I think is there.
It's fragile.
It can go bad.
But I think that that's the distinction that matters for me.
Unidentified speaker
And it's— I mean, ultimately, when you think about just that topic in specific, really the ultimate goal of both of those systems is a safe community, right?
So there are different strategies that are employed to get us to that sense of safety or feeling of safety that people have.
But ultimately, that is your higher-level goal, I believe, is that you want it to be a safe community and that everyone can see themselves in that and not feel either, you know, attacked by the system or excluded from the system.
And so I think that that maybe is, you know, changing that sort of terminology a little bit from the—.
Councilor Herbold.
When you say community safety or police— or not police, public safety— it feels like it's responsive, you know what I mean?
And so perhaps we take a level up and view it from the lens or the framework of the highest level what we're trying to achieve without trying to define that it has to be interventionist or it has to be, you know, preventative or this, that, or the other.
So I think it's a good conversation to have at some point.
Yes, go ahead.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I like part of what you just said.
Let's move up to the place where we can all be comfortable, but I also don't want us to lose something because I think there is a piece of community and public safety that is interventionalist.
Unidentified speaker
Oh, of course.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
And many of our community members do want to make sure we have.
And if we move to the language of community safety because it's broader and maybe more comfortable for some people, but we lose in doing that some of the more traditional interventions.
Angelita Morillo
That's a—.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
That is a very meaningful change.
Unidentified speaker
Oh yeah.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
And I don't actually think that we are prepared to make that change.
Unidentified speaker
Well, and that's that you all are in the position to define whatever it is.
And so You know your public better than I ever will, and you know what the tolerance or the expectation is better than I ever will.
But I think it's important for us to sort of figure out where they overlap, like your diagram, and what it is that doesn't dilute either one of them in some significant way that doesn't provide the level that's expected, but also communicates effectively what we're trying to Especially with safety, public and community safety, I see it also as—.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I do love Venn diagrams in general, but see it as something that's constantly kind of shifting, and community gets like— the people get to kind of decide sometimes, you know, what that safety piece feels and looks like.
And so I think of it as a Venn diagram that's not static but is changing, and it almost Kind of like this Menti meter that we were using, that it can shift to.
So that's my piece.
Angelita Morillo
Yeah.
I appreciate this discussion.
I think that what I put community safety down because to me that does mean something different than public safety.
I think what Councilor Green, how he outlined it as far as like a more democratic version versus a more paternalistic Yes.
So I think that's a fantastic version of something being done to you, but I think that what we're kind of not talking about is who is served by these systems or who feels safe according to these systems.
So when I think about community safety, it's because I think over the past few years there has been a consciousness and an awakening around how certain public safety systems, like how police impact Black and brown communities and what it means To change those systems so that they serve everybody equally.
And so, to me, community safety means that we're taking into account the people who were historically not served by those systems and are not being served right now.
So, that means, like, for— okay, for the people who have mental health crises, they were not necessarily served by police, so then we created Portland Street Response to have that sort of public safety response that needed to shift and change.
That's part of community safety.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Angelita Morillo
I think that when we activate public spaces so that there aren't— your car window isn't getting smashed because there's a bunch of people walking in a downtown area because it's a lovely street and everyone's going shopping and having dinner with their families, that's public safety too.
But to me, I see that there's like an evolution in what public safety means that is more inclusive of everybody's experiences.
Unidentified speaker
Oh, I'm sorry.
I think—.
Olivia Clark
I just wanted to add to what Angelita was saying, that it's not just what public safety does to you, but it's what it does for you.
I think there's also the for-you element.
Candace Avalos
I actually don't see it as circles or Venn diagrams at all.
I see it as a spectrum, and I see public safety being on one end of it and community safety being on the other.
And I think the I think that's a great question.
And I think that's why I'm asking about the spectrum for me is because I believe that public safety is more about response.
It's more about answering to the ills of our lack of doing the other end of the spectrum, which is creating safe parks, having opportunity, having jobs, having people live in, you know, have the income to be able to support their families.
And so, and then, you know, in the in-between of that is where I see things Like the CHATS and the PSRs, which are like somewhat responsive but also trying to tackle more of the root problem.
Whereas, you know, again, public safety is like there is a crime and we have to address a crime, right?
We cannot let people, you know, come in and shoot up people, right?
We have to respond with a blunt tool in that scenario.
Whereas on the very, very other end is do young people in particular, if we don't build our systems around safety, around what young people need, then they're not going to be efficient.
And so what do young people need is what I really see at the other end of it, of like, how are we ensuring young people are able to, you know, be supported, have resources, have places to be safe, which are parks and community centers.
So yeah, I don't see them as circles.
I see them— and not to— and, you know, I know that by saying a spectrum, that feels like, oh, it's linear, and I'm not trying to make it sound linear, but I do see— I think spectrums don't have to be just, you know, one-sided, but I do see them as a range, and I, I tend to see policies through that lens anyway.
So that's just how my brain works.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, him, and then I'll get you.
Dan Ryan
First of all, glad we're doing this.
When I envisioned wanting to have this day where we hung out and listened to each other, this is exactly what I was hoping we'd accomplish, because we'd use words, and you could— I could sense during last year's budget especially, that we had different definitions for different words, and it allowed this to happen quite a bit.
Um, I put down infrastructure, public safety, and parks.
And the reason I didn't put community safety, because I added parks, parks and arts, it's because I listed parks.
I didn't feel like I needed to do community safety because that was part of that.
Listening further, I get what you're saying, but I sometimes think that gets into the role clarity between the county and the city when we start to get into behavioral health and mental health.
So by listening to taxpayers and others, their biggest beef right now with us is that they see the amount of money that they're spending to live here has gone up so high in the last 10 years, and their service delivery on pipes, paths, parks, permits, climate, all of the stuff, public safety, has gone down.
And so that's, I think, what we're struggling with as a city.
And perhaps I'll just say this.
We all say we have different constituents, different friend groups.
Maybe I have the most amount of friends who have left the last 10 years, and that, that revenue left our city.
And that's really hard for us to lose all that revenue.
And that's one reason I advocate the way that I do.
Unidentified speaker
I think, I think this is such a good discussion to understand that there are the shades.
Like there are the things, there are pieces and parts of all of these discussions that we want to make sure are communicating with each other so that we're not doing this thing over here that could have a strong impact on this particular priority or this particular area, but we didn't consider it through the lens of what is this adding to that picture or what is this taking from that picture.
So back to this idea of what are— what's the give and take amongst all of this, and so building this sort of structure is intended to help things reference each other, communicate with each other, and not isolate each other.
And so this discussion about where community service— community safety intersects with public safety and then with economy and all of those other things, I think it's important to have that spectrum, to use your word, of nuance, of consideration.
That oftentimes we just draw the hard line and don't necessarily communicate between the two.
I think Mitch was next.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I see you.
Mitch Green
Yeah, just briefly, Dana, thank you for kind of talking about the— there's a theme that underlies a lot of this, which is what are we getting for our public dollars?
And, you know, it's not just folks maybe at the higher income distribution who have left.
No, I know, but I think what I'm about to say is going to validate I just want to echo what you were saying, which is that I also have friends who are socialists, who are working-class folks who left because they didn't feel safe, because they weren't seeing that response.
And so there's a range of reasons why people don't feel safe.
I think, you know, our traditional public safety bureaus are essential in that space, so it's not— you can't necessarily fit it into any particular buckets, even on ideological spaces.
And I'm not suggesting that's what you're trying to do, but it is a thing that people who observe our councils might suggest is a thing.
Dan Ryan
I think what I need to name, though, is it's not higher-income people I'm talking about.
It's working-class families.
Unidentified speaker
Sameer, I got you.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I think there's a few things here, and I want everyone to hear both parts of this first thing, because It's kind of like when you say someone loses a loved one in an act of violence, and you could say that we have fewer acts of gun violence, we have fewer homicides in the city.
That's true, but it doesn't help the person who just lost their loved one.
So it's important that we look at the empirical data, which shows that we don't actually have this outflow of millions and millions of people leaving the city because of taxes or whatever, and also the real experience of the person who leaves the city because of either Sure.
—Through taxation and the feeling of not being served, or safety, or any other reason, is still important.
It's still vital, even though we can look— the empirical data doesn't change the anecdotal part of it.
I did want to mention, because the response, prevention, recovery piece was really important, the Public Safety Service Area at the city did a strategic planning process actually in this room, and their mission of the service area is to advance safety through collaborative prevention, response, and recovery.
In terms of the operational side, we've definitely recognized that there's components of all 3 parts of this.
I will say the operational side uses these terms differently than the legislative side and the policymaking side, because Community Safety Division became the Public Safety Service Area and now has a subset of it called the Division of Community Safety, which does Portland Street Response and violence prevention, ceasefire, all that work.
So there's going to be differences in how we use these terms, and I appreciate that we're defining these for ourselves.
But I did want to mention that on the operational side, the city has a role in all 3.
And there's the one challenge with the city-county— well, there's many challenges with the city-county structure— is that if we say that the county does something, and this is true for shelters, this is true for our different types of emergency response too, and first response, response that in the event that we say something is their job and not ours, that often means we still respond to it with what we have.
And sometimes what we have is not ideal, but because we are held democratically accountable for what we do, we still send something.
And that can have an opportunity cost or a direct cost in terms of a negative outcome, because if we're, if we're sending So if we're sending a resource towards something that's the county's responsibility because we didn't develop something specifically for it, whatever that thing that we are sending should be doing is now not being served as much, or it could actually be harming the situation, making it more complicated.
So there's a complication here, and I know a lot of us have conversations and thoughts about the city-county merger concepts, different proposals and all that, but—.
Unidentified speaker
For another day.
Jamie Dunphy
No, no, no, you're not.
Sameer Kanal
Absolutely not alone.
But I think that's something I just wanted to make sure is part of the conversation too.
Unidentified speaker
Candace.
Candace Avalos
Tiffany had whispered something to me, and so I want to reframe it.
Unidentified speaker
It's all your fault.
I'm just kidding.
Candace Avalos
Well, you were like, oh, I see it in colors, and when I was talking about the spectrum, and I was like, yeah, you're right.
Not only do I see it in colors, and because I was trying to explain, I was like, I I know spectrum sounds linear and I'm not trying to make it sound like that.
So then I was like, a color wheel.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, that's how I pictured it.
Candace Avalos
So yeah, so that, that is actually how I see it.
I see it as a color wheel where it all comes back, right?
It all is in it, right?
But it's a— it's still a spectrum, but it all feeds into each other.
That's how I see it.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, I had Angelita.
Angelita Morillo
Um, I think, I think the reason I initially took your comments to mean high-income earners was because you talked about taxes leaving the city, and that's usually how it's discussed.
It's like wealthy people are fleeing the city, so we're not getting enough taxes.
So I appreciate your clarification on that.
Um, I think that, uh, what I see is a lot of, uh, working-class, lower-income people leaving the city because they cannot afford to live here anymore.
When my mom and my sister and me first moved to Portland when I was in 7th grade, my mom could rent A 2-bedroom apartment for $1,200 a month.
That would be impossible today.
My 1-bedroom is $1,600 a month, and I don't have children to take care of or anything like that.
But I also think that community safety to me means that you feel like your life is not going to be upended because of an economic issue randomly, that you can have a medical emergency And you're not going to suddenly be unable to pay your rent and get evicted.
Because I can tell you, when I was homeless, it was the least safe I've ever felt in my life.
And I was very lucky that a lot of circumstances, you know, I was protected and I didn't encounter what many people on the streets face.
But the immense loss of safety and inability to conceive of a future where you could do something different and you can actually dream is something that poor people, unhoused people in our city feel very profoundly, and they are often treated as the safety problem instead of as people that are unsafe.
So to me, that is like a large portion of the discussion around community safety too.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, so we've got 25 minutes and we've still got a few of these to get through before we have to break for lunch.
So we're gonna— I'm gonna let the last couple that had their hands up and then we'll move on to the next.
Steve, I think you were next.
Steve Novick
Yeah, I just— in response to what Alana said a bit ago, I actually don't worry about this council abandoning the interventionist part of public safety, and I'll explain why.
When I've had conversations with people out in the world that talk about, you know, that band of radicals in the city council, one of the things they'll say is, oh, come on, it's not like they're defunding the police.
They proposed Eliminating a $2 million increase to a $300 million budget, and I voted with them.
So they're not dismantling the existing public safety structures.
Now, somebody could correct me and say, no, the only reason somebody didn't propose a 20% cut in the police budget was you wouldn't get Novick's vote.
But my assumption has been that there is not like a groundswell for eliminating the traditional interventionist parts of the public safety system.
Unidentified speaker
And Elana, last word.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I think it's really important for us to have this conversation because it's where a lot of division on council sits.
But before we leave this slide and this agenda item, I just think it's really important to note that that is just one thing up on this list.
Unidentified speaker
We're moving to the next one.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
That's where we're headed.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Because I don't want to lose some of the other really important core services that we need to make sure we're funding.
It can't just be public safety.
Unidentified speaker
That's exactly where we're headed.
So the next biggest bubble is parks.
Do we all agree that parks and providing green spaces, activity spaces, that is one of our core services?
Yes.
Again, not defining levels.
Okay, parks got a thumbs up.
Okay, so then we have housing, I think, would be next.
And so that was one where the question was, was sort of Are housing and homelessness completely intertwined?
Are they similar to these 2 where there's commonality but there's some differentiation?
Give me a sense of where you stand with housing being one of our fundamental services.
Go ahead, Mitch.
Mitch Green
Thank you.
I see the capacity of our housing stock.
I see our ability to produce it and preserve it and in some sense influence its cost.
As a fundamental core service.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Mitch Green
I also wrote up there things like land use and permitting that, you know, it's not as interesting, so it's tiny font.
But I think the way that we influence that is largely through that book of business.
We have gotten ourselves, though, into a space in the city where we spend a lot of money subsidizing And facilitating the production of different forms of housing, whether directly or indirectly.
And so I think one of the challenges that we're going to have to face in the city as we— an opportunity, frankly, is to rethink some of that.
And we don't need to get into my own pet ideas at this point, but I think if we don't solve that capacity piece, then we are going to generate homelessness.
Unidentified speaker
So housing you're thinking of in the sense Yes.
Of policy decisions, affordability, availability, sort of that framework.
Mitch Green
Yes.
I think our job is to make sure there is abundant housing at all times, irrespective of the demand.
Unidentified speaker
Do we feel that that is a standalone kind of effort in this, or give me some other flavor on whether or not you believe that homelessness is Kind of define that a little bit better because this will, this will come into play here when we set our priorities.
Go.
Oh yeah, Sameer, I think it was— oh, was it?
Okay, I'm trying to look out of both eyes.
Sameer Kanal
I agree with everything that Mitch said, but I'll— I guess the way I would phrase it is, is homelessness is the symptom of the failure to do housing right.
Okay.
And when we build enough abundant housing of all across the spectrum and we make it so that people can afford it, to live in sheltered, you know, in homes, we won't have this problem to the same degree.
Unidentified speaker
Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guiney.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I think what my colleague said is right, and I do think we need to treat housing as a different item on our agenda Thank you.
Olivia Clark
Councilor Smith.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you, Mayor.
I think that housing is first and foremost absolutely— or homelessness rather is first and foremost absolutely an economic issue.
And the housing solutions that Mitch and Sameer are talking about means that we have far less people falling into homelessness.
If we as a city take on homelessness, homelessness, which we may not decide is a priority for us, and I think that's okay.
But if we do, then we have to start to talk about what services go along with that housing and whether we have housing of different types with different services attached, not just of different levels of affordability.
And so I think that there are 2 pieces to housing.
Affordability and also are services attached or not and what are the restrictions and requirements around housing that we need to address at some point.
I want to note that we are talking about housing as a core service, but the city does not actually house very many people.
We subsidize the creation of housing.
We create a planning and permitting and zoning Right.
Zoning system that makes it easier or harder to build different types of housing in different areas.
But as of right now, creating housing, making— ensuring we supply housing is not actually a core book of business for us.
Maybe it should be.
I know some of my colleagues would argue that it should be.
I'd probably agree that it should be.
But are we talking about the right now, or are we talking about what we want it to be?
And when we say housing, what do we actually mean?
Unidentified speaker
And I think you just hammered in on one of those discussions.
So if we say a priority for us is housing and it includes many of these things, one of the strategies, expectations, success markers that we may establish as part of that could be creating Or building or investing in affordable housing or whatever the right answer is.
But it could be that that's one of the strategies that's related to that issue that would be determined at some, you know, in some future discussion, some future date, some future capacity.
