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.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thanks, Wendy.
Olivia Clark
Great.
I'd like to open up this work session.
I'm going to gavel just for fun.
And I'm sorry I was late this morning.
I had a flat tire, and I'm going to have to leave early today.
So I'm going to turn this meeting over to Councilor Koyama Lane.
I'm going to ceremony— I will bring you the gavel, and you can close the meeting because I have to leave early.
Unidentified speaker
Thank you, Mayor.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
So sounds great.
Thank you, Vice President Clark.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Today at this work session, we're going to dive into the future of Civic Life and the Neighborhood Program.
This is an especially important and timely conversation.
As we've seen, Civic Life is at an important point navigating leadership changes, reduced resources, structural changes across the city, and at the same time, Portlanders have been really clear.
They want to see engagement that's equitable, easier to access, easier to participate in, and more meaningful to the decisions we make.
And so today is an opportunity for council to help shape the direction of this work.
With charter reform in place and our district-based council structure taking root, we have a chance to define how the city invites Portlanders into their local government.
This is a moment to think big about what a coordinated, responsive, and inclusive engagement system should look like and what role Civic Life should play as the hub of that system.
So to guide our discussion, the Civic Life team will walk us through a presentation that covers the history, current state, and some future visioning for both citywide engagement and the neighborhood program.
And then after the presentation, we'll have time for clarifying, um, And technical questions, technical and clarifying questions.
And we'll take a short break before moving into a discussion on each of the 3 key policy questions where council direction is essential.
So each of us has a note-taking sheet in front of us here at the dais to jot down questions and ideas on all the 3 discussion topics as we go.
I would like to thank Civic Life and this team here, our community partners, for the extensive listening, learning, and relationship building reflected in this work.
And with that, And with that, I will turn things over to Laura Oppenheimer, Interim Chief Engagement Officer, to begin the presentation.
Laura Oppenheimer
Thank you, Councilor, and thanks everyone for being here to be part of the discussion, which we are very excited to have.
Again, for the record, Laura Oppenheimer, I use she and her pronouns.
I am the Interim Chief Engagement Officer and the long-term Chief Communications Officer.
I am joined by Harmony Dashiell, our City Engagement Manager, and Adam Lyons, our Neighborhood Program Lead.
I think less than 4 months ago when City Administrator Lee asked us to really take on the challenge of understanding and assessing where civic life is today, where it has been, and where we believe it is headed, one of the things that the 3 of us quickly realized is that we were probably past due for a conversation with Council to really get that policy direction to make sure we have shared alignment around the scope, the mission, the priorities of Civic Life.
So here's what we're going to walk through today.
First, I'll give a little overview of the history and the opportunity before us, then share some highlights of what we have heard from Portlanders about what they are looking for in city engagement.
Then Harmony will walk through where we're at with the core team and the bureau-based engagement for Civic Life.
Adam will do a deeper dive on the neighborhood program, and then we will dig into those policy questions.
And as Councilor Koyama Lane said, you have these sheets in front of you if you'd like to jot down questions and thoughts as we go.
So why now?
We see 3 important kind of forces coming together to create an important inflection point for civic life.
One is just kind of acknowledging the elephant in the room.
There's been a great deal of leadership turnover over the years.
There have been budget reductions, a lot of change Secondly, we've obviously had charter reform.
That was a mandate for a responsive city government.
Engagement was at the heart of that work and of Portlanders' expectations for their new form of government.
And third, engagement is one of about half a dozen core services that have gone through realignment and moved into a more centralized structure.
Taking all 3 of those things together, we really see this as a moment where we can set that future direction with some guidance from all of you.
Thank you, Mayor.
So there's a journalism term called don't bury the lead, so we're not going to do that.
Starting with where we believe civic life is headed, and then we'll kind of walk through the mechanics.
We really see the Office of Community and Civic Life building relationships and creating pathways for Portlanders to shape the city decisions across neighborhoods, identities, and communities.
As Portland's hub for inclusive and coordinated engagement, Civic Life strengthens the connection between community voices, city services, and City Council priorities.
That is really an expansion of the origins of Civic Life, and we're gonna take just a real short trip down memory lane here.
What we now know as Civic Life began very much as a community-centered movement around neighborhood-based engagement.
That really got going in the 1960s, and it was about a decade later that the city formally developed a program then called the over the years, there have been quite a few iterations and several names along with that.
You'll see some of the key milestones marked here.
In the early 2000s, really a focus on inclusion, capacity building, and kind of shifting the culture, leading to the major modern revision of the neighborhood program standards in 2005.
You'll hear those referred to as the ONI standards.
It was called the Office of Neighborhood Involvement at the time.
Sameer Kanal
Councilmember Herbold.
Laura Oppenheimer
Over the years, various programs were added beyond the neighborhood program, and in 2018, the City Council gave Civic Life its current name and really broadened that mission with the idea that it was there to connect Portlanders with their city government.
However, since 2021, we have seen significant downsizing and a lot of turnover in leadership.
Right at the same time that voters were approving charter reform and creating the geographic districts that now anchor our City Council.
So I had to go back myself and dig through the past 5 budgets to really get a sense of how dramatic the scope has changed for Civic Life.
You'll see here over the past 5 budget years, the bureau kind of shrinking year by year from 50-some staff down to fewer than 10 as of this last budget year, with only 4 of those positions filled in July as we headed into the core service realignment.
You know, and during that 3.5-year period, there were a series of 3 interim or acting directors without a long-term director in place.
So I say that just to kind of understand where we are coming from as we launch this rebuild.
But then you will see the upward trajectory at the end, and that is—.
Thank you.
Core service realignment kicking in.
We now have about 30 staff.
Harmony will share more about that later.
It really does create a new opportunity for us.
This graphic visualizes the ecosystem of engagement as it existed up until our new form of government and core service realignment.
Civic Life was a collection of small— the neighborhood program and other small engagement programs, in most cases run by a single person.
Within bureaus, there were engagement staff doing fantastic work to ask Portlanders what they thought about projects and programs and to build relationships.
However, the experience was pretty uneven for Portlanders, with each bureau doing things a bit differently.
There wasn't a common ecosystem or infrastructure tying that work together.
This represents the system that we are moving toward under the umbrella of community and civic life with a core team providing citywide strategy, resources, and programs, and embedded teams in the service areas conducting engagement in alignment with citywide strategies.
Now, all of this needs to be centered around what Portlanders want from engagement.
And fortunately, we are not starting from scratch.
There have been some really significant efforts over the last several years to hear from Portlanders.
I'm just going to briefly highlight 3 of those, and we'll certainly follow up with some additional reading for anyone who wants to do a deeper dive.
First, the Portland Engagement Project in 2023 and 2024.
Civic Life at the time worked with a contractor, 40 community partners who mobilized their networks, and heard from about 700 Portlanders who generated 1,000 ideas, all in the name of informing how we can move forward with better city engagement that met the needs of our diversifying population and our new form of government.
3 Key themes emerged from that research.
Number one, start with us.
Portlanders want to be proactively engaged before decisions are made.
For each of these, you'll see a couple of representative quotes.
Of what we heard.
Number 2, vary the options.
Make it easier.
Don't expect everyone to engage the same way and meet people where they are, literally and figuratively.
Number 3, centralize.
We heard that people would like a common hub where they could find the ways to get involved with city government and make their voices heard without having to hunt things down through different bureaus and different offices.
The second input that I'd like to highlight is the Portland Insights Survey.
This is our biennial benchmark survey of public opinion.
It's conducted in conjunction with Portland State University, statistically valid research with community partners helping boost participation among underrepresented communities.
There's a standard question we can track from one survey to the next next, about the ease of contacting the city on issues important to you.
You will see here that the response is lukewarm across the board, with particularly in District 1, a lower level of satisfaction.
And again, you'll see 2 representative comments here, and I think they reflect that there is a good deal of skepticism on the part of Portlanders, but also hope as we move into a new form of government that there's the opportunity for change.
I do wanna note that the 2026 Thank you.
And the 2026 survey has been out in the field and we'll be getting results back in a few months and look forward to sharing those and seeing where we are.
Last but not least, the Charter Commission itself focused on not only conducting innovative and inclusive engagement, but also thinking about how that needs to be part of the new form of government going forward.
You'll see here a quote from the final recommendations from the Charter Commission, urging all of us to continue to engage with the communities historically left out of City Hall decision-making and our community partners.
I highlight these 3 bodies of work to say that they're here to inform and to anchor where civic life can go in the future.
With that, I'm going to turn it over to Harmony to share an overview of our system today.
Harmony Dashiell
Thank you.
Harmony Daschiel, she/her pronouns for the record.
I am currently the Senior Engagement Manager for the city and oversee all of the staff that are embedded in bureaus for engagement.
And we're going to take a walk through what makes up Civic Life right now from a staffing component and what we bring to the table.
