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.
Steve Novick
Good morning.
I call this meeting of the Community and Public Safety Committee to order.
It is Tuesday, um, uh, September 15th, 9:30 AM.
Could the clerk please call the roll?
Keelan McClymont
Good morning.
Angelita Morillo
Morillo.
Keelan McClymont
Here.
Loretta Smith
Here.
Keelan McClymont
Here.
Novick.
Sameer Kanal
Here.
Steve Novick
Uh, could we hear the statement of conduct?
Eric Zimmerman
Welcome to the meeting of the Community and Public Safety Committee.
Sameer Kanal
To testify before this committee in person or virtually, you must sign up in advance to the committee agenda at www.portland.gov/council/agenda/community-and-public-safety-committee or by calling 311.
Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link.
Eric Zimmerman
Registration for virtual testimony closes 1 hour prior to the meeting.
Sameer Kanal
In-person testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard.
Keelan McClymont
If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for 3 minutes unless the Chair states otherwise.
Your microphone will be muted when your time is over.
The Chair preserves order.
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If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given.
Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting.
Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass.
Additionally, the committee may take short recess and reconvene virtually.
Your testimony should address the matter being considered.
When testifying, state your name for the record.
Sameer Kanal
If you're a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent.
Virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
We have 3 items on our agenda today.
First, there's a report back on a resolution Councilor Smith sponsored earlier this year to study police officer recruitment goals and the cost of achieving and sustaining increased staffing levels.
My apologies to Councilor Smith for taking so long to get this on the agenda.
Between the budget, other legislation, and staff events, second is continued discussion of the Protecting Portland Buildings Ordinance that would prohibit the carrying of firearms into certain city buildings by persons who have concealed weapons permits.
The sponsor has an amendment I'll be motioning as a courtesy.
We'll have the city administrator here to share his perspective.
Third, we have a new ordinance from Councilor Zimmerman to amend the Conduct Code for Portland Parks with updates to ejection and exclusion criteria.
But our first order of business is the approval of the Community and Public Safety Committee meeting minutes from July 7th, 2026 through August 4th, 2026.
Are there any objections to approval of the minutes?
All right, by unanimous consent, the minutes are approved.
Brian Hughes
I could—.
Steve Novick
Um, the clerk, read the, the second item.
Keelan McClymont
Item number 2, document number 2026-314, Portland Police Expansion Cost Report.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Um, we have a somewhat lengthy presentation today, but I think that the, um, content warrants it.
We're on for 30 minutes, but if you can get through before then, that would be great.
So take it away.
Nick McDonald
Good morning, my name is Nick McDonald.
I'm a performance analyst with the Public Safety Service Area.
Steve Novick
Good morning.
Brian Hughes
Brian Hughes, Deputy Chief, Portland Police Bureau.
Nick McDonald
So I'm going to present on the report presented to council pursuant to Resolution 42 directing the DCA to prepare a report on expanding— the cost of expanding the police bureau.
Just some background.
This kind of issue has been looked at in the past.
In 2015, there was a staffing study.
Yes.
Which looked at increasing staff from 924 in 2015 to 951.
In 2020, there was an updated study that looked just at patrol officers, recommending increasing patrol officers to 399.
But those recommendations were never fully implemented at the time.
So we took a workload analysis framework.
We looked at what work the police bureau is expected to do, how much time it takes, and the level of performance that the We looked at 3 primary scenarios.
One of them, the lowest here, took the period around 2020 as our kind of scenario for most challenging recruitment and retention.
The high scenario there looked at a scenario where we have a dramatically improved recruiting and retention situation.
And the medium scenario there, we think, is a plausible increase on a glide path that reflects our best recruiting performance over the last few years sustained over a decade.
So the model here of that middle scenario charts out what that would look like over about 10 years.
We see a gradual increase in the number of available non-trainee officers.
A full trainee docket.
And by about 2030, we eliminate our vacant positions and would need reauthorization for increased.
And by June 36th, we reach the full level of our model.
So one of the main assumptions here is that a decent proportion of these officers would be assigned to patrol with the goal of reducing response times for priority service.
You can see over the past few years, we've had a decline in both the number of dispatched calls for service and an increase in the response times for all categories of call.
The patrol staffing level over the past 10 years has been pretty stable at about 330 officers.
The decline in officers has not really affected patrol staffing levels.
It's been one way that that's been dealt with is an increased reliance on overtime.
One of our assumptions in this model is that a decent chunk of new hires would be assigned to reduce overtime.
We think that by 2036, we could reduce overtime by approximately 2/3, saving about $13 million a year.
Thank you.
By reducing personnel backfill overtime and planned mission overtime.
There would be about a third of the overtime that would not be able to be removed, which would be emergency situations, warrant service, those kinds of things.
The Chief's Office put together a staff— a sample staffing plan of how we would use this number of officers.
I'm not going to go through this in detail.
It's in the report.
But you can see a large chunk of this goes into patrol operations.
We envisage a new precinct, but an increase across the board in most areas as well.
So when we're looking at the assumptions, all of these numbers are in non-inflation-adjusted dollars.
They use the average current compensation rates for each job classification.
They don't include expected increases for future years.
The model includes total taxpayer burden.
Both the general fund and the FPDNR levy.
Although those aren't city expenses, they are expenses to the taxpayer that are incurred because of city policy.
So we did include them in the model.
It includes core costs of salary and benefit staff and immediate costs like training.
It does not include capital facilities, non-sworn support staff, recruitment spending, or equipment and vehicle procurement beyond initial officer outfitting.
We think the recruitment and retention would cost approximately $3.5 million a year in training and onboarding costs in addition to other costs.
So you can see in the first year here, we add about $700,000 in costs, and that increases to a total of about $38 million above current levels by 2036.
This is net of overtime savings, but not including the items that we didn't include.
In addition to these items, we think there's about $338 million in capital costs associated with new buildings and vehicle storage and, you know, places to put hundreds more offices.
So in summary, this is what we estimate the costs to be, about $700,000 in the first year, going up to about $38 million annually by 10 years, factoring in about $340 million in capital costs over that period, plus the various other costs like vehicles that would be associated.
Thank you for your patience.
I understand there's a lot of dense information there, but I I'd like to pass it over to any questions you might have.
Loretta Smith
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank the Public Safety Service Area and the, um, Portland Public, uh, the Portland Police Bureau for completing the report.
Uh, is Aaron Smouts here?
Could you come up to the, to the table, please.
In, in February, I introduced a resolution, uh, that would require Deputy City Administrator for, uh, Public Safety to provide a report on police officer recruitment goals and costs because council was being asked to make major decisions about police staffing without a complete picture of what would actually take— it would take to recruit, train, deploy, and sustain additional officers.
Council adopted that resolution and directed the Deputy City Administrator for Public Safety to answer several fundamental questions: what the level and the organization structure of staffing would look like and support the public safety outcomes Portland expects, how long would it realistically take to recruit, hire, train, and deploy additional officers?
What would that growth cost, not only at the point of hiring but over the long term?
And what additional investments would be required in training, supervision, vehicles, equipment, facilities, uh, civilian staff, and professional development?
And lastly, and how should Portland plan for these costs as our city and its public safety needs evolve over the next decade.
So today's present— presentation is the result of that direction that was given in February.
I appreciate staff providing council with a more, uh, transparent and fact-based foundation for this conversation.
I want to emphasize that this report is not a final staffing plan, is it, um, Deputy, uh, Chief Hughes.
And, and it does not recommend one specific number of officers.
It gives council a framework for which to decide what services and outcomes we expect from PPB, um, and what staffing time, infrastructure, and funding will be required to deliver all these different, uh, subsets.
So for me, um, since this is not a, a specific staffing plan, uh, Deputy Chief what additional analysis and community engagement are needed to turn it into an actionable workload-based staffing plan?
Brian Hughes
Thank you for the question, Councilor Smith.
Brian Hughes, Deputy Chief, Portland Police Bureau.
I think you're spot on there.
I think it would involve more public comment and input to help us to be more informed about exactly what the public wants to see with regards to right now we're under-resourced and not able to properly handle property crimes in an appropriate way, and that might be something that Portlanders are interested in.
So this, uh, the allocations that you saw earlier in the slides were, uh, you know, what we would like to see and based on feedback that we're hearing from public.
But I think if, you know, we were to go forward and actually have an honest conversation about properly resourcing this police department, I think we would have a different conversation.
Then we would have those kinds of conversations to help direct that work.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
I like that answer.
And because we have to center what we do around what our community would like.
And so having that kind of direction going forward, I think it's important and it's critical.
And we would be intentional on making sure that we bring the public into a system that sometimes to them feels not as transparent as we should be, but centering all of our decisions around what, what the public says, I think it's very helpful.
In terms of PPB to establish specific staffing requirements tied to the 7-minute high-priority response time goal, I know we've gotten a lot of pushback, and we've gotten a lot of criticism about how quickly we respond.
If we could wave our magic wand today without any additional resources, are there ways that we can increase response time?
Brian Hughes
I think we're at a point now where we're at a bare-bones organization and have trimmed a lot of the fat, especially in this year of budget cuts, to— we do the best we can and deploy the resources we have the best we can.
So right now I say we're a very lean organization, and when we start talking about making a serious impact on response times, then we start having to have the honest discussion about growing this police department.
Loretta Smith
So one of the things that I noted from the report that was the presentation that we just were given, it said that patrol officers didn't go down.
It was at 332, if I'm not mistaken.
Nick McDonald
That's correct.
Loretta Smith
So if we have maintained 332 patrol, it seems to me that we should be able to respond quicker and that the majority of the decrease were in-office.
Nick McDonald
Well, I'll defer to DC Hughes on this, but one thing that has changed is the nature of the calls.
They are taking longer.
We've also had policy changes like welfare hours that takes about 10% of patrol officers' time, and there are, there are various factors which have contributed to that.
Loretta Smith
Okay, so what you're suggesting is that we still need additional patrol officers?
Nick McDonald
Well, so the, the, the equation for patrol is you have the number of calls, the length of time a call takes, and the number of officers available to deal with them, and, you know, the time that they're spending.
And you have to balance those 3 factors.
You either drive down the number of calls by diverting them somewhere else or choosing not to respond to them at all, or you increase the number of officer time being spent on response, or you somehow manage to decrease the time it takes to respond to a call.
But those are the 3 kind of primary elements that affect it.
Loretta Smith
Okay, thank you.
And my last question, Aaron, could you introduce yourself, please?
Aaron Schmautz
Sure.
Aaron Schmaltz, president of Portland Police Association.
Loretta Smith
You came and gave a brief presentation at my Coffee with a Cop in community.
There were a couple of things that you wanted to point out about the report that was critical, that you thought that the people needed to know about?
And as Deputy Chief noted, that any further expansion of this report should also include the community and what they want.
What were those items that you talked about that you thought were critical?
Aaron Schmautz
I talked a lot at that meeting.
You know, I think overall, historically, the police bureau has been structured improperly.
The way that you look at our funding mechanism, I know there's a lot of conversation around our staffing and how people are hired and how we navigate, but the police bureau does not have an overtime budget.
There was a budget note from 2020 that indicated that we needed to make sure that we were staffing properly and also ensuring that we had staffing trajectory.
When you look at the police bureau, vacancy savings has been how we've paid for, uh, for overtime in the past.
Um, and, um, but at the end of the day, you know, I look at, at the work we did, uh, with school police.
Um, I ran that program before it was, uh, disbanded.
Um, as the police bureau has lost staffing, we've never really done a true gap assessment of the work that is missing as a result of us just plugging holes.
Um, when we took the school police out of, of the Portland public ecosystem, we actually did a gap assessment, and everyone was pretty surprised about the holes that police fill in the absence of other resources.
But I can tell you that, for instance, when we would have like a football game, we worked directly with Office of Violence Prevention, with other partners, to create and manifest a good safety plan working together.
And I would just argue that as we continue to build other systems in Portland, unless we build those systems and ensure that our systems are working together, Right.
We might as well just throw the money in the trash.
Because the bottom line is, is if we're not— you know, you create PSR, you create, uh, you know, increased OVP, all these things are good, um, but if they're not working directly with and training with law enforcement to ensure that we have agreed-upon outcomes, we're never going to see any actual benefit for that investment.
Loretta Smith
Yes, and, and I said this is my last question, but I want to direct this to, um, CA Lee, who's our, uh, interim, um, Public Safety DCA.
One of the things that I learned, and, you know, this is like on-the-job training, and it's a master course in how to understand what actually goes on, but I was surprised to learn that fire had an overtime budget that was put into the budget.
And Will you, will you do the same for the police going forward?
Is that on the table for discussion to have an overtime budget for police?
Unidentified speaker
I think it's something that we can have a conversation with, with the police as we look at developing the mayor's proposed budget.
I think it's something truly tangible that we have to look at when we look at the limited resources that we have from a resource standpoint, human capital, from officers being out on the street and the demand for more officers.
As it relates to the number of calls that we have coming in and their ability to respond to them in a timely fashion.
I think it really comes down to as well the level of service that we're looking for out of our police department.
If we're looking for certain response times to be certain things or we're looking for them to respond to certain type of calls, I think that's a conversation that we have to have as it relates to the resources that we have to be able to do that.
Does overtime help in this conversation?
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
Or do we need to add additional officers?
I would just, you know, put this one little caveat out here as well too.
We have to be cautious about the amount of overtime that we're asking officers to work because at that point in time, just like driving or anything else, once you work so many hours, your response time and your ability to respond to these things is reduced tremendously.
So we wanna make sure that we're putting not only our officers but the public in the best safe, predictable predicament that we can put them in, considering the work that we're asking them to do.
Loretta Smith
I agree.
And I was pleasantly surprised that the report had that there was going to be a 2— if this was going to be implemented, that there was a 207% increase in community, you know, activity in community policing.
And I was personally, just happy to see that.
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Councilor Murillo.
And by the way, I think that I'm going to hope that we can hold ourselves to like 5 minutes apiece so that we have time for a second round.
Angelita Morillo
No, it's not going to be 5 minutes.
I have a lot to say on this.
And if we're going to set standards for people on the committee, it has to be universal.
Thank you guys for coming today and for sharing this report.
I do have some pretty big concerns about the process that went into creating this report.
A community member sent my office the results of a public records request that included 12 pages of feedback from PPB to LEADS in the public safety service area.
And my reading of the report compared to this feedback is that a lot of correcting information and feedback is missing in this report.
And that includes definitions and the characterizations of the I was really struck by the fact that there is consideration for a new 4th precinct and that there was direct PBV feedback that they were unfamiliar with the research done to identify the 4th pre— 4-precinct model and are curious about what factors are included to inform the need for them.
So I'm very curious about that assertion as well.
So before I get into my questions, I just wanted to name some of that I was really struck by 3 things in the report that could be done to improve staffing and retention that don't include hiring new officers right away, and I want to talk about those a little bit because I feel like these are important areas to understand and work on before we launch into any kind of new hiring or staffing or investment plan.