Angelita Morillo
Yes.
As far as answering the question, I think that housing and homelessness are inextricably intertwined, and I think the cost of housing is a I mean, statistically, it is a very large factor in why people become homeless in the first place.
And we also see that if you are homeless for a sustained period of time, you are going to have mental health, physical, and addiction problems because what it takes to cope to live on the streets long-term is very difficult and painful, and human beings seek comfort in the ways that they can under very difficult and painful circumstances.
So I think that the city does need to take on the creation of housing.
I'm obviously in favor of social housing because what we learned in the housing committee from the folks who presented on social housing is that if people do not make a dedicated, sustained, like a true choice to continue to build housing that is outside of the profit market, We will not address homelessness.
And that is going to take political will and commitment to do that.
And I think it's going to take the partnership of a lot of people who want to see homelessness end so that their businesses can thrive, which means that we also need them to be team players in this discussion as well.
Because I think wealthy people used to build libraries and museums and things for the public good, and I don't see that happening as much anymore.
There's a demand to be given everything without giving anything back to the community, and I have concerns about that.
But people, you know, if you're— if you have an emergency, you can't pay your rent, you're on the street, no one has $1,600 in their bank account to just pay for a new deposit to get a new They don't have that.
Most people are living paycheck to paycheck to the cent.
So I think it is inherently economic, and I think that the city has to do— has to make the strident choice and the courageous choice to remove profit from the equation for some of the housing that we create, or we're not going to get out of this.
Unidentified speaker
Again, I'm going to do this to you.
No, no offense, but, but we're getting into sort of like the strategies we want to employ, and right now we're just trying to define core services, but that will come back as one of those indicators here in just a moment.
Oh, Loretta, yes.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Housing is one of our core services because we fund affordable housing projects and we also fund homeownership activities with down payment assistance, and we also help seniors who are in their homes to do rehabilitation of their homes.
That is our core services.
That is the infrastructure piece of what we do for housing.
That's a part of our housing, Portland Housing Bureau.
Unidentified speaker
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
So the support or the systems that support being in housing.
Loretta Smith
Right.
Unidentified speaker
Yes.
And so you have pieces and parts that are different.
You have different pieces and parts.
Loretta Smith
Right.
And it's very probably confusing to folks because we don't have our homeless services in the Portland Housing Bureau.
And so for me, that seems so— it seems not like it shouldn't be.
We created a whole We have a new system for folks to use our services through the Portland Solutions, and it seems like if we're going to do homeless services, that they should be done out of the Portland Housing Bureau.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
So you view them as interconnected?
Loretta Smith
Yeah.
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Yes, Steve?
Steve Novick
I think that I tend to agree with what Mitch said originally, was the city's primary role in terms of housing, at least at this point, Is through zoning and planning and making it impossible to build housing.
At this point, although I think a lot of us think of housing as it should be a core service, we just don't have enough money to move the needle a hell of a lot in terms of how much affordable housing is available.
So I think that if we really want to think of that as being a core service, we need to figure out a major funding source to deal with it.
I also just want to say I agree with most of my colleagues that homelessness is largely a symptom of Unaffordability, and there's plenty of behavioral health problems in West Virginia, and there's not very much homelessness because even people with problems can find a place to live.
It's still true, as Elana was saying, there are some people who are homeless who reached a point in their lives where if you gave them a house, they would need support to stay there.
But the fundamental driver is unaffordability.
And finally, I did just want to say that 20 years ago, Housing was— look, as now, largely produced by the private market, and we didn't have as much homelessness.
And so I think that we should keep that in mind and realize that the sort of national forces that have driven down housing production everywhere since the Great Recession that have prevented the private market from keeping up with the demand for housing.
I mean, I'm not saying that we should all— that the private market was great 20 years ago, but I think that we should keep in mind that there was a time we didn't have this much homelessness even though we had a commodified housing system.
Unidentified speaker
Did I see you earlier?
I'm sure.
Okay.
Yeah, last one on this topic unless— and I'm giving you the right to go if you need to before we have to move on to the next one.
So go right ahead.
Dan Ryan
I just want to say that I agreed with everything you said, Angelita, about housing being— the affordability of housing being the main driver.
And then once you're homeless, addictions tend to— I mean, who wouldn't after a week or two out on the streets?
And in my life, it's an and, and I think we don't lean into the word and enough on this body.
Loretta Smith
Yeah.
Dan Ryan
And what I've experienced in my life from family and from friends, and it's on two hands At least I can think of those people.
They had escalating behavioral health issues, and that caused them to lose their jobs, to lose their, their, their spouse, and then they found theirself homeless.
And it was absolutely their addiction and not getting into recovery that escalated that exit into the streets.
And I don't think it's helpful for us to be in denial about that.
And our city has an addiction crisis.
It's That tends to stick out nationally, and most people know that with raw data.
Unidentified speaker
Given you—.
Candace Avalos
I figured.
Yeah, I'll just end my thought.
You know, I agree with a lot of what I've heard.
I'll just end my thought with, um, I have been listening to, um, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, a book.
I've been listening to it on my way into work over the last month, and I think what stuck out to Thank you.
Angelita Morillo
Councilor Smith.
Candace Avalos
The thing that stood out to me the most in what I heard is that the places that have the highest issues with homelessness have the most wealth, and it's because they don't cater to the people that need it.
The places that have the most wealth, they cater to wealthy people, and so they build things for wealthy people, they create resources for wealthy people, and that is our problem, is that we do— and that is very clearly shown in the fact that we have very little production in 0 to 30 AMI.
We keep building Housing for people that I'm like, who are these people?
Who are you building this for?
People can't afford that.
And that is the common thread across the country.
And what's interesting about the book is it's talking about, you know, the threads that people think are the threads aren't actually.
The main thread is that so many of these cities keep catering to the people that don't need it, which is why when one of those questions I wrote that we make policies for people that actually need it.
That's my goal.
Unidentified speaker
Creating the Creating the balance, creating more opportunity, and creating the policies that afford that or incent that in some way.
Okay, the last one that we're probably gonna have time for before we have to break is infrastructure.
So there's a bunch of different things.
It'll say streets, it might say water.
Is infrastructure one of our core services?
Yes.
Okay, and is it one Yes.
That we can define as all of those things, all of the pieces and parts, the foundational stuff.
Do we define buildings as part of our infrastructure, city buildings and assets and that kind of stuff as part of the infrastructure that allows the city to work, right?
Okay.
And do we feel that infrastructure right now is Is this a policy-level discussion or is it a resources-level discussion?
Do we feel we're okay on policy?
Do we feel like we need to revise policy?
And do we feel like we need to focus some of our resources toward some particular part of infrastructure?
Okay.
Elana, I think I saw you first.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
So I think the number one issue with infrastructure right now is certainly a resource and I think of everything up here, infrastructure is actually the most core, core service because it is the thing that we don't have a city if we don't provide that.
And we can't provide it the way we need to because of budget.
I think there is more agreement probably when we start getting into this than we might think there is around what the priorities are for infrastructure.
But it feels to me like a place where there is a lot of effort to bring up really important want-to-haves, sometimes at the distraction of what is the core service in infrastructure, what is the must-do.
And I don't know that we have talked about yet what the must-do is as opposed to the really nice-to-have within infrastructure.
Unidentified speaker
Candace, I saw you next.
Candace Avalos
Infrastructure is absolutely policy, and you can ask any East Portlander that because we have— and this is where equity comes back— because we have constantly been waiting for basic infrastructure.
And that was also what I noticed in our first budget cycle was, you know, I kept hearing, oh, we're cutting everything across the board, across the board, across the board.
That's not the case.
Not when you look in the line items.
It is disproportionately cutting things in our district.
I was pretty peeved off by the fact that we were cutting maintenance for parks that we hadn't even opened in East Portland.
That was infuriating because I kept being told it's just across the board.
And so that's why the details really matter.
That's why we keep fighting.
That's why Councilor Smith or Loretta keeps fighting for the spreadsheets, because that's where those things show up and that's where the policy happens.
You know, when we talk about anti-displacement policy, when we talk about being able to use our, our resources or distribute our resources equitably, that's all policy.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Olivia?
Olivia Clark
Yeah, I just wanted to echo what Elana said, that for a long time we've been chasing shiny objects and not taking care of what we have.
And at least 3 auditors have said to the city that that's exactly what's What's going on here.
So it's one of the first things that this council took on was asset management and trying to understand what's at risk across the board in all of our infrastructure.
So, and now we're also, once that's done, we're going to start talking about how do we fix it.
But in the immediate, we're already taking on the street issue.
So we're on it both policy-wise and budget.
Unidentified speaker
This isn't unlike every single other city.
Because that road, we can keep paving those potholes for another year or 2 years, but roads, if you've ever looked at the life cycle, they go like this and then they go like this.
And so really kind of taking that one by the horns and trying to push it forward in some meaningful way has dividends that are very long-term.
Is that a— is yours just a follow-up on your own?
Oh, to hers.
Okay, go ahead.
Candace Avalos
I think you're right on that, but again, I have to bring it back to it's It's really hard for East Portlanders to hear that we have— it's now time to just do maintenance.
We have to maintain what we have.
We don't have those things.
So that's why, like, you have to talk about equity, right?
So I want to raise that because I keep hearing this, right, of like, oh, we keep looking for shiny new things.
And it's like, sounds great to people that have had shiny new things.
But for people that don't have those, we don't have things to maintain.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Right.
Candace Avalos
So if that is our core frame that we— like, because I just keep us here.
I hear us keeping to return to that, and as an East Portlander, I have a problem with it because we— I am not prepared for us to say that we are in maintenance mode when you have to continue to build where you owe us infrastructure.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
I had Mitch next, and then I see you.
Mitch Green
Yeah, I think it's definitely a policy and sort of resources question.
They are inextricably connected.
I think I want to go back to something that Tiffany raised early on in the discussion, which was our ability to be successful in this strategic priority setting process is the willingness to take the risk and maybe risk our own seats, because we are in an election cycle, to say, like, what are we doing today that is maybe politically unpopular but sets our city up so our grandkids have a shot?
Candace Avalos
All right.
Unidentified speaker
All the blame today and none of the benefits.
Mitch Green
None of the benefits, right?
So I think we've gotten the ball rolling.
We have asset management focus now.
We have— but we also have opportunities to take that other kind of land use zoning permit, like some of these sort of regulatory approaches that don't necessarily have a direct cost, and use those to enable our ability to expand into areas that That solve those deficits of attention.
I say this as an ADHD person, so I can say that.
But while also just spreading our resources farther, I think.
I think that we can approach this with a qualitative shift and also say we need to go and raise our resources and be more sensible about this.
So yeah, anyway.
Unidentified speaker
Elana.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I hope that our discussion around infrastructure doesn't become only maintenance or only shiny things, because I, I hope that the answer is we absolutely must build to a foundational level anywhere that doesn't have that.
And as we build to that foundational level, let's do it in the best possible way, which means we do incorporate some of the shiny things from the start.
But let's not add shiny things where we are already at that level until we've gotten our basic maintenance up to snuff.
So I hope it doesn't become a one or the other conversation.
We need to get everybody to that level.
We need to stop doing things above that level in places that already have it while we have crumbling roads.
Unidentified speaker
Creating and enforcing the baseline equitably in all areas as sort of a foundational shift of what we're willing to to do and when and how.
Sameer.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I think it's worth pointing out, like, all the community centers in Districts 2, 3, and 4 have names, and East Portland has East Portland Community Center because they got one in East Portland.
And so, like, there is a gap there that needs to get remedied.
That doesn't mean that the other 3 districts don't have needs that are unique to each specific district, and North Portland is historically underserved too, and I'm not neglecting that.
I think maybe one of the things is shiny doesn't mean new always.
Shiny, really what we're talking about is in excess of the basic.
And so we have parts of the city that don't have the basic.
They will be new and shiny when they're built there at the moment that they open, but they are getting to that core level.
And then beyond that might be what we're— so it's kind of a word choice usage here.
Candace Avalos
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
And both to your original But, and then, so, so when you look at this, what we're talking about here is balance.
It's figuring out what we have to absolutely do right now and commit our resources to right now to set ourselves up to keep moving everything else in the right direction.
And infrastructure, if we're talking facilities, may look like they need a this just as much as they need roads, and they, they're not mutually exclusive.
I think that's a great point.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
And so I want to— we can have multiple priorities.
2 Things can be true at the same time, right?
And so we don't want to look at this through the lens of one moving forward and one excludes the other.
It just may be the pace at which we're able to move with one or the other.
But they should all be talking to each other.
Because if you build the shiniest thing ever in wherever and nobody can get to it because the roads are terrible, Yes.
So we have to have the collective conversations where, as we establish priorities, they are working together in concert, and we're willing to have those difficult conversations about what we're willing to wait a year— a budget cycle on so that we can invest in whatever this is.
And that's policy decision for you all.
So you all get to have those conversations and make those decisions.
Again, not necessarily establishing any of that today, but I think it's important that we have that conversation.
What we're trying to do is say— and this isn't your priority list, we're going to come back to it and I'll show you what you told me.
We've just run up on lunch, so we'll take that break.
Sameer Kanal
Just— I know that your job includes summarizing, uh, so I'm not faulting you for doing that.
I think the word that you used is not reflective of what was said.
I think equity is actually what we're talking about, not balance here.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, well, I'm sorry, interchangeable in my head, but I understand that there's a difference for you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Final thoughts?
Steve Novick
So first of all, I want to say that I think the extent to which the city has frittered away its money on shiny objects is exaggerated.
I mean, possibly the biggest shiny object I can think of is the streetcar.
And maybe the streetcar, we spent more money than we should, but also there are a variety of reasons why Earl and Charlie championed it.
And it turns out that it serves more low-income people than you would think.
And it's also been a A tinge of our development strategy.
So I don't think that— and also I want to say that I was— I got the 10-cent-a-gallon gas tax passed, and what we tried to do with that was not enough of 2 different things.
We spent a slight majority of it on pavement and a slight minority of it on safety investments and sidewalks, you know, including a chunk in East Portland.
But what I think that we need—.
Candace Avalos
We—.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you.
Steve Novick
When we think about infrastructure and particularly about transportation, I think that we need to build up, you know, have realistic lists and realistic discussions about tradeoffs.
And either we raise enough money to keep the major streets throughout the city from deteriorating, or we say we're going to let some of them deteriorate.
And if we have X amount of money and we have to allocate it, then we say, okay, here are some But fundamental infrastructure problems in East Portland that we want to fix, even if that means that division between 39th and the river becomes gravel.
I mean, we literally need to talk about those trade-offs.
And in transportation, there's more urgency.
I mean, going back to what Lana was saying about infrastructure is sort of the most fundamental.
I mean, a city can have rampant crime for a while and recover.
A city can have rampant homelessness for a while and recover.
A city cannot have no water, no clean water and recover.
A city cannot have no sewer system and recover.
And a city cannot have a totally nonexistent transportation system and recover.
And every year— transportation is different in that streets are like teeth, and if you're not doing regular brushing and cleaning, then you're into root canals and extractions.
So it's— I heard the mayor, I was talking to him about this a couple days ago, he said Well, we need to start the work on transportation, raise enough money to start the work.
It's like, no, it doesn't work that way.
You can raise enough to slow the bleeding, but unless you raise a certain amount, the bleeding will continue and get worse.
So, I mean, those are the conversations I think— I mean, I think we literally need to sit down and say, okay, here is what it would cost to build the amount of sidewalks we want in East End.
And West Portland, and here's the amount it would cost to maintain our major streets.
How much are we willing to raise, and how do we divide it between the two of them?
And I'm not presupposing the outcome.
I'm just saying those are the discussions we need to have.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, we have run up on lunch, so we need to be back.
Is 55 minutes enough time?
Can we come back right at 1?
Is that agreeable?
Okay, so we will pick— oh, sorry, Mike.
Oh, yes.
You can't have a large quorum.
And I'm not sure what that's going to mean.
That'd be a lot.
No, but I— yeah, I mean, like, yeah, you can't have 6, I think.
Angelita Morillo
You guys know what committees you're on.
Unidentified speaker
Just take a look at who's around.
Dan Ryan
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
And we'll be back at 1 o'clock.
1 O'clock.
Great discussion, guys.
Our victories.
So we did a significant amount of the, the kind of higher-level discovery-type work earlier, kind of the open conversations, and now we're going to hone in on what those highest levels of priority are.
I do not believe any of I don't think any of them are going to be a surprise to you.