Our current state as of August 4th, when the engagement realignment went live and all of the staff that were in the bureaus became embedded as part of Civic Life.
That includes 9 in the core team.
Those are those single-staffed programs, and we'll do a little bit deeper dive in a future slide here.
2 Of those programs, including the Portland Insight Survey, moved from other bureaus into that core Civic Life team.
And then the embedded teams that represent 3 service areas in several different bureaus that are 21 positions that are now part of the Civic Life umbrella that historically were not so.
Thank you.
In the past, those bureaus designed and implemented their own engagement strategies.
There is variation across the city and across the bureaus.
That's not a bad thing.
We can talk a little bit about that today.
There are definitely opportunities for standardization and where we can work smarter, not harder, or have consistency both for community and for the information that we bring to city leadership.
But there are some very notable differences that are there and should be there because of the uniqueness of the work that different bureaus do.
Thank you.
One thing that, as we stepped into these roles a few months ago, became very clear as I met with all of the impacted staff with engagement, all of their supervisors, and various leaders throughout the city is that many of these engagement teams in the bureaus were in flux, not just from the new form of government, not just because of engagement realignment, but just over the course of those 5 or so years that Laura touched on, just as civic life was going through cuts, Many of the bureaus were also going through their own realignments of sorts, restructurings, budget cuts, that many of the engagement teams that were within bureaus had high turnover in supervisors.
Very few of them had supervisors of those teams that were engagement professionals.
They are amazing staff that said, oh my gosh, there's a need.
We need to make sure that these teams have supervisory leadership and stepped in and did amazing work.
But we didn't have that continuity.
Thank you.
Of someone who kept up with the standards and the practices and does the deep dive.
Generally across the city, only a couple of teams had that continuity.
This highlights a little bit of the org structure that we have.
You'll notice Laura as the interim engagement officer in that core team that has those individual programs.
The infrastructure that is within the bureaus is what is below.
I will say each of those yellow squares tells a little bit different story as to what those staff cover, how many staff there are, what the purview is.
There is significant difference in how these teams are funded, and if they are funded from restricted funds versus general fund, some of that determines the very specific work that they do.
Not covered in here or in the presentation is that many of these teams prior to realignment or over the last few years also had CSA support to help with some of the on-the-ground and administrative work.
We do not have any CSA days anymore in the new realignment and civic life structure.
And so that is a hit to our capacity in doing the work and being out in community.
Also worth noting that not every bureau and not every service area is represented in this system.
Public safety, we do cover Portland Street Response and PBEM, but we do not have anybody in the engagement structure from the other bureaus.
I think it's also worth noting while we work— look at Parks and Rec that have 5 staff and one of the largest teams, yes.
Only 3 of those are permanent positions, that we do have 2 that are set to expire in the next fiscal year or this fiscal year, and only cover the SDC-funded projects.
So it's very specific, the work that they do.
So again, each of these tells a unique story about the needs of the bureau, about the current capacity of the bureau, but also how we do engagement and where engagement fits in.
This graphic shows the core Civic Life team.
So those 9 positions that are in that upper bucket that we had there.
So the different programs that we have are listed here.
Again, all of these are one-person programs.
In engagement, we like to work as a team, but all of these are huge lifts that are done by single staff people and then coming together and supporting each other as best we can.
I'm gonna run through these really quickly, but the partnerships, which is the We Are Better Together program, historically was in human resources and moved over with realignment to civic life.
The immigrant and refugee engagement position—we just finished up welcome week, welcoming week.
So amazing that we have that here in civic life.
The youth engagement is the Multnomah Youth Commission that we have in partnership with Multnomah County.
This is our portion of that program.
The neighborhood program, which we will talk more in depth about when Adams.
Has his section here coming up.
And the Urban Native Engagement, which is a vacant position right now, the position description is currently under review and we hope to be able to launch that recruitment soon.
The other component of the Core Civic Life Group is the citywide functions.
There we have the advisory bodies.
You all have heard a lot about those and the admin rules that are being reviewed and in those final stages.
Different engagement resources and systems.
That's something we have done a relaunch with in the last couple months of of bringing a convening of not just the 30 staff that we're talking about right now, but any of the staff in the city who do engagement-related activities, outreach activities, to be able to share resources and support and systems in that broader group.
We now have the insights survey that came over from the CBO office and opinion research.
We are working on standardizing surveys as we go across the city, maybe not necessarily to always be statistically relevant, but to say, how do we do this?
How do we survey folks?
What are some consistencies that we have?
What are the platforms that we use?
So that is work that Laura is really moving forward and hope to have some more information to share with you soon.
And then an admin support specialist that we are also getting ready to recruit for.
Okay, as far as like what, what all that means, we talked about positions, but on the ground, what is the experience of these roles and what they do.
All of our engagement folks really work and operate to get input to inform decisions that city leadership makes.
Some of that comes to you all when we have policy procedures and questions.
Some goes to bureau leadership or the administration, but we want to hear from Portlanders before we make that decision.
It's been a commitment from the city to activate and hear from folks who historically have not been plugged into the work that we do here at the city.
Thank you.
Many of our staff are well-versed in facilitation, in running and executing events, being able to really get to Portlanders where Portlanders are at.
We're also adept at developing partnerships.
There's a big branch of being able to connect with the different events that are happening in the city, be able to support our community-based organizations, our school districts, different large functions that happen in the city that are maybe not city-specific, but are collaborators in this work that we do.
Thank you.
And then outreach, how we share out programs.
When we talk about engagement and outreach, oftentimes these words are used interchangeably.
There are some important notes that those of us in the business, if you will, do see as a difference, that when we're looking at engagement, we're usually looking at getting input back.
So not just sharing what we're doing, but also being able to elicit that feedback to help inform that decision-making.
And outreach, where we are able to share out here is what we're doing.
Here are the resources that we have.
We want to make you aware of something that's going on, but don't necessarily have that two-way conversation in what we're bringing to the community.
Priorities.
As we have stepped into this structure and been on a learning journey the last couple months of the broader diagram of what this looks like, we have a couple things that we know need to be addressed sooner than later.
Creating shared standards and expectations and structures for engagement across the bureaus and service areas.
This has been a long wishlist thing for those of us who have done engagement in the city for a long time that we maybe don't need to develop our own templates, or do we have a common outreach and engagement strategy platform that we can have?
Part of the dialogue we'd love to have with you all is how can we be more standardized in what comes to you and information that we share to you to be able to make informed decisions?
So I think there's a big opportunity in places where we can make improvements.
Thank you.
Improvement to save capacity, but also to create an expectation from community and from leadership on what engagement looks like and how it's reported out.
We would love to integrate one-person programs into a coordinated engagement system.
It is a passion of mine that we don't leave our staff on islands by themselves, especially when we do engagement, that if there are these one-person teams, that it is come into our fold, you're not by yourself, how can we support you, where can we come together and, and work together so that you are not alone in this work.
Thank you.
Provide clear direction and framework and communication on the vision.
This is feedback that we've gotten from a lot of staff and also from community of what are, what are we doing?
What's happening with realignment?
What is that end goal?
What are we trying to achieve here?
I hope that this is the beginning of some dialogue with you all about what your needs are so we can really paint that future vision.
As we are all new to this work sitting up here at the dais, we're all learning as we go.
Thank you.
This is an opportunity for us to really start fresh and be able to articulate that to bring everybody along for the journey and to collaborate in that work.
I touched on a few of our vacant positions that will help us with capacity.
These are important positions for us to be able to move the work forward.
The Urban Native Engagement Coordinator, having an admin specialist that can help us with the advisory bodies, with the neighborhood program, and the Public Works Engagement Manager.
As you noticed on the chart, there is that vacant position.
So I am housing all of the bureau-wide staff but we will in a long-term goal have 2 of us to share that lift.
Complete the advisory body program improvements.
Again, you all have heard from Civic Life on that component.
It's not something that we're going to do a deep dive into today.
We would like to stabilize the neighborhood program that has been in flux for several years and be able to get us into a better, more comprehensive, cohesive space there.
And develop engagement performance metrics.
We're working with the data office that we realized that through all of the changes, whether it was program cuts or realignment, that there is only one current performance metric.
And so we will work on developing those so that we can have measurable results for the work that we do as an organization and as a bureau.
All of this learning journey has not been without some challenges and some identification of gaps in where we are at as a city.
So we wanted to be straightforward with where those are, that It's not all sunshine.
We do have some notable places where we have pinch points that we don't have any dedicated positions for citywide initiatives or employee engagement.
When I talk about citywide initiatives, that's support of the chief offices, the sustainability officer, comms officer, the engagement officer, any of those we don't have any kind of engagement person for, which Which leaves us in a crunch for when we have outreach needs and engagement needs for the programs that are run out of those spaces.