For the call response times, on page 16 of the report, it It says that the call response times have gone up at the same time that the number of calls, or low, medium, and high priority calls, have gone down.
In fact, response times to high priority calls have gone up the most at the same time that they have seen the greatest decrease in call volume.
The report states this information, which is, I think, good to acknowledge, but it doesn't really explain why this would be.
And something other than workload seems to be impacting call response times.
So before we suggest adding any new officers, we should understand what the driver is for this and how we might correct for it in order to inform us for an actual staffing position.
Because I, you know, sitting in this committee, we keep hearing the calls are just taking longer, but I have no clarity on why the calls are suddenly taking longer, what those factors are.
And I think that's really critical because maybe our officers are initiating calls that are unnecessary, maybe, uh, you know, there's a lot of different things, but I would like to know why so we can make that decision.
The report also, um, so does the Bureau have a plan to explore what might be the root cause of some of these calls taking longer than they did before?
Brian Hughes
Councilor, yes, we initiated that discussion with you all 2 weeks ago in this committee and are continuing the work to look at a better way of explaining that through the president of the— I'm sorry, the chair of the committee, and plan to come back at future meetings to discuss it more in depth, to have a more robust discussion on why the calls are taking longer.
Certainly de-escalation is part of that, and time is part of that, giving people the ability to make better choices, use time as a tactic.
De-escalation as a tactic, number of officers as a tactic.
There was an incident just this week up at the library, I think it was on Sunday, where a person had what we believed to be a gun.
Turned out it was a BB gun and was waving it around, uh, real populated area.
If you've seen any of the social media posts on that, there's been several, but you see a good 7, 8, 9 police officers standing there.
Those are just the ones you see.
There's other ones you can't see that are in the street to ensure somebody doesn't drive down or walk down into the middle of what we're trying to do there.
We were able to use time and get additional resources there, including— you may have seen the police shield.
They're holding a big shield so they can safely go up and deal with this person, put them in handcuffs, and take the— what turned out to be a BB gun away from them.
But that's like a very visual reminder this week of what, you know, that looks like in practice.
And And, you know, a decade ago, I was asked the question here 2 weeks ago what that might have looked like.
And I don't know that we would've spent that much time on a call like that.
But, you know, through the settlement agreement and looking at how we operate as a police bureau, that's one of the changes we've made for the better that had a better outcome.
So we'll come back at future CAPS presentations and dive into those a little bit more for you.
Aaron Schmautz
Thank you.
Angelita Morillo
I appreciate that.
I think it'll be helpful for us to get more clarity.
And we appreciate that if there are efforts in de-escalation, I think that's great.
The report also notes a number of concrete examples about how police could further reduce their call and workload by shifting work to other agencies or from sworn to non-sworn staff.
I thought that was pretty interesting, and I think that we should prioritize recalibrating workload before we work on staffing so that we are making a proposal from the right starting point.
One example that stood out to me in the report was that in April 2026, the Call Allocation Working Group recommended that approximately 14,000 welfare check calls could shift from PPB to Portland Street Response.
And the report also suggests that it would take 4 to 5 years to fully realize that shift in call load.
Can you tell me why it would take that 4 to 5 years to shift that call load or how we can make this a priority?
Nick McDonald
Yeah, in addition to the expansion plan that Portland Street Response currently has, that represents about a doubling of their capacity.
What would it look like in practice if we were trying to speed up that process?
Well, I think we have a lot of work to do in terms of capacity, and there's just a training pipeline and an expansion tempo that, you know, that is the estimate from Portland Street Response of what that would take.
I mean, there are— I guess there are ways to speed that up if we wanted to invest dramatically in it, but, you know, doubling the size of an agency is a painful process.
I would defer to Portland Street Response on that question.
That's just sort of more of an operational area for them.
Angelita Morillo
Okay.
That's fine.
We can ask that in the next meeting we cover this.
But I think that that's interesting, right?
Because if there are 14,000 welfare calls where we have calls all the time in the city of actual violent incidents that we need police to respond to, and they— I don't think you should be spending your time on welfare calls.
That's things that other people are trained for, and police are some of our most expensive employees.
So anytime that they're responding to something where it's not an immediate violent crime, we are spending the maximum amount of tax dollars and staff resources to respond to that type of call.
On page 19 of the report, we also noted that officer-initiated calls have been in the 21 to 23% range Or about 42,000 to 46,000 calls.
The report says that these are calls where officers are spending a greater percentage of patrol time on self-initiated activities.
And then on page 21, the report says that there is not enough capacity to investigate child abuse cases, domestic violence, property crimes, elder fraud, or white-collar crime, and that before we consider staffing up investigations, we need to staff up patrol.
Thank you.
Has the Bureau considered limiting officer-initiated calls in favor of improving call response times and investigation capacity needs?
Brian Hughes
Thank you for the question, Councilor.
You know, that's a balance.
That's a balance that we constantly face with regards to the work that we do.
A lot of the self-initiated work is traffic stops, and as I said 2 weeks ago, high crash corridor, trying to reduce fatal crashes is an aspect of that, but then our stolen vehicle missions.
They just did their last one on Saturday night.
I'm so proud of them.
I listened for about 15 minutes while I was attending an immigrant refugee welcoming week event at ERCO.
And in that 15 minutes, I think they recovered 3 or 4 stolen cars.
And I'm thinking, okay, that's 3 or 4 cars that we're going to get back to somebody that's probably just trying to make a living in this city and needs their car to do that.
So, I mean, that's a giant bucket of self-initiated activity work that that we intentionally do, and I'm supportive of it.
We'll continue doing it, but it's a balance.
You're right.
And we have to balance, you know, the call load and response times.
But when we look at the call response times, we also break that down as well.
You know, we have, you know, a car gets broken into and how long we respond to that versus how long we respond to the weapons calls that we discussed 2 weeks ago.
And, you know, we are thank you.
We are placing a priority on responding to the immediate high priority 1 calls.
Unfortunately, the way priority calls are banked right now, as your report suggested 2 weeks ago, that includes the top 3 priorities, which is not only somebody could be injured right now or is being injured right now or there's a weapon involved, somebody could be injured to the third one, which is a crime is occurring now, any crime is occurring now.
So it's constant balance.
Right.
And then, you know, you have those life safety priorities, and then you also have kind of what is a customer service priority.
You know, what are the expectations of Portlanders?
If somebody's car gets broken into, do I get a police response within an hour or, you know, 5 hours or 6 hours?
I'd say on a day like Sunday when all the officers downtown are dealing with the person we believe to be armed, that's going to look quite a bit different.
So I know that's a long-winded answer to your question, but— You know, self-initiated work is an important part of what we do to keep the city safe.
So for clarity—.
Steve Novick
So, Councilor Morillo, I'm gonna have to ask to move on to Councilor Zimmerman, 'cause I think that we do wanna get this done by 10:30, and you've had 10 minutes.
That leaves about 8 minutes for each of the rest of us.
So Councilor Zimmerman.
Eric Zimmerman
Okay, um, I'm interested in— I don't know that I have the right language to describe the, the function that I'm talking about, but what number of trainee slots does the Bureau need every year above what we consider the full staffing model?
And I, and I say that from right.
You all know I've spent a long time in the Army.
We have a pipeline of recruits that we know this many hundred thousand need to go to basic training every year to keep up with whatever the Army says is the minimum standard for the country.
Fire is kind of similar in terms of getting toward where they can start overstaffing so that they always have somebody in the pipeline.
So I'm trying to get a sense of what that looks like eventually.
And that would— that is somewhat unrelated to are we an 850-officer town, a 1,000-officer town.
It's what is the percentage to, or how much do you address it to, keeping that pipeline always ready and always coming out of training to replace the next retiree?
I guess I'm trying to get a sense of sense of that?
Because the way we, we do a lot is we— because we're in this situation of so many vacancies, I think it hasn't allowed me to understand just what is that, that churn number if we weren't in the vacancy moment.
If we were at full staffing moment still, how many overages do we need to have to be in that?
And I'm kind of curious about that.
Brian Hughes
Yeah, I don't have the answer to that question.
That's a fascinating question though.
To think, 'cause we're gonna be pushing that 877 number here.
Chief Day's very focused on hiring and we'll, at the beginning of October here, bring in another double-digit class of hire.
Yeah.
You know, new officers.
The problem with the city in our police bureau and hiring and attrition and everything else is we've hired in waves, right?
Loretta Smith
Right.
Eric Zimmerman
Which then hurts us 25 years later.
Brian Hughes
Sure does, yeah, when they all retire.
So hard to average that.
I don't know that we're seeing as many kind of retirement waves coming.
There are still the favorable pay periods for people to retire.
And so we expect to lose a certain amount.
So I can bring that back to the team and see, but it'll be interesting to see 'cause there's 2 buckets to what you just talked about.
It's that attrition with people leaving the Bureau and then it's also the day-to-day, you know, you have officers in training.
We'll send officers for, you know, I think right now it's 2 days in person and we'll need to be able to cover the street while they're in that training.
And we either do it on overtime or we do it with additional staffing.
So yeah, I can break those 2 out and get back to you.
Aaron Schmautz
Can I comment?
Eric Zimmerman
I had a sense you wanted to weigh in.
Yeah, please.
Aaron Schmautz
I was leaning in, I think.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, to Chief's point, you know, the history of staffing in the police bureau, we knew things were coming.
There were a couple hiring freezes in around '14 and around '17.
But also, you know, you look at where our staffing is now, if I'm correct, and if I'm wrong in the data, I'm sure one of you will point it out.
But in 2019, we had about 9 people in the training status because we were pretty fully staffed.
And that number's above 100 today.
So that 330 number that we have available on patrol over a third of them actually aren't.
And so that piece matters.
We're also seeing that our agency in the center of our staffing has a gap as a result of a bunch of people leaving in 2020.
And so I think it's pushing half of the police bureau has less than 5 years on.
And so our training officers are very junior, which I think is a structural deficit.
And I mean, it used to be a big deal to become a coach, and now we're just really kind of please everyone be a coach, 'cause you have, if you're gonna staff quickly.
And lastly, comparing us to fire is just completely not possible because fire has like both local and national standards around, you know, we must have 171 butts in the seat at all time to ensure for a lot of different structural things that matter in fire safety.
The police bureau has never, we have mandatory minimums, but we don't meet 'em and we don't have mandatory overtime, which I'll tell you right now, Yeah.
To the city administrator's point, I don't want— like, people say all the time that I just want my members making a bunch of overtime.
When I was new, there was no overtime.
We would all be sitting waiting on the radio for someone to ask to get a couple hours because we weren't getting paid very much then either.
But I would love to have a fully staffed agency where no one got any overtime and everyone just worked 40 hours because it's better for everyone.
And so I think what the one thing the city has never done is set like a 10-year longitudinal plan of this is where we want to be year over year.
This is where we want this to be 10 years from now.
Is how we wanna partner with all of our different groups.
This is what a fully funded, fully woven public safety model looks, not just for police, but for everyone.
And we set those goals and we meet them and we don't change it.
And it's hard because politics change, but policing isn't political.
Policing as far as staffing shouldn't be political.
Eric Zimmerman
I agree in that 10-year trajectory and I appreciate both these answers.
I think that we are lacking a designator for our patrol officers, actually all officers.
We're lacking a designator for their readiness level.
And right, I'm putting my kind of Army hat on here 'cause that's the language I have.
But readiness meaning they're ready for the mission.
That doesn't mean trainee, that doesn't mean DPSS-T, that doesn't mean in, you know, a ride-along kind of thing.
It means how many are out of training and ready to go.
Otherwise, we call them trainees until—.
Ryan Swift-Major
Right.
Unidentified speaker
Okay.
Eric Zimmerman
And so I think that that would be a helpful designator in the way that data is presented.
If in case we do have such a large number who are really not actually available for a patrol shift alone in the traditional sense, then I don't want them included in a staffing presentation without an asterisk, right?
So that we can understand that.
I have mentioned in this committee before, and I do want to get to the place where every time the police bureau doesn't hit minimum staffing in one of our precincts, that it's a red star cluster up.
And I think we need to start letting the, the public and the city administrator and the mayor and those— this council know how many days, how many shifts a year are going below minimum staffing, right?
Other agencies can do that.
I think that we should incorporate that into our culture because I actually think I think that Portlanders have not been made as aware of how many times that they are going about their business and the city's police bureau is below minimum staffing while the city's fire bureau has a mandatory overtime so that they don't hit below minimum staffing.
I just think that— because I don't disagree on— you heard me last time, I think, talk about this, and I'm not getting to a place where I want to have a bunch of folks on overtime.
I actually disagree with you.
I agree with you, President Schmaltz.
I think that overtime is the worst-case scenario, and getting to a place where you are ready with your 40 hours, you're awake and spry, okay.
You get into 50, 60, 80 hours, and I think we're in dangerous territory.
But I don't know that we are letting the public and the City Council know just how often that if we were a minimum staffing agency, We would have— we would have somebody more on overtime, or that we would— how far we are below.
So I'm just thinking through some of those things, but I do think that getting a sense for, of the 300 and some odd patrol officers, how many are trainees, is a critical need to better understand our current pipeline.
And in the 10-year trajectory and looking at trend models, having an understanding for what is the authorization above what is considered the full staffing model for the Portland Police Bureau in order to incorporate the trainee number each year and what that flow looks like, I think is how in the longer term we get ahead of this.
To the debate about size of the bureau and et cetera, like, I think I'm pretty clear in terms of where I think to go, but I don't think that this aspect of the conversation— Mr. Mayor, I think— I don't think this aspect of the conversation actually changes based on the size of the bureau because it's a modeling aspect.
So I'd be looking for that.
And I appreciate Councilor Smith bringing this forward.
I want to hear more of the conversation, Chair.
Steve Novick
Thanks.
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Kanal.
Sameer Kanal
Just a clarifying question, Chair.
Is this the only time we're going to get a chance to talk about this?
Because I think this is a higher priority than at least the second item on the agenda, and I'd be open to tabling that one or pushing it back a meeting.
Steve Novick
Well, the second item on the agenda has been before us numerous times.
I want to make sure that we get through it.
This is not the only time we're going to be talking certainly about— I mean, I've already said I want to have another session on response times, and I'm going to indicate some of the things that I think that need to be addressed.
But I really want to make sure that we get through the second item and the third item.
Thank you.
Yeah, I guess I could maybe give it a little latitude and stretch us until 10:37, but I don't want to go beyond that.
Sameer Kanal
Okay, I really want the fact that some of our questions are not going to get asked to not be taken as we agree with the things we didn't get to cover and just wanted to get that on the record first.
I want to start— thanks everybody for being here.
I want to start with commending Chief Day and the Personnel Division for the hiring that's been going on.
And Chief Hughes, you mentioned that.
I've been supportive of filling vacancies, have been since started working at the city in 2021.
I think we need to talk about what the target we're hiring to is.
That's separate, as I think was noted, but we can talk about that.