And then I'm going to turn it over to Mike, and Mike is going to work through what some of those success strategies are that you all agree walking away from here would mean that we are moving in the right direction under whatever these priorities are that we establish.
So if I can get the slideshow up.
Let's see, Adam.
It's up on this— there we go.
Okay, we did that.
Yes, success.
Raymond C. Lee
But that is not—.
Unidentified speaker
You controlling it?
It's not clicking now.
Sorry, y'all, technology is difficult.
There we go.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, so when I spoke to you individually Yes.
And we asked you what your priority areas are, your strategic priorities were, these were the things that came up on your list.
This should not be a surprise because it looks very much like what we talked about over here.
Obviously we would finesse wording and those sorts of things, but just for a starting point of this conversation, these are ranked in the number of responses that were the same or were in concert with the idea.
Steve Novick
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
So public safety, obviously we had the big discussion about community safety and how we want to term that, but that came up as the most responses gotten.
So it was 9 of you said that was one of your highest level priorities, whether it was community safety, public safety, but something related to safety.
The next one that was even to that, again, 9 responses, was housing and/or homelessness.
We discussed that a little bit earlier about how there intertwined or how they might be treated or defined differently.
The next one, which came in at 7 people, said that the economy— different ways that we said economy: economy through jobs, economy through business development, economy through revenue streams.
Economy was next.
And then the next one, which was the same, 7, was core services and/or service delivery and/or systems.
So kind of all working together, how do we become the most effective and efficient government at providing services and at the level that we expect them to be?
And then followed by that with 6 votes was infrastructure.
There were a couple of things like sustainability and environment that came into play in those conversations but weren't necessarily You know, their own topic.
So I put it there.
It may not belong there.
I just wanted to have the note for the discussion.
And then finally, the last bullet, which could be because transportation maybe was viewed as part of infrastructure for many of you, um, but it came up sort of on its own with just one person, and another person said quality of life.
So if we go back to this list and talk about What we named as core services, the things that we thought were those most important things like quality of life amenities, so parks and, and that type of stuff might fit within core services, or some of the, um, uh, human services that we provide might fit in that category.
But this was just sort of the starting point for you to see these were kind of the top 5-ish Can you elaborate on the core services delivery systems?
You— okay, yes, I'll tell you how we got there, but you all will get to define these things.
If you wish to sort of move them forward to the next section of definition and then sort of high-level strategies.
So that one was we should be delivering on what we— defining our core services and what it is that we absolutely must provide to the public.
So that was water, roads, it was a number of things.
So what is our service, what should our service levels be?
There was also the discussion of systems.
Through, you know, either policymaking, deliberation as a body, some governance kinds of things happened there.
So really it was about the, the function of government and are we doing it in an efficient and effective way for whatever our standards are, if that makes sense.
So they, they kind of got lumped because they didn't necessarily exclude one another, but that's to you to define.
Mitch Green
I think I saw Mitch Yeah, I think I'm not surprised to see that, that list of 6 things rise to the top, roughly in the same ranking, more or less, depending upon how you define certain things.
That's what I see when I see the kind of community insight survey stuff, any kind of polling.
Those are the categories I see.
Unidentified speaker
And so we're a proportionally represented body of the public, so it makes sense that And then I guess just sort of a big picture question too to you all is I'm glad to hear that that's what's being— what you're taking in from the public and that surveys are reinforcing those ideas.
I also want to make sure that we're not categorizing based on the committee system that exists, though they should be in concert.
They should coordinate.
Complement or work together.
I just want to make sure that you don't feel that you're confined in that way, but this really is the right list.
Maybe not in the same order, maybe no order, but really this was just our starting point for this next layer.
Yes.
Oh no, Elena was next.
Alana.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
So if we're talking about where are the big decision points in terms of policy and how do we do things that we need to make, I think this I think this is the right list.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
But if we are using this list to choose what we fund, I'm going to argue very strongly against this because parks is not up here.
And parks was one of the biggest things in our last exercise around what we thought our core services were.
I don't think it pops on something like this because there are a lot of complaints about what we need to do more of in our system, but it's less the trade-offs— what do we want our system's focus to be— conversations that we need to have.
So I don't think it pops in the same way for a list like what you just put up.
But at some point, we're going to move from these are our priorities to this is what we need to fund.
And at that point, I'm going to want to jump up and down and say parks has to be higher than it looks like when I look at that list.
Unidentified speaker
And I think that is a perfect point for this Okay.
So I think the biggest part of the discussion is, is parks part of some other category that we want to call out as an important key element of whatever that is, or is parks at a level that we want it to set as its own priority topic and then define it further underneath it?
And it, it could be that maybe it's not one of those that's Parks is a huge part of it, but maybe it's something more— don't use my words, but quality of life, a little bit broader than parks, but maybe it needs to be parks.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
And it could be that parks is part of sustainable infrastructure.
Certainly open space is part of having a sustainable infrastructure in our city, and that our parks services, our rec programs, are part of core service delivery.
And if we're calling those 2 things out and different places, and we all understand that sustainable infrastructure includes publicly accessible open space, and core service delivery includes rec programming.
I'm perfectly happy with that, but the words aren't there.
So I think we need to say out loud that we believe they're there, or I need to fight the fight that they get put up there somewhere.
Unidentified speaker
Totally.
That's exactly what we needed to hear.
I think there was one before you.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I'm sorry.
Unidentified speaker
Sameer was next.
Yeah.
Sameer Kanal
Thanks.
That's one of the 2 changes I noticed too.
I agree.
And I think for me, when I heard your question back in the one-on-ones about strategic priorities, I think maybe I assumed that the things that we all agree on might not be as worthy of mention.
And you may have noticed when you said parks, when you first wrote it up just now, it was like, yeah, cool, thumbs up, let's move on.
Because we all like them, and I think there's some nibbling around the edges in terms of changes that might need to be made or whatever.
But the other thing is parks is super broad and it falls into several of the categories depending on how you slice it, and we sliced it a little differently as a group than one-on-one.
The other thing though is economy, which is not on this list, but if you look at the word cloud, there's like 500 things—.
Unidentified speaker
Yes.
Sameer Kanal
That are in the small text from, permitting and all that.
I'm noting, you know, Saturday, so I think DCA is back there in the trucker hat.
Economic development didn't make the list as its own thing, but the—.
Unidentified speaker
But it is.
There's a ton of them just phrased differently in there.
Sameer Kanal
Right.
And I think the other piece of it is, and Dan, I think, says this the most, but I think we all understand, the economy is how you get the tax dollars to fund everything else you want to do.
So that's a core part of it, but I think it's just worth mentioning that I think both parks is in this list and economies in that list, just in different ways than we sliced it.
Unidentified speaker
Yes.
So from your perspective, if we can play— and Elana, from your perspective, if we can place the pieces of parks, open space, those things as definitions within some of these categories, that is sufficient I don't know that we were answering that question.
Sameer Kanal
Do you want to go first?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
If we are all assuming that core services includes our rec programming and sustainable infrastructure includes publicly accessible open space, I don't need it to say parks up there, but I do need to know that the majority of my colleagues believe that a a key piece, not a smaller piece, but a key piece of those 2 things are those programs to be comfortable.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I agree with that.
I'll also add park rangers.
Parks are part of public safety too, especially the recreation side and the ranger side.
So I think parks is sort of a method, like the Parks Bureau or Portland Parks and Recreation are a delivery vehicle for many of our strategic priorities.
In fact, I think it's actually all 5 of— well, maybe not housing homeless, but the other 4 and the quality of life.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
Loretta, you had your hand.
Loretta Smith
Yeah, thank you.
I do— when I saw the list, I thought that parks would be in core services, but as we're talking about it, I think parks needs to be their own thing because they're one of our general fund budget areas.
So as we're talking about public safety and what we're doing around homelessness and housing, there's a lot of general fund money there, and I think we need to have that front and center too with parks.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Angelita?
Angelita Morillo
Thank you.
Yeah, I completely agree with you, Elana.
When I thought about sustainable infrastructure, I immediately thought that— I assumed that parks was part of that, but you're right that we should call that out, and I think it is really important.
I do think our recs— the rec side of Parks and Recs does need to be under core services because so much of that I think we view as luxury, but it's actually critical.
That's where kids are getting food.
That's where families who don't have access to affordable daycare are sending their kids.
So just want to very strongly assert that I completely agree with that analysis, and I assumed that it was there.
I'm glad it was called out.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
So for the purposes of the rest of our afternoon, can we start with those 5 groupings, understanding that parks belongs within a couple of different categories, and we will call those things out as we move forward and define?
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
So if— and again, I just want to say this is the start of the conversation on all of these.
So what we're trying to do is figure out what these highest-level areas are, what we think moves the needle in the positive direction, and what needs to come back for a more thorough, thoughtful discussion to give greater direction to all that we are trying to achieve and can provide some of those equity points and some of those district-focused points moving forward.
But for the purposes of today, we are going to try and again keep it a little bit higher level and get into some of those definitions that you all just described.
So I think, I think we're ready to move into that section if everyone's okay with that.
Okay, and so Mike is going to start working with you through defining and establishing some expectations.
Yeah, good.
We may have to trade places after a while.
Okay, so I want to, I want to make another list just to make sure we've got it at its It's like what you have.
And then what we'll do is we'll take each one of them just in the order that you give them, and we want to talk about some of what— you know, use parks as an example.
If we're talking about core services, delivery systems, Parks and Rec Bureau, and what do we want from that?
And we'll just have some discussion on it.
And then that will, that will be our list that we create in the report.
So as you're saying, I want to make sure it's down there, it'll be down there for sure.
And then we'll, we'll kind of go and see how far that takes us.
So it— for our list, are we at public safety, or should that say Community and public safety.
I'm just going back from yesterday or this morning's discussion.
Yeah, I didn't hear you, Sameer.
Safety?
Is that— that's great with me.
Is that good with everybody?
Any— you know, sometimes— I don't know if this is the right thing to say, but sometimes we, we ask when we're trying to get like, okay, just what's everybody's feeling.
Fist to 5.
This is a Texas thing, maybe.
I don't know.
Fist is I'll fight you over this, I'm so unhappy about it.
Then we know, like, okay, we can't do that.
5 Is I'm all in, and, you know, somewhere in there.
So any fists over safety only?
Loretta Smith
I don't necessarily want to just call it safety, because when you think about public safety, you're thinking about 911, you think about police, think about fire.
So I just think it's, it's not complete when you say just safety.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Do we need to include the word community?
I think that's really my, my, the heart of my question.
Or does public safety capture what you meant?
Candace Avalos
Well, process-wise, I guess I'm like, how do you expect to facilitate this?
Are you expecting to get consensus?
Because fist-to-five is purposely not consensus.
So if we're doing fist-to-five, then let's do that, right?
Unidentified speaker
No, the fist-to-five is to kind of give me a temperature to like, okay, let's talk about it so we find the consensus.
Candace Avalos
Sure.
I've just— fist-to-five is used to address models around consensus is why I bring it up.
So, um, so I just— yeah, I guess I want to understand that before we keep going because I think that's been Yes.
That's actually my biggest anticipation coming into this retreat.
I want to understand, like, to what extent— because we're not going to be 100% on everything.
So what is it that we're documenting, and how are we documenting the things where we're not 100%, where we are, and what does the in-between look like?
Because I— yeah, I worry that, at least from my perspective, not everything has to be consensus.
So if 99% of us want something, then I think it needs to go on the board.
I don't think, you know, but again, that's why I'm asking, are we going for consensus or not?
Because that determines how I will approach this next phase of the conversation.
Unidentified speaker
Tiffany?
Tiffany Koyama Lane
We have kind of decided on some priorities in terms of forming and naming our committee structures.
So does it make sense that we go off of Good.
Which I think all of these could probably fit under.
Unidentified speaker
I just want to make sure I'm representing what you want.
That's, that's all I'm asking.
Because if we put public safety, you're going to have some things under there on community safety.
But if it's important to you to have it up there, then I want to have it up there.
Sameer Kanal
I'm good with safety.
I'm good with community and public safety.
I think if we spend time, we're probably going to spend I a lot of time on public safety.
Think we're going to spend more time than it might be worth debating otherwise.
So that's why I suggested just the word safety.
And we— maybe as you get from 30,000 to 28,000 feet, you start getting into that.
But I also agree with Candace.
I'd like a little more clarity on our approach to this conversation because I think we saw some near but not quite consensus.
Dan Ryan
I agree with Sameer's language, and I say that because that usually helps us get to So what I'm hearing from most of you, that you, you're happy with the word safety.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, we're going to go with safety.
We'll make sure that we delineate when we talk about them through housing and homelessness together.
Is that right?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Is that Right.
We talked about how they were inextricably linked but also separate in the policy, and we never came back and talked about whether homelessness is a strategic priority for this council or not.
Sameer Kanal
Is there— have we defined the distinction between strategic priority and core service yet?
Because I think that, that, that's where a lot of the disagreement I think that's where the disagreement might land in terms of whether or not we should be paying for homelessness services, and that's, that's more of a core services conversation.
Whereas if we have a strategic priority to reduce homelessness and the intervention is in the housing side of it, then it makes sense in one conversation but not the other, is what I'm trying to say.
And I think Elana is bringing up the right question there.
Unidentified speaker
I don't know.
What, what's your sense on it, Council?
Candace Avalos
I think it needs to be housing and homelessness.
I think that it is the number one thing that we have to tackle, and I think we get so caught up in like whose responsibility it is, and I'm tired of pointing fingers.
It's our responsibility to solve homelessness and housing, and we do that in our way, right?
Like we provide more housing, we create social housing, right?
So I think we need to— like that's where I want us to get unstuck on that.
Like yes, there's lots of details about how to go about it, but it's very So once we—.
Unidentified speaker
You know, we're really just making sure we've got the right priorities, and then we're going to dive down into what are some of the success measures for each of these.
So I don't want to get too wrapped up, but what I'm hearing from most of you is you want them together, even though you're going to distinguish them as we go through.
I think we're all in agreement that we want them together.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I think that the strategic priority is to house Portlanders.
Candace Avalos
And does that not solve homelessness?
I don't think there's a point to removing both.
Mitch Green
I, I would offer that, um, for the sake of this, this stage in the action— a little too close to this.
For the sake of us kind of settling on like these big categorical variables that we think about homelessness as a symptom of how we approach our housing problem, so I think it's okay to have them together in this category.
When we get to the place of how we fund things, whether they're upstream or downstream or somewhere in between, that's our budget setting process.
But I would advocate that they— they're still two sides of the same coin in a sense.
But I agree that our strategic goal is to house all Portlanders.
I think we're all saying the same thing in that regard.
Unidentified speaker
Again, as we break down, we're going to see different things that address different portions of it.
All right.
Economy.
Is that okay as the word?
Or do you want to say economic development?
Or what's— is the economy good?
Mitch Green
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Core services, do we need to call that out as the strategic priority?
We spent a lot of time talking about what those were.
Do we want to say that's— we're still there?
All right.
And the last one, infrastructure.
Do we just want to say infrastructure, or do you want it to say sustainable infrastructure?
Mitch Green
Infrastructure.
Unidentified speaker
All right.
Very good.
Okay, so I'm going to tear this so we can keep it.
Yes, I'm sorry.
Dan Ryan
So I'm good with everything that we've done so far except core services delivery systems.
I get that's what we do.
I feel like that's where we are not naming parks.
So I'd be good with like safety, housing and homelessness, economy, infrastructure— sustainable infrastructure, we're calling it— and then parks.
Because we're basically talking about all our infrastructure except parks, and I feel like parks will get lost.
I always add arts to it, but that's just me, maybe.
Unidentified speaker
Here is the list from the discussion this morning on core services.
Dan Ryan
Yeah, there's infrastructure.
Unidentified speaker
Is there anything that's not listed there that's core services besides parks?
Parks is—.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Can we call it parks and other core services?
Okay.
Olivia says no.
I hear you.
Mitch Green
I mean, I think about 311 as an Service is an example of a core service.
Service is an example.
I mean, our ability to intake complaints from the city, collect and route sort of priorities from our community, that's service, I think.
And that cuts across pretty much the only things.
But that's the plumbing of our city.
That's the customer service plumbing of our city.
That's a core service.
And I think it's bigger than parks.
So I think we need to name core service.
Unidentified speaker
Councilor Sameer and then Loretta.
Sameer Kanal
I agree with that.
I think there are practices as well that we talk about, like, you know, the democracy portion.
311 Is a part of that.
Equity is a part of that.
Community engagement is a part of it.
I think that those are different from the question you're asking.
The conflation of what is a core service and what is a strategic priority Those are not—I interpret those as two different questions.