We also don't have the employee engagement, things like onboarding, employee retention practices.
We've been in conversation with Bureau of Human Resources about what that can look like.
That it was a little bit of a one-two punch that between just staffing reductions and realignment, that a lot of the folks that we had within bureaus that did that work are no longer in positions to be able to do so.
Councilor Smith.
We have no dedicated support staff for City Ops, the admin portfolios, and for several bureaus.
We only have 3 service areas that are covered here.
We do not have all the bureaus.
We are getting tapped by all the bureaus, which is fantastic.
I love it when people come to us, but that means we're having to kind of plan on the fly on how we make sure to take care of everybody in that space.
Engagement staff also hold a significant non-engagement responsibility.
That is what made, I think, engagement realignment so complicated.
I can speak for myself that my previous role was equity and engagement.
And so how do you pull that apart to be able to make a civic life group?
And that has not been without painful points, both for the staff and for bureaus of who takes on that work then if we're pulling someone from engagement and they had maybe equity work or HR work that they were also doing in that So there are very few people in the city that did 100% engagement work when we started to make these moves and continue to look at what the needs are in this space.
We have experienced a lack of flexibility to pivot to special events or citywide needs.
If there is something that we need to mobilize for, we don't have a flex team that can do that.
I would love to see that as maybe an option that we explore together to be able to be responsive and proactive in that space right now.
Councilor Smith.
We've done some of that work living on hopes, dreams, and favors from our colleagues and our staff, which is not a sustainable or resilient way for us to do this and not probably best by community.
So we'd love to have some thought partnership on what that can look like.
As the whole city has experienced funding constraints, that has been exacerbated with realignment of not knowing what budgets we have to use in engagement.
We are a pretty scrappy group and like to do things as inexpensively as possible.
And yet to reach communities, to do right by communities, especially communities that have not been engaged with the city, a lot of it is pay to play.
So going into the new fiscal year where we didn't know if we were going to have access to budget, what that budget was going to be, what IOs to charge, we did have some missed opportunities of long-term partnerships that we could not make commitments but also just a, even in this first quarter of the fiscal year, what do we have to work with and where can we show up where we need to be able to pay for things?
And there was not that certainty when positions moved, but the budgets did not.
That is getting rectified partially in the fall TAO.
So all is not lost, but it is a pinch point in the here and now.
Varying understandings and definitions of engagement and outreach.
I touched on this a little bit before of oftentimes those words are used interchangeably.
We have a lot staff in the city that do outreach.
We have a good amount of staff that do engagement, but where are those lines and who do we bring into realignment?
Who's part of civic life?
And with the overlap in those spaces, how can we continue to support our outreach staff where there is that shared expertise and knowledge that we can have and be able to make a system that supports all the staff that do engagement and outreach?
And then just to call it out, Civic Life reputation, both internally and externally.
We heard loud and clear from staff that were anxious about being part of the engagement realignment because of the reputation that Civic Life has, both in the city with staff of like, ooh, y'all are moving over to Civic Life, but even from community of, are you sure you want to do this?
This is where people go to get laid off or for things to get cut.
Yeah.
So I'm just being blunt here that there was a lot of reputational damage here, and how do we start to rebuild that trust internally and externally with our staff in our cities and take care of our staff and not have it be a perceived punishment to come over to Civic Life?
So we have recommendations.
We're not here just to be doomsday.
We'll turn it around a little bit.
We have some ideas on where we can get to a better place.
Establish a 5-year stability plan in collaboration with the bureaus, with service area leadership, with you all, with the city administrator, that we can start to change that trajectory where we've had about 5 years of decline, that we can get to a place where we're better off.
I think keeping in mind of what the fiscal state of the city is right now, we're not looking to wave a wand and have everything be better in a year, but I do think we can come up with a intentional plan of what the future looks like.
We would love to have recommended staffing and funding adjustments for next fiscal year to make sure that we do have the resources that we need to do the work to come by community and also get what you all need for your decision-making.
And develop a structure and funding model that provides that flexibility that I talked about earlier, that when we do have one-off projects that maybe don't necessitate a bureau having an engagement team, but they do have something that comes up, that we're able to pivot to that demand, or if we have just something big in the city that happens to need our attention, that we have the flexibility and ability to be able to do that.
And with that, I'm going to pass it over to my colleague Adam to speak more about the neighborhood program.
Adam Lyons
Thank you, Harmony.
Yeah, for the record, my name is Adam Lyons.
I use he/him pronouns, and I'm the city's interim district and neighborhood liaison.
In a previous role, I was also the director of Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods.
So I've also— I've had the experience of being in the community side as well.
The Neighborhood Program is Portland's longest-standing public involvement infrastructure connecting Portlanders with their city.
Today I want to give you a clear picture of how that system works, where it's had challenges, and what we're doing to stabilize it.
We also have recommendations on how it can evolve under Portland's new form of government.
Next slide.
I want to thank Laura for her walkthrough of the program's history.
Even over the past few years, there's been a lot of change.
We've combined 7 districts into 4.
We've At its core, the neighborhood program is about partnership.
Portland has 94 recognized neighborhood associations supported through 4 district coalition offices aligned with the city's new boundaries.
Those associations are open to anyone in the community and utilize hundreds, if not thousands, of volunteers to run meetings, events, social media, and other activities.
District coalitions are all now nonprofits with paid staff to support neighborhoods and lead district-wide programming.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Laura Oppenheimer
We've also expanded the number of Next slide, Laura.
Adam Lyons
Thank you.
This slide represents how the responsibilities are currently divided.
On the city side, Civic Life funds and manages the coalition grants and scopes of work.
We provide bureau-specific notices and communications to neighborhoods.
We maintain a community contact database and oversee and support the whole system.
Our district coalition partners then translate that infrastructure into direct support for neighborhoods, including insurance, fiscal sponsorship, small grants, communication support, and other types of technical assistance.
District coalitions' work extends beyond just neighborhoods.
Combined, their offices support hundreds of other small community-based nonprofits.
So the value of this model is that the city doesn't have to build every connection itself.
We invest in infrastructure that already exists in the community.
I want to also note that I meet with the districts every Monday.
I've been to board meetings and met with neighborhood leaders over the last few months.
I've been really heartened to hear a strong desire to reengage the city and resume information flow between bureaus and our hyper-local volunteers and district staff.
Current state—.
Sameer Kanal
Next slide, please, Laura.
Adam Lyons
I also want to be transparent about where the neighborhood program stands today.
Until this fiscal year, there were 5 staff for this office, and now it's down to a single funded coordinator position.
While we are still doing a staffing analysis, I can tell you my personal experience in the last 3 months— one staff is going to struggle to meet the needs of the community and the city.
Thank you.
Over the last several years, city leadership turnover, limited administrative capacity, and inconsistent contracting have created instability within the neighborhood system.
That instability has had real operational consequences for our partners, including delays in contracting, reimbursements, and communication.
And when these processes have become inconsistent, the relationships are affected too.
We've heard a lot of frustration from coalition and neighborhood leaders, and rebuilding trust is going to be a big part of the, the work moving forward.
But I want to emphasize something equally important.
We know what our problems are.
Our focus is moving from identifying the problems to systematically addressing them.
We are working to stabilize backend structures, improve external communication, and rebuild community relationships.
And on a positive note, despite all these challenges, there's still significant interest and goodwill in partnering with the city and Civic Life on this.
Our goal isn't to just return the program to where it was, it's to build the structure necessary to operate at a high level going forward.
Next slide.
With a little shorter priorities and action plan, um, our immediate work is centered around 3 priorities.
First is contract and reimbursement stability.
Our partners need predictable contracts, clear expectations, and timely payment.
We are looking at how long-term contracting could provide greater stability and reduce reduce administrative disruption.
Second, information flow.
We need clearer and more consistent communication between civic life, city bureaus, and our coalition and neighborhood partners.
The third is rebuilding community trust, and that requires responsiveness, transparency, and regular friendly engagement.
These priorities may sound operational, but they are really foundational.
Before we can redesign or expand, we need to make sure we have the basic systems in place to be successful.
Next slide.
Our first recommendation is to modernize the neighborhood program so that it operates as part of a broader, more coordinated engagement ecosystem.
Neighborhood associations remain an important pathway for civic participation, but they're not the only way we do engagement.
Portland needs— also engages residents through cultural and community-based organizations.
There's bureau-specific engagement programs and many other networks.
The opportunity and our goal is not to have those systems compete with one another.
It's to connect them better.
That means ensuring we have appropriate staffing and financial stability for trainings and resources that help broaden and deepen diversity and participation, and also coordinating neighborhood engagement with Civic Life's whole body of work.
Modernizing isn't just— isn't abandoning the neighborhood system.
It's about making it stronger, more connected, and integrated with our new form of government.
Sameer Kanal
Next slide.