I think one of the things that has been coming up as we look at these trainee counts is that many of the— much of the staffing time— sorry, the staffing numbers that we're seeing include people that absent any changes to hiring or the number of officers will be fully ready in the months ahead, right?
There's a bunch of people in the pipeline right now.
And so I think that's, that's something that we should take into account as we're looking at where we want to get to.
I also think, just by way of framing, I remain categorically opposed to hiring freezes in public safety, and also that we've historically said that public safety just means police and fire, but also BOEC, Portland Street Response, the whole public safety system.
And I was really concerned when last year the hiring freeze was partially applied to public safety.
I also wanted to pick up Councilor Zimmerman's thread about overhiring for training.
Maybe fire's not the best comparison, but BOEC also has a similar thing, and I know labor's more familiar with that, at least that one, because PPA also represents some of the employees at BOEC as well.
With relation to minimums, I think that I agree that we should show when we make them or not.
I think the challenge that we have is we don't have A consensus view of what minimums are in terms of numbers.
When I've dug into that deeply last time, or 2 times ago now, I was told that the primary, not only factor, was historic staffing patterns from a time with different crime patterns, different 911 call volumes, and a different first responder ecosystem that excludes PSR and more.
So I'd like to figure that all out.
On slide 6, Nikki said that the patrol staffing level has been pretty stable.
The decline in officers has not affected— has not really affected patrol staffing levels.
It's been taken from other areas of the Bureau.
And then we've seen, as Councilor Murillo pointed out, calls going down, response times going up, in particular for high priority calls, and staffing remaining stable.
I think we've talked about the complexity of calls.
I think that's important.
We've talked about welfare hours, which are just a good thing to do.
I also want to talk about prioritization, relatively speaking.
There's sort of two things.
You know, I was actually standing across the street from the library Uh, situation on Sunday, um, for at least the, the later portion of that.
And so having the context— you don't always have the context of what initiated the call when you show up and the, the situation's already partially in resolution.
Um, I can say that, that we do see a lot of officers there at the time, and then, um, when it's done, it's done.
So I, I did want to just point that out.
I'm not— I don't know that that necessarily advances any idea, but, um, just watching how that I do want to talk about prioritization though, because we saw last year that $800,000 was spent in a month on protest response at a single building.
And we did change that over the course of last year.
I want to point that out.
On the whole, we do know that protesters were not protected there.
We know that transphobic protesters got a police escort at the sports bra last week.
And I think that there's a, there's a having a consistent approach to how we respond to protests.
Councilor Sameer Kanal, approach to that and understanding what police's role is going to be in that, and also the relative level of priority is something I'm very interested in.
I also wanted to flag the self-initiated calls.
I'm— there are 2 things in this conversation that have kind of baffled me.
One is the idea that we're conflating self-initiated calls with missions.
I was really confused by that, so I want to dig in a little bit on that.
And the other was about the table of what would be added.
Um, With relation to the— yeah, thank you, Bree.
So with relation to the missions piece, reducing that is something that seems like it should be an important priority.
And I keep hearing that increasing self-initiated calls is a priority.
I'm baffled by the idea that a police officer seeing like a homeless person just existing and pulling over, which I've seen at the OnPoint on the south side of Lombard in Portsmouth several times, I perfectly get the example of missions and investigations and have constantly been bringing this up as something we should be increasing priority for.
So I was very confused by that, and I just wanted to get that on the record.
Chief, could you speak a little bit more to that?
Because you mentioned a stolen vehicle situation, and I think that's important to bring up.
Ryan Swift-Major
Yeah, so I think that's a great point.
Sameer Kanal
But I also know that a lot of the self-initiated calls we've been seeing, this is why I asked about priorities 2 weeks ago, priority levels have been not in that space.
So can you give a little more on that?
Brian Hughes
Yeah, so to bring it back to what you were just talking about, the OnPoint call that you've talked about a couple of times now, I'll bring it right back to what you said about the library call.
You don't know how that call started.
And if you just look at social media and see a bunch of cops pointing guns and long guns at a homeless person on their back, It doesn't look good.
But when you understand the full context, as I presented to you today, then you understand about why they took the time they did and did everything they could.
And for me as a police executive, seeing that and seeing all the people that were standing around, including you, potentially in the line of fire if that person was not well or high on drugs and mentally suffering, maybe suffering from mental illness, I don't know, and actually had a gun and decided to shoot.
I think that's a good point.
The, the level of problem that we would have had there.
You know, for me, you know, it's a resource issue.
I'd rather have enough police officers there that can block every street off and get those people out of the danger, including you.
So that's part of this, that we, you know, you have to understand the full picture of what's going on here.
I don't know the nature of what was going on at On Point.
I don't know how the police were called there or why they were called there.
Generally speaking, police officers, there's there's people that are drug affected.
You can go within 10 blocks of this place and probably find 10 right now, people that are drug affected.
And I don't have the police officers to go and interact with all of those people.
And as Councilor Murillo says, maybe that's not the best response for a most expensive resource to be interacting with those people.
Generally speaking, the welfare checks that my officers go on are more extreme cases, cases where somebody's passed out maybe halfway in the street and it presents a safety issue.
Thank you.
Those are self— those would be self-initiated calls that would fall into that bucket.
As far as self-initiated activity, as officers have time between calls for service, and I don't know how many calls they're holding right now, I could look, I'm sure there's probably double digits, they try their best to make a difference and impact what's going on in this city.
And they do it through traffic stops and engaging with people, checking if people have warrants.
If they see somebody dealing drugs, they'll go and interact with them.
And a lot of this is community-driven, to Loretta Smith's point, or Councilor Smith's point, apologies.
When you're at your Coffee with a Cop and you're hearing from the public about all these problems that are going on, including the bottle drop at 122nd and Gleason, we have officers that are working on data-driven approaches right now to go out there and fix that.
And they do it through self-initiated activity.
Every single time they interact with somebody and go out with somebody, my data people are constantly on them to create calls and ensure that we can track that and be data-informed about what we do.
So all of that generates self-initiated activity.
And so for me, it's a balance, right, between ensuring that our most high-priority calls for service, the threats to our citizens and our public, are taken seriously and we respond to those in a timely fashion.
So does that answer some of your questions?
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I do have a little bit more on the on-point because I did see the beginning of one of those Uh, situations, but I, I think it— that might be better, uh, offline.
But I appreciate that.
Um, I think the, the situation— we, we could go down, uh, a lot of different, um, pathways with this, and I think it's really important to do.
I, I want to talk about the two— I have two questions I want to get to.
One is about the workload analysis framework.
So I really appreciate that, and I'm glad that that happened.
Is there a plan to update the police staffing numbers page on the police website to mirror a workload analysis framework, because it still has the already debunked officers per 1,000 capita thing on there as the primary metric of comparison at the bottom of that page.
And so is this— does this show a shift in PPB's thinking?
If so, I would be very happy to shout the praise from the rooftops on that.
Brian Hughes
I'd have to get back with the team and find out, Councilor.
I don't have an answer for you there.
Sameer Kanal
Okay, I would— yeah, well, then I will just take the opportunity to advocate there.
Okay.
Um, the, the, the thing that relates to that, um, is— well, actually, let me follow up on a different thread.
Self-initiated calls report puts it under patrol time.
In the response you gave to Councilor Murillo, it sounded like you were saying it more closely relates to investigative time.
Can you, can you kind of give us a little bit more on what category that fits into in your mind?
I mean, it's usually done by patrol officers, but as we know, patrol officers are often doing investigative tasks or pre-investigative tasks.
Brian Hughes
Yeah, the bulk of it is in the patrol world, and but, you know, investigative is— that's a, a huge bucket.
If they, like I talked about 2 weeks ago, if somebody breaks into a car and they miraculously have some time to follow up on that call, which I can't see how they would.
But if they did and were to go out and follow up, investigate, maybe get video from a Plaid Pantry if their credit card was used, that would be an investigative type thing.
I think the bulk of the self-initiated activity that you're going to see are subject stops and traffic stops.
So in the patrol world.
Sameer Kanal
Thanks.
I see Councilor Novick's putting it up, so I'll make my question into a comment.
I did.
This is less about anybody up here, but because it affects the ecosystem and the response that you gave, Nick, to Councilor Morillo's question about PSR and the speed of it, I want to just note for the record that the reason why it's so hard to expand it has been intentional delay and frankly sabotage of that program by the people on this side over the last few years that predate us.
PSR, it predates Seattle's program.
We're still in an extended pilot that's not 24/7.
And Seattle's now a full department.
And so I'm glad that we have a permanent hired program manager there, but it's still under a structure that isn't necessarily the best for it as a division, not its own bureau.
And so in terms of raising that expansion tempo, it is leadership that is not anybody on that side.
And I don't want to imply that it is, but that's a part of the ecosystem we have to fix because we should have had what people thought we were getting when we piloted it 5 years ago, what they thought they'd have by now, and we haven't gotten it yet.
Thank you.
So I'm looking forward to, to getting the same response, Nick, to that about, um, that, that Councilor Morillo is going to get from, from PSR about how we can accelerate that, because it's unacceptable to say now we're just delaying and we're starting over this expansion every time.
We have to expand for what we should have had 5 years ago now and not keep pushing back the starting point of the expansion program to get it to 24/7.
Steve Novick
Thanks.
Thank you, Councilor.
Um, so I want to go back to page 18.
And by the way, I don't want to overlook the fact that what you were asked for is like how long it would take and how much money it would take to do a certain kind of expansion.
And we haven't really been touching on that, but I appreciate all the detail that you offered on that.
Going to page 18 of the report, it talks about response times going up, and it says there's many factors that contribute to this, including increased travel times, more complex or higher acuity calls requiring more officers, And fewer available patrol officers, meaning longer wait times.
And then Mr. McDonald's presentation says we have the same number of patrol officers.
And then President Schmout says, well, it's not really true because a lot of those are trainees.
And I would just encourage you, when you talk about a topic, talk— say the same things each time and talk about the nuances, because otherwise it looks like you're contradicting yourselves.
Well, we have fewer available patrol officers.
No, we have the same number.
I think Control that's a good point.
Officers?
And if the answer is we have the same number but they're not really as available, then please say that.
I would also say that the factors that were listed on page 18 don't include something that Chief Hughes mentioned, which I've heard before is important, which is that the police are— on some calls, the police are spending more time than they used to because they're more attention to de-escalation, etc.
And that strikes me as something different from more complex or higher acuity calls requiring more officers.
That means you're spending more time on the same higher acuity calls.
And what I'd like to see, we take up the issue response times again, is breaking these out.
Do we have more complex calls?
What's the data on that?
What kind of calls are there?
Do we have higher acuity calls, whatever that means?
Yeah.
Are we spending more time on individual calls because we are doing a better job?
And I'd like to have that kind of broken out.
Another thing that I wanted to note is that somewhere in this report it says that when it comes to clearance rates, crimes that are never assigned to an investigator are not counted in the clearance rates.
And I find that extremely alarming.
I mean, I think that we should at least have a statistic for clearance rates, including crimes that were actual crimes, not just reports, that were not assigned, and then maybe a separate clearance rate for crimes that were assigned.
But only having it for crimes that were assigned is not acceptable, frankly.
And another thing I wanted to say is that I think that there's— you talk about It would be good to have more officers for domestic violence cases, for child abuse cases, for property crime investigations.
And that's something I'm not complaining about.
You're not providing detail on how much we need for each now, but I think that in future discussions about potentially increasing the size of the police force, we should have sort of a discussion of, okay, here's how many more people we think we would need in order to properly respond to the here's how many people we think we would need to properly respond to the child abuse crimes.
Here's how many people we think we would need to have more burglary investigations.
Because I think that what the public would like to see, if we're talking about increasing the size of the police force, is increasing the size for what particular purposes.
So those are just—.
Aaron Schmautz
I mean, if anybody has any off-the-cuff responses, I'd be happy to hear them, but I just wanted to get those if I may, both you and Councilor Morillo have brought up, you know, work that's very important and that has historically been done by officers in non-patrol responses.
And to the point of the study, those things have been removed.
You know, ICAC, the Internet Crimes Against Children, is some of the most insidious things we see in our culture and society.
You know, that team is much smaller.
And also, and to the point of traffic, you know, we have a lot of officers that are doing a lot of you know, having traffic officers.
I know that you guys just passed a no right on red ordinance, and, you know, there is the question of, you know, who's going to enforce it and how we're going to navigate that.
And again, you know, just deciding what our priorities are.
All of the things that you mentioned, Chair Novick, are things that are priorities that we have seen dwindle.
The police bureau's structure historically was patrol would respond provide a package to some kind of non-patrol response to investigate.
And we've seen nearly all of those catch basins be removed as a result of attrition because we have 200 less police officers today than we did 20 years ago.
And so again, it's an issue of priority, it's an issue of structure, it's an— and I mean, as a street sergeant, you know, an issue of we do see our sergeants responding and taking more time to respond to some of our more difficult societal issues.
Acuity is always kind of a hard measure because it depends on those being acted upon, I think.
But we do need to, you know, allow our bureau to set those priorities for one, and for two, set a clear political statement about how we want to navigate all those things.
Thank you.
I—.
Steve Novick
Okay, if any— maybe now set aside 7 minutes to have a lightning round.
Do any councilors want to get in in a couple of minutes get further questions on the table, even if we don't have time to answer them.
Legacy hand.
Legacy.
Councilor Kanal.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you, Chair Novick.
Um, I, I, I think the, the thing that I wanted to, to talk about here, the table the other thing that baffled me, I mentioned there were 2, is the increase in a line that has 3 things together on it.
This is slide 6, I believe, which has, it's the second line.
It says community engagement/BHU/SRO.
First off, SRO here, Behavioral Health Unit and school resource officers, right?
Yes.
Okay, so, um, we've talked about community engagement and how there's a difference between the work of like, uh, former Chief Lovell in that area and Natasha Hansberger, all that, which I, I am very supportive of, and the idea of just broadly being at things.
We talked about the holiday markets.
Unidentified speaker
I don't—.
Sameer Kanal
I won't reiterate that.
Generally supportive of the idea of BHU having, uh, having the resources it needs.
Um, I don't like the idea of without any policy conversation on whether or not we want to return this program, talking about expanding the school resource officer model.
I, um, I think that, that Sergeant Schmaltz is correct that there were gaps that were created for Portland Public Schools.
Um, I think that, that Sergeant Schmaltz is correct that there were gaps that were created for Portland Public Schools.
Um, I think that's their responsibility to handle.
And I think one thing that we've done, and, and my colleague Councilor Smith has brought this up in other contexts many times, um, we take on jobs that other jurisdictions should be doing, um, quite a bit.
And I, I, I want to have that conversation.
I also think that the, the model of school resource officers is not one that we should just be bringing back without a conversation.
And I, I really want to, uh, that, that was pretty problematic to me.
I think we should disaggregate that stat, have it separate, and ideally keep it at zero for that particular line while looking at BHU getting what it needs.