So, but when you're getting to this, I did want to mention that that last piece—that of the quality of life transportation piece—I think the transportation piece falls under core services and sustainable infrastructure.
Quality of life might be something that's kind of nebulous, but around and kind of is all the above.
But I do think it's.
Dan Ryan
I think where I'm having a different definition is I think of infrastructure as all our pipes and all, you know, water, sewer, transportation.
That's infrastructure to me.
And so that's probably where I'm hung up.
Sameer Kanal
Can I ask, do you think—.
Dan Ryan
And I don't— I think parks gets lost in that.
So that's why I call out parks.
And then services, I think, yeah, we should be delivering all of our services better.
Unidentified speaker
Let's go to Loretta and then Elana, I think.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
When I think about core services, I think about water and sewer.
You know, do we have drinking water?
Is that sustainable?
Do we have water to bathe in and to do our grass and flushing of the toilets and our parks and our transportation system, which includes Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Elana?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
So none of these buckets are exactly how I would have named them.
I think everybody would have named them a little bit differently.
That's okay.
We're working through this together.
But I'm wondering, do I'm wondering, Councilor Dan, if we can take a leap of faith, because I kind of want to see where we're going with these and do the next part without parks being up there.
And if parks doesn't show up in the next level in the way that it needs to, I will be right beside you fighting to actually take a step backwards and change this list to put it up there.
Yeah.
Raymond C. Lee
Sure.
Dan Ryan
I think really what I was also getting at was that my definition of infrastructure, which I know a lot of Portlanders have as well, is water, sewer.
It's all pipes and it's the streets and it's the— it's all a PBOT.
Yeah.
Like when I hear from people complaining, it's like we've got to take care of our infrastructure and that's what they name.
So I was— I was putting that out of there.
I was putting that into infrastructure, not core services.
Unidentified speaker
Got it.
Dan Ryan
But yes on waiting and be patient with parks.
Unidentified speaker
Candace?
Candace Avalos
Well, I think that, you know, the parks thing, I don't know, I think it's infrastructure.
So I'll say that.
I think core services is also about navigation.
Like, there are a lot of services that we offer the community.
How to buy a home, how to file a complaint, right?
There's so many, like, soft services that aren't Yeah.
Yeah.
And parks aren't just putting a road somewhere or building a building.
So I think that's why it needs its own category, because it encompasses what Mitch was saying around, like, 311.
It's like navigational services is what I see as core, because that's the main thing of government, right?
It's the infrastructure and it's providing service to people who need it so that they can get what they need accomplished.
So I think that needs to be its own category.
I think parks can be under infrastructure.
I mean, it's very clear we all care about parks, and we actually have to think about parks as infrastructure, because if we're talking about our roads deteriorating, we need to talk about our parks deteriorating.
And so I think that's all like sticks, bricks stuff is infrastructure, in which parks falls for me.
Unidentified speaker
So, so let's do that.
Thank you.
I think let's, let's jump in.
I think we'll see that parks get covered, and to your point, Elana, if they're not, then we, you know, we're going to take a step back and say Did we get it?
And we'll add to it if we need to.
Meaning it's beyond just the foundation of the roads and the sewer, but it gives you kind of some of the asset management pieces and And buildings, parks, those sorts of— just throwing it out there.
Y'all don't have to take it.
Olivia Clark
That works for me.
Unidentified speaker
Sustainable infrastructure and open public spaces.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Okay.
Dan Ryan
I think core services is a big picture item that covers everything.
The delivery— it's a practice, not a function area.
And that practice of offering good services is in each of these categories.
So I was having trouble separating it in this game, including a parallel construct.
That's where I'm at.
Unidentified speaker
Let's go down a level now and we'll worry about where those go.
Elana, did you have a question?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I was just wondering if talking about the delivery piece helps with making it a strategic priority.
That it's about how we deliver them as opposed to just writing core services up there.
Olivia Clark
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
Well, I'm leaving verbs out.
Okay, let's talk about now what I want to get into for our next little bit is what are Okay.
So we'll just get some bullets out there and then we'll see if we need to synthesize and work through some things.
But when you think about what does success look like, and think about it in a way that Raymond and staff can say, okay, we get what you mean by this, so then initiatives And programs in conjunction with your committees can be created.
What does that look like?
Let's see, I think Olivia had her hand up first and then Angelita.
Olivia Clark
I'll just do one.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Olivia Clark
And let other people do more.
I think improving the 911 response time.
Angelita Morillo
Okay.
Loretta Smith
Angelita.
Angelita Morillo
I was going to say that, and I think something we haven't really talked about in public safety yet is the— like, do we have the resiliency to handle and to protect our constituents if there is a natural disaster or an earthquake?
We don't really have like a metric for that because we haven't done the policy work to Okay.
Unidentified speaker
How would you say that?
Give it to me in a short version.
Angelita Morillo
Emergency— yeah.
Olivia Clark
Disaster response?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
But it's not preparedness, right?
It's survival and ability to rebuild after a disaster, right?
Angelita Morillo
That's correct.
Yeah.
I think Elana is hitting more what I'm trying to say because I Sorry, I don't know how to put this succinctly.
I raised my hand before figuring out a way to say it for you in an efficient way.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I'm sorry.
Is it every Portlander knowing their plan in an emergency and understanding how we will respond to save lives and rebuild?
Angelita Morillo
Yeah, like, I don't know what the metric is when you create— like, if we address the CEI hub or like the oil train before the earthquake happens, then the metric is that we saved the river.
But there is no metric for that if we don't do that work preemptively.
So I'm not sure how to say that.
Unidentified speaker
I probably didn't get it exactly right, but I put resilience to natural disaster.
Angelita Morillo
Sure.
I think that encompasses it for right now.
Candace Avalos
Maybe like resilience and recovery of natural disaster, like it's like the pre and post.
Olivia Clark
Oh, just disaster response.
Just disaster response.
Can we add any T's to that?
Neighborhood emergency teams?
Unidentified speaker
There's a couple of words that are in the emergency management ether which are mitigation, meaning you're doing things ahead of time to deal with potential disaster.
And then there's this other word which talks about more physical things or network-type things called So you'll hear those words often in emergency response, but I don't— you know, just throwing those out there.
Angelita Morillo
That's so helpful.
I think that's exactly more what I was going for.
So I think, yeah, mitigation, hardening, I think those are good options too.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, very good.
I've forgotten who was next.
But I see Mitch's hand, so I'm going to go there.
Mitch Green
The right responder to the right call type.
Unidentified speaker
Did you say time at the end of it?
Mitch Green
Time.
Each time.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, Steve.
Steve Novick
First of all, Mitch, I'm going to invoke Sameer's rule that there is no wrong call, so it's not the right response to the right call.
But I just wanted, as a complement to improved 911 response times, I would add solving crimes.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Uh, Loretta, and then Olivia.
Loretta Smith
Yeah, and I think that response time by our police— I was at a, at a Wilkes Neighborhood Association meeting, and there was a robbery at At a house, and it took about 2 and a half hours for the police to actually respond to it.
So I think we also need to hold that system accountable too in terms of how they respond.
And maybe it's, it's lower on the response table.
I mean, they're going to go to guns and violence and stuff first, but I think there is an expectation from our neighbors that And that's a little different than 911 response, right?
Yes.
Mitch Green
Okay.
Dan Ryan
I just wanted to underscore that.
When you said response times, I thought you meant that when someone would actually show up.
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Well, it's both—.
Olivia Clark
It's both how long it takes for the 911 to answer the call and for the response.
So I think the The first bullet, second bullet, fourth bullet, it all means we need more police officers.
Angelita Morillo
But I—.
Candace Avalos
That's not what it means.
Dan Ryan
That was brave.
Unidentified speaker
We're going to let Raymond worry about that.
Tiffany, and then Alana.
I don't know if Candace had her hand up.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I would say increasing public trust.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Olivia Clark
Can I just add to that, Tiffany, that it's an intangible sense of safety and trust?
I don't know how you measure that sense of safety that the public has.
What'd you say?
Tiffany Koyama Lane
He said vibes cultivation.
I think there are ways to poll the community.
Unidentified speaker
Elana, I think you had your hand up.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Now that we have police response time up there, I'm feeling the need to channel my colleague Steve Novick because we do need improved response time on immediate items, on calls for action Yes.
And I think if we are giving direction to our city administrator with these priorities, we need to decide whether we want improved response time for every call, or if we want improved response time for certain types of calls where you need an immediate response and waiting any amount of time is too much time.
And if we're okay with somebody waiting 2 hours or even a day or 2 for a response, response when you come home and something's been stolen out of your house, but there's nobody there, and what you're actually waiting for is for somebody to come and look for fingerprints and catalog what happened and all of that.
And I, I don't know if we want an improved time for that also, but when we start talking about staffing resources, there's a really big difference if we want an improved response time for everything or just for the immediate in-progress I think they already triage like that.
Olivia Clark
I think there probably is priority order.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
There is.
And are we okay keeping that?
Are we asking it to improve on everything, or are we asking for it to improve on specific things that we care most about?
Which is our ask when we put it up there?
Unidentified speaker
Sameer, were you going to comment on that?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
You look confused.
Sameer Kanal
No, I, I agree with that, first off, but I wanted I wanted to mention first, do no harm as a goal.
The thing we can control the most is what we as a city do.
And so that's number one, is make sure we are not doing any of the harm.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Sameer Kanal
And that relates to equity, but it's— I'd say there's an overlap but not the same thing.
Unidentified speaker
So, very good.
If we can, somebody come back to Alana's question.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
When we put improved response time on the board, are we asking Raymond and our DCA back there to improve response time by police on every single call, or are we asking for an improved response time on— I don't know how we are going to describe it, but active, in-progress Imminent threat calls.
I like that.
Unidentified speaker
Let's hear from Sameer and then from Angelita and Dan.
Sameer Kanal
So first, we should also have ambulances, fire, PSR response times on this list, the other responders.
Secondly, to this, I think it is— I think it's worth exploring, and I don't know if the solution is to say these types of calls or that, or to To actually relook at the priority order list.
You know, there's a 9-tier, they use 7 of them, priority list, and what is up or down in that list can affect, you know, if you're on your way to a priority whatever call and something higher comes up, you deviate what you're doing.
And I think having a conversation around that is worth engaging council with.
Right now it's entirely at the administrative level.
Jamie Dunphy
Okay.
Sameer Kanal
So the answer yes is a short answer, but the long answer is I think I'm not sure if the best way to do that is for us to create a new classification system for what gets prioritized and what doesn't versus just engaging with the administrative side on their existing priority order.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
I'm going to hear from everybody and then I'm going to write down.
Let's go Angelita and then Dan and then we'll go Mitch.
Angelita Morillo
Yeah, I think I agree with Sameer, that we need to include all the calls, not just police, but our response times for all the other types of emergency calls as well, which would include Portland Street Response for mental health crises, amongst other things, and fire response as well.
I think what— obviously we would want all the call response types to improve, but if we had to choose, if that's sort of what you're asking more, I would say the imminent threat calls are the most important.
I think realistically, like with police, I think statistically if they respond to an imminent threat call, they could potentially intervene.
If they're responding to your TV got stolen from your house, are the police going to open a full-blown investigation to get your TV back?
That would be ideal.
I don't think that, from my understanding, that police really solve that type of crime.
And I think that kind of gets to Steve's point of, like, are police actually solving crimes or are they responding and documenting?
Because that's 2 different things.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
I'm going to wait until I write anything down to kind of finish this off.
Dan and then Mitch.
Dan Ryan
Yes to the question, and I trust that Raymond, Bob, and their teams can provide us with what that looks like.
I think that's what you all can do for us.
I think more relational time in general would be something I'd like to see improved.
Relational time, face time.
People are really missing having conversations, not when they're responding to a crime, but actually seeing more of Portland Street Response out on the street talking to people, the police out on the street talking to people, fire out on the streets talking to people.
And Candace, you're shaking your head, so you should tell me why.
But I think it's really important that we have more relational time.
And that would get us back to core services, whatever, about improving our core services.
Unidentified speaker
Let's go to Mitch and then we'll come to you, Candace, okay?
Because he has his hand up there.
Mitch Green
Yeah, I wanted to respond to Elana's question.
I think for me it would be not a proportional increase in service or resource scaling to preserve Our existing distribution of response times.
It'd be more trying to respond much more quickly to the most acute issues.
Your house is on fire, you know, someone's waving a machete at you like a block away, like someone's having a mental health crisis, getting the right response out there within minutes.
And then the other things are—.
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Mitch Green
You know, those are things you can— we can prioritize as such.
But that's because we don't have the— I don't think we're going to have the resources to scale all that.
Unidentified speaker
So it's especially the acute issues.
Mitch Green
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
Before we write it down, Candace, you had your hand up there.
Candace Avalos
Yeah, I mean, I'm shaking my head to Dan's comments because it goes back to one of the things that I think we need to talk about, and we're not going to be able to dive into, but I think Councilor Smith.
I think is always the missing piece when we talk about this is how do you define safety?
I don't want to be friends with police just for the sake of being friends with police, okay?
I want them to do their job.
I want them to respond when there's emergencies, and then I want them to move out of the way so that we can fill in the rest of the spectrum with all of the other things.
Because a lot of people, it doesn't matter, they're not going to feel safe by seeing more police.
And, and if we are stuck with that Yes.
If the answer is always police, no, it's not.
And I think that's— it's just really hard to continue to define safety by one way.
And, you know, I know that it's unpopular to say, but I don't really believe in community policing.
I don't think that that's the job of police.
I think their job is to solve crimes and deal with emergencies, not to take kids to the grocery store.
I just don't.
So I think that That to me is a high— is a low priority of what I want them spending their time on, especially because we have supposedly a crisis of their time.
And I do not want to see police on the clock doing community engagement.
That's not their job.
And I don't want our kids having to engage with police.
I think they can engage with plenty of other kinds of leaders.
I don't want to spend the very precious, expensive dollar on time for police.
Dan Ryan
I have to respond because I didn't just say police, but that's the only division you focused on.
Candace Avalos
I said everything else.
Dan Ryan
So what I'm saying is I think we dehumanize our public safety responders, and I think them having more opportunity to be relational in the community is— I can't understand why that wouldn't be good.
Candace Avalos
Because if we're talking about fiscal responsibility, I am tired of seeing I'm not seeing us waste public dollars for police to go to events when that's not addressing the core public safety problem.
If we agree that they are public safety, then let's have them do that.
And the community safety aspect has so many other kinds of service providers, whether government or nonprofit, that deal with that.
So again, this to me is about fiscal responsibility.
Olivia Clark
Yeah.
Candace Avalos
I really do not want us wasting dollars building relationships with police when we are struggling for them to meet to answer their phone calls?
Dan Ryan
I need to be listened to.
So I said, I said all those other things before that, so we were just adding to the list.
So it's an and equation.
Candace Avalos
And did I not say and?
I mean, I just—.
Dan Ryan
No, it sounded like this doesn't matter.
Candace Avalos
Well, you're allowed to hear.
Well, yeah, but this is a constant problem that Dan and I have, and I'm frankly tired of it.
You always say that you have to be listened to.
You don't listen to me.
So if I am going to make a statement, you always feel like you have to respond constantly on the dais.
And so if this is a space for us all to share our opinion, please let me have my space.
Dan Ryan
Granted.
I just hope you did hear me earlier say all the other things.
Candace Avalos
I heard you, and I had my own opinion, and I'm allowed to respond without you having to say that it's about you.
It's not about you.
I have my opinion.
Dan Ryan
And you did hear that I said I'm done.
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, let's go on to Sameer.
Sameer Kanal
So, uh, I think when we're talking about core services, just to take a quick step back and then get into this, uh, I think we, we've agreed that the core service— the, the responsibility for defining a core service is in spaces like this, right?
It's elected leaders defining those core services.
I think we've all kind of come to that conclusion, and that's the premise for what I'm about to say here, which is that I think if we're talking about what the core services of the Fire Bureau— there's the fire marshal part, the prevention piece, there's responding to fires, right?
There's some things that they have to do that support that work, but the core mission is related to fire and rescue.
That's in the name.
Similarly with police, the core piece of it is responding to to those calls and all of that.
So when we talk about core services, going to walk around in the community with folks is not part of that.
It's a thing that may be in the— supports their, you know, the secondary thing that supports it.
It may not be.
I think that's what we're talking about here.
But I will say that the City Council did vote, and I think— I don't know if the facilitators are aware of this, so I want to remind them— we did vote to actually deprioritize for overtime dollars specifically this idea of police being out in the community and prioritize things like human trafficking and other things for overtime dollar expenditures.