Adam Lyons
The ONI standards.
Our recommendation is an update to the ONI standards.
Stabilizing today's operation is only one part of the work.
We also have to modernize the framework governing the system.
As Laura indicated earlier, the ONI standards were adopted in 2005.
Our government, our communities, and engagement landscape has changed significantly since then.
A recommendation is to restart this work through a community-driven process in 2027.
The city's responsibility would be to establish clear goals and guardrails for the process.
Community then would help shape the desired outcomes and how they can be achieved.
Ultimately, a proposal would return to the city for public testimony and consideration.
The objective of this process is to create clear contemporary expectations around accountability, transparency, and As I said before, this program is at a similar inflection point.
We've been candid about the challenges because rebuilding trust requires transparency, but we also see tremendous opportunity.
There is renewed interest from our partners.
There's a new district-based government structure.
There's an opportunity to clarify how neighborhoods, coalitions, civic life, and council offices work together.
And there's an opportunity to build a new relationship with the city's Our immediate responsibility is to stabilize the system, strengthen administration, and rebuild trust.
Our longer-term responsibility is to create a clear vision for what this program can become.
We don't need to recreate it from scratch.
We need to take what's endured, address what hasn't worked, and build the infrastructure for the next chapter.
We look forward to doing that work with our community partners and with our City Council.
Thank you.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Laura Oppenheimer
Thank you, Adam and Harmony.
Now we will turn to the 3 policy questions that we laid out for discussion today.
I'll give a quick preview of those, and then I believe we'll move into any clarifying or factual questions.
First, big picture.
We're really interested in knowing from all of you what principles you believe should guide the rebuild and integration of our engagement system for the city to ensure that it is responsive, coordinated, and inclusive.
Second, we're hoping to talk about decision-making input that comes to you.
How should community input inform council decision-making, and how can we design an engagement system that reliably meets those expectations?
And third, focusing more specifically on the neighborhood program, let's take the moment after this 18, 20 months we've had in our new form of government to talk about.
How can we make the most of the transition to district-based council seats, fostering connections between neighborhoods and elected leaders?
I'll leave it there, and I believe Councilor Koyama Lane will facilitate, uh, the next section.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you very much.
So at this point, do any colleagues have clarifying questions before we take a short break and then come back to discuss each of Councilor Kanal.
Sameer Kanal
Thanks.
Thanks, everybody, for the presentation.
A lot of thoughts.
I'll get to those when we get to this part.
But I wanted to clarify 2 things.
One, Adam, you said our goal isn't to just return the program to where it was, it's to build the structure necessary to operate at a high level going forward.
And the word just there implies that it is also in part to return the program to where it was.
And my question is, where it was when?
How far back in time are we trying to, to use as a metric point?
Adam Lyons
I think the, the metric point would be probably before charter reform and after, and how— I mean, I really see in this process of discovering and looking at this system again after having been gone that, that, that is a significant advance in the way that we do participatory government.
And figuring out how to marry the neighborhood program with that new form of government, I think, is a really interesting and compelling question, but it's going to take a lot of work.
So that's the— I think that's the demarcation that I see when I look at this evolution, if that makes sense.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, thanks.
The other question, Harmony, you said that public safety only had 2 people and that it covered PSR and PBAM.
My question is, what is the situation with BOEC Fire, community safety programs, and police?
Harmony Dashiell
That's a good question.
I'm going to tell you all what I have told the staff, that with all of us being new as of the end of May, these moves in the allocation of where people were coming from and who was part of engagement realignment came before our time.
And we have gone on as much of a hunt as we could for the whys.
And don't have most of them.
So I don't have an answer as to like why those decisions were made or who was moved and what thought and dialogue went into that.
So I don't know, but it is a gap.
Like clearly there are some large bureaus and buckets of work in the city that don't have representation and that I will work with Public Safety to see what needs to happen.
But we do welcome their staff that do engagement work into Being at our monthly meetings, participating with us.
Like, we do want to have that there, but I— we unfortunately just have to kind of make peace with there are some things that we will not have known because the people who made those decisions are no longer in the roles that put that into action.
Sameer Kanal
Okay, that makes sense.
I think it would be helpful to get an idea of what that means for the future.
Is the intent to keep it in the bureaus forever?
Or is the intent that that's just a second phase of the work?
And I understand you won't be able to answer that on the spot.
Yeah.
And I imagine that'll be when we have a new permanent city chief engagement officer, that that'll be a part of it.
I've had this similar conversation with you, Laura, about the communication side.
This is not the same.
I think there are reasons why it makes sense to keep engagement in the bureau that I don't think apply to communication and vice versa.
But it I think it is similar in the sense of it's the same question of what's the best course of action.
And I think the interest I have is some of these smaller groups don't have people who are doing it longer than 5, 10% of their time.
And then I guess I have a question that maybe more, it may be more for you, maybe more for our chair today.
Were neighborhood association representatives or coalition directors invited to speak today?
Are we gonna get to hear from them?
I know that they're here.
Harmony Dashiell
Yes.
They are here in the room, but I don't think that was part of how this work session was structured.
Sameer Kanal
Okay, uh, I would love to know why that is, and I understand that the— that that may not be something that you were involved in the decisions on, but in which case it's okay to say so.
Olivia Clark
D4 is in the audience.
Sorry?
I said D4 is in the audience.
Sameer Kanal
Yeah, D2 as well.
So I think all 4 are here.
Yeah.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I would love to hear from our district coalition partners.
Okay, so that's acceptable?
Sameer Kanal
Like, we've got till 5, so if it's possible.
I, I know I don't mean to disrupt or run a show that was already planned here, but I, I would love to have that sometime before the end of today.
Um, I, I think we've, we've had the, uh, part 1 of your 3-part thing of what you heard in the, uh, in the feedback was effectively nothing about us without us.
So here's a chance.
Thanks.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you.
We'll get through our clarifying questions and then see if that's possible.
Councilor Novick.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Chair.
I just have to ask, PBOT has one engagement person?
I mean, I know they do a lot of outreach.
Does that reflect a distinction between engagement and outreach, or does it reflect the fact that all their outreach people, that's not their entire job, they're just doing regular jobs and outreach?
Harmony Dashiell
All of the above.
And I will say, and that engagement person also has a significant body of work that's not engagement on their plate as well.
So I think it's a place where we do collaborate with PBOT leadership and Public Works leadership of what do we need to adequately cover the work.
But you're spot on that a lot of PBOT staff are maybe planning staff or execute the projects that do engagement as part of their daily work, but it's not a majority of it.
And so part of the system and infrastructure that we need to set up is making sure that we're making sure that we are supporting staff that are in that shop as well, that maybe 20% of the work that they do is engagement, and we want to prepare them and equip them to be successful at that, but that they're not a whole lot of just dedicated engagement staff that mobilize across the bureau.
Steve Novick
Thank you.
Olivia Clark
Yeah.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Any other clarifying questions?
All right, colleagues, we're going to take a quick 10-minute break.
So it is 2:46.
Let's get back at 2:56.
10 Minutes, 2:56.
Thank you.
All right.
And we are back.
We are going to move into discussion time.
We have 3 policy questions, and before we get to policy question number 3, we will We'll have time for our representatives from the different district coalition groups to come up for about 10 minutes to share some of their thoughts.
So we will kick it off with policy question number 1.
Colleagues, please feel free to get in the queue.
What principles should guide the rebuild and integration of Portland's engagement system to ensure it is responsive, coordinated, and inclusive?
Go ahead.
Olivia Clark
Thank you, Chair Koyama Lane.
Um, I'm going to veer a little bit off script here, or off the issue.
Um, I would say the bottom line, we have to provide them with support.
This is completely ridiculous, inadequate support.
And I'm— I might get a little heated here.
Um, it's embarrassing to me that we have so little support for our neighborhood associations.
Loretta Smith
Yes.
Olivia Clark
They were just thinking we're going to help them with insurance, technical assistance, maybe small grants, and one person is going to do that for a city of 165,000?
That's absolutely bananas.
It's bananas.
You know, I have to say, I'm going to reveal my own bias, is I worked for neighborhood associations in Eugene, and I did the neighborhood newsletter, and I organized Voters for Livable Neighborhoods.
Then I went to Salem.
I actually, before I worked for 3 mayors in Salem, I worked for the neighborhoods.
Candace Avalos
I had 5 neighborhood Mm-hmm.
Olivia Clark
And, and the city gave them money to do their own thing.
And of course, you know, the, the issues were generally around traffic, sidewalks, storm sewers, all the things that we hear all the time, and that's not any different.
So here we find ourselves here today, and I've made it a point to go to every single neighborhood association meeting, to organize my own meetings where I ask the neighborhood associations to come, Thank you.
And it's the same issues that I heard up and down the Willamette Valley.