Um, North Precinct needs, needs the capital work.
There's no question about that.
The physical building, I don't think anyone has who's been in that building thinks otherwise.
I think it's pretty clear that the Central Precinct needs replacement or, or work as well.
Similarly though, we haven't had the conversation outside of the Bureau referencing it and other things for the, the Fourth Precinct.
So that's all context.
My lightning question is, where's the authorization or where's the prior conversation about the where the stuff would go?
Because some of this stuff makes a lot of sense in here.
Op support, traffic transit makes sense to me, for example.
But even if it is a— it's a 1,500%, but it's 6 people, so anything's going to have a huge percentage change.
Where were these things identified?
Brian Hughes
So I think that warrants additional discussion, like you said, and like Councilor Smith said, from public input.
This was just kind of take a look at where the bureau is, where we'd like to aspirationally see it go.
Councilors have at numerous times told me that they would appreciate a precinct per district, that they could be connected to their commander, their command staff, and we could have each precinct aligned with council districts.
So that's where that came from.
Some of the other conversations are just like President Schmaltz was saying, when you scale up the organization and make it bigger, there's a number of other areas that need to expand as well, like include traffic, or not traffic, but training.
Yeah.
You know, that is a, I think, a miss on this slide where we didn't really proportionately increase the training as much as I think we probably should have.
That's kind of a finite pipeline though, 'cause of the state academy.
We can only get so many people through the state academy, right?
So this is aspirational.
It needs more vetting out, I think, for, like I said, with discussion with public about what they would like to see from their police department.
So.
Thank you.
Yeah, right now I don't have all the details on exactly how that was.
I was part of some of these conversations, and I think frankly it's mostly just scale increase.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Nick McDonald
And then just on the precinct, we modeled an additional precinct because we don't have currently somewhere to put 350 new sworn officers and the ancillary non-sworn staff.
You could model this with 3 precincts.
You would need to substantially increase each precinct, and it would be kind of a wash financially.
That's just a decision that would have to be made.
Sameer Kanal
I get that for operations.
I think capital would—.
Aaron Schmautz
Can I respond to the, just the SRO portion, just 'cause it's important to me, 'cause I ran it?
2 minutes.
Steve Novick
Quickly, I wanna give the opportunity to the rest of the members.
Aaron Schmautz
So just to the point, SRO is, it should say YSD.
The Youth Services Division was not just cops in schools.
It was a very robust program.
And at the Coffee with a Cop, very prominent leaders in our Black community have said to me they wanna see our cops playing basketball with kids again.
But I would tell you that it's a moral imperative for all of us and not just a responsibility of Portland Public ensure the diversion of our young people from the criminal justice system, and that starts with partnership.
And so I do think that us having that partnership matters.
How we do that is, is definitely worthy of, to your point, desegregation and real conversation.
But it was through our Youth Services Division that we saved a lot of kids from a pathway they were on, and that partnership begins with non-conflict interaction with young people.
Sameer Kanal
I'll look forward to that conversation.
Steve Novick
Councilor Smith.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank everybody for coming, and, um, I don't have a lightning question, but I think, um, perception is reality, and the perception that the public has is that we don't have enough folks to, to man the, the bottle drop on 122nd and Gleason.
We don't have enough folks to stop the drug dealing that happens, you know, a block, 2 blocks, 3 blocks away.
And that perception, while it may not be true, but it is what drives folks.
And I think it's going to be so important for us to have those conversations that you were talking about, Chief, in regards to the community, have those conversations yes.
All over those, you know, coffees with community all across the city.
Um, I've invited many of our, uh, our city council people to come and, and participate.
And I, I'm happy to say that the chair, he came by, and, and so he saw the importance of, of having community.
And we have community from not just District 1 but from the entire city.
But I do think that we need to have some conversations across all districts with law enforcement, PSR.
We brought them out last month to make sure that people understand that there are different levels of public safety and the different levels of public safety that we, that we have.
So I just want to say thank you.
I know that you have been on a tour in regards to this report, and it's— thank you for putting it together because for us, it just gives me a baseline of, of understanding where we could be, what the possible is, whether or not we're going to go in that direction that this report says.
But at some point, we're going to be able to, to do some of these items in a way that's meaningful and that it cuts down the, uh, the, the overtime, because the overtime is, is egregious.
But I understand it, and I understand why we can't get the overtime down.
But I am concerned, just like the CA Lee is, about having people do overtime and, um, and they're not fully rested and healthy to be able to, um, to address some of the concerns that they have to as, you know, a patrol officer.
So thank you very much, uh, Mr. Chairman.
I don't have any more questions.
Um, And I am— I will lend my time to someone else who has another question.
Steve Novick
Um, thank you, Councilor.
And we actually have hit 10:37, which is my chosen extension time.
Thank you very much, Councilor, for being responsible for this report being generated and for this discussion.
Um, and thank you, thank you all, really appreciate it.
Uh, could the clerk read the next item?
Keelan McClymont
Item number 3, document 2026-01.
6-123, Amend code related to prohibitions on possession of firearms within certain city buildings to disallow affirmative defense for persons with concealed handgun licenses.
Amend code sections 3.18.020, 14A.60.010, and 20 thank you.
Steve Novick
Um, this item was brought to us by President Dunphy, but originally the idea came from the administration, and the administration is here at its highest form in CA Lee.
I wanted to ask CA Lee to lead off by just explaining why the administration thinks this is an important thing to get done.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you, Councilor Novick.
Just for some historical purposes as it relates to this subject matter and how it came to be, this conversation really started in kind of 2 separate areas of the administration, one from a public safety service area conversation as it relates to them being made aware that the county was moving in this direction of prohibiting firearms within their public meetings.
The second one was from my end, and this goes back to some of the conversations in council meetings that we had as it relates to the ICE facility.
And when we had a citizen actually kind of break the barrier and come into the DICE area, I started asking questions of our staff.
What are our protocols as it relates to safety, security, as it relates to our council meetings?
Sameer Kanal
Yes.
Unidentified speaker
And within that conversation, it came up that we do allow firearms concealed carry into our chambers.
And that was a new phenomenon for me because majority of the cities I've worked in are aware of, and just best management practices, it was not allowed in the council chambers or council setting.
So we started having this conversation along with the Public Safety Service Area, which Yes.
It was stated to me at that point in time that they were evaluating, evaluating this situation.
But also, uh, in the council president's check-in, I kind of asked his thoughts on the matter as well as it relates to, you know, what he has seen through the history of this body and being a council aide previously and also serving as a council president.
What was his appetite for consideration of taken a look at this policy from a best practices standpoint.
One of my responsibilities, uh, as in this role is just to ensure the safety not only of staff but even the community that are entering these chambers to voice their concerns, feedbacks, or just provide comments to the City Council as it relates to certain policies or discussion points that are happening in front of this body.
I do, and I did feel it was a concern, especially as tensions are rising on a lot of these conversations that we're having at the dais to ensure that we're creating a safe environment for not only the council, but also for citizens and community members who are joining us on a meeting basis to ensure that they are safe during these proceedings.
That was really the essence.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
Of why, uh, as administration, we thought it was good to have this conversation.
Anytime, you know, we're looking at best management practices that may impact the way that people engage with us, we want to make sure we're doing it in a constructive and intentional fashion.
And that was part of the reason why we wanted to bring it in front of this body for consideration.
We know ultimately the council will make the final decision as it relates to it.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
But we just wanted to make sure that council was aware of what was happening around us in the surrounding areas, but also bringing subject matter expertise to the conversation as well around best management practices as it relates to these type of settings and meetings to ensure that people are safe.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Mr.
Administrator.
I want to note that, um, at some point here I'm going to introduce Councilor Dunphy's Amendment 2, which would require the city administrator to adopt administrative rule to clarify various things including a standard operating procedure for enforcement of such prohibitions that uses— that includes notice and opportunity to cure, ejection or exclusion prior to referral to law enforcement.
And I just want to give you the opportunity to say that it's your intention to set up a process which will make it clear that referral to law enforcement is a last resort.
Unidentified speaker
100%.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
President Dunphy, I saw your hand up earlier.
Do you want to add anything?
Unidentified speaker
You know, I just was hoping to clarify some of the specifics of what this new amendment does and some of the work that has gone on since my last time being here.
I think this is my 4th, maybe 5th time for this committee on this item.
But I, you know, this is an item that, as has been discussed, I am introducing on behalf of the administration, but this is something I have my full weight behind.
I'd like to just sort of note a couple of things that have changed and some of the things that you specifically mentioned here.
First, city's HR policies prevent city staff from carrying firearms on the job.
The administration— administrative rule is workplace called Workplace Violence Prohibited, HRAR 4.12.
Council passed this back in 2002 by ordinance.
And so no employees or elected officials should have been carrying at work.
For the last 25 years.
Second, as was mentioned, if this ordinance were to pass, the highest level of criminal risk for somebody who brought a concealed carry licensed gun into one of the— either the Portland Building, City Hall, or the 1900 Building would be a Class A misdemeanor.
That is a real penalty, but as you may hear from staff later, that person would need to make a lot of compounding bad decisions to get the police thank you.
And then we would have to have a felony conviction if the police called on them for having a concealed handgun in here.
And at the end of all the possible decision trees, there would not be a felony conviction.
And finally, state law has really strong preemptions on local gun laws.
So essentially, if we're going to exclude concealed handguns from these buildings, we only have this one tool.
We can soften some of the edges, and the Dunphy II Amendment does some of that, but we so the amendment does 2 things.
First, uh, when Mike Porter took over on this ordinance when Linda Law retired, he noticed that the code as written could potentially be read as creating a new local-level firearm violation that would be preempted under state law.
So Dunphy 2 clarifies that that is not the case.
Then the amendment directs the city administrator to create thank a draft ordinance that would be able to be adopted by the council.
Thank you.
You, Mayor.
Councilmember Zimmerman, I would like to make a motion to create administrative rules through standard rulemaking process to clarify a few concerns that have come up in the hearings.
First, to Councilor Zimmerman's concerns, we would require security to have standard operating procedures for dealing with an unauthorized CHL, ensuring that we start with education on the rules and an opportunity to do the right thing and go store the one.
Second, to Councilor Kanal's concerns, the city administrator would need to define the exact terms around which buildings are considered CHL-free zones and layout process for other buildings to be temporarily or permanently included or disincluded.
That would mean that if we have additional rules around firearms at a community board meeting that's not in one of these 3 buildings, the way we decide to do or not do that should be consistent and uniform across the city.
Um, so, colleagues, I hope that this is my last opportunity to be before you.
Um, I urge you to adopt the Dunphy 2 amendment, and thank you for everybody for the feedback.
It has meaningfully improved this ordinance, and I of course urge you to vote yes and refer this to full council.
And I'm available for questions, though there are far better subject matter experts here who can answer better questions than me.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Councilor Kanal, is that a legacy hand or is that a real hand?
It's a real hand.
Go ahead.
Sameer Kanal
So, 2 questions.
One is Uh, you know, in the description of the amendment, it says that it, it attempts to clarify something, uh, with relation to what, um, what buildings we're talking about.
But then in the, the code itself, the— this is Amendment Dunphy 2— it says that the city administrator will adopt a policy identifying.
So my— just to be clear, our, our intention, if this amendment should pass, is that the city administrator will decide whether or not a building is included in this or not.
I think it's fairly clear that the 3 downtown buildings are going to be in this, uh, 1900 building, Portland building, and here.
But in terms of other things, our, our intention, if this should pass, is that the city administrator will be making that decision through a process that is consistent, consistent, but ultimately not council.
Is that correct?
Unidentified speaker
In as much as that standard rulemaking generally is the purview of the administration and the public process involved in that, but there is often an opportunity for council to weigh in as well.
I'll turn to the city administrator for that, though.
I'll have to lean on legal for that one.
Sameer Kanal
And the other question I have is legal, too.
So I'll just get it out of the way, although I'm not sure if it's for Mike or a different attorney, and I'll let him say it.
Um, there are bodies that constitute governing bodies under the charter that may want their meetings, regardless of location, to be included or not.
And I'm— I want to make sure that there would be nothing preventing, for example, the CBPA from saying our meeting, even if it's not here, constitutes a governing body, an official meeting, and should be subject to this protection, and that there's no legal We're not curtailing that or affecting it in any way is the question.
Thank you, Councilor Kern.
Michael Poore with the City Attorney's Office.
I'll take them in reverse order since that's top of mind, and I'm just coming back from a couple weeks off, so I'm a little slow.
But so to your first question, I believe Robert Taylor spoke to this several weeks ago and said that this can be as expansive or as narrow for subcommittees and groups as council and city administrator's office through the administrative rulemaking process wanted to make it.
So I think there's room for that.
Uh, sorry, room for that meaning that this amendment, Dunphy 2, would not curtail that in any way?
Correct.
Aaron Schmautz
Okay, thanks.
Ryan Swift-Major
Yeah.
Sameer Kanal
Um, and then to your first question, starting from the beginning, we talk about clarifying, and then I, I can't remember the I word we use, but identifying perhaps.
Clarifying meaning that the statutes—.
Steve Novick
There are 3 ordinances that are affected by this amendment.
Sameer Kanal
And that's the clarifying that the cross Titles 14 and a few others, 14, 20, and 3, we are clarifying language.
And then to the identification portion that others could speak to, but I worked on as well, what we're attempting to do is take the terms of the state law that was passed and then give them meaning through, uh, administrative rules.
Eric Zimmerman
So governing body, things like that, is the identification piece.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Um, goodness, I see no councilors in the queue.
Does anybody have anything to say?
Eric Zimmerman
Are we just on the amendment?
Steve Novick
Um, actually, good point.
I should I should introduce the amendment.
I introduce Dunphy Amendment 2.
I would appreciate a second.
Sameer Kanal
I'll second.
Second.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Councilors both seconds.
So now it's introduced.
Yes, to the amendment, Councilor Zimmerman.
Eric Zimmerman
Thank you.
Well, I appreciate some of the work that has gone, and I think some of the spirit that's behind this.
The council president, when he was describing this amendment, said that a person would have to make a lot of compounding bad decisions for a Class A misdemeanor to be used.
That's actually not how laws are enforced.
It's not how laws are written.
So an SOP is, I think, a good procedure, but a different or new security guard can quickly just get a hold of police and say, I have a violation occurring here, and then that police officer could show up and decide to enforce.
What I'm trying to paint a picture here is that yes.
We shouldn't pass a law that has such a broad discretion in terms of— or let me say it this way.
We shouldn't pass a law and expect that it will never get enforced because of this idea of discretion.
And I think that when you do, you see that things can get used in different ways.
And so I'm cautious there.
And I say that with respect for the amendment and what it's trying to achieve.
But again, I'll go back to this continues to actually not address those people today who are following the law, and it's not addressing those people today who are breaking the law.
It is creating a new class of law to be broken by those who have already put their name on a On a registry and gotten fingerprinted and gone through the training program, et cetera, et cetera, to meet the letter of the law.