And you can see my press release from 2 weeks ago as to how they haven't been following that.
But that's a thing we've already decided and don't need to relitigate on the use of overtime dollars.
Having said that, I think there's a bigger conversation here that is worth having.
And I still haven't seen the conversation because there's a similar conversation in terms of prioritization of calls with fire.
There's a similar conversation with ambulances, a similar conversation with PSR.
It goes down the list.
It's not maybe as acute or as high stakes to everybody, but there is a conversation over how do we direct when we have multiple competing priorities, what are the places where bringing response times down matter?
What are the types of calls coming into 911 that we need to respond to?
And I also wanted to just put a quick unrelated plug that the improved 911 response times to me also includes the non-emergency line that the 911 folks also staff.
We have a non-emergency response line.
So I just, it doesn't need to be written down, but I just wanted to flag that.
Unidentified speaker
So in terms of kind of grabbing that, Do we need to have an— I have maybe a lack of words here, but analyze our system for evaluating responses?
Sameer Kanal
Can you clarify what you mean by evaluating responses?
Unidentified speaker
We talked earlier, like, you know, you have already a protocol for what item gets responded to, et cetera.
Are you guys saying that needs to be Do you think that needs to be reexamined?
Raymond C. Lee
I don't know if that's a—.
Sameer Kanal
I don't think it's the idea behind it needs to be examined.
I think there's a conversation we should have with the administrative side over is a self-initiated call really a second-tier priority by definition versus is a— you know, and Steve's brought up the welfare checks issue.
Steve's also brought up the idea that if the burglary happened 3 hours before the person got home, And then they call it in, it doesn't matter as much.
And so maybe it's not about the system needing to change, but maybe just where the items go in it.
At the same time, I don't know that we should be doing that as a blunt instrument through a council resolution without talking to the police officers and brass that are doing it.
Unidentified speaker
So maybe, you know, I've got it here, improve response time of police, especially to acute issues.
Maybe under that, And then it becomes a discussion on here's how we're doing it and what tweaks need to be made.
All right.
Let's see.
Angelita, and then I see you, Steve.
Angelita Morillo
Thanks.
I just wanted to say that we have the call time restructuring project going on right now.
So bureaus are already investigating and getting an analysis for us on what the best procedure is for which responders should go to which calls and how we prioritize that so we don't have to make that decision even politically.
It can be from a factual basis about what the best responses are, and I think that's beneficial.
But I do want to highlight something that I think Candace said, which is I think what you were trying to say, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that not everyone feels the same sense of safety from the same sense of— from the same responder because of a lot of complicated reasons, and our communities are not monoliths.
Right, so you have— some people don't feel safe with police, some people do.
Some people want to see police at community events, some people that would make them not want to attend the event.
And so if we're talking about core services and like the thing that they have to respond to, that's part of why I said I think it needs to be those immediate situations that require that.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, that's very helpful.
Steve, you had your hand up.
Steve Novick
Yeah, 3 things.
One, I actually think that there's a lot of people who say we need to improve response times without giving gradations.
So if there is a consensus among us, and I think there is, that we agree there are gradations and improving response times is more important to some things than others, I think that's important for our folks to know.
So that's one thing.
Second, I just have to say that Elana and I actually did a poll last year where we asked the question, is it important for people, for the police to build relationships in the community?
And people were split.
It was like barely more than half said yes, it is important.
Sameer thought that the question was phrased in a way that pushed towards that.
I didn't.
But I mean, it was— I will say that the one district where people, a majority clearly said no, we don't care about relationships with police, was Tiffany's and Angelita's and mine.
But it was over— I mean, it was not— I mean, you see the division in this council.
There's also division of the public about whether that's important.
And the third thing is, I just realized I'd like to see on the safety list fewer unnecessary deaths, because I think that's one of the core results we want out of what we do in safety, is fewer people dying by gunfire, fewer people dying in Fewer people overdosing.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, let's go to Jamie, then Candace, and Loretta.
Jamie Dunphy
First, Councilor Novick, thank you for saying that.
That has been running in my head, that I have been trying to think of how to articulate that a core service, not necessarily just to safety but to the city of— as government, I guess— is how many people get home safely tonight.
And whether that means someone who dies on the way home in a car accident Is shot in a drug deal gone bad, is arrested and sleeps the night in jail, or doesn't have a home to go to.
Like, that is a thing that I've been thinking about.
Like, ultimately, how many people in our city are going to get home safely tonight?
I need to also voice something, colleagues.
I am getting really frustrated already because this conversation is devolving the way that I thought it would, because we are supposed to be looking for areas of commonality.
Compromise, and everybody is instead defaulting to points of pedantic, uh, need to be heard.
And I'm asking everybody to please stop defending yourselves.
No one is attacking anybody.
Let's try to find— rather than wordsmithing and getting down into the nuanced tiny details, if we can start recognizing The point of this is to find commonality, and if we have a conflict, then let's just move on from that and find a path towards the common middle, because I'm honestly pretty frustrated right now.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, thanks.
We'll keep moving.
Candace, then we're gonna— yeah, move ourselves on to the next topic here.
Candace Avalos
Yeah, I mean, I'm frustrated too.
I think that what frustrates me is, uh, that people aren't allowed to just state their opinions and not have to, like, have to have this back and forth.
Like, if I don't agree with you and I tell you, it's not about you, it's about the idea.
And it's because I represent specific people that those are the ideas I'm bringing forward.
So I don't appreciate having to have this who gets to have the last word on what's more important, because that's what's happening.
And that's where I get irritated, because I am speaking from my experience.
I am speaking from the constituents that I came here to represent.
Loretta Smith
Councilmember Herbold.
Candace Avalos
I do not need to be lectured about what my constituents need.
I think one thing that I hear a lot in particular that I talk a lot with my neighbors about actually, because, you know, I always joke that our HOA chat is kind of like a microcosm of Portland.
I kind of see all the dynamics of like their frustrations with the city and, you know, the mix of frustration and compassion and all of that.
And I think one thing, something I talked about a lot on the trail actually, was how do we explain expectations of our systems, right?
So if somebody is like, I expect that when I call, this happens, that is where a lot of the frustration happens.
When I was sitting on the task force that the governor put on, I was on the public safety one, and this is a lot of what I talked about.
And I talked with officers about, like, how do you communicate, like, what your actual capacity is in certain scenarios, right?
So it's like— Yes.
You know, if a robbery already happened, then it's like we're not going to rush to get somebody there to you because it already happened and we're just there to document versus there's something else happening in the moment.
And that lack of understanding I think causes more frustration than is necessary.
And if people had a little bit also more of a way to triage their needs, because I think also we just create everything as just one blunt tool, one entryway for so many of our things.
And we need to explain there are different entryways.
I would talk to my neighbors a lot about like 311 because they were constantly calling 311, but it— what they were doing it like because that was the only tool that they felt like they had available to them, but it wasn't meeting their needs because it wasn't designed for their needs, and then they get frustrated.
Loretta Smith
Right.
Candace Avalos
So there's something in here that like we need to talk about, like communicating expectations around how you get responses that I think would go a long way in us redesigning our systems to lessen the dissatisfaction people feel when they understand what each tool is for.
Unidentified speaker
So I'm going to put it here.
We may decide later it should move or also goes under core services.
But what I'm hearing you say is we need clear communication of services.
And so we won't lose it.
Okay.
Before we move on, you know, earlier you talked— had a great discussion about community safety.
Most of what I'm seeing up here doesn't really fall under that.
Do we want to say anything about, you know, in terms of measures, success measures that relate more to community safety?
And I'm going to turn the page I think Loretta or Sameer went first.
Candace Avalos
Can you say it again?
Sorry.
Unidentified speaker
Do you want to say anything about success measures for community safety?
Because y'all talked a lot this morning about kind of the distinction and the overlap between community safety and public safety, so that was great.
But everything we've listed so far this afternoon related mostly to, I think, public safety.
So I just I just want to make sure we're given direction.
If there's anything, okay, we need to call out on community safety specific, we've got it in terms of success measures.
Loretta, and then Sameer and Mitch.
Loretta Smith
I think we do need to have a measure.
I do a coffee every month.
It's called Coffee with a Cop.
And we've been doing that for about the last 7 months.
And there are about between 40 and 60 people who come there every month.
They are concerned about their own individual safety and things that happen in their community.
And so I look at that as a measure of success because they keep coming back every month, new questions.
And so I bring a police officer, Captain Foxworth, and he brings someone else on his team, and they come for 2 hours and they get to have— build a relationship.
So I think it is important, Steve.
Raymond C. Lee
Thank you.
Loretta Smith
I think it's important for constituents in District 1 to build a relationship with police, and they enjoy this Coffee with a Cop.
They've never had anything like this before.
So I try to continue to do that, and we focus on different issues sometimes for part of the meeting.
But I think I measure the attendance of the number of people that come and they keep coming back every month, that that is something that they want and need because they didn't have that before.
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
All right, Sameer.
Sameer Kanal
So I'll start by noting that some of the previous page does relate to that, um, and including what I said the first time.
But I'll say, you know, having street medicine available 24/7 is a success metric to me.
Right now it's not available.
Unidentified speaker
Having— I'm sorry, say it again.
Sameer Kanal
Street medicine.
So we have 2 different types of that.
We have the CHAT program in fire, and we have the Portland Street Response program.
Violence prevention, and I think you can do violence prevention in several different ways, but the main 3 that I wanted to shout out, one is the very people-oriented part the Office of Violence Prevention and Ceasefire does.
And I'm mentioning that not to say those programs are what we're talking about now, but for my colleagues who are familiar with those programs to know what I'm talking about.
There's violence prevention on the place-based side, just like Safe Blocks, the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, or CPTED.
And then there's the prevention of recurrence, which we've already talked about, which is investigating.
And, you know, the person most likely to do a shooting is probably someone who's already done one more than the average population.
If you If you catch them after the first one, you've prevented the second one, right?
So those— the way that we can go about all those things is a part of it.
And the last thing I'll say is free third spaces, third places for people to go.
And that's where the community centers piece comes into it, that if you have good stuff for people to do in a place, bad stuff is less likely to happen there.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
And Mitch, you had your hand up.
Mitch Green
Yeah, I think in terms of metrics, and this is going to get into whether or not we even do this line of work, but I mean, I think if you're, if you're thinking about there's someone in your community who's unhoused, is dealing with an acute crisis, an immediate crisis, being able to have a clear— there's one number you call And then it's just, it's pretty clear that folks just show up and there's like a seamless, like, we've got you, rather than this kind of confusing array of like, well, we got to call this other number and then there's that person on that phone is going to call the other number and then no one ever shows up.
That to me, that's some— it feels like that's something we can measure.
And then the community feels, feels like they have a A basis for understanding whether we're investing in a way that improves that system.
And that's— I think that touches on community safety from both the perspective of the person who's experiencing the crisis as well as the people around them.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, so improved system of responding to—.
Mitch Green
People experiencing mental health crises or just generally being unhoused.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Mitch Green
Oftentimes the same type of condition and experience.
Okay.
Sameer Kanal
Sorry, just to clarify, you wrote improved system of responding, but I think, Mitch, were you talking about response only or also how you enter the system through the call, like having a single number to call?
Mitch Green
I was thinking about it's from response to just resolution and care.
Like, it's that— it's like there's no gaps for someone to fall through the cracks once you start that call.
Okay, I know it's kind of complicated, but—.
Unidentified speaker
No, I, I'll, I'll kind of synthesize it later for sure.
Okay, I gotta move us on.
Do you need a break?
Are we ready to go?
Can we do another one?
Do another one.
Let's take an easy one.
Oh wait, there aren't any easy ones on that list.
Let's just take the next one.
Let's take housing and homelessness.
And so again, you know, think what are the success measures that you would say, okay, Raymond, these are the things we're wanting to see progress-wise.
And I'll just go here, here, and there.
Olivia Clark
Units built.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Increase units built.
Tiffany?
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Increasing the number of people that go from sleeping, living on streets, unhoused, all the way to being housed and having data along the way.
So going that whole process.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, got it.
Is it Elena next?
Alana, I'm sorry.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Increasing the number of Portlanders who can find an affordable home in a convenient location to their work or activities.
I guess I'll say work, school, or activities.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, repeat it for me again.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Increasing the number of Portlanders who can find an affordable home in a location proximate to their work, school, or activities.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, I got it.
I think Rich and then Sameer, and I'm sorry, then Dan.
Mitch Green
Yeah, I mean, I just put a plus next to what Elana just said.
I was going to say something very similar, but that's— we just put a plus to it and then we can move on.
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Sameer and then Dan.
Sameer Kanal
So I have— it's related, and then I have a quick— transit-oriented development, uh, is the first thing I'd like to add to that.
And I think that relates to what Alana said, which I would also agree with.
But I wanted to, um, ask, and maybe it's— we can circle back if you'd prefer this way, but, uh, if I can offer a friendly amendment, uh, from units to bedrooms, because I think our focus on units built has led to us overbuilding studios and underbuilding 3 and 4-bedroom apartments.
So—.
Unidentified speaker
Bedrooms?
Sameer Kanal
Yeah.
Angelita Morillo
Families.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
It might be 2 separate metrics, increasing the number of units built so that more families have housing and increasing the number of units that cater not just to the singles and couples who we often see pop in our homeless population, the people who we know need housing in our community who don't often show up in that data.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I think the thing we're trying to do right now is measures of success, right?
And so I think the thing we should be measuring is the number of people, and you can't measure that without a door-to-door count, but you can estimate it pretty well with bedrooms.
So that's why.
Unidentified speaker
Let's go to Dan.
You've been waiting.
Then Jamie.
Dan Ryan
A lot of our public housing that we have, affordable housing, are— the time between when someone leaves and when a new person is too long.
So our vacancy rates.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Dan Ryan
So we're leaving our units, our precious units, empty too long.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Jamie.
Jamie Dunphy
Permit issuance time.
Unidentified speaker
Ooh, that's very good.
I've kind of lost my order.
I think it was Mitch and then Candace, or Tiffany, Candace.
Mitch Green
Sustained quarter-over-quarter reductions in evictions filed for not Not for cause, is that what you said?
Unidentified speaker
Okay, say that for me again.
That was a very nuanced—.
Mitch Green
I'm getting very into the metrics, so sorry about that.
Unidentified speaker
That's what we need.
Mitch Green
Just a sustained reduction in another— the number of folks in our community who are being brought to court for eviction because they haven't paid the rent.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Is that something that we're creating services at the city to affect right now, or is that something where you want us to do something new to affect it?
Mitch Green
It's something that I want us to evaluate as we identify the policies that we do have control over.
What do we think the impact on that metric will be?
So if we're doing good housing policy, we're going to do the thing that you said, and then I put a check box on it, which should then feed to fewer people being evicted.
Unidentified speaker
All right, Tiffany, and then Candace.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Decreasing the number of people losing housing and falling into homelessness and increasing access to eviction protection legal services.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Is that similar to this?
How is that different than that one?
Sustained reduction in the number of people brought to court for eviction due to not paying rent.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I think there's some connection, but I also— there are a lot of people that don't understand that they can get support, and that is something that we, we can support them in finding legal representation and support.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, so say it for me again.
Increase the number following the homeless, and what was your second one?
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Increase connection to eviction protection legal services.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
All right, um, Candace.
Candace Avalos
Um, I don't think it's up there yet.
Stabilize the affordable housing market.
I know there's like rent buydowns and stuff maybe up there, but I can't read it all now.
Um, but just overall, that portfolio, um, Social housing.
I thought Mitch or Jamie was going to say it, so I guess I'll say it.
Social housing.
And then, you know, it's somewhat up there, but I've been calling it gap financing for humans.
Like, there's just these, like, little spurts of help that we can give with our resources that go a long way, and I think we need to consider that.
Unidentified speaker
How would you How do you say that?
Increase?
Candace Avalos
Just say gap financing for humans.
Olivia Clark
Can I ask a clarifying question of Candace?
Does the social housing include a limited equity co-op?
Because I would say let's, let's get a limited equity co-op in the next 3 years.
Candace Avalos
Yeah, it actually includes that and a couple other things.
So I think that's why I use it, because it's a pretty All right.
Unidentified speaker
Did we have improve retention?
I don't think we have a— move housing retention rates?
Is that what you said?
Raymond C. Lee
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
All right.
And then Steve and then Sameer.
Steve Novick
I just wanted to underscore what I think is the importance of what Sameer said, transit-oriented development, because transportation is the second largest expense in Portland.
Transportation is the second biggest expense of the typical family after housing.