And folks, I think this city is dependent on not just neighborhood associations, but volunteerism generally, and we don't do enough to support that.
You know, volunteers make the world go around, around here.
If it weren't for volunteers, you know, the Arboretum wouldn't work, all the way down to, you know, different community places.
So this is a high priority for me.
It's part of my advocacy for partnerships, volunteerism.
I just think it's vital.
And the one thing that I didn't hear earlier, and I'm not sure how this fits in number one, but I'm sure we can make it fit, is that there's a demographic issue going on here.
And I think a lot of our volunteers, the people that are keeping neighborhood associations afloat, Yes.
Are an older demographic, older generation, at least in District 4.
And I went to the Saul Alinsky Midwest Academy School of Organizing.
I know what it takes to organize.
You know, you have to— immediate, specific, realizable kinds of things.
And that's usually around a stop sign, or it's usually around a pothole, or it's something unsafe.
And those are the kinds of things that we need to use to motivate younger people also to get involved.
As long as there's an immediate, you know, real— realizable thing we can do, it does get people more involved.
And but we need resources for that, and maybe we need some training, maybe we need some organizing training for some of the neighborhood associations.
So obviously this is a high priority for me.
I just think it's absurd that we have this lack of resources for our neighborhood associations.
And as far as District—.
The District 4 coalition goes, um, it's geographically so huge and so diverse that we also should look at having a satellite office, or not just one office way up in the northwest, but something in Southwest Portland, or maybe in Sellwood or something, because we have a huge, uh, huge area that we have to cover in District 4.
But I guess Bottom line here is we need more support.
That should be your principle because we're woefully inadequate.
Just leave it at that.
Thank you for listening to me harangue.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Councilor Novick.
Steve Novick
So, Madam Chair, is it okay if I sort of jump around?
Candace Avalos
Go for it.
Okay.
Steve Novick
So I think that, and this really sort of relates to question 3, but I think that the existence of the representation by district has the chance to be a real game changer.
I mean, for one thing, when I was in the commission form of government, I hardly ever went to neighborhood associations because you knew I couldn't go to 99, so why go to any?
And now, like Councilor Clark, I— that if I haven't gone to all of them, it's not for want of trying.
So I think That, that means that we can tell the general public that neighborhood associations are a place to go to, you know, interact with your councilor, and that should make them more appealing.
Um, and what— I mean, one of the problem— I mean, one, one thing I just wanted to really underscore here is, um, there's— damn, where is it?
Um, you talk about, um, providing Develop training resources, capacity for increasing diversity and expanding participation.
And I think that's something the neighborhood associations could really use.
I remember saying 10 or 11 years ago that I thought that neighborhood associations' funding should be dependent on the extent to which their membership meetings reflected the diversity of their neighborhoods.
And Amanda Fritz almost cut my head off with a machete.
So I think that we should— could achieve the same thing, you know, with carrots rather than sticks.
If, I mean, if we had the resources to help, and maybe we don't, but if we had the resources to help the neighborhood associations sort of recruit people in order to make the people that show up more well-representative.
And the last thing I wanted to say is that we should make sure that the bureaus let—.
Councilor Smith.
Councilors know if they're doing outreach on specific projects in their districts.
Uh, like if PBOT's doing outreach on something or other, they should let the councilors know.
And then the councilors, A, can be aware that the outreach is happening on, and B, might be able to steer— help steer people to be, you know, part of the— part of the people who are outreached to.
So, I mean, I just— all of my comments obviously have to do with I think that representation in my district is a game changer, and it should be a game changer in a positive way, in a variety of ways.
I mean, the public— I mean, maybe this was somewhat true before, but the public— we are the front door for a lot of people, and we should take advantage of that.
Laura Oppenheimer
I did want to briefly say we're actually already working on a system to be able to provide both council offices and the district coalition offices Thank you.
Councilor Green.
Mitch Green
Thank you, Councilor Koyama Lane.
And can you remind me what you, like, we're answering the first question or whatever we want to do?
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I'm trying to get folks to answer the first question.
That is what was asked as we break it up into 3 conversations.
The first one is what principles guide the City of Portland's approach should guide the rebuild of an integration of Portland's engagement system to ensure it is responsive, coordinated, and inclusive.
Mitch Green
Okay, great.
Briefly, I'm just going to say I want to echo Councilor Clark's comments broadly.
I like when you go off on a rant, by the way.
You don't always use a lot of mic time, but when you do, it's just like, listen.
And you said something in there that I think is directly relevant to the question.
You mentioned the Saul Alinsky School, that sort of theory of of organizing that is deeply neighborhood-driven.
When I took my courses at Portland State on community development, we read all that too, and Portland was a lab for that.
And so I think if we were to resource our budget with the resources necessary to do that work and focus on building the neighborhood association, enable them to build and do that sort of neighborhood-level community organizing, I think we'd find That we get more inclusive and broad-based participation.
We build the bench with younger people.
We want to do that.
I think our city staff, I want us to actively and intentionally build out that diversity of opinion and participation.
That's what that looks like for me.
But I want to enable them to continue to sort of be the sort of source of a lot of the, the ideas, the volunteer work, and, and like elevating what needs to come to the councilor's attention.
Um, that's, that's I think what I had for my first one.
And then, and then you said all that stuff and I was like, I like, I like all that stuff.
So, um, there's other pieces here that I'll speak to when we get to the other parts of the structure conversation.
Thanks.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Great, thank you.
Councilor Avalos.
Candace Avalos
Okay, hello.
Thank you so much for your presentation today and just bringing this conversation forward.
It's so important as we're standing up this new form of government that we really get the future of our engagement right.
Um, one thing I'll note, um, the slide that you mentioned around what the Charter Commission said, I think is important because, um, we really just made such an councilor Smith.
Thank you, Mayor.
I think the City of Portland made an extraordinary effort.
That's not a word.
Extraordinary?
That's the word I was looking for.
Effort to make sure that we were reaching different parts.
And I think the success there was about the partnerships with groups that had connections to community.
And I think that's the key for me in what we need to continue building is what it looks like to partner with people.
Because understandably, not everybody is comfortable with government.
Not everybody is interested in hearing from government.
Thank you.
But they love to hear from their own neighbors.
And I know a lot of the polls show that too, that the best way that people get information is from their own neighbors.
And so I think that's why neighborhood associations become important, because that's one way that people feel connected to their direct community.
And therefore, you know, those are trusted sources.
So I think it's good that we continue to invest in that.
Obviously, we've got the new district system, we've got We've got the coalitions, and I want us to put effort there.
And it is important that we really assess, that we not make that the default, right?
And, you know, I think neighborhood associations, from my time prior to becoming a homeowner, I tried to dabble in some of them.
I remember I went to the Hollywood Neighborhood Association And it was fine, but I was like the youngest person there by like 40 years.
I'm not kidding.
And they were all like, oh, like it was all welcoming and all that, but I didn't feel like I knew how to engage in that space because I was a renter and I was 40 years younger.
And I just, so, and I obviously was making an effort to go because, you know, I'm this, right?
So an everyday person is not gonna take that kind of a risk.
And if they walk into a room like that, Like that, that would be an immediate, like, I'm not going back there, just because, you know, they, they just might not feel represented, right?
Um, and I think too, um, just this concept of people who rent, like, not feeling part of their neighborhoods is something that we really need to address.
It's something I experienced a lot.
Um, and I hear often from folks who want to be engaged in their community but don't feel like they're treated the same.
They're treated like they're just temporary because they're renting, which I honestly don't understand that concept.
Loretta Smith
Yeah.
Candace Avalos
I've had people telling me like, oh, you can just go rent somewhere else if you want to live in another neighborhood.
I'm like, what?
Do you know those deposit fees?
Do you know how hard it is to move?
Like, that is just not a realistic thing.
And so this like concept of renters being fluid and they can just go anywhere and therefore they have no place and no home, it permeates in the culture of the neighborhood associations in my experience and what I hear from people.
And so I think I just want to elevate that.
Like, it's important.
Thank you.
Neighbors hearing from neighbors is absolutely the way that people feel most engaged, and let's make sure to not define all of our engagement around that.
And not to say that we can't strengthen it, because one thing that I do too, um, when I do my constituent days and I go knock on doors, one of the goals of that is to invite those people to their own neighborhood association.
So I'll say, hey, you know, I'm knocking doors in, uh, Parkrose, and you have your neighborhood association coming up this Next week, right?
So trying to get people there.
So I definitely think that's worth the effort.
But again, how are we expanding beyond that so we're not stuck?
Because there are real barriers that people feel to their inclusivity in those kinds of spaces.
And let's see, I'm looking at the question here.
Yeah.
Ultimately, we just need to really elevate our own goals of equity and racial justice and accessibility and thank you.
Transparency.