So I just, to the amendment only, Chair, I just wanted, I will likely support this amendment because I think it makes this underlying better.
But this underlying idea that nobody's going to ever violate this law and so don't worry about it is, is It's not a way in which I believe we should be tackling this.
A gun law violation is a serious violation.
And, well, and I'll hold there until we get to the underline.
Thank you, Chair.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Councilor Smith.
Angelita Morillo
Thank you.
Keelan McClymont
Thank you, Mr.
Loretta Smith
Chair.
Who am I talking to?
Am I talking to Council President as the maker of the, of the ordinance or to the DCA?
Steve Novick
I kind of think you can take your pick.
Loretta Smith
Okay, um, I'll ask the DCA.
If a licensed concealed carrier holder unknowingly enters a covered building with a firearm, will that individual first be informed of the restriction and given an opportunity to leave and secure the firearm before the police are contacted?
Unidentified speaker
I would believe so, yes.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
And to, to back that up, under what circumstances would staff immediately refer someone to law enforcement rather than first offering an opportunity to comply?
Unidentified speaker
And I'm, I'm gonna be speaking a little off the cuff because this would all be a part of the SOP that would be developed for this.
I think when any person that was entering our facility and not complying with the rules of this facility, we will first try to communicate with that individual and escort that individual out of the facility just through our normal norms of our security protocols here at the city.
Loretta Smith
Right.
Unidentified speaker
If that person is refusing to leave, just like if we had someone refusing to leave the chambers or the building after they have been asked to leave, then we would engage with police to come on scene to have that person comply with leaving the facility.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
And when we're making this transition, will signs be posted at the building entrances and will they be visible?
Visible before a person enters the security screening area?
Unidentified speaker
Uh, yes, and we'd have to meet ADA compliance as well too.
So even the signage or whatever we do would have to be compliant so that people would know that they're entering a gun-safe zone as they enter our facilities.
Loretta Smith
And the last question is, who will train security personnel and city employees on the progressive enforcement procedure, and how will the city ensure it it is applied consistently?
Unidentified speaker
Yeah, very good question.
As it relates to city employees, that's part of our normal training as we onboard people into the organization, is letting them know they're not supposed to carry guns into the facility.
As it relates to our security, we will leave that up to our head of security, Manny, to work with our contractor, because this is a contract service that we have as it relates to our facility security now to make sure that they are aware of our policies and procedures as it relates to carrying concealed or carrying guns, period, right, on our premises.
Loretta Smith
I appreciate that.
Thank you.
And Council President, um, I just want you to know that I am prepared to support this ordinance because I believe that government meetings should be safe and they be welcoming spaces, but, uh, lawful gun owners must receive clear notice when, when the rules change.
And someone who enters without threatening anyone and genuinely does not know that a building is covered should be informed and given a, a meaningful opportunity to comply before the situation becomes a, uh, criminal matter.
So I appreciate your, your comments, um, CA Lee.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Kanal.
Sameer Kanal
Just to clarify on the— would you expect, CA Lee, that the signage would be somewhat similar, different content, but similar in terms of where it is and how it's used to the Sanctuary and Protect Portland Initiative signage that's gone up?
Unidentified speaker
Probably so.
I would want to look at it more in detail to kind of see directly where that signage is placed throughout.
Entering our facilities, but also inside our facilities.
But I could see it lining up pretty well with that.
Okay.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I think I'm generally inclined to support the amendment.
That doesn't— I still have questions.
Most of my questions are about the underlying ordinance, though.
I think I don't love the idea of us continually saying we're going to do things through administrative rule.
Um, this is narrower than I had originally thought it was going to be, so I, I'm okay with that, um, because it, it is, uh, not actually substituting on some of the questions that my colleagues raised.
The code itself has some guardrails for that, and I think if we have an issue, we should be changing those guardrails as opposed to this part.
So I'm, I'm going to support the amendment, but I do think we should really get into the details on the, the ordinance itself, proposed ordinance itself.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
Seeing no else in the queue for the amendment, could the clerk please call the roll on the amendment?
Keelan McClymont
Yes, for the amendment labeled Denphy 2, Kanal.
Sameer Kanal
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Morillo.
Angelita Morillo
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Zimmerman.
Eric Zimmerman
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Smith.
Loretta Smith
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Novick.
Steve Novick
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Uh, with 5 ayes, the motion to amend the ordinance as shown in Denphy 2 has all right, any comments, questions to the underlying?
Steve Novick
Mr. Zimmerman.
Eric Zimmerman
Okay, um, we've had this topic up a few times.
I've been in a briefing with some city staff from the attorney's office and from the Public Safety Service Area.
On September 1st, I sent an email to the city administrator and one of our senior deputies or Chief Deputy Attorneys asking for the records related to all the work that's— that was important to the origin of this work.
That records request has gone unanswered.
I have received no records.
So if I'm wrong about that, I would encourage those who that request went to to tell me I'm wrong and that you did send them all over.
But I have no emails, no documents, no Teams chats, none of the things that I asked for 2 weeks ago related to this.
The reason I did that was that the meeting that we had left me deeply unsatisfied with the answers that came from where did this come from, why is it being pursued.
And you addressed a little bit of that today, Mr.
Administrator, but I don't take kindly to what I felt was a reasonable request and was told by the city attorney that that request would be fulfilled.
And that it has not been 14 days later.
So this is a topic now that I think has been unnecessarily brought to this committee multiple times without a lot of work happening in between.
And so it hasn't been well managed, that there is a sense of not wanting to work on through some things.
And the meeting that I was brought into was just frankly a, here's our final solution thing that we want to present.
There's nothing else we can do.
There was no discussion.
There was no let's get some ideas.
It was just, this is the thing, we'll see you in committee.
And that's why— that's what spurred my request for this, because as I understand it, some members of the council president's team and others perhaps in the city administration's public safety area have been working on their pet project.
But this is certainly not what I was expecting when the chair referred it some months ago back for some additional work.
Unidentified speaker
So—.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Eric Zimmerman
That doesn't necessarily mean that this is, for me, an ordinance dead on arrival, but it's certainly an ordinance where I'm struggling to, to make a decision.
It has not ingrained itself to me.
I've asked that we look at this in a way so that we are not doing what I think this ordinance will do, will result in more guns being left in cars.
That's what I think is going to happen.
So I'm just trying to be very clear about that, because for those folks who are today following the law by getting a concealed carry permit, and the nature of a concealed carry permit is that no one knows you're carrying, which is the privacy aspect, the public safety aspect, not, not being threatening aspect, that's really just fine for those people.
And the sheriff has a record of all those folks.
This, to me, given the number of enforcements that our security agents in this building have noted have occurred in the last 5 years, and I think it was 5 was the number, is a solution in search of a problem.
And I wanted to work through a way in which we could make this a solution in search of making a better something.
And yet we haven't been there, and I haven't seen the work come.
I haven't seen the, the public service safety service area step up in a responsible manner on this.
So I'm pretty disappointed.
I think that the, the cascading bad decisions comment is one of those where you say, does a guy who looks like me get enforced against more often or less often than a person who doesn't look like me?
And I think that this ordinance is wading deeply into that and not in a great manner.
And so I'm thinking about that.
And SOPs are not laws.
SOPs are internal functions that do not have to be followed by the letter of the law.
And so I don't want to lean on the health of this ordinance is on the following of an SOP, because the SOP is a standard operating procedure.
And so for me, that, to my colleagues, is where my concern relates, is that we've been given some buffering areas where we think this will help make it better or do this.
And I see that.
I see the spirit there.
But to create a new class of activity that is today legal and safe and not something that the city is dealing with in a meaningful way of like, we have this problem we must address, I am confounded.
I'm confused.
I don't even have the right word.
I'm confused about why this has been such a huge effort.
And I, and again, I put this in somewhat of a pet project category.
And that's too bad.
And so I, I would love to, to frankly see some of this conversation.
I do think that a tabling of this for a much later date and stop bringing it back, Chair.
This has been too much.
Bringing it back every couple weeks with no substantive difference.
Councilor Sameer Kanal.
That we take a look at a different time on this if people are really gung-ho about it.
But passing something that I believe will be enforced differently against different people based on the circumstances, something I have a lot of caution here.
And but I do want to hear the rest of the conversation.
I know that, you know, Councilor Kanal and others and I, we've had these conversations.
I want to see where this goes today.
But I'm pretty irritated with a 2-week-old public records request on this.
To try and get a sense of where this all came from and what it's about was unfulfilled.
So I'll stop there.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Kanal.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I guess I have some process questions.
So, and I'm not trying to like say anybody did anything wrong backwards looking here necessarily.
I'm trying to understand, you know, I think the intention was that a conversation would occur between a member of council who's not part of this, Council President, um, and up to 2 of us because we have a committee quorum issue if it was more than that, and that that would yield some sort of substantive difference.
Can someone explain what exactly happened there?
Because I, I think, uh, like, I don't know the, the specific conversation that happened.
I was not one of the 2.
Um, if any state legislators are listening to this, this, this is absurd.
So, you know, track that for the public meetings law piece, but can we, can we get a better understanding of, of what exactly happened?
I don't know who was involved in, in this.
Steve Novick
Um, actually, I mean, I thought that originally I'd asked for the administration to, if possible, meet with individual councilors.
Um, and I don't know how it actually played out.
I wasn't part of one of those meetings.
Uh, City Administrator, can you explain to me Who met with who at what times?
Unidentified speaker
I don't have the actual dates.
I have to rely on staff.
They actually met with the councilors to kind of walk through how those individual meetings went, uh, with councilors, uh, as it relates to the actual time.
But I know those meetings did take place.
I know Councilor Zimmerman kind of referenced kind of how that meeting took place, but I'd have to rely on staff.
Steve Novick
Is staff here to elaborate?
Sameer Kanal
Trying to find the date point.
I'm—.
I don't necessarily need the exact dates, but just to understand that if everybody got— like, what was the—.
Steve Novick
How—.
Who got one?
Sameer Kanal
What was the idea behind it?
What was the intent?
Kind of was the question.
Keelan McClymont
Yeah, so Elizabeth Perez, for the record, um, Enterprise Services Director for Public Safety.
Um, we met a few weeks ago with, um, Councilor Zimmerman, Councilor Murillo, uh, uh, Councilor Smith's staff, um, as well as Council President staff.
I think Eben was there as well, uh, to walk through the, uh, documents, the ordinance.
Uh, PPB was there, um, DC Hughes, uh, as well as Manny Guerra from security and the PSSA staff.
So me and, uh, Bree, as well as the city attorney.
So that was the conversation where we had where I believe Councilor Zimmerman was still unsatisfied with the answers.
Thank you.
Sameer Kanal
Okay, so Councilor Novick and I, no briefings, but 3.
Okay, so I guess first, thanks for being here, Director Perez, and thanks everyone for the, the work that you've been doing on this.
Um, I think I'm a little confused, and this is maybe less a question for, um, for staff, but maybe, um, but But was the intention here that we could have an iterative process of figuring out a method of solving some of the underlying concerns?
Was that the sort of purpose behind these?
Keelan McClymont
I don't— yes, that was the purpose.
I don't know that we reached that.
I mean, clearly we did not reach that.
Steve Novick
And correctly, Councilor, I think that I, at least as one of the people suggesting this, because I wanted to spend less time, didn't want to keep on bringing this back to committees.
I was hoping that people would have Okay.
Eric Zimmerman
Councilor Kanal, I think that was the spirit of the chair's direction some months ago.
Yeah.
What occurred the 31st was a, here's our final product.
That is the first meeting that has occurred that I was invited to.
So the months ago guidance, I think, was in good spirit, Chair.
Everything since then, I would disagree with that it was good spirit.
Sameer Kanal
Okay, and so I think, um, would it be fair, Council President, then to ask that was this amendment that we just approved designed to address what was raised there, or was it sort of something that we were— something unrelated and we're still trying to address what was raised by, uh, councilors on this committee in the, in the briefing?
Unidentified speaker
And I'm not trying to like, you know, expose the sausage-making process too much here, um, but trying to, to understand if there's still more work to do I can say that it was written specifically to address concerns both, uh, that were brought up in the meeting and also additional ones that, uh, when Mike Porter took over from, uh, City Attorney Linda Law, who retired, uh, identified a couple of additional, um, ways to strengthen this.
So in the briefing, it was discussed the extent to which Okay.
Sameer Kanal
I think there's, there's still underlying things to understand, and I understand this is, for a lot of folks who may be listening, this is a simple, are guns bad or not kind of vote, and I don't think that's actually what this policy is.
It's a— there, there's a lot of nuance to this in a specific sense in terms of differential enforcement, as, as Councilor Zimmerman brought up, but also what the city is doing to address gun violence.
What are the guardrails?
City of Lee, what are the— you mentioned in other cities you've worked in that this is something we've already resolved.
Are the rules—.
Unidentified speaker
Sorry, I'm sorry.
I just had a very brief thing to say to that specifically was like the point I missed to say was that the state law is incredibly inflexible and is incredibly narrow.
And so to address some of the underlying concerns that were brought up by this body was simply not possible because it is fundamentally We have very few, very little flexibility in terms of what the underlying solutions may be.
And so that is an important component of what the amendment that you all just adopted was.
Sameer Kanal
Then that's fair.
And like I said, I think that the amendment itself helped.
I just don't know that it addressed the underlying issues that have been raised, some of which I share and some of which I don't.
But yeah, Cully, do you Can you speak to what the rule is in the other cities you've worked in?
Like, what is the— in terms of what do we want to see, not necessarily, you know, you know.
Unidentified speaker
I'll use Dallas because it's a very good comparison to size and scope and kind of the meeting frequency that we see here in Portland.
In general, you cannot bring any firearms into any Dallas City Hall or chambers during a government proceeding or court proceeding in a city building because Dallas also has Municipal courts as well.
And that's typical, just the general rule of law as it relates to bringing firearms into City Hall.
Now, how is that functioning?
The City of Dallas has its own equipment and building services and security that is in-house, city employees, not contracted out, that administer that code.
So there's metal detectors As you enter City Hall.
So if it goes off, you have a concealed, they tell you you cannot bring that gun inside the city facility.
Now, what they do with the gun after that, we don't know.
And that is not something that is policed from that standpoint, but it is managed through having metal detectors, 2 sets of metal detectors, one as you enter into building and one as you enter the council chambers.
Sameer Kanal
Okay, I appreciate that.
Then that's Texas.
It's Texas.
I mean, you get guns in like Happy Meals there.
Like, it's, it's, uh, I wouldn't say all that now.
So, uh, that, that's interesting.
Um, I appreciate that clarification.
I, I'll let the conversation proceed, but I, I appreciate this.
Thanks.
Steve Novick
Yeah, I put myself in the queue just to say that I am not sure if there's any version of this that could address everybody's concerns.
So, I mean, from my perspective, I thought that it was important to make it clear, I mean, to have it brought out clearly that nobody's going to be subject to a felony charge and that there is going to be a process and referral to law enforcement would be the last resort.