And if we can plan a city where people can live in an affordable home and don't have to drive, then we make the city overall more affordable.
And in fact, there's some cases where you might be able to— a house— having a house here might be somewhat more expensive than having it there, but if you reduce your transportation costs, the overall expense to the family is lower.
Thank you.
So I just, I was really glad that Sameer said that and just wanted to underscore it.
Unidentified speaker
Sameer, you had your hand up.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, thanks, Steve.
Reducing and repairing displacement.
And here I mean not only our legacy of redlining and gentrification and all of that, which I absolutely do mean, but also ensuring that elders are able to age in not necessarily the same home, but At least the same neighborhood, the same area, ideally the same home if they'd like to.
Like, anything that keeps people where they want to be is, I think, good.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Yeah, very good.
Okay.
It's a great list.
I often will say, okay, Administrator, does this give you direction?
Anything you have you want to ask about?
Raymond C. Lee
Nothing I want to ask about, but what I will say as we come back to council with how we plan on achieving this There is going to be some dollars associated with this, so we're going to have to make some decisions as we go through this as well.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Are we in this process going to take these lists and prioritize them?
Because we weren't asking about consensus on all of the things on this list the way we started to on some of the earlier lists.
So before, Mr. City Administrator, you go through and start to design programs, I think it's important for you to know from us either what are the priorities or what has the most and strongest support.
Those might be different things, and we haven't had that part of the conversation.
Raymond C. Lee
Yes, that would be beneficial.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, we'll, we'll use Mentimeter for that here in just a minute.
I think maybe we'll try that, or we can use dots.
We've got dots, so everybody loves dots.
Mitch, then we'll either move on or take a break.
Mitch Green
Yeah, I just wanted to say that, you know, there's a lot of stuff that I'm very specifically trying to champion through council right now, but I've been trying to do this exercise at a pretty high level of generality and metrics.
And so to your point and to your kind of question, City Administrator, there will be dollars that we would have to execute.
And so I I'm going to be really keen on making sure that one of our strategic priorities is setting our city up, BPS in particular, to kind of identify what is the fastest way that we can move from point A to point B on any kind of code, land use changes, anything that we can unlock without any direct dollar expense, the ability to develop and consider transit-oriented development in an easier way so we don't take 6 years of process, because that's extremely costly.
We can't afford to get that time back.
So that's kind of how I've been showing up in this discussion.
Of course, I have very specific interests in housing, of course.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, let's— it's 2:20.
Let's take about a 10-minute break, come back at 2:30, and we'll either kind of keep doing these or we'll, we'll do our priority of these and Then take the next one.
So 10 minutes, and Hillary and I'll decide how we want to plan this.
Thank you.
We've got a lot of ideas here.
The committees are already working on certain things.
Staff is already working on certain things.
What do you think about handing these lists to the appropriate committees to have Them determine what moves forward.
Okay, that's what we wanted to know.
We're not pushing for it.
We're wanting your opinion.
No, no, they're all fine.
They're all fine.
They're all fine.
Here's the other thought.
The other thought would be that we take all of this, we put it all together, we send it to the city attorney's office.
Hillary is putting into Mentimeter the items you listed.
And we'll take a break after one or two more of these, let you rank them.
We'll give you 5 votes.
You get to vote for your top 5, and that way we'll see the ranking of them.
That'll help for, uh, that'll help Raymond.
We won't lose any of those ideas, but they'll be ranked.
Okay, so now we have about an hour and a half.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
We've got 3 more to do and then the rankings.
The rankings won't take too long because you can vote as fast as your fingers work.
But, and let me just say, you're doing good.
It's not easy.
It's not easy.
And, you know, you get— everybody gets feelings ruffled every once in a while.
It's okay.
You're just human.
We're all just human.
And, and it's hard work.
If it was easy, Anybody would do it.
But you took on hard jobs because you want to make a big difference.
And you're doing just fine.
So let's take on the economy.
What?
Now, again, let's— we might have gotten a little too granular on some of those, so it's okay.
But let's keep it up at the high level.
Think success measures.
What would you look at, say, 2, 3 years down the road from now and say we've been successful?
What are the measures?
And we'll go with the first hand up, Sameer.
Sameer Kanal
So I'll say, so I'll say 2.
One is reduced inequality.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Sameer Kanal
And the other is a higher percentage of Portlanders who have A higher percentage of Portlanders who have— it's on.
Yeah, a higher percentage of Portlanders who have living wage jobs.
Unidentified speaker
Got it.
Sameer Kanal
I think it's on right now, right when I finished.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, Mitch, I think I saw your hand, then, then, uh, Elana and Dan.
Mitch Green
Yeah, I would, I would echo, um, just growth in wages, particularly at the bottom end of the income distribution, growth in real wages.
I also would like to see, uh, commercial rents come in line with reality.
So small businesses can afford to operate in this city.
Unidentified speaker
I want to put more affordable.
Is that fair?
Okay.
Um, Elana.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I'm going to second the higher percent of Portlanders with living wage jobs, but I want to make sure that we're not just using an outsourced calculator for living wages, that what we're actually talking about is the ability to afford to live within our city limits.
Candace Avalos
Yes.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I think that's really important that that's tied to living in the city.
I would like us to have a higher standard for wages for when we, when we set the minimum wage.
When we subsidize a company or hire a contractor and say you have to pay average median wage, I would like to change that to a living wage.
So a higher subsidy for— or a higher standard for wages for contractors we do business with.
I think that's measurable.
And I think my third one is similar enough to Mitch's that I'll leave yours around.
Commercial spaces for small businesses.
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
I think Dan and then Steve.
Yeah.
Dan Ryan
Business license tax revenues up, increase.
And less exits, a decrease in exits of businesses established in our city for the last— for 10 years plus.
Unidentified speaker
Say that one again for me.
Dan Ryan
Fewer exits or closures of established businesses that have been in our city 10-plus years.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Tiffany and then Loretta.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Increased resources and support for small businesses, and also that those supports— that there's an awareness of those, that everyday Portlanders understand that they can access those if they're starting a small business or they run one.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Loretta.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
I think it was 43% of the storefronts had left downtown Portland, and I would consider our economy getting back on track if we could reduce that number at least by half.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, so do you, you mean reverse that trend and raise the number?
Loretta Smith
No, increase the number of storefronts that come back to downtown Portland.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Sameer and then Jamie, or Jamie and Sameer.
Jamie Dunphy
Thanks.
Lower incidence of childhood poverty and lower incidence of poverty-related crime.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, and Sameer.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, broad-based engagement with, uh, small businesses, which I think includes Dan's refrain of doing exit interviews, but also while they're still We do a good job of talking to a few business owners, but we don't talk to the smallest of our businesses and particularly the most marginalized community members who happen to be in business leadership.
Yeah, like food cart owners, communities of color, all that.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
All right.
Angelita, you had your hand up.
Angelita Morillo
Yeah, Jamie's comment actually made me think about DEI.
Decreasing domestic violence rates as a metric for measuring the economy, because we know that people have to stay in domestic violence relationships because they can't afford to live on their own.
Unidentified speaker
Councilor Smith.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Candace?
Candace Avalos
I think that since the pandemic, you know, as it relates to the economy and business, things have been tricky, right, as the world has changed.
And one thing that I noticed in the pandemic is that there were a lot more neighborhood business hubs growing.
I know, you know, we were all stuck at home, right, so people were going more to their coffee shop down the street.
Than the one that's by their workplace because they're working from home, for example.
And so I think that it's important that we diversify and create new economic centers beyond the downtown.
Gateway is a perfect example of that.
We're talking a lot about what that looks like.
But I just received so many, you know, reports or whatever, strategies, efforts from the city that Center around downtown, and I just think that's the past.
I don't think we're looking forward enough, and I think there's so many opportunities with the Lloyd Center, with Gateway, where we can create more business hubs instead of relying on downtown being our only business engine.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, very good.
Sameer, and then Steve and Mitch.
Sameer Kanal
Reducing and ideally eliminating food deserts.
Unidentified speaker
Let's see, who is it?
Steve, Steve and Mitch, and then Dan.
Steve Novick
Uh, following up on— oh, sorry.
Uh, kind of following up on what Candace was saying, I was going to say increasing foot traffic traffic both downtown and in our neighborhood business districts by both visitors to Portland and residents of Portland.
Unidentified speaker
All right, Mitch, and then Dan.
Mitch Green
Yeah, I think you should be able to kind of go to any park or any just sort of major center of pedestrian life and be able to get a hot dog whenever you want one.
So just make it easier for that microenterprise.
Unidentified speaker
You're way down there in the weeds, Samer.
Mitch Green
Well, but I also think it's a systems-level kind of thing because we've got a culture of saying no to stuff that's like emerging and we need to get to a culture of yes, specifically to my policy idea.
Unidentified speaker
Support microbusiness?
Mitch Green
Microentrepreneurialism.
Unidentified speaker
You know I can't spell that.
Mitch Green
That's all right.
Neither can I.
Unidentified speaker
When you can't spell it, you just abbreviate it and then you figure somebody will figure it out.
Dan Ryan
Yeah.
Increase in new businesses and track them for 10 years.
Unidentified speaker
Track.
Track.
Dan Ryan
And then hotel vacancy rates, they're very— we have the highest in the country of any city.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, anything else on economy?
Dan Ryan
There's a few.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Lower the percent of household income Lowering the percent of household income going to housing and childcare combined.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, say it again.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Lowering the percent of household income going to housing and childcare.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Jamie, Mitch.
Jamie Dunphy
I want to get back to pre-pandemic attendance levels at live performance.
Candace Avalos
Yes.
Mitch Green
This isn't about hot dogs, I swear.
It's developing a world-class traded sector export industry of sustainable fibers, manufactured wood products like cross-laminated timber to lower the production cost of housing both in Portland and also elsewhere.
Unidentified speaker
Say it again.
World-class production?
Mitch Green
Production complex, like center of excellence for sustainable Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Sameer, Candace?
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, so one is a strong waterfront economy, and I think more broadly utilizing the natural features and really Ensuring that those are humming along and the businesses that relate to those.
I'm referring to the parks having hot dog carts down by the waterfront, of course.
Unidentified speaker
It was all good until you brought up hot dogs.
Sameer Kanal
It was coming.
This whole— all the whole day's been building up to hot dogs.
We finally got there.
Jamie Dunphy
It's what the people paid to see.
Sameer Kanal
The other thing is tourism having— Having those big events that skip us stop skipping us.
And that's whether it's— yeah, that's conferences.
It's Taylor Swift.
Shout out to Taylor Swift.
Come to Portland.
That's the— everybody uses Taylor Swift as the example.
Beyoncé too, of course.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Is this our official plea to Taylor Swift to come to Portland?
Sameer Kanal
This is definitely not official.
Jamie Dunphy
Taylor, please come here.
Unidentified speaker
Taylor, if you're watching.
Candace, you had your hand up.
Candace Avalos
I would like— I mean, I don't know that we've said much yet about workforce development, so I'll add that in there.
But particularly, I think we need more pre-apprenticeships.
There's so— there, there's so many opportunities to kind of create these pipelines into the union jobs that aren't just going straight to apprenticeships.
It's something that I explored when I was at Verde.
We were working on a pre- apprenticeship for ductless heat pumps that would lead into the sheet metal workers, uh, union to do full HVAC.
So I'm just like, what are those baby steps?
I think sometimes we get so caught up in like, we got to do the big thing first, but there's actually lots of little small steps, including pre-apprenticeships, to lead into those good-paying union jobs.
Olivia Clark
Okay.
Jamie Dunphy
Yeah, similarly, um, employment opportunities for people who are coming out of homelessness.
If we agree that Homelessness is economics.
It doesn't matter how cheap your rent is if you don't have a job.
Candace Avalos
Can I add a terminology to that?
Yeah.
It's something that I've heard Brandy Westermann say and I've been using, which is called try and fail jobs, particularly for folks exiting homelessness.
Because if you've been chronically homeless, dealing with all the millions of things that you do when you're homeless, And you have to do a 9 to 5, even if it's like a fast food joint.
If you miss a shift, you get fired, right?
So there needs to be more jobs, kind of like the GLITTER program.
I think they do a good job of modeling this, where they know that, like, it's going to take some time, that maybe you're not going to be on time all the time, or maybe you're going to have some mishaps, but that doesn't mean that you're irredeemable and therefore get fired.
So they're called try and fail jobs for that reason.
Loretta Smith
Good.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, all right, last one and then we got to move on to the next area.
I'll give Elana and Tiffany.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Um, a growing industrial employment sector.
I might say a growing sustainable industrial employment sector.
Unidentified speaker
All right, Tiffany.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Stronger rights for domestic workers.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
All right, so I'm going to tear these off, take them over to my friend.
You want to just take pictures Okay, there's 3 pages of them.
We're going to have a problem with Mentimeter on this one.
It only allows 12.
You can cut them down.
Okay, there's one.
Candace Avalos
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Got it?
You can probably send this to us.
I'm sorry, I hit you there.
Okay.
Dan Ryan
Give up a ballot.
Unidentified speaker
Core services and delivery systems.
What would make you look at this area 2 to 3 years from now and And say that's success.
We've made some success.
Loretta, and then Jamie, Candace.
Loretta Smith
For the people in the back, I got you covered.
Increased sidewalks with SIP, Ms. Priya, the Sidewalk Improvement and Paving Project.
Unidentified speaker
Jamie.
Jamie Dunphy
Um, meeting national standards for permit issuance.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Candace Avalos
It's me?
Unidentified speaker
I can't— we'll go Elana.
Candace Avalos
I was next.
Unidentified speaker
You're next?
Olivia Clark
Yeah.
Candace Avalos
Okay.
I'll just put it as a big bucket.
It's a lot of things, but community engagement, you know, it means a lot of things, but I think that's an important bucket around, like, delivery of services.
And then navigational delivery, navigational improvement.
Unidentified speaker
Tell me what you mean by that.
Candace Avalos
Hold on.
What am I trying to say?
Improve our navigational services.
Is that how I'm trying to say it?
Angelita Morillo
Like 311?
Candace Avalos
Yeah, it's like 311 and all those other things, but like just how people navigate the city.
It's just too confusing, right?
And that's a big frustration people hear.
It's kind of also what I was saying earlier around like people don't know what resources should provide what things, and so then they get frustrated.
So we just need more communication about what is available, what kinds of tools are at their disposal, and helping people navigate those.
And that include— that's part of community engagement too.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, good.
Thank you.
Um, oh, it's Elana.
No, I think we went along.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
We said we wanted parks under this bucket.
Steve Novick
Yep.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
So an improved registration system for recreational programming, increased swim lesson capacity so that every Portland kid who needs swim lessons can register for swim lessons, and increased parks camp capacity so that there are more opportunities for affordable day camps for working families across our city.
Unidentified speaker
Swim lessons—.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
3 Separate things.
Unidentified speaker
Swim lessons availability, is that what you're— that what you said?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Increased swim lesson capacity and increased parks summer camp capacity.
Unidentified speaker
Got it.
Okay, Sameer and then Olivia.
Sameer Kanal
I want to build off of something that Candace talked about, which is now that the communication side, that basically that we're in alignment with our public because we've conveyed expectations of what constitutes a core service so that people know, you know, what they can expect realistically and what can't be.
And I think this also relates to Steve's earlier point about which roads we can afford to maintain.
I have one more after that.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Sameer Kanal
Community centers being available, open, more of them as well, but places for people to go.
Unidentified speaker
Such a That's a big thing that somebody else touched earlier about third space.
This is one of those.
Mitch.
Then we'll go back to Olivia.
Mitch Green
I think that if— I think if we were to provide like clearinghouse services that like right now developers need to rely upon on their own, like architectural services, design services, For anyone who wants to either open up a preschool for all facility or, you know, wants to do that residential infill project, and they can just choose from a menu of different plans that are approved.
Just investing up front in that as a central service could go a long way.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, I just put improved development services process.
Mitch Green
Yeah, perfect.
Unidentified speaker
Let's do that.
I think Olivia and then Dan and then back to Jamie.
Olivia Clark
I think transportation's in here, right?
Is that right?
So I want to increase— well, increase the percentage of streets that are in good condition.
Unidentified speaker
I think—.
Candace Avalos
You want to wait?
Unidentified speaker
Let's save it for infrastructure.
I don't want to lose it.
But let's see, Jamie, I think we're to you.
Jamie Dunphy
Now I'm thinking mine might be infrastructure.
I was going to say specifically safe, clean, affordable, delicious water.
Delivery.
Is it infrastructure or is it core service?