Those are the city's stated goals, and how we, um, see those through, and, and I believe the way that, um, we measure that is, um, how do people, you know, how— what is their entryway into city government?
Um, what is the way that they feel they can be easily heard?
What are the, the actions that they can take that they see an equal action from the city?
I'm, I'm feel like I'm rambling on I'm not trying to put my words in the right place, but you get my point.
I see you nodding along, so you, you picking up what I'm putting down.
Um, so it's been a long work session day, okay?
Don't judge me.
Um, everyone's a little loopy.
Um, so yeah, I think this is just about rebuilding trust, um, with community and creating, um, clear accountability back to community.
Um, so who did we hear from?
Who are we who are we missing hearing from?
What did they tell us?
What changed because they participated?
Those are the kinds of things that make people feel like their engagement was more than just sitting on a piece of paper in a file and not, you know, and not doing anything.
So how do we show the impact of your engagement is to me the key of how we build our systems.
Um, yeah, I think I'll leave it at that for now.
Thank you.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Councilor Smith, All right, we will, we will go to Councilor Pirtle-Guiney and then Councilor Kanal, followed by Councilor Novick.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you, Councilor, and thank you all for being here today.
Um, I'm going to try to stick to this first question and not get into all of the neighborhood association pieces because I think you have that further down for us.
And I want to start by just appreciating Councilor Smith.
I just wanted to underline some of the words in the question because that integration is so key.
And sometimes when we try to have a no wrong door policy, what we end up with is nobody actually knowing where the door is.
And I think that we risk that with the way that folks look at the city right now, right?
There's neighborhood associations, there are bureaus who do outreach, there are bureaus who don't do outreach well.
There's Messaging and communication going out that we call outreach that is not actually really asking for people's opinions and input.
And now you have all of these councilors who represent districts who are each going out individually, all 3 of us in a district, asking people their opinions about things and asking them to show up to town halls too.
And it is not integrated.
And I really worry that in trying to make sure we can reach everybody where they are, which I'll get back to, that's an important principle, um, that we've created a no clear path to a door policy.
So I look to you all to say, how are we making it clear to folks that what we are doing is saying there is no wrong door, come talk to us no matter what, but there is guidance to these different paths and people understand how to engage in each path and what each path is for and what the differences between them are, because I don't want somebody in, in one of my communities to feel like they have to go to all of these spaces to be heard.
So I think that's the first piece that's really important as we think about the future of our system.
Um, the second piece that I, I just want to name is that we need to make sure that the way we reach people yes.
Is reflective of the whole community.
And we'll talk more about some of the different specifics in questions 2 and 3, but we often talk to ourselves.
We often see the same people at the same events and the same outreach and the same forums, and that's fantastic that they are involved.
And I do not want to discourage that in the least.
But we have to figure out how we're reaching beyond that as well, right?
Reaching community doesn't mean just reaching people who are already engaged in groups that are engaged.
So while it's really important that we use our partner organizations who can reach people we can't to help with outreach, that still only gets us to the next layer out.
What I want to know is what we're doing to talk to people who are not already involved in an organization, who are not showing up to a neighborhood association meeting, who either think that their opinion doesn't matter or who don't have the time, right?
So where are we going to find those people, and how is that a part of our integrated, inclusive, coordinated system?
It can't just be using proxies thank you.
So I'm going to start with those.
I guess that's 2 and a half principles and leave it there because I think that those are so important, and we will not have a better system and we will not get Portlanders feeling better about government if we can't do those 2 things.
And I'll probably say more as we get to the next questions.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank Thank you.
Councilor Kanal.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I agree with my D2 colleague broadly, as well as Councilors Green and Clark on everything.
I also will separate and do the question-by-question piece.
So for question 1, I think when we start by talking about what principles should guide everything, start with the city's core values.
I think when we reference those, we tend to talk about the first 2, and anti-racism and equity are really important.
We talked about the non-duplication of efforts.
It's also a fiscal responsibility thing as well.
Loretta Smith
Mm-hmm.
Sameer Kanal
But I think this one is really about collaboration, and the idea that we're in partnership with our communities is really important when we're talking about engagement.
For me, engagement means co-creation, and that is a different concept than a lot of the other things.
Another core principle is incorporating council engagement directly.
I have major concerns about the idea that this thing is housed in the administration to begin but without getting too deep down that right now, I do want to note we have a funded position that I'm disappointed has been vacant for 15 months now, uh, for on the council ops team for engagement.
And hopefully that person, when it's hired, can work with the chief engagement officer when they're hired as well and keep us connected to try to avoid some of the things that were referenced.
When we talk about demographics, and I do agree about age, I think we, we— it's not It's not just age or gender or race and ethnicity and all that.
It's also, I think, that the housing status, and this is not exclusive to neighborhood associations, this is a broader piece of it.
So I'll circle back on that.
But I think there are a lot of reasons why people move around.
And so geography is not always static and it's not always chosen.
We've talked about renting.
Most renters don't want to leave the place they're in.
They get priced out or they have to move for other but also we have a large history of displacement in this city, and so people are connected to multiple areas, either, you know, the parks they go to, the churches they go to, whatever.
Um, you talked about engagement and outreach.
Harmony, you mentioned that some of the staff are engagement and equity.
Uh, I talked to Laura about separating communication and, and, uh, engagement as well.
I was really disappointed to see that in the interim process, each service area combined communications and engagement.
Yeah.
Into managers.
There was like a service area manager for those 2 disciplines together.
I thought that was a really bad choice because I think one of the really big risks and failures of engagement in the city, as someone who worked in the Portland building doing engagement for a few years, is the idea that it's the same thing as communications.
Communications is one way, engagement is 2 ways.
It is so different beyond that, but that is the foundational difference.
Steve Novick
Right.
Sameer Kanal
Engagement is co-creation, and I think relates to the collaboration piece of our core values, whereas communication is more about transparency.
It's equally vital, it's just a very different thing.
Um, and I, I think I, I agree as well with, uh, Councilor— Council Vice President Clark's point about resources.
It can't be responsive, it can't be coordinated, it can't be inclusive unless you have the money to do that.
Um, one of the main reasons why engagement is, is not inclusive is we just can do the thing we can do and we can't do that extra thing that we need to do to get that other group of people that can't do the default, whatever it is.
I agree completely with the point about that Councilor Avalos just made.
The way I wrote it was we need to show how we used or why we didn't use the input.
And sometimes we're not going to do it.
We're not going to do the thing that we heard the most from, but I think we owe it to everyone to at least acknowledge it.
Yeah.
Knowledge.
You know, we got a lot of written testimony, uh, who supporting a different outcome for Cesar Chavez, right?
But we all explain why we voted the way we voted.
That's a good example.
Sometimes that hasn't happened, but I think it's, you know, more often than not we should listen.
Also, this was one of those where we didn't, and we should explain why.
Um, and I think it will be effective, bigger, all of that, if, if it shows.
And it'll also be I think if it shows, if we show how we used engagement, if we show that what you did here mattered and it affected something that occurred in the city.
I did engagement on police accountability.
I cannot tell you how often the reaction had nothing to do with police accountability or the ballot measure or anything like that.
It was, what's the point?
I already told you this.
So one really important thing when we talk about centralization, there's good and bad to that.
I would love to have all the reports for all the engagements we've ever done before.
In a single place for not only city staff but for the public to see.
Because I had to dig out and spend hours trying to find, you know, acronyms that nobody'd ever heard of that had done research and outreach on police accountability going back to the Stores Commission in the 1980s before I could say, acknowledge, hey, this thing happened.
And, you know, you're right, you did say it, or your, I guess, grandparents said it back thank you.
2 Other things.
I agree completely with Councilor Pirtle-Guiney about the piece about connecting it and about having it show impact.
I think that the other piece is we have to staff the— sometimes what we do is we direct you to the right place as a response.
It's not solving a policy problem.
And so those other places have to be operational as well.
So for example, staffing 311.
That's a thing that helps make engagement events more relevant and more helpful, even though they seem like a different thing, because sometimes either us or them, we're trying to— it's a doorway into not only policy work, but constituent services work.
And then the last thing is engagement does not have to be business meetings.
They do not have to be work.
We should be talking about fun.
We should be talking about joy.
We fund block parties.
We already do this for the exact reason that everybody knew this already when we started funding block parties.
And I, like, I make a point of just pulling over if I'm driving by a block party that I see, like a road closed.
I always peek down the way.
So literally 2 days ago, I was driving, pulled over, chatted with some folks in North Portland about the block party.
And yes, it was funded.
Thank you.
Through a mini microgrant or whatever.
I can't remember if it's a mini grant or microgrant, but those things are really important.
And I think scaling that up is really valuable too, because it shouldn't have to be a chore to engage with your city government.
It should also be a thing that helps enhance your overall experience of being a Portlander.
Thanks.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you.
Councilor Clark, do you want to speak to that first question still?