And as to the discretion issue, there's always going to be concerns about discretion in enforcing any law.
And I'm not sure that we can, you know, ever erase those concerns other than, you know, we just need— we should be keeping an eye on it.
So that's in part response to Councilor Zimmerman's suggestion that we table this for a future date.
I just don't know that there's any further discussion that's going to bring any more clarity.
Eric Zimmerman
I'd like to move to table this discussion with no date specified.
Steve Novick
Councilor Zimmerman moves.
Do I hear a second?
Loretta Smith
Second.
Steve Novick
Can't remember, is there discussion of a motion to table?
Keelan McClymont
Uh, no.
Steve Novick
Okay, in that case, can I ask a question?
Councilor Kanal has a question.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, so would that be a motion to postpone indefinitely without, without a date?
Eric Zimmerman
Yes, like if it's ready to come back at a future time, sure, but I don't want to set a date today.
I think that's gotten us in a bad rhythm.
Sameer Kanal
Okay.
Steve Novick
In that case, could the clerk call the roll on the, on that motion to table or whatever we're calling it?
Keelan McClymont
Yes, just one moment.
Uh, okay, so, uh, on the motion to table—.
Eric Zimmerman
Is it a motion to table or to postpone indefinitely?
They're just very, very different.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I'm really trying to understand how would this item come, come back if it were to come back?
Would it be That we have to vote to do it?
Would it be that the chair can put it on an agenda if and when it's ready but is not obligated to do so?
What's the— and partially, what's the specific vote we're taking?
Partially, what's the intent?
Angelita Morillo
Sure.
Steve Novick
I have to ask the clerk to elaborate on that.
Keelan McClymont
Sure.
If the item is tabled as the motion was originally made, then the committee has to bring it back at the following meeting or it is basically indefinitely Done.
It's gone.
Um, if the motion is to postpone indefinitely, then it can be brought back either by the chair or by, um, members of the committee making a motion.
Steve Novick
Councilor Zimmerman, was your intention to have it be the second, postpone indefinitely, or to table?
Eric Zimmerman
I think the postpone indefinitely allows us more flexibility for when I'll say If it becomes ready at a future date.
But it doesn't mean that, again, we're back here doing it all over again by, you know, your discretion.
It sounds like the tabling means either it's next week or it's dead.
And I think that wasn't my intention.
My intention is bring full products that are ready.
Steve Novick
Okay, in that case, I'll ask the clerk.
The councilor having stated his intention, can we treat the motion as a motion to postpone indefinitely?
And go ahead and vote on it, or do we have to remake the motion?
Keelan McClymont
Uh, it would be easiest if Councilor Zimmerman would, uh, withdraw, withdraw his motion and make a new motion.
That would make life easier for me.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Eric Zimmerman
Definitely kills it.
Keelan McClymont
Okay, yep, sorry, we're getting conflicting information here.
Um, motion to postpone Indefinitely kills the item?
Steve Novick
Yes.
Keelan McClymont
Okay, so Sumner's tabling.
Loretta Smith
So tabling, if it's—.
Keelan McClymont
Oh yeah, I'm sorry.
Eric Zimmerman
Good morning, Beth Woodard, City Attorney's Office.
Keelan McClymont
A motion to postpone indefinitely will kill the item.
Sameer Kanal
If you would like to lay it on the table, then you will just need a motion later to pick it up.
Keelan McClymont
So you can do— if there's no time certain, you can do a motion to lay it on the table, and then when you're ready, you'll just need another motion to take it off the table.
Eric Zimmerman
I'm going to keep my original motion because that more reflects my intent here.
Okay.
Thank you for the clarification.
Thank you, Chair.
Steve Novick
Um, okay, can we proceed to, uh, can the clerk call the roll on the motion to table or lay on the table?
Keelan McClymont
Okay, motion to lay it on the table.
Kanal?
Sameer Kanal
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Morillo?
Angelita Morillo
No.
Keelan McClymont
Zimmerman?
Eric Zimmerman
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Smith?
Loretta Smith
Aye.
Keelan McClymont
Novick?
Steve Novick
No.
Keelan McClymont
With 3 ayes and 2 nays, the motion to lay the item on the table has been approved.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Um, and now, uh, let's have a, a 13-minute break before moving on to the next item.
We reconvene at 11:30.
I'm reluctant to start a brand new substantive discussion without everybody here, so I'm going to give Councilor Carl another minute, but then we'll start.
All right, committee is back in session.
Uh, could the clerk read the next item?
Keelan McClymont
Item number 4, document number 2026-332, amend prohibited conduct code To update ejections and exclusions for drug possession, weapons possession, and abuse in parks.
Amend Code Chapter 20.12.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Councilor Zimmerman and staff, take it away.
Eric Zimmerman
Thank you, Chair.
Thanks to the colleagues.
I'm bringing forward this ordinance and this proposal for discussion with you all today and interested in your process and thoughts here.
If we could, I've got my staff in front as well, but I'm going to talk through our presentation first.
I'll start with the problem.
There's a continued frustration among Portlanders with the use of dangerous drugs and the weapons that we see in parks.
And these kind of controlled substances like fentanyl and heroin, we know they're very addictive, we know they're very toxic, can result, of course, in behavior problems in our parks.
I think that many of us have probably seen the Thank you.
We've seen examples, or we've seen ourselves, or we've talked to neighbors who are seeing the paraphernalia that is left in parks when drugs become the thing you do in parks.
And we often hear about what are the tools that we have to help with this.
And so from that perspective, we're bringing forward this safe park ordinance.
I want to talk about just a little bit of terms of what tools do law enforcement today have When they face somebody in one of our parks who's being violent or has— is using illicit drugs in the park, what exists today?
So of course, they can issue a warning to an individual, they can eject that individual from the park, and they can exclude the individual from the park for a set number of days.
And then of course, because a lot of this is also illegal activity, they always do have the ability to arrest that individual or cite them.
And more of the judicial side.
I want to be clear, what we're talking about when we say exclusions is more of an administrative side of things than it is a judicial side, and that's an important piece here.
If we go to the next slide, the goals today, it really is about making our parks safer for every Portlander, every visitor.
It's also to refine and give some of our public safety folks, including our park rangers, some tools To kind of keep illegal and dangerous behavior out of our parks, and that when we actually enforce against such things, that we have the ability to improve the situation not just in that moment, but in the days to come.
To update the process for how park exclusions are issued and to protect the reputation and continued enjoyment of one of, I think, Portland's greatest assets, which are our parks.
So next slide there.
Okay, so as it currently sits, we have some exclusion parameters and, and certain number of days.
What this ordinance does is that it increases the minimum length of exclusions for elevated violations from 60 days to 90 days.
And so I want to be clear, this is not making any Activity and any new activity illegal.
This is not making any old activity illegal.
This is just saying what's on the books of extending from 60 to 90.
So that includes violent crimes, sexual crimes, types of crimes that are under ORS 163.
Of course, rape, assault, murder, stalking, child abuse, elder abuse, abuse of animals, mental illness, disability.
I'm sorry, I said it.
I said animals.
I'm sorry, I meant I'm reading too many things here.
Intimidation, property damage to park at least $1,000, abuse of adults with mental illness and developmental disabilities, and other types of abuse.
What we're proposing here is also increasing the minimum length of exclusions from 30 days to 90 days for drug possession, sale, and transportation.
Transportation, solicitation, or distribution, and weapons possession.
So what is currently a 30-day exclusion in those groups of crimes that I just described, moving those to 90, which is similar to the last group.
Drug possession, sale, transportation, solicitation, or distribution— these are drugs that are covered, include toxic and dangerous substances like fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamines as defined by ORS That's $475.
We're also adding counterfeit substances, which is a new list for me.
That, that's just a definition to get around some of what's happening in the drug market for people creating new things and, and making different claims.
But really what it's getting at is it's controlled substances or anything in that container that's purposely made to imitate a manufacturer or distributor other than, uh, who can legally manufacture or distribute.
An example of that would be someone made a fake label for a prescription drug like oxycodone.
I'll put this in the category of nuances that we were asked to include because we're seeing that come up as a way people try to squirrel out of accountability.
I want to be really clear that this does not include legally owned or purchased marijuana, legally owned or purchased prescriptions.
We're really talking about the illicit hardcore drugs right now.
Weapons possession.
This includes but is not limited to any firearm, pellet gun, spring-loaded weapons, Stun gun.
Stun gun, et cetera.
I have a picture here of a machete.
I was at a neighborhood event one time where a police officer was nearby and took a machete off of a patron in the park, and that was the end of the interaction, right?
Take the machete, but there's nothing else.
There's no there there after the fact.
And I want to be clear that this does not include legally carried concealed weapons.
Just to be consistent to my colleagues.
All right.
Going on to the next slide.
There we go.
What you see here is 3 different levels or 3 versions of offenses, a tiered system, which does exist already, but this is a bit of a refine here, a tiered system that allows for the policy to focus on chronic offenders of elevated violations who create the greatest threat and disruption.
So mostly what we're talking about is that first violation of the things the second offense within a 3-year period, that, that person would be excluded from all parks within that park service zone for 180 days.
And the third offense in 3 years is a person excluded from all parks in the city for 365 days.
So not only do we go longer, but we also expand.
If a person continues to violate within a 3-year period, we expand the exclusion zone to include all parks in the city.
Thank you.
Not just the park from which it occurred, but to the broader sense of parks.
And so we see this map here.
When I talk about park service zones, this is, I think, a helpful description of what we're talking about.
Actually, go back just a bit, please.
I want to highlight this given the nature of how things go on today.
If you interact with a person yeah.
At a park and we disrupt a behavior, the goal isn't that they just stop doing it at that one park or leave that one park and then walk to the next one and then have no accountability.
But we want to give them the opportunity to do the right thing.
But if they continue to violate a second and third time, you do see that we can expand and say the parks in this area— clearly you're using this area as kind of home base for, for bad behavior, so we want to pull that away.
But that doesn't come in until you're into your second or third okay, moving into the next piece.
I wanna just clarify where exclusions apply.
This includes the park and city property or right-of-way, which is adjacent to the park, including walkways, pathways, sidewalks, and streets.
I think of this as areas from which that person and their behavior still has impact upon the park.
And so just stepping off the grass into the sidewalk may not have a meaningful change.
And so that's what we're seeing here.
It creates an exemption, of course, for any person who's just passing through the area.
If you're walking through, going to work, going to school, whatever that is, that this does not interrupt that and make— it just means that the behavior in which you were excluded for, it means you cannot just hang out in the park in a recreational way in which we, I think we all understand.
But the passing through is remained protected for all individuals.
Next slide, please.
This encourages a bit more of a consistent approach to exclusions.
If an authorized park officer— so that's PPB and our park rangers— engages with someone who's engaged in prohibited activity and the officer does not issue an exclusion, then we're looking to have them document why they did not issue an exclusion.
I think that this helps us ensure that the officers are educated on the available tools, encourages a more consistent consistent approach and gathers data on effectiveness and impact of a policy change.
Portland Police Bureau and Portland Parks and Recreation would establish a process to document that information so that it would not be too burdensome.
That's not our goal here.
But Safe Parks does not require and it does not mandate any such exclusions.
I want to be really clear about that.
Officers retain the discretion that they have today To make the decision on the factors on the ground.
Each park is different, each group of people are different, these violations are different, and we're not changing anything with their current today practices.
Going to the next slide, this does close a loophole that I believe is one of the reasons that we're not seen as effective of exclusionary use.
So right now, if someone appeals an exclusion to the city's hearings officer, That exclusion is automatically stayed by the city's hearing officer until the appeal is decided.
The automatic stay of an exclusion lets the offender return immediately to the park from which they were excluded.
I'm identifying that as one of the bigger concerns.
The Safe Park Ordinance eliminates the automatic staying of a parked exclusion.
The city's hearing officer can still stay a decision on a case-by-case basis, but it goes through that process.
There's no automatic stay just because an appeal was filed.
Safe Parks does not eliminate the ability to stay executions— exclusions.
The city hearings officer can still stay an exclusion through the appeals process.
The Safe Parks does not eliminate or create obstacles to file an appeal, and a person who is excluded from a park can still appeal the decision and get a second review.
I also think that this gives our City Council some more oversight of an exclusion process that is not largely something we see much of now.
It requires that PPB and PPNR report to Council one year after the enactment.
The report allows Council to track implementation and provide transparency and provides transparency on the process.
The report will outline the number of exclusions, locations, which violations triggered, the process for which officers used to document, a summary of the reasons why exclusions perhaps were not issued, and information on how officers enforce a violation of the exclusion order.
So what we're really talking about here is there is criminal activity that an officer may what we're saying is, in a lot of those cases, we'd like them to be considering the other tool, which is a park exclusion, at the same time.
But the other side of this is that exclusions can be used without the citation for criminal, right?
This is this balance that folks have to use, and I think that it's one of the tools that offers a, a non-judicial option to folks who are in need of that.
Councilor Sameer Kanal, To counter some behavior, and it says that if you're— if you think it's serious enough that you're using, using the legal process, then why are you not also taking a look at the exclusion?
So just kind of trying to pair those up a little bit better than I think we currently are in practice.
So in summary, with the next slide here, this sets a 90-day minimum exclusion for elevated violations, including drug and weapons offenses.
It increases the escalating impact of exclusions for repeated elevated violations.
It clarifies where exclusions apply, ensuring safety and usability of adjacent city property and right-of-way.
It encourages consistent approach to exclusions, requiring documentation when an exclusion is not issued, closes a loophole that lets offenders return quickly to parks, eliminating the automatic stays for appeals, and gives council more oversight of the So I wanted to bring this forward to the body for consideration, given that I think in all of our districts we've encountered some level of frustration over dealing with a problem in the park.
And that takes form in different parts of each district.
But I do think that we have an exclusion process in the city that can be used more effectively.
I also believe that it is a tool that we can use to help our parks.
Thank you.
Tool that is a step down from the more legal enforcement of certain things and could have an impact in a way of sending a message and setting a new behavioral change without including judicial.
But at the same time, if we're going to be doing the judicial, that we make sure we're also taking care of the park, the park users, and saying if you're getting caught doing this stuff, you can't start coming back the next day and to trying to interrupt that behavior.
And that's where we see that 90-day.
So I do appreciate, Chair, you getting this on the agenda, and I would welcome the discussion.
Thank you.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Councilor Smith.
Loretta Smith
Thank you, Mr.
Chair.
Thank you, Councilor Zimmerman.
I can appreciate what you're, what you're trying to solve for, but I think there's a bigger issue with this, and I think that communities of color will be targeted to have longer stays out of the parks and being able to use our facilities.
And for good or bad, I think there— I, you know, I've heard about some things that happen in parks, but I just don't support the idea of putting extended you know, I think it's divisive, and I, and I think it, it, it hurts communities, and particularly communities of color.
And so I won't be supporting this.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
It occurred to me, I think that we have some, um, public testimony folks signed up, right?