Unidentified speaker
Because see, that's where we're at.
Let's—.
Jamie Dunphy
We have a— we'll save it for infrastructure.
We'll talk about the lake later.
Unidentified speaker
Angelita, and then Dan.
Angelita Morillo
Um, I was going to say, I don't know, and maybe this is also infrastructure, but reasonable rates for our different public utilities.
Unidentified speaker
All right, Dan, I've been ignoring you, but now I'm to you.
Steve Novick
It's okay.
Dan Ryan
Um, revive and support our neighborhood associations and the neighborhood business associations as well.
Unidentified speaker
Neighbor, I'm going to put them both because we're going to run out of Mentimeter room.
Oh, I brought the dots.
Yes.
Steve Novick
Make sure people know which services are actually county services.
Unidentified speaker
They can blame them for more stuff.
I'm going to put that under communication.
Yeah.
Okay.
Anything?
Now let me ask this Last question, and don't take this in the wrong way, but, you know, we talked a lot in the interviews and some even this morning.
It is— I'm going to call this excellence in good board governance a part of this?
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
I'm going to write it down and then I'm coming to you, Elana.
All right.
Yes.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I'm not sure how we want to capture this one, so I'm going to ask my colleagues to maybe help.
But when you talked about excellence in governance, I have also been thinking about where Thank you.
Excellence in service provision broadly requires commitment to our workforce, and when our workforce believes that this is the best possible place to work, we can retain the best possible employees who can then offer the most excellent services.
And so I'm not sure if it's in this category or if it's somewhere else, but I think somewhere we have I think it's important to note that if we want to provide the best possible services, we need to have a commitment through stability, through meeting the needs of our workforce as well.
And I don't know how we want to capture that, but I think it needs to be up here.
Unidentified speaker
So I hear a lot of city councils will say it this way: recruit and retain high-quality Sure.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Be the best possible city to work for so that we can recruit and retain high-quality employees.
Unidentified speaker
There's not enough room to put all of that in Mentimeter, but I—.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
But if we're doing stickers—.
Unidentified speaker
No, I don't want to use stickers.
Okay.
Be the best place to work.
Loretta Smith
So—.
Unidentified speaker
And you're exactly right.
I mean, you know, you know that saying, it's not the Xs and Os, it's the Jimmys and Joes, you know, and that's That's so true.
The city manager in my city where I live, he has a great saying.
He says, if you hire the right person, they'll do 1,000 good things you could never predict.
And if you hire the wrong person, they'll do 1,000 bad things you can't prevent.
And we've all been there, right?
So you're exactly right.
Okay.
What else in core services?
Please stand.
Dan Ryan
Make our council chambers more welcoming and safe for those in dissent.
Unidentified speaker
All right.
All right.
I'm bringing them to you, Hillary.
She's probably keeping up with me now.
Last one, then we vote.
I like your faith.
I got faith in Hillary.
She's the best.
All right, infrastructure.
And I know there's more to that word, but I'm just writing it up here this way.
All right, a couple of you wrote things down.
We're going to start with you, Olivia, and then Jamie, then we'll get you.
Olivia Clark
Okay, I would say that we need to increase the percentage of local streets and arterials that are in good condition.
We need to reduce the number of potholes.
That just falls under that.
Unidentified speaker
Streets and what else did you say?
Olivia Clark
And arterials.
The local streets and arterials in good condition.
We need to reduce the number of potholes.
We need to increase the resources for transportation infrastructure.
Unidentified speaker
All right.
Jamie, you had one.
Jamie Dunphy
Safe, clean, affordable, delicious drinking water.
Mitch Green
I was like, wait, where are we going?
Candace Avalos
We love Portland water.
Jamie Dunphy
Water in every tap and out of every toilet.
Unidentified speaker
That's good.
That's very good.
All right, what else under infrastructure matters to you?
Sameer and then Elana.
Sameer Kanal
I'm not sure Actually, come back to it.
I'm not sure if this follows— belongs in the last one.
Mitch Green
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
Elana.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Retain our level of open space, which means that we will need to increase our level of public open space as our buildings get denser.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Retain an increased level of open space.
Is that it?
Let's see.
Hold your hands up.
I'm just going to go around the table here.
Steve.
Steve Novick
Raise $45 to $50 million a year in order to keep our major streets in their current mediocre condition.
Unidentified speaker
That's pretty much what we got there.
Steve Novick
No, mine is a much more modest goal.
Not improve in good condition, maintain in their current mediocre condition.
Unidentified speaker
We got to find, right?
Is that— find $45 million to keep streets mediocre.
I've never heard a more glorious goal.
All right, Dan.
Dan Ryan
Yeah, increased tree canopy, especially in East Portland, and then complete the merger, the one, the one water merger between water and sewer.
Which most Portlanders think already happened since they get one bill.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, water merger.
Can I just say it that way?
Sameer Kanal
Sure.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Let's see, do you have one, Angelita?
Angelita Morillo
Yeah, uh, I was gonna say harden bike and pedestrian areas.
And this is going to be a really big one, but addressing fuel storage along If it's shorter, you could just put CEI Hub.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Uh, Mitch, let me turn the page here.
Okay, go ahead.
Mitch Green
Just for the record, put a checkmark next to CEI Hub, but I know you know that.
Yeah.
I would also say this council should adopt a legislative agenda that champions for local transit-oriented and surface street dollars and not as much for megaprojects that I would personally call boondoggles.
Unidentified speaker
For local—.
Mitch Green
Surface streets and transit.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Mitch Green
And fewer multibillion-dollar boondoggles.
Sameer Kanal
That'll capture it.
Unidentified speaker
I think every person had their hand up.
I'm just coming around the bend.
Sameer Kanal
I got a bunch, so I'll leave the boondoggles till later, but because I— I would love to have a hierarchy of plans so everybody knows what governs what.
Right now, there's always a plan that we passed 40 years ago that nobody remembers that comes out only when the conversation is 80% of the way over, and it's like, oh, but does that deal with this plan?
Or does it comply with this plan?
I'd love to improve our hard transit infrastructure, by which I mean light rail.
Unidentified speaker
Councilor Dan Ryan.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Sameer Kanal
So you can't backslide on light rail like you can backslide on a bus route.
And finally, emergency routes, specifically out of the North Portland Peninsula.
Unidentified speaker
What do we need to do with it?
Sameer Kanal
We got no bridges that are gonna hold up to a major earthquake out of the neighborhoods on the peninsula.
Shout out to Donna Cohen.
And Travis Nelson.
Unidentified speaker
Loretta, you have one?
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Olivia?
Olivia Clark
Okay, uh, for Sameer, I think a rowboat in every garage.
But I was going to say replace 100-year-old water pipes, but I think it's really expedite asset management finance plan.
That's really our number one plan.
Hierarchy.
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Tiffany.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Increasing bike mode share.
So that's the percentage of people commuting on bikes to school, to work.
And then that goes hand in hand with also decreasing car traffic on our greenways.
If you want people to be biking more, they also need to feel safer.
Loretta Smith
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
Was there— Candace?
Candace Avalos
Equity and anti-displacement policies to determine our infrastructure resources and more public restrooms.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, go back to your first one, equity and anti-displacement policies, and you had an explanation for them.
I'm sorry, Candace, go back to the one equity and anti-displacement policies, and you had a reason for it.
Candace Avalos
Yeah, I was just saying like to determine how we deploy our, our infrastructure resources, right?
Unidentified speaker
Very good.
Mitch, anything— I mean, Jamie, anything you want to add?
Elana?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I want to add to Sameer's comment about escape routes, if you're willing, because I had written down ensure every neighborhood has safe egress in a disaster, and I think it's more than just Not just the official emergency escape routes, but can everybody in every neighborhood get out?
And then when you said improve light rail, was that expand infrastructure, or was that just improve the infrastructure that we have?
Sameer Kanal
It's expanding, but it's expanding on the rail side, but it's improving on the overall transit side.
I think that we should look at bus routes that are likeliest to get Cut, but our high ridership and make them rail so that the state can't screw us.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I had written down more MAX lines, so I'm wondering if that's— okay, that's what you have there.
Perfect.
Sameer Kanal
Purple Line, St. John's to the airport.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I'm in.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
All right, Dan.
Dan Ryan
Revenue.
Yeah.
Allow us to spend our SDC fees on deferred maintenance.
Angelita Morillo
Yes.
Dan Ryan
Oh my God, you guys agreed with me.
Geez.
Unidentified speaker
STC funds on deferred maintenance.
Okay, so let me just say real quick, because we're going to take a, a stand-up break so we can make a shift.
Okay, Sameer.
Sameer Kanal
Okay, so reducing our utility rates to averages, regional averages.
Yeah, we had— I think we put it under— it's related.
Okay.
Exploring a public electrical utility and building the lid over I-5 and getting the interstate bridge replacement done, which are multi-trillion-dollar projects but not boondoggles.
Mitch Green
But only that, not a 10-mile widening project across the state?
Sameer Kanal
No, no 10-mile widening project across.
Steve Novick
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
So say it for me more briefly.
I-5 cap?
Dan Ryan
I-5 cap and I- Sameer, while you're on it, we could improve the look when you drive into Oregon.
The contrast between Welcome to Oregon and Welcome to Washington is quite a contrast.
Yeah.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Dan, I've suggested we go out there and just do some planting and cleaning, the 3 of us.
I'll invite the state rep to come.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, real quick, I hate Nyland Neighborhood Association.
We're going to take a quick 5-minute break.
And we're going to finish on time.
We're going to vote and you'll see it.
But I want to remind you, we won't lose any of your ideas.
So, you know, some of you had ideas that are not going to make it in the top 5, okay?
Because there's just no way to do it.
But we'll still gather it.
It'll be a part of the report.
So they'll be ranked.
So even if it's not the top 5, doesn't mean that idea is going to be lost.
Thank you.
But your colleagues are speaking, saying these are the priorities.
And then, you know, we will at a point, we'll work with you because obviously you've got committees that have some work to do with some of this.
So, you know, this is not the end of the journey.
That's what I'm trying to say.
So this is the start of the journey.
And some of these ideas are going to evolve and get better and get get some more traction and some of them will maybe fall by the wayside because you think it's not as big of a priority as we thought.
Okay, let's take 5 minutes and we'll come back and have your voting fingers ready.
Good work, guys.
Very good work.
Olivia Clark
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
That is probably the one that went on to— there's 24 under, um, uh, economy.
And so that may be— we may have to do sticky dots, or else we do 2 separate ones and then try to combine the top 12 and then have them rank those, which is going to take more time.
So it might be better just to do dots on that.
Yeah.
Okay, so let me finish this one.
Olivia Clark
All right.
Unidentified speaker
Waiting on Alana, but that's okay.
We've got a little bit of, um— oh, there she is, right behind me.
Ta-da!
Okay, so we actually— we've got this populated in the system.
It's going to pop up in your phone if you go back out to the QR code.
It's actually not just voting, you get to rank them.
So you'll slide them around in your phone and tell them which one's number 1.
So you get to vote on all of them in ranked priority, and then it'll populate where you ranked them.
Okay.
Yeah, sorry, y'all.
Y'all had a lot of things.
Sameer Kanal
Is there a limit on how many you can rank?
Unidentified speaker
Every single one of them you get to rank, and they— you should be able to slide them.
Yeah.
Jamie Dunphy
Is there an up or down arrow?
Unidentified speaker
Yes.
Yep.
And I had to abbreviate a couple of them, so I apologize if it didn't capture every single word, but we have those written on the flip chart, so when we give you the report, it'll be in there.
Candace Avalos
You can, but you don't have to rank all of them.
Unidentified speaker
Um, yeah, so you should slide them into the order in which you think they are priority.
Leave it at the bottom.
Just push it to the bottom.
Yeah, I think you have to slide them.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay, we'll see when we do this.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Yeah.
Oh, so I guess you don't have to, but then does it let you— oh, then yeah, you can do that.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Oh yeah, we can move it out of the ranking.
Unidentified speaker
So yes.
Yeah.
And then Okay, I had to do it on the fly, so I'm sorry I don't have all the instructions.
And then it should just auto-populate, I believe.
Yeah, because they're— you might tell them once they get in there, they have to hit submit.
Okay.
Oh, there they go.
Angelita Morillo
Yep.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, if you can type.
I can't type.
I was like—.
And then your chicken's I would have liked it.
The stickers, we're gonna have to use those.
His is not working?
Yeah.
Um, have you cleared, like, gotten completely out of it, cleared the whole program out and then started over?
Steve Novick
I think that's what I did, yeah, by accident.
Unidentified speaker
Apparently not.
We know you want to solve crimes.
Jamie Dunphy
We'll set your priorities.
Unidentified speaker
It orders it by how many people said it was 1, 2, 3.
So I'll get the backend report and it tells me who ranked 1, 2, 3.
And so I'll hand— I'll give that to you all, basically.
Yeah.
Did it work that time?
I was going to hand you my phone if it didn't, see if that would work.
Yes, it'll have all the data in the background.
So if, let's say, everybody put something at number 2, which pushed it to number 1, we'll be able to tell.
So what is the red versus blue?
It's— I don't think it has any indication.
I think it's just when I put the questions in.
But it has a whole backend that I'll share.
Things are getting real.
We're getting loopy.
It's getting loopy.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
No, we were talking about Steve being a detective.
Angelita Morillo
Oh, it moved.
Unidentified speaker
It jumped for some reason to that side.
That was because you had the join code in the URL at the top.
Oh.
Sameer Kanal
So I was taking that off so that people online can't just join.
Unidentified speaker
Gotcha, gotcha.
Oh, but I see now.
I gotcha.
Mitch Green
So I'll go move that.
Unidentified speaker
That's, it's okay.
Still waiting for a couple more.
Steve Novick
That was a time where he was a traceable private eye.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, that's the vibes.
Okay, one more.
Councilor Smith.
Oh, there we go.
Okay, so improve emergency response times, 911 response times, violence prevention, disaster mitigation, solving crimes.
So these are all in ranked order, which I think I think will help inform when things come back potentially to you all for policy discussions.
I have all the backend that will tell you just how many people said, you know, which ones, but this gives us the upfront look at which ones ranked the most highly according to you all.
Loretta Smith
What does the color mean?
Unidentified speaker
It doesn't.
It's just the design, and I had to add so many lines it just changed a bunch of colors.
But I have all— the system's smart enough to say this one got 8 number 1s, this one got 4 number 1s, so we'll have more data for you to make sure that the representation of their ranking is correct.
Okay.
Which one do we do next, Don?
Jamie Dunphy
You got it?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Okay, here's the next one.
Housing and homelessness.
Candace Avalos
Aye.
Unidentified speaker
It's not done yet, but you can watch it play out like a game.
Oh, typos.
Sorry about the typos.
I'm sorry, the very first one.
Exactly.
Hey, Transit oriented development made it up to 3rd Street.
Coming up.
Veterans are killing it.
Thanks a lot.
A little loopy.
Yeah.
Jamie Dunphy
You should see us in the evening meetings.
Unidentified speaker
We've just invented a new unit, bedrooms.
Perfect.
That reminds me, somehow we should have had council after dark as a priority.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
That's in the good governance piece.
Sameer Kanal
I consider that the epitome of good governance.
Mitch Green
We all gotta wear those old-timey sleeping caps?
Jamie Dunphy
Oh, one more.
Unidentified speaker
Oh, okay.
Okay.
What is that?
Increase in housing units and bedrooms.
Decrease in those falling into homelessness, but also connection— connecting to services, prevention services potentially.
Transit-oriented development, stabilize affordable housing market, reduce permit issuance time, increase the number who can afford homes located near, reduce eviction cases and Okay.
And so on.
Okay.
Now, of course, some of these are interrelated, so it's not expected that just because we take up number 1 first that we would not consider number whatever if it's part of the equation.
And so all of that will come back as it makes sense, because again, on the fly, we were, you know, kind of just trying to get general understanding of where you stood.
So, okay.
Housing and homelessness.
The next Next one before we go back to the old-fashioned way of doing business.
Core services and delivery systems.
Give us those.
I think we're going to be on time.
Angelita Morillo
I know.
Unidentified speaker
So normally these are more like in small rooms, small group type things?
Sometimes, um, sometimes it's just like this.
Usually the bodies aren't so large.
Oh, at retreats?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
So state law in Texas makes you open it at the beginning and allow someone to speak if it's a meeting or a workshop.
I think this group is particularly well suited for watching vote results.
Oh, we're so close.
So close.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Excellence in governance, number 1.
Yay, y'all.
That means that that conversation can start moving forward.