Olivia Clark
I would like to just riff off of the comments that I heard, more of a discussion.
And I'm happy to then move into 2.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Um, Councilor Novick, are you wanting to talk about the first question still?
Steve Novick
Arguably.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Okay, let's go Councilor Clark, Councilor Novick, and then we'll move into question number 2.
Olivia Clark
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I would like to just add the word under the realm of responsiveness.
I've heard that a couple times, but responsiveness should be a high, um, a high value.
And to Councilor Avalos's experience.
I just wanted to speak to that, that when I go to neighborhood associations, sometimes people are amazed that a councilor showed up, or it's like, ooh, the first time I've met a councilor.
Wow.
It's like, you know, I don't think it's any big deal, but it is to them.
And then if you actually listen to their issue and then you're able to respond and get a result, that's huge.
And I think that if we can do more of that, we can show that the city works for people, you know, if we can respond to their immediate need or whatever it is, we're going to restore confidence in the city if we can, if we can engage in that way with neighborhood associations or whoever it is, respond to their issue.
I also want to, uh, get back to, uh, Councilor, um, Pirtle-Guiney on the door.
I thought that was a really great observation.
There are so many doors, and I have I talked to a few people in the administration about what Seattle does.
Now, this is different than 311, but I think they have a thing called Fix It.
And if you call Fix It, it goes to the right bureau.
You know, if it's a water main is broken or a streetlight is out or there's a horrifying pothole, they have a way of dealing with that immediately.
Fix It, as opposed to finding your way through PBOT.
Or I've had neighbors who've called the water bureau about a water leak in the street for 2 weeks and never gotten a response.
And so when, of course, I intervene, they get the response, it gets fixed, it's great.
But I think if we had a door, like a fix-it door, that might, that might help.
But it is different than 311.
Just a thought.
I'll stop there.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Go ahead, Councilor Novick, and then Councilor Smith.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Chair.
I just can't resist commenting On a council that's sometimes referred to as being defined by generational differences, I really appreciated hearing Councilor Avalos saying, um, you're picking up what I'm putting down, thus demonstrating that there are idiomatic phrases that all the generations up here can understand.
And I think actually that might be a principle for our public engagement— use more cross-generational idiomatic phrases.
Candace Avalos
Now hold on, is that like some elder phrase?
What do you mean?
Got it.
Sameer Kanal
It's been around for a while.
Candace Avalos
Okay, good to know.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Right.
Councilor Smith, go ahead.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Um, Councilor Clark, I think we have the Fix-It.
It's 211, right?
311?
Olivia Clark
I think 311 is a little broader than a Fix-It.
Loretta Smith
Yeah, and they're supposed to be pushing those calls to the right bureaus, and if they're not, I think you need to tell City Administrator and the mayor.
That's not happening.
Because that is the reason why we, we did this whole new system, is to make sure that people go to the right place.
I think Fix-It sounds better.
It sounds like, you know, you want— it's more engaging that, you know, if you want something fixed, call Fix-It.
That sounds more engaging.
But we do have something that's, that's there, and I think that Councilor Smith.
I agree with that.
You're also absolutely right.
We need to put more resources into our neighborhood associations.
Um, I have a couple staff folks who actually— that's what they do.
They go to neighborhood associations, they interface with them, they bring back things that they want.
Um, and, you know, you, you can't just do it like once every 6 months.
You got to do it every month.
You got I think that's right.
We got to kind of be a fixture of what's going on.
But I think we also need to invest in people resources.
So what they were talking about, I— it's just amazing all the people that we have lost in civic life that are not able to address some of the concerns that we used to do in the neighborhood association and within civic life.
I think it's important Thank you.
And I also do think that we have to, um, we have to figure out ways to get different people.
And I've talked to our District 1 Coalition about this, about how to get different folks into the room, because renters, um, diverse communities, uh, folks who just don't want to be bothered, they, they don't come.
Uh, people who know the issues, who, who understand that there's been a stop sign that's been broke for 4 years.
They come because they're rallying around that.
They're rallying around a specific thing.
But we need to figure out how to do it, because when we don't figure it out, we get ballot measures that tell us we need to do more outreach because we're not reaching people.
And, um, I think if we have the infrastructure put in place that we can do all of those things And everybody's not going to come to a neighborhood association meeting, but there are other ways in which that they can engage because we have 12 folks who were elected and now they have 12 folks that are interfacing with them at different levels of the community, whether it be the grocery store.
People are going to events inside their community.
That's how we're reaching out to people.
But I think you all's work is Number one, I think it's so important.
And, um, I will talk to Dana about when she's going to fill that, that position because I think we, we need to have that.
We don't have the infrastructure as council to be able to reach folks.
We only have people who you've already, um, talked with, and then we don't really have access to that information if they didn't give it to us.
So we are reaching the same people, and I find I find it fascinating to a degree, and I don't know, I haven't talked to the mayor about it, but District 1, when we had our budget hearings, I noticed the other 3 districts, they were standing room only.
We did one with City Administrator Lee, and we had 2 hours.
We were done in 45 minutes.
Yeah.
People weren't there.
And I don't know how you do that.
I don't, I don't know how anybody does that.
Uh, there is, there is a, a reason why people are not showing up in District 1, and it's, it's not all the same reason.
But thank you for the work that you're doing, and I, I really want to work with you, uh, to try to see if we can do something about Thanks, Councilor.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Councilor Green, did you want to expand on this first topic, first question about the principles for rebuilding our engagement system?
Sameer Kanal
I'm going to.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Okay, great.
Let's move to number 2, which is how should community input inform council decision-making, and how can we design an engagement system that reliably meets those expectations?
Mitch Green
Thank you, Councilor Koyama Lane.
You know, I underline council decision-making here because that's sort of the operative fulcrum.
It's not the decisions and priorities of individual councilors, but it's like, what is the body doing?
What are we spending our time on?
What are we engaging on on a policy basis?
And so I, you know, there's 2 areas I think about through this conversation.
One is, you know, the work of the city staff.
Councilor Smith.
One is I do think that we should try to find ways to structure work sessions intentionally around that being a forum for the district coalition officers or representatives or maybe a delegate from the neighborhood associations to come and make a case to council on something.
Maybe it's a piece of feedback, maybe it's identifying an opportunity, maybe it's a gap, but the work sessions is how we sort of get ourselves Or to become aware of gaps or become aware of challenges.
So that's one piece.
Just some regularity, maybe quarterly.
I don't know what the right frequency is, but we don't really have that.
And again, just, I know the formality of our institution doesn't often afford it, but having space to almost casually engage in a back and forth across this dais, I think, is really important.
Unidentified speaker
Councilor Smith.
Steve Novick
Yes.
Mitch Green
Upstream of policy seems really important and doing it in the public eye.
And I think we've got folks who do watch these sessions from their laptops, from, you know, their phones.
They post about it.
And so being able to have them see that engagement with the district coalitions, that might spark an interest for them to get involved too.
So that's one idea.
The other part is, you know, we've got a really good practice where Where when we consider a council action that came out of committee, we get a committee staff summary.
I think it might be interesting at the committee level or even at the council meeting level to have a coalition summary of like specific legislative items that maybe have been talked about, are being contemplated, and council might want to vote on because that provides another touchpoint that It's not mediated through specific reps.
It's straight from the community.
Of course, making that work requires us to solve some problems that we've still been wrestling with, which is like, how do we create this long lead time of notification about the sausage-making that we're doing long before it does come to the point where we're starting to kind of bring together finished final actions?
But I think when folks were thinking about this new form of government, they envisioned that sort I think that's a great point.
I think we need to have a sort of iterative process when we thought about committees, if we're going to have committees, right?
That's an open question.
But I think that's the value that they bring.
Yeah, and I just think, you know, there's also been some conversation around the budget and sort of bringing back things similar to the budget advisory committees.
But if we're going to do that, if we're going to go in that direction, it'd be great if we empower And gave the tools to our district coalitions to also provide us upstream and early interventions on budget priorities.
I just think that connected to this idea of council adopting a sort of annual or biennial or whatever the frequency is, like prioritization exercise that then guides our budgeting, I think that we should be in line with what our coalitions are thinking as well.
So that's— those are just a couple thoughts on that.
Thank you.
On how to design a, I think, a closer connection with council decision-making.
Thanks.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you, Councilor.
We will go to Councilor Novick and then Councilor Avalos.
Steve Novick
Thank you, Chair.
So how should community input inform council decision-making?
I think part of the answer to that is council should be aware of and sensitive to how much of the community they're hearing Because I think often in this building, you know, we have one nonprofit motivate 200 people to send us an email and 20 people to show up, and we think we've heard from community when actually it's a very small, self-selected part of the community.
By the same token, if you have neighborhood association people show up and the people who go to the neighborhood association are vastly underrepresented of the diversity of their communities, that's not really hearing from community either.