Keelan McClymont
Yes, we do.
Loretta Smith
Are you—.
Steve Novick
So we should probably do the usual, let's have, you know, clarify— technical and clarifying questions, then we move to public testimony and then to broader debate.
Councilor Kanal.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you to Councilor Zimmerman and team for working on this, bringing it forward.
Um, as I'm reading this, I, I had a question around the, uh, expansion of the geography of ejections and exclusions.
To include the adjacent city property and the right-of-way.
Does that mirror the authority and jurisdiction of park rangers?
There's been questions that have been raised to my office that the answer has been very difficult to get and convey back as to if— can you do the, like, step in, step out of a park onto the sidewalk, and whose jurisdiction is it?
Yes.
Is the anticipation that, that park rangers would be able to do the additional work, which if it's the same person doesn't feel like much additional work, of saying actually the sidewalk's not okay as well?
Or would this by necessity require bringing in a different responder to that situation?
Eric Zimmerman
I'm going to start with what I hope my philosophy can be about it, is that such silly lines are not drawn, right?
That if, if a person yes.— who works for our parks rangers knows that something's impacting the park from just a few inches off the grass, that we don't get into some line of, oh, that's mine, that's yours, this is ours, etc., because nobody in the City of Portland cares.
What they care about is the City of Portland is taking action.
And so whether that's a police officer, a PS3, or a park ranger, they're all City of Portland employees.
So that's, that's the philosophy from which I would like to I think that's where I would like to get to because I don't think that these lines of demarcation are actually very helpful to the public and they're not very helpful to having a functional city program.
And I then, I will follow that up with, I'm not exactly sure what the standard today is when it comes to differentiating the work and where it goes.
And I think if those lines do exist, that I'd be all for working out how to eliminate this I can't work across the line idea because I just think that's non-functional.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, I would also just say it relates to the, um, how dispatch works, that piece in terms of let's say I'm called, uh, 311 in the remaining hours it has, or 911, and how that gets done.
Because I, I, um, I, I have been told, and I've personally had the experience of debating whether to make the call based on where a situation is occurring and based on who the responder might be.
Eric Zimmerman
This, this is a really important point, Councilor, and I, I, I really appreciate that.
Um, the— what you're highlighting is that some of the exclusion stuff, right?
So what can be enforced by a park ranger is very different than what can be enforced by a Portland police officer.
And I would like our rangers to be able to yes.
—Kind of take ownership of that park situation in a way that doesn't have to involve always a legal and judicial situation.
And the next piece of this is that if police are involved, you know, I think that for a lot of these, they have the same ability as park rangers, but because they mostly spend their time in the citing and arresting world, like, that's where their thoughts are at.
But actually, I think the exclusion that the rangers spend their time in marrying those up a bit would be helpful, but it's an important, like, how do you dispatch kind of thing.
But stopping a park ranger just because the sidewalk isn't their jurisdiction seems nonfunctional to me.
Sameer Kanal
Okay, thanks for that clarification.
The other question I had was, I just want to make sure I'm reading this right.
On page 19, and it goes into 20, there's an area that relates to the automatic stay that's been removed from the code.
This is Section I. I can't see that.
I got to scroll all the way up here.
The 20.12.265.
And I just wanted to make sure I was understanding correctly that the idea here is that text previously said there's an automatic stay unless it's in Dishman, East Portland Community Center, etc.
And now you're saying there's not— there's just no automatic— where there wouldn't be an automatic stay for those locations?
Eric Zimmerman
I'm trying to catch up here, sorry.
Yeah, sorry.
Can you say again where you're looking?
Sameer Kanal
It's, uh, the bottom of page 19 of Exhibit A, and it's, uh, Section I.
Eric Zimmerman
Okay, of course the pages are not numbered.
So your question again, Councilor?
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, just, just making sure I understand correctly that basically right now It's automatically stayed unless it's in these locations that are enumerated in subsections 1 through whatever.
And this is now saying— and those would not be automatically stayed, and your change would make it just not automatically stayed, period.
Okay, uh, that's the clarification part.
Thank you.
Eric Zimmerman
Thank you, Councilor.
Steve Novick
Councilor Morillo.
Thank you.
Um, are we just doing technical questions or yes, and I think there's not much public testimony, but there's a couple folks.
Angelita Morillo
Okay, I'll keep it brief.
Um, I think this might be for you, but maybe for Parks staff as well.
Um, how did you speak with Parks about this proposal, um, or with LIUNA?
Um, how long did they have to process this, and did they have any feedback on it?
Eric Zimmerman
I'm gonna actually have my staff talk about their work with Parks Bureau and anyone else.
Luke Sack with Councilor Zimmerman, for the record.
We engaged with the administration extensively, with Parks and Recreation, with PPB, and the City Attorney's Office, and they're all in the room as well to answer any technical questions if you have specifics.
Angelita Morillo
Okay, great.
I think I'll hold off until we move into discussion so folks can testify.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
Does the clerk want to call the public— the folks signed up for public testimony?
Keelan McClymont
Certainly.
We have— excuse me— 3 people signed up for testimony: Nick G., Lou S., and Ryan S. And Ryan is online.
Ryan, if you want to unmute and begin your testimony while— if there's anybody in the room wants to come up.
Thank you.
Ryan Swift-Major
Good afternoon, everyone.
Or I guess it's still good morning, almost afternoon.
Um, I apologize in advance, I'm in an office where the video camera is not quite synced up to where I am, so I'm going to be waving my arm while I'm talking.
Uh, Ryan Swift-Major, business manager of Laborers Local 483.
Unidentified speaker
Hi, Ryan.
Ryan Swift-Major
I appreciate the amendment being brought forward.
I think in its intent to help with safety in parks.
I also appreciate Councilor Smith's concerns about how this will be utilized.
I have a lot of concerns about this, and I know our members do as well.
I have a question.
And questions about does this extend to community centers?
When I went through and listened to the slides that you're talking about, Councilor Zimmerman, see violent crimes, child abuse, elder abuse, abuse of adults with mental illness and developmental disabilities, intimidation, weapons and drugs, and the discussion about the ping ponging of people.
Going from one park to another park to another park.
So the safety things that happen in parks always extend to community centers.
The same people that struggle with drug use in the parks make their way to community centers to use restrooms, to use shower facilities, to sometimes try to push their product.
The people with machetes are not just in the parks.
They are also in community centers.
Right now, there is not a safety plan in place for staff at community centers to exclude or acknowledge that other than calling park rangers.
So someone walking around in a restroom with a machete, there is no recourse for staff to exclude them unless park rangers see it.
Thank you.
And so I just have a lot of questions about purpose, uh, focus.
I'm also pretty frustrated that park rangers weren't reached out to, seasonal park rangers, park technicians, facility maintenance—.
Eric Zimmerman
All of those were in the room.
Ryan Swift-Major
Recreation staff, park staff.
We're continually told that the city wants to make The City of Portland to be a place to work, an employer of choice.
And when employees bring forth safety concerns, it feels like we're not listened to, feels like we're not acknowledged, and it feels like we aren't brought into the conversation to help develop any type of plan that is going to need to be enforced by people that are front-facing staff.
Thank you.
So thank you for your time and consideration.
Keelan McClymont
And that concludes testimony.
Steve Novick
All right.
Any discussion?
Councilor Kanal.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah.
First, this is such a fascinating agenda today.
These 3 things together have actually, you know, I think in the last item we were talking a lot and Councilor Zimmerman brought up the differential enforcement possibility and had an interesting conversation with Chair Novick about that.
And I think that's something that is really fascinating.
I appreciate everything that Councilor Smith said.
That's sort of my starting point on this too.
I think there's a lot of interesting things here.
As I go through this, my question around park rangers was really about who's responsible.
Um, because I think one of the challenges is I don't want to inadvertently— what already exists and then what would be added, the nexus of that be that because we're expanding the juris— the, the geography of this, that we're forced to bring in police.
So I want to dig into that a little bit more, um, because that, that is both a problem for the differential enforcement possibility but also a problem from the perspective of what we were talking about in the other agenda item of the workload that we're expecting to, to staff too.
And I, I think we shouldn't be expanding low acuity type of things into the police workload.
So that's what I'm trying to just understand a little bit better and see if that is what's happening or not.
We had a really interesting item a few months ago from Councilor— from Chair Novick, um, where the, the actual changes to the code around the nuisance properties that Councilor Novick was proposing was less the issue than what already existed.
And I'm trying to understand that as well here because I, as I'm going through it, I had a couple big questions, but a lot of this makes sense.
And I think, you know, adding counterfeit substances makes sense to me completely.
I think adding pedestrian plazas as a place that we're looking, if you've been excluded from a pedestrian plaza before, that that's relevant, makes sense as well.
And I could go down the list and talk about several of these things.
When you get lower in the document, I think that I mentioned the one concern which comes up in a few different places and how they work together.
The other question I had was about the sort of workload issue with relation to, it's now C3 in the middle of page 16, the requirement that you document why you didn't do it.
And I just wanted to understand that a little bit better.
Yeah.
As well.
I will say real quick to the testimony, um, when I have seen the, the— when I've gone on tours, um, and met with some of our Parks and Recreation employees, which I did as a member of the Parks Board before I was a councilor, uh, as well as now, um, I, I, I have said that I've heard— sorry— that there has been a desire for a, a safety plan for a, a very long period of time.
That helps with frontline employees who are at a fixed location.
Because park rangers, my understanding is there's 29 still, something like that.
I think we had a small expansion authorized, but I don't know how many of them have been hired.
Is anyone here from— is Vicente here or anyone else?
Vicente Harrison
Yes.
Sameer Kanal
Oh, hi.
Can you let us know how many park rangers we currently have versus authorized?
Sorry, I didn't see you behind the pillars in the corner there.
Vicente Harrison
Vicente Harrison, Health Safety Emergency Manager with Portland Parks and Recreation.
Uh, thank you again to the committee for being here today.
Um, City Administrator, uh, just to answer your question directly before any further remarks, currently we have, uh, 29 permanent park ranger positions And we have another 11 seasonal positions that we bring on during peak season, which is the summer.
Sameer Kanal
Okay.
And then Director Pierce, I see you're here too.
Thank you both for being here.
Vicente, I almost didn't recognize you out of the uniform.
You're always— I see you out and about so often, so I appreciate your work in general as well as being here.
Director Pierce, how many parks assets, how many physical locations are there?
Unidentified speaker
You know, I don't have that figure off the top of my head.
Ryan Swift-Major
A lot.
Sameer Kanal
Significantly more than 29, right?
Vicente Harrison
Yes, for sure.
Sameer Kanal
And so even if all park rangers were on 24/7 and never took a break or had to sleep, which obviously is not a thing, but even if that was true, we'd have geographies that are not covered at any given moment, and a lot of them.
Um, and so I think that's a, a part of this that is not— that I shouldn't— we can't say that that's a weakness of the ordinance because it's not about the code, but it is sort of an adjacent question of if we're doing this, are we really adding work to an entity that doesn't have the staffing, and what's the plan then?
Um, I— 29 is, is ludicrously low in my opinion.
I believe there was a plan to have it near 80 that was suggested, uh, a year to a year and a half ago, if I recall correctly.
I heard about it, and, uh, that seems like— and, and we're having this conversation on another yes.
And I hope that the administration is coming up with a way to do it as fast as possible, understanding that it's not going to be perfect on day 1.
And I don't want to hold you to like, well, we authorized 80 positions, why aren't there 80 people today that are fully trained on July 2nd or something?
But that's the piece of this that I'm trying to understand.
I want to first just give you a chance to respond, and then I'm going to let— hear what my colleagues are talking about as we go forward.
But thanks.
Vicente Harrison
Yeah, so just a general response to the work that is being done today.
I'm going to just share those remarks, and then I can, you know, follow up on the question that you had in terms of the potential of scaling up the program.
So Portland Parks and Recreation have received the initial proposal for potential tidy Title 20 updates for discussion and further review.
PP&R leadership is committed to collaborating with public safety leadership, the Portland Police Bureau, elected officials, and other city partners to identify sustainable and effective ways to improve public safety in Portland.
PP&R will continue to evaluate the potential Title 20 updates, ensuring all proposed changes are properly reviewed and vetted in accordance with the Bureau's and city's established processes and core values, as with previous code updates.
This review will include input from key stakeholders such as PP&R equity team, staff, public safety leadership, the City Attorney's Office, the Parks Director, our Deputy City Administrator, the City Administrator, and other relevant city partners.
Public input and community perspectives are important to Portland Parks, and should be considered as appropriate stages during the city's evaluation of potential changes to Title 20 code.
This vetted process has enabled our past success in being thoughtful, sustainable, legally sound, practical, and aligns with the city's commitment to public safety, equity, and responsible stewardship of Portland parks.
So in terms of directly Scaling up our program.
Right now we're at 29, and that's all we're funded for, is for 29, with the seasonal budget to bring on additional.
If there was an opportunity to scale up the program, that would be how we've done in the past successfully.
We'd stagger that approach.
So we would likely bring on, you know, at least 6 to 8 rangers.
There's an annual—.
Ryan Swift-Major
6 To 8.
Vicente Harrison
Ranger Academy that we would like them to go through that takes place every March that all rangers go through in order for them to be properly prepared to go out and safely patrol our parks and serve our staff as well as the public.
So that, that's the answer to that.
And just in addition, in terms to the property, so we have about 12 community centers.
We have 12,000 acres approximately of parkland.
And over 144 developed parks.
So 29 rangers are across a 24-hour shift, or excuse me, a 24-hour work period, 7 days a week.
So at any given time, we have about 6 to 8 rangers for the entire city on, and that's at the very best outcome.
Steve Novick
Councilor Morillo.
Angelita Morillo
Thanks, Chair Novick.
Thank you guys so much for being here today to talk to us about this.
So I think there was some conflicting information earlier, and I'm curious, for Parks and for the rangers, how were you consulted on this policy?
Were you given time to give feedback?
And I think particularly on the modifications to Chapter 2, absolutely.
Vicente Harrison
There were some preliminary discussions in terms of this, so we were consulted.
That didn't expand to the degree that we would like it to do in terms of all of our staffing and making sure we're getting input from our leadership and other key stakeholders.
But the consultation did take place and we were able to talk about these potential changes.
Angelita Morillo
Gotcha.
Who were some of the folks that you're hoping to bring into the discussion in your ideal world?
Vicente Harrison
I mean, ideally, you know, our equity team is, is when we've updated Title 20 in the past, these are the kind of the milestones that we look to.
The equity team, obviously our PP&R leadership, which is our division managers and the staff that report to them, which is a lot of our field and community center staff, our City Attorney's Office, of course.
And I think that this, this has been going through our City Attorney's Office, which is good.
Our parks director and DCA.
And obviously that will go up to our city administrator as well.
And then other city partners.
We would like to, you know, just get city feedback in terms of the community that we serve.
The user experience is important to parks.