How do we, how do we be the best we We can be in this system that we're building as we go.
Registration system for parks and rec programs.
I think that was registration.
Was that right?
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
He abbreviated it.
I might have missed it.
Reasonable utility rates, development services process, customer experience, sidewalk coverage, community engagement, and down the list.
Okay.
All right.
So we've got our rankings on those in this system, and now we're going to do the old-fashioned way on the other 2 that had like 24 things each and wouldn't fit in this system, but we'll bring all of that back to you, uh, in, in a concerted report.
Yes.
All right, so I had to put them behind you.
You can see there's 3 for the economy and then there's 3 for infrastructure.
So you're going to get your own sheet of dots.
You have to turn this into me.
And Candace, if more than 8 dots are missing, we got a scandal because you can only vote— you can only vote 4 things.
I'm just telling you.
All right, so here's the numbers.
Look at the screen so you can see the numbers.
I was just teasing.
Mitch Green
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Your number 1, your number 1 priority is the orange.
So when you look and you say, that's my number 1 priority, Put an orange dot by it.
Pinky orange.
That's it.
But dark.
Dark, yeah.
I don't know why they didn't give us better colors.
Probably I got the cheap ones.
Yellow is your number 2 priority.
The green is your number 3 priority.
And then the orange, putrid orange there at the bottom Yeah, yeah, that's your 4th, and that's all you get to vote.
You only get to choose 4 priorities for economy, 4 priorities for infrastructure.
Now again, we won't lose any ideas, but you only get to vote them that way.
Okay, questions for me?
You don't really have to turn them in.
I trust you guys.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
This one's not as anonymous.
We can watch each other.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, yeah, it is on camera.
You should You should remember that.
Steve Novick
2, You get 8 total dots.
Unidentified speaker
You get, you get 8 total dots, but you got to use—.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Did I give you 2 sheets?
Unidentified speaker
Nope.
Here we go.
All right, read them and weep.
Put the dots kind of by the bullet point if you can.
That'll help me.
Remember what your numbers are, right?
Yeah, maybe I should bring that over this way.
So if you forget the scoring, here's the chart.
And you want us to use every dot?
No, you get to use 8 dots.
Mitch Green
Okay, 8 total.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, you get to use 8 total dots.
This was for the last— for the economy thing.
Jamie Dunphy
For the last—.
Unidentified speaker
Not the economy, the core services thing.
Oh, this one is?
Oh, so we can take this one out.
It just got a lot easier for you.
And remember, you can use 4 dots on infrastructure, 4 dots on the economy.
Well, you could get somebody to trade them to you.
I'll give you one of my— my orange.
Loretta Smith
Oh man.
Unidentified speaker
This is core services.
This one was a core service.
I actually only got an But I think you've already put it up because they said— yeah, yeah, those 3 are economy.
I know, that's why I had to use dots.
You always have to have a low-tech plan.
What happened to that?
No, it didn't crash, but there were so many of them we couldn't get it into Mentimeter.
So they were just listing them all.
But, but, but I was like, I told Raymond we would take these and we would consolidate them, you know, but it's better to let them feel like they got them up there.
Totally.
Our city council, my last retreat at You told me none of them had to do with core services.
No, not one.
All right.
So, so we will do, uh, takeaways and we're done.
Angelita Morillo
Okay.
Unidentified speaker
Let me get her.
Olivia Clark
Oh, that—.
Unidentified speaker
Of all people.
Oh, you, you can't take me seriously, Candace.
Can't take it seriously.
So Hillary, will you score it and tell them kind of how it rates?
Candace Avalos
I'll do the math.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, I was going to say, you know I'm not a math person.
All right, turn them in.
I got to count you.
Whoa, look away, she used an extra one.
Did you?
Did you share them?
Loretta Smith
I don't know.
Unidentified speaker
I don't know.
It's all right.
What'd you do?
It's all right.
She's an attorney.
I trust her.
I'll take your thing.
Yeah.
And we're finishing on time.
Mitch Green
Yeah.
Unidentified speaker
What time are you gonna be done?
4.
Steve Novick
About 4.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm meeting with the crew from Vancouver, so— Oh, cool.
Steve Novick
Yeah.
Jamie Dunphy
What are you guys doing tonight?
Unidentified speaker
Nothing.
Nothing.
We'll probably both go to dinner.
What time is your flight in the morning?
Mine's 7:30.
Oh, okay.
It's not too bad.
Yeah.
I knew it was daylight savings time, so I was like, I'm not going early.
They're like, you're on, you're on.
Oh, we gotta respect it.
Angelita Morillo
I do.
Unidentified speaker
I tortured you.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I feel victorious just having like narrowed enough that I only felt like I was killing 3 babies on each.
Jamie Dunphy
Oh, now we're gonna make you choose publicly which of your children you like the most.
Steve Novick
That's too mean.
Fedora-wearing guy.
Unidentified speaker
At the around the booth.
Angelita Morillo
Oh yeah, that glass backhand.
Just you.
Oh, you and Samir.
Unidentified speaker
Wasn't he wearing like a little cape thing too?
Steve Novick
He was wearing like a vest and like he was like very—.
Candace Avalos
Yeah, so I, I don't know, I just tested it out.
Unidentified speaker
So, so Hillary, remember you got to go in reverse order, like how you give points to it?
Yeah, I've made that mistake where I did— they were like, what?
Okay, council, we'll, um, we're gonna wrap it up here after, um, Olivia's finished voting.
Tiffany?
Where's Tiffany?
She may have stepped out.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, there she comes.
All right.
So while Hillary is tabulating them, I want to say just a couple of words to you and we'll wrap this up and she'll come back and tell us where we are.
So first of all, I want to tell you I'm very proud of you.
I really am.
I mean that.
I work with lots of councils.
Our company does, I don't know, 50 of these a year.
And Hillary and I do the majority of those.
And you guys have done a lot of great work.
And there was a lot of people that said to us, some of them around this table, we're not going to get anywhere.
But you did, you did, and I'm proud of you.
And I, I'm not surprised.
I came into today after the interviews and I was like, yo, they're going to be just fine.
And you have.
And so I appreciate it.
I know it's not easy, and this is not by any means the hardest thing you have to do.
You have a lot of hard things in front of you.
I know that.
Thank you.
Kudos to you for the hard work today.
And what I'd like to do is let you know we'll create a report, we'll capture all of what's said, none of what you said will be lost.
It will get a report that we will send to you and to Raymond.
And then, you know, you probably have some more slow conversations about each one of these priorities ahead of you, which will include your subcommittees.
But you've got a great— you made some great strides today.
And so one of the things we like to do just to kind of wrap things up, Raymond, I want to let you say anything you want to say.
We'll kind of wrap that up.
But I want to let you share if you have a brief takeaway for the day.
You don't have to, and you can't be long, but if you want to share, hey, here's my takeaway or one of my takeaways from the day, I want to give you that chance.
So Anybody want to start?
Angelita Morillo
All right.
Angelita.
I feel like this was really helpful, and it did make me see that we have more aligned areas than I think we normally do.
And I wish that we could do this without being filmed because I think that we could have— I think because we're always kind of performing when we're up on the dais, it changes the dynamic.
Dynamics a bit, but I think that here it was a little bit less that way.
And so I think that's why we were able to have those better conversations.
Um, but honestly, I just— I did really appreciate the exercise at the beginning, just getting to hear more personal things about each person.
I appreciated getting to know more about you guys as people, and it was very meaningful.
So appreciate you.
Loretta Smith
All right, thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Somebody else?
Steve?
Comment and a question.
Steve Novick
Comment is This was nowhere near as painful as I thought it was going to be.
A question for the council president.
When you said councilors assemble, was that a deliberate reference to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Power Rangers assemble?
Jamie Dunphy
No, I'll make— when I make a Power Rangers reference, you will know.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Steve Novick
All right, very good.
Thank you, Steve.
Unidentified speaker
Anybody else?
Take away, Mitch.
Mitch Green
Yeah, I just have to say the irony is not lost on me that we had so many ideas around economy and infrastructure that we couldn't put it in the technology system, which— and we're here for a prioritization exercise, which I think is really kind of funny.
But we know how to adapt, and I do think that I see some dots there that I can live with.
And again, we don't always agree up here, but I really think that I'm serving with some of the smartest people in this city.
Unidentified speaker
You are a very smart council, yes indeed.
Somebody else?
Olivia?
Olivia Clark
I think this was very beneficial.
I really enjoyed it, actually more than I thought I would.
But I— and I have to say that something I was thinking actually was demonstrated today, that there are real generational differences here that we need to recognize in terms of our our vocabulary and how we react to things, and we need to be sensitive to that.
All of us do.
So I really appreciate it.
Unidentified speaker
Great point.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Anybody else?
Takeaways?
Elana?
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
We had a lot more hopes and dreams there than we have not just money for, but time for.
And, you know, I think there's going to be a lot left off the table.
But I think that we had the opportunity today to also see not just a little more about each other personally, but a little more about some potential partnerships.
Loretta Smith
Mm-hmm.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
When we look at what made the priority list and what didn't, and who else put their dots there, and, you know, who else voted for those best hopes and worst fears at the beginning, there's some real opportunity for Partnerships that we may not have seen before that I hope we can follow up on as a body after today.
Unidentified speaker
I think that's true.
And, you know, I always say organizations become what you talk about.
And you will not accomplish 100% of what you talk about.
But you'll accomplish exactly 0% of what you don't talk about.
And to your point, there's more left on the table than what you can do.
I know I mentioned this to you.
We've worked with the City of Frisco, suburb of Texas, in the Dallas area, for 15 years.
They've done great.
But I can't tell you how many council retreats I've done with them where they listed, we want a Class A office space, and we didn't get it.
We want a Fortune 100 company, and they didn't get it.
We want that.
But it kept coming up, kept coming.
And today they actually have more Class A office space than they know what to do with, uh, post-pandemic.
But they also have a number of Fortune 100 companies.
And so it may not all get done while you're on these seats, or it may, but it's likely to get done because you brought it up.
All right, Hillary, you got a report for us?
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
I'll bring them up front.
Okay, Tiffany and then Sameer.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I enjoyed just observing how you both facilitated too.
I think you did it well in a lot of ways, and there was pretty tight facilitation.
And I appreciated that there were— you kind of mixed up and modeled different ways of Thank you.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I appreciate you engaging us and calling on us.
That was, I think, helpful for me to see.
I saw some of the places where we got in the weeds, the terminology, wordsmithing, some of the divides that Olivia was bringing up.
Those stood out to me.
I appreciated in the beginning that we kind of started off and were rooted in— there was something that you said about like it's clear that we all really care about our constituents in our districts, and I think that felt good to start there.
And then I, I could feel that in the room too.
And then I think whenever we get a little bit more human, I'm reminded that not only are we bringing our constituents in the room, but we're also bringing a lot of our own, own like lived experiences.
And I could see that when people were starting to share, and I think that's always helpful.
Unidentified speaker
It's beneficial.
Yeah.
Yes.
All right, thank you.
Sameer, you had your hand up.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, first, thanks to Dan for pushing for this.
I think there's some imperfections, but a lot of really good stuff here, and I appreciate you pushing for it.
I know, Tiffany, you have as well in the past.
That community public safety definitional conversation is one I've been hoping to have for a year, so thank you for giving space for that.
And I think we, including you both, had the right people in the room today, so that is a big part of my I'm gonna share my feelings on this.
I'm really excited about this.
I'm thinking, as I look at the people who've established committees here, about how to take this and make it work in committees, as opposed to— I think everybody had the right causality on this, so saying this first and then do it.
But we have a committee structure that I think actually aligns pretty well with the priorities we set.
So good job to you both.
Unidentified speaker
All right.
Excited about that.
Oh, Loretta, you had your hand up.
We'll give Hillary just a minute.
Loretta Smith
Yes, I thought this was very, very helpful.
It was great to hear people talk about some ideas that you don't normally hear them talk about because we're not in everyone's committee.
So it's, it's really good, and I appreciate the, um, the moderation of what you did, and it was, it was very good to keep us in track.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you.
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
All right, Dan.
Dan Ryan
I thought it was great that we actually had some conflict.
I think that that's necessary.
It's— Portland plays nice too much of the time, and we don't often feel safe enough to have dialogue.
That's not easy.
And it wasn't lost on me that it was usually in the areas of public safety or in the areas of homelessness and housing because it's painful.
It's painful and it's difficult and it's complicated.
I also hope this was helpful to you, Raymond.
That was one of the main reasons I wanted to do it, because I thought it'd be helpful for the staff to understand what our thinking is as they go into budget planning.
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, for sure, for sure.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Yes, yes, yes.
I just hope we can kind of remember the things that were positive and helpful that came out of this, because I know Raymond and I have talked about how in the future it would be great if we could do one All right.
Unidentified speaker
Very good.
We'll come to you, Raymond, to share at the end.
But Hillary, talk us through the scores.
Okay.
This is going to be easier because it's not split up.
So increase the percentage of streets and arterials in good condition, top of the list.
And then we had reducing potholes.
Increasing the level of open space.
Then— The CEI hubs.
Oh, thank you.
Oh yes, I missed this one.
CEI hubs.
And then there's another one down here.
Increase number of people biking to school and work.
Safe, clean drinking water.
And then some others.
And so we'll keep the scores and then put them in in order for you all.
Next.
And then this one, I had to split it onto 2 things, so forgive me if I have to jump around here.
Higher percentage of Portlanders with living wage being able to live in the city.
This one, storefronts coming back to downtown.
Lower incidence of childhood poverty.
Raymond C. Lee
Let's see.
Unidentified speaker
Let's see, this one was 8.
Diversify and create new economic hubs beyond downtown.
Decrease the percent of household income going to housing and childcare.
And then there was one over— this one had 13.
So strong tourism, conference, etc.
And then employment opportunities for people coming out of homelessness would probably be the next one.
So again, we'll make sure none of this is lost.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you.
And Dan, Hillary and I are probably going to have some conflict after this about my handwriting.
Oh my gosh, we're going to have a talk.
I should have been the scribe.
Steve Novick
Hillary, I just wanted to note that I think you skipped over one towards the bottom which got a few dots, which is more public restrooms.
Unidentified speaker
Oh yes, I did miss that one.
Yeah.
Olivia Clark
All right.
Unidentified speaker
Well, guys, we've really enjoyed it, really appreciate it.
You've been so good to work with.
Hope we have a chance to do that in the future.
But Raymond, let me let you have final word and we'll be dismissed by the president.
Raymond C. Lee
First of all, I just want to say thank you to the council.
These conversations are never easy as you talk about what are the critical things that this city needs to be doing to be a city that we all proud of, proud of the city that we live in today, but also proud of the city that we're building for towards the future.
I appreciate everyone's engagement in this work because this work that you're doing today will help shape the work that 7,000 other employees will be doing and try to help move this city forward.
This is a building block to where we're heading as an organization and as a community.
And without this building block, everything else can't stand upon anything that we do.
This is the first phase of us building towards a strategic plan.
This is the first phase of us truly developing a North Star for our organization and for our community.
And you are the essence of that.
You are the reason why we're heading in the direction that we're heading.
And as I talk to people throughout the community and the organization, I always tell people, We're at a pivotal point in our time as an organization, as a community.
And where we'll go for the next 25 years will be dictated by this leadership group.
This leadership group will have a tremendous impact on the quality of life for people we can't even imagine, businesses who haven't even started yet, and visitors who haven't even dreamed of coming to Portland yet.
So I just want to say thank you, not only for today, but the dedication that you're giving day in and day out to this organization, and the dedication and hard work you've given to the residents and citizens and businesses that you represent on a daily basis.
Kudos to everyone in the room to get through it.
I know it's not always easy, but we made it, and we got a lot more hard work to go through.
So I'm proud of you all.
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Councilor Smith.
Jamie Dunphy
Take a donut to reward yourselves for your good work.
I need to really quickly thank Open Signal, our folks at BTS, Adam's running around making sure we're all doing this.
Unidentified speaker
Yes, thank you, Adam.
Jamie Dunphy
Thanks to our security team.
Thanks to Haley Blonsley.
Thanks to Dana Richardson and the council ops team for paying for all this, y'all.
We forced them to have to So thank you for that.
Oh, and to the council clerks, thank you, Keelan, for being here on a Saturday.
Candace Avalos
Keelan?
Jamie Dunphy
I'm sorry, Rebecca.
Oh my God, Rebecca, I'm sorry, I didn't see— I saw the blonde top of your head.
And to all the staff who helped facilitate and all the decision makers who made decisions to make this happen, thank you all.
We are adjourned.