It's what we want people— we want them to have a valued experience when they enter our spaces.
So their feedback is very key.
So those are just a few.
Angelita Morillo
Gotcha.
Um, as far as your individual feedback, what was some of the initial feedback that you gave, um, and did you see it integrated into the policy?
Vicente Harrison
Yeah, the initial feedback we, we gave was, you know, a lot of conversation in terms of the theory of what this potential is.
Um, obviously, as park rangers, non-sworn officers, we work in collaboration and partnership with Portland Police in terms of really making sure sure that we're able to address some of the crimes that are in parks.
Cold is one thing, and I think a lot of the things that we've talked about today are crimes that are taking place in parks.
And we really would value the police support in that regard.
And we've had success in the past and currently are working with police in terms of joint patrols, targeting certain areas that we know the public has let us know that they have identified crime in so we could address at our level.
Thank you.
The potential for expanding beyond the park zone is something that is definitely something for more consideration because there's just jurisdictional lines that we can't cross in terms of what the rangers are responsible for.
So within parks property is where our jurisdiction ends.
But as we go into the roadway and public sidewalks, there's other conversations in terms of those entities being able to you know, work with rangers on what our authority would be for activity in those.
And currently what we do now is we refer— a ranger just doesn't end when they leave the park, but we refer those situations to the proper folks so that they're aware and they can take action as necessary.
Angelita Morillo
Okay.
So I'm hearing some, you know, general feedback.
Was there something specific that you wanted modified?
I'm hearing maybe some conflict about the sidewalk aspect of it and that being outside of jurisdiction.
Are there specific things that you wished were in the proposal or integrated?
Vicente Harrison
Again, I think just a fully vetted process in terms of just making sure we hear back from our staff.
I don't want to speak for our staff in terms of their— how this impacts their work and how they come to work and feel.
Like they are safe to perform their duties.
So I think that is just an important piece that, you know, we would want to see.
But there, there, and again, with our equity team is just a very another element because parks are the most diverse places in the city.
Everybody convenes there.
And we would want to make sure that we are able to support our citizens from an equitable standpoint in terms of this code update.
Angelita Morillo
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate you, you know, not everyone always thinks about bringing their frontline staff in, and I really appreciate that you have that perspective and that you're trying to get those folks there, because often the frontline folks know exactly what's happening on the ground that the rest of us don't.
And I do agree with Councilor Smith's earlier comments around the potential negative impacts on different communities who are going to be overpoliced.
You know, rather than, than other people.
I would definitely love to have a briefing with frontline staff.
I don't know if that happens at committee or if it happens individually for us, but I would love to get more of that perspective really fleshed out about what it's going to look like to change this enforcement, and from the equity team as well.
So perhaps that's something me and the chair can work on.
Ryan Swift-Major
Thank you.
Angelita Morillo
To either bring that as a discussion to committee or individually.
Trying to see if I have any more questions.
And were the unions who represent the rangers consulted on this as well, or is that— are those some of the folks that you would want to bring in as well?
Vicente Harrison
Well, since we didn't necessarily lead this process, that would be something for Councilor Zimmerman's staff to answer.
I'm not certain.
So, yeah.
Angelita Morillo
Gotcha.
Okay.
Well, it sounds like we need more extensive process with frontline staff regardless.
And I heard from the person who testified for LIUNA that I think they wanted to be a part of that process as well.
I think I will pause there.
See if my other colleagues have anything else to add.
Steve Novick
Councilor Zimmerman.
Eric Zimmerman
Thank you.
Aside from the sidewalk thing, I'm a little bit confused by some of the discussion here.
So what is it about the current— because the only thing that's really changing here is after a park ranger writes an exclusion, which means their job is done, that the automatic stay process doesn't occur.
And actually, that's it.
That is the only change for day-to-day work from a park ranger perspective that would change is the stay is no longer automatic, because the other change is just taking what's already on the books and saying it's going from 30 to 90 or from 60 to 90.
So I don't want to throw around certain words without meaning here.
So I don't know what you mean when you bring up some of this stuff, I also would be cautious about, you know, when a counselor's office reaches out to management, we are— it's encompassing upon management to have that first-line perspective versus me reaching down to speak to individuals.
So I want to be real cautious here with what we're saying.
But what I don't understand, and I would like to— because I actually, colleagues, I want to be real transparent.
The sidewalk extension piece is one of those of If that's not going to work, I think we pull it, right?
I want to be real transparent about that.
I think we pull it.
But this idea that somehow this is this grand change because it's like a whopping 5 things— 30 turns into 90, 60 turns into 90, automatic stay is eliminated.
So I don't want this to be too much bigger than what it is.
Thank you.
And I think that the idea that, Mr.
Administrator, that I would reach down into your employee base to write it with an employee versus writing with your managers is a strange standard.
But if there is something that I'm missing, by all means, let me know.
But I want to— the idea about where this is enforced and how it's enforced is incredibly important, and I value that part of this discussion.
I want to just talk about a couple of places: Dawson, Wilkes, Columbia Slough Trail, Northwest Powerhurst, Ventura, Gateway, East Holiday, Lincoln, Cherry City, Cully, Whitaker, Sacagawea, Kunamokwit Peninsula, Farragut, Matt Dishman, and Lily Albina.
The number of exclusions that occurred at that list of places was 16, and it was this last year there.
I'm looking at my staff.
This last year.
Okay, 16.
Vicente Harrison
16.
Loretta Smith
Okay.
Eric Zimmerman
Out of 16, 11 of those exclusions were for things that don't fall into this category.
They were other types of exclusions, the non-elevated type.
So we're really talking about 4 that would have fallen into this category.
And that is out of a total— so 16 out of a total of 257 exclusions that existed.
Yeah.
Across the city park and infrastructure, and it looks like community centers.
So I say that because how and where things are enforced and where exclusions have existed, I think that there has been a lot of work to make sure that folks are being quite careful and quite transparent and also using it judiciously.
But the majority are happening in other— in parts of the city.
I think a lot of this is probably downtown.
What I heard from folks is, what is the point of an exclusion if they automatically— it stayed?
So why would I write it?
So this is one of those where you hear that and you go, okay, we can work on a tool to give public safety this thing.
Brian Hughes
So yes.
Eric Zimmerman
Okay, got it.
I still am missing like what this crux is about, about what changes for the interaction between the officer or the park ranger and the person.
I'm not, I'm not understanding that.
But we don't want to have things on our books that are not seen as worth of doing if they are automatically stayed or there's a change there.
So, but I do want to the colleagues, I just want to say like the sidewalk thing, if that has those are things that I think are worthy of the discussion.
Our attempt in expanding in those areas was just to improve what looked like a broken system.
But if those are not functional, I'm happy to hear that discussion and move those out in a future reading.
So thank you, Chair.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Kanal.
And by the way, Councilor Marie and I both have to leave at 12:30 on the dot.
Sameer Kanal
Okay.
Has the Parks Board been consulted on this by any chance?
Unidentified speaker
Maybe I'll jump in.
I also, I just wanna respond a little bit to Councilor Zimmerman's question.
I think there's some process clarity that maybe is, at least for me, this is a new process in terms of how we're producing code amendments.
When in 2019, when the last time the parks updated it, it was run by parks, there was a series of steps that Parks went through in terms of public feedback and all those steps.
This is coming from a council office, and it isn't— wasn't at least eminently clear to me we were moving from an informal consultation into a formal process of feedback and review.
And so I think part of what we are saying is at least the convention has been when a bureau is running these processes, there's a series of steps and fuller consultation.
And so I think we may be— clearly we're moving into that fuller process now.
Ryan Swift-Major
Thank you.
Unidentified speaker
And we can help with that process in terms of consultations, both with staff.
There would be no expectation, it would not be appropriate for you to directly consult with staff.
I think the question is what step in this journey are we on?
When are we moving to a more formal dialogue around this?
And how can we be in support of that?
I think in general we are supportive of this proposal.
It's more about just process clarity about how do we work on this process together.
And no, the Parks Board met last week and we did not bring this as okay.
Sameer Kanal
I guess just because I have the floor, I think process clarity is good.
And I also agree, we've been told many times it's not appropriate for us to call like, you know, the front desk of a community center.
So if you are one of the people who works at the front desk of a community center and are wondering why that hasn't happened, we've gotten a lot of don't do that over time.
So I think that makes sense.
Thank you.
I think it'd be helpful for us to know, like, what it— what's a reasonable timeline as well, and we can follow up there.
Unidentified speaker
Yep.
Sameer Kanal
I'd love to know what the Parks Board thinks, just personally, as I mentioned, a former member of it.
But I think that that's just kind of helpful general clarity.
The— for me, there— I can go through, and I'm happy to follow up with Councilor Zimmerman about the stuff here that is like, this might be a challenge, this seems really awesome, and here's things that if I had this other information would be helpful for me.
The pedestrian plaza piece, and this is just a clarifier, the exclusions there are done by PBOT as well, right?
And so I'm curious how the information would be shared as an implementation question that I don't think—.
Eric Zimmerman
We'd love to have done that.
We actually made a decision To not muddy the water given the code issue there.
But that was in our early discussions of it actually makes sense because it kind of walks like a park, functions as a park, but is a PBOT asset.
So I made that decision not to include it in this time, not for a reason that we didn't think it would be a good, it's just that we were focused on parks this time.
But accurate.
Sameer Kanal
And in terms of what you're changing, that makes sense.
I'll note that I was asking more from the perspective of, When you're looking at, have they, is this the first offense, second offense, third offense, you're also now looking at pedestrian plazas as an earlier, the first or second, to determine if this is the second or third.
And so I'm curious how the information flow is gonna come from PBOT over here.
But what I'm also hearing is, I think it's time that we have the conversation about what is the park ranger program's jurisdiction.
Not only geographically, but also in terms of what you can do.
And obviously Vicente is somebody who should be at the center of that conversation as part of this process, because I think you're right, the pedestrian plazas walk like a park and talk like a park and probably should be ranged.
I don't think you guys use that term, but it should be served by the park ranger program in the long run, not tomorrow, but, you know, at as part of this conversation.
And so I'm curious about that, but that's, that's a piece that I think we should dig into more over time.
Thanks.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor Kanal.
So I have a question both for you, Vicente, and for, and for the police folks who are here.
I think Councilor Kanal mentioned this earlier, the requirement that there be a documentation of why an exclusion wasn't issued.
Are people concerned that that might be a workload issue, or does that seem like something that's not really a problem?
Vicente Harrison
I'll let police go first and then I can.
Sameer Kanal
Good morning.
Chris Burley, Portland Police Captain at North Precinct.
Aaron Schmautz
Appreciate the question, Councilor Novick.
This has been a point of conversation.
I've spoken with there would likely be a cost in us identifying, creating some type of template so we could pull data.
And, you know, with any unfunded mandate right now, the way things are, it makes it very difficult.
Sameer Kanal
It is also a time constraint on our officers.
Aaron Schmautz
Our call response times, as was discussed by Deputy Chief Hughes earlier and brought up by some of you, is nowhere near where we want it.
And so this would be another burden on our officers.
Ryan Swift-Major
Thank you.
Eric Zimmerman
You know, requirement of our officers to write a report or finish a template.
Aaron Schmautz
And I attempted to reach out to staff at the Police Bureau to kind of find out how much they thought that might cost.
However, I haven't heard back on doing how much that would cost.
Vicente Harrison
Thank you again, Councilor Novick, for the question.
So currently within the program, this documentation is taking place.
It's not a direct tally, if you will.
So when a ranger makes contact, that is documented in their daily data, that's their daily report.
If there isn't an exclusion issued, there may be a special report associated or a subject of interest report because the individual just walked away.
This is why one of the things that is in this proposal that we do support is the removal of the stay because that would give us, when we do get contact information of the individual that we're excluding, that would give us immediate remedy for the park.
But the tallying, so to speak, of why and why not, it's challenging and there's an equity component.
And I'll just share an example.
If we are dealing with someone downtown per se that is drinking outside, right?
That's, that's a, you know, what would sound like an excludable offense.
You know, obviously there's more detail based upon the contact.
We have these same situations happening at Peninsula Park Rose Garden where we have folks that are out, a couple having a bottle of wine on a picnic blanket.
Now, will we have the same standard there to issue an exclusion for somebody in those situations?
So there's there's always more when you're dealing with the frontline situation and the information that you're gathering concerning what the condition is.
So I don't know necessarily if, if that understanding why or why not we didn't take that enforcement action would tell a story that would be useful.
But we do document those currently now within our daily reports, whether it's a special report, an incident report, whether it's a damage report or vandalism associated.
So that's how I'll answer that question.
Eric Zimmerman
Chair, can I just clarify something?
Of course.
The great example that the director just gave, but that's actually not what the need to document is about.
If you look across the park and you maybe see something, you make a choice in your head not to deal with it, that doesn't require it.
What this— so, so good example, and I want to make sure that the rangers don't under— they understand that that's not what we're talking about.
Really, this is about— this is about a lot of your officers, uh, Captain.
So you, you make an arrest, so we've already got you in the, uh, we're doing reports, we're doing— we're taking the time to arrest what we're saying is that if then the arrest for what is also an excludable is not excluded, is there the possibility to make a note in that report of chose not to exclude for this reason, et cetera?
And I'm sure there are very good valid reasons why, perhaps, but that wouldn't apply if there was no interaction, no arrest, no— and that's why it wouldn't really, in that case, apply.
Vicente Harrison
Okay.
Eric Zimmerman
I want to just clarify, because that's some nuance, but that was a perfect example.
And then I am— Captain, I'm hearing you loud and clear on this report piece.
And to colleagues, I would put that also in the category of willing to hear more about and what's functional or not functional if there was an amendment to it.
But that's how I want to describe that.
It's more, we're already making an arrest.
Why wouldn't we also do this?
Because that helps then the rangers later on to be like, you've been right, you got arrested for drugs in public, you got to have an exclusion now.
That's what— that's our intent here.
Steve Novick
Councilor Morillo.
Angelita Morillo
Sorry.
Thank you.
I know we're almost at time, and Councilor Novick and I have to leave right at 12:30, so I just wanted to put a question that I want on the record for future discussion, if you could bring it.
Basically, I just feel like I need a lot more understanding on why this code change makes sense as a solution, especially given a lot of the risks that Councilor Smith laid out earlier.
So if the Bureau could get us more data on how many exclusions the Bureau issued in the last few years, how many of those were appealed, reversed, how many were for conduct that's currently listed on the E.2A list, and how many contacts that ended in a warning or ejection instead of exclusion, and what standards there are for that decision-making.
Sorry, I threw a lot of questions at you.
I'm sorry, I threw questions out at you, but it's recorded so you can look at it later, or I will email it to whoever would like.
But I think those are some of the questions that I would want answered for the follow-up discussion.
And thanks so much for your time today.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Councilor Morillo.
Thanks everybody for, I think, a valuable initial discussion of this proposal.
And now this meeting of the Committee and Public Safety Committee is adjourned.