I think that's a great point.
So I think part of how should community inform council decision-making is council needs to be sensitive to how much of the community they're hearing from.
And we should also all try to do our best to make sure that we hear from the whole community rather than self-selected parts of it.
And that's really hard, but I just think it's something we need to be sensitive to.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Avalos.
Candace Avalos
I think the main thing about getting community input for our decisions is that we actually have to seek their input before decisions are made.
We are always asking people to give us their input on decisions that are basically made.
Even if we say they aren't, they basically are because we are bringing them in way late into the process.
And in order to have people help us make decisions, we need to get better at giving them the tools to make decisions.
Because part of my experience prior to being on council, just as somebody who was constantly trying to influence what was going on at council, I was constantly met with no, but not why no.
Not here's how you could get to yes.
Here's the reasons why these things are not possible, but here are other options.
And so those are the kinds of things that I'm trying to do in my office.
We started a Workshop with Me program, and I found that really useful because also And also, it's important to teach people to talk to each other, not to us.
Because what often happens is people have access to us.
They're just naturally— we all have our own personal connections that we come in here with.
And then there's the layer of people who are used to coming to council, your typical lobbyists or people who are active in being in council meetings and all of that.
And so we need to make sure that That it's not just this kind of one-to-one direct to us, because what I want is I want all of those groups that have those different opinions to face each other and explain to each other why we should or shouldn't take a certain action.
And that's what I saw in my workshop with me, which I am trying to scale, because it's like, okay, lobbyist for a tenant organization or housing development, talk to a tenant.
Yeah.
And, you know, let's debate the policy, but let's talk about your own experiences, but face each other.
Don't just talk to me.
And so how are we creating more of that kind of intentional space where people can actually workshop things with each other, with community, not just with us?
Because that formality is what I think is a barrier.
And then especially because if they're being brought on— brought in at a point where it doesn't feel like anything they say is going to change the direction of the decision.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Yeah.
Candace Avalos
So I think how are we structuring our engagement in a way that when we're communicating, this is the time where we're asking you to weigh in because here's the rest of the timeline and here's the point where, you know, like this is the point where decisions need to get made, right?
We've gotta file the ordinance.
We're not gonna be able to make as many changes in this stage.
So helping people navigate the legislative process, I think, is really important.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Yeah.
Candace Avalos
Process helps them feel like they can actually be informed of where they can influence it.
And so I just want us to create more conversational type spaces, not just like one-sided surveys or tell us what you think or dot exercises.
Those are all— they have a role, but when all of our systems are designed by that kind of one-way input, it's not giving people the confidence that their input is being used in the future.
And one thing I wanted to mention too is we just really need to— I think this might have been towards the first question, but we need to actually value people's time.
And valuing their time means giving them dinner, having childcare.
If we have the ability to give stipends, if we have ways to compensate people paying for their parking, Those are the kinds of things that I know for East Portlanders, those are the big barriers.
Most of our constituents, they've got young families.
And so if you want to hear from them, you need to make it worth their time and know that their time is valuable and there's a dollar amount to that.
And it doesn't have to mean a dollar you give, but it has to mean value that you give back in return.
Councilor Dan Ryan.
Loretta Smith
Thanks.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Khan.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you, Chair.
I have some things prepared, but I really just want to pick up on that last piece because it's so important, valuing people's time.
I also want to talk about parking because this is one of those things that I remember asking about parking assistance for an event that I was trying to do and was told basically it was against the climate values, so it wasn't a good use.
And it's like people could ride transit, Well, even before the rapid rounds of cuts we've had of transit, that's not valuing their time either if it takes 2 hours to get here when you have to transfer several buses from East Portland.
And so one of those things related to that is also not always being downtown, but getting out and about in the community.
I love the spaces we have at the Portland Building or the 1900 or whatever, and of course here, but it's important to get out and about too, even though it's a little bit more difficult.
Even if the space is a little imperfect.
But I agree with all of that.
Okay, so another like really big picture thing here is I want to— I'm going to answer the question, but I don't want it to come across as the purpose of engagement is to affect council decision-making.
It's also to affect the mayor's decision-making.
It's also to affect the administrations, the bureaus, et cetera.
And so I'm going to, you know, some of these concepts may be the same.
That's a conversation that we should be involved in to, um, because I don't— otherwise we're, we're creating a permanent, permanently adversarial situation where this is the input after there's already a proposal when 70% of what we engage with is coming as a proposal from, from the mayor.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
I just want to make sure that that's something that he gets the same access to the same information.
Um, I agree completely with Councilor Novick that when there's geographic-specific engagement in our district, we ought to know.
Um, you know, PBOT or whatever is doing an engagement here.
Um, parks— those 2 I think are the, the most dominant ones, but not the only ones.
Um, it shouldn't be difficult for me to get invited to the Portland Solutions Problem Solvers in my district.
I shouldn't have to ask for that.
That's just like the textbook example I can think of of what didn't work.
Um, I am on them now, but it shouldn't have been that hard.
Uh, I also think this applies when it's not in the district but adjacent to us.
So CEI I-Hub, for example, is in District 4, but it definitely affects a good chunk of my district as well.
Um, I think in the legislative process, civic life can play a bigger part of that.
I think, um, Prosper is asked when there's a real estate and/or economic, uh, analysis, or, you know, maybe that should be somebody else, but somebody doing that analysis— OEHR should be involved in the, in the, uh, equity, um, impact statement.
I think the community I think that's a very direct way that we can engage.
I don't want it to slow down the process, so it involves resourcing, right, for having a policy person who can do that rapidly.
But that's important.
And part of this, by the way, is on us.
And I appreciate this question, not because it's necessarily an ability to give you guidance, but because it's helpful for us to talk about.
We don't hear from our advisory groups enough.
We only have like 10 or 12 of them that are council advisory bodies.
I think that's a good point.
That I those are the ones I think need time at council meetings, which is very scarce.
But for those, we should be doing that for the council appointed and council advising ABCs.
The last thing I wanted to mention here is we need a system that does not pick and choose who matters within a community.
So in communities of color, and I assume this is the case in a lot of other communities as well.
There's the people within that group that we always go to, and we should go to those folks.
We should still go to them, and also we should be adding to that group as well.
It can't be the same folks over and over and over again.
You know, my family is Indian American.
There are 3 or 4 folks that are engaged with, if at all, at times in the past.
Now it's broader.
I have seen some motion there, but I don't want it to be— we shouldn't be picking winners and losers.
I agree.
Based on who aligns with our preexisting knowledge of their alignment.
And we should continue to reach out to everybody we already have, but just broaden it.
And it's an uncomfortable thing to talk about, especially for people who are not a part of that specific community when we talk about it.
And I want to acknowledge that.
But like, which is why the example I used is my own community a second ago.
But I also think it's really important that we don't just go back to the same folks, especially when we know that they tend to agree with what our policy priorities might be.
I don't think that's happened with anybody up here, but I want to acknowledge that, uh, in the past, um, it has been a concern, and it's definitely something that's a perception issue even if it's not a reality.
Thanks.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you.
Councilor Pirtle-Guiney.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
Thank you, Councilor.
I just want to note, as you think about this question of how you get community input to us or what we need need, um, that the timing matters.
And I know a few of my colleagues said that, but I think we need to ask the question about whether we are looking for community input on what we talk about, right?
The agenda setting.
What topics do we prioritize as the council president or as committee chairs set agendas?
What are we making sure doesn't get bumped and what are we allowing to get bumped?
Council President, I think that's a great question.
And is that influenced by what community needs us to do first?
And then there's the issues that we debate.
Are we making sure that community concerns are getting on the table, are part of the debate, are being considered as we make a decision?
And then there is what decision do we make?
And those are 3 very different places for incorporating input, and we need to be clear with folks as we do outreach about where we're seeking their input, at which level in that work, and then follow through on it, right?
One of my colleagues said that sometimes we take into account what we hear and sometimes we don't.
Well, if folks are expecting their input to influence that third piece, the actual decision, that's going to feel really bad.
It's going to feel like a failure.
It's going to feel like, why do we bother showing up?
If If we're clear with people that what we're asking for is help figuring out what makes it on the agenda and the opportunity to make sure that every single concern, interest, wish around that topic is part of the debate, that we're considering various amendments that reflect community concerns, then at the end of the day, if we weigh those against each other and decide on something else, so be it.
But we need to be clear about those first 2 input points and, and honest about what we're looking for between those as well.
Olivia Clark
Thank you.
Sameer Kanal
Thanks.
Um, I had forgotten one thing.
I, and, and I, I also wanted to just note, I, you know, I mentioned the written testimony on a particular thing in the past that as a case study.
We also got a lot of, uh, verbal testimony and, and emails in that may I think you may have had a different reflection on that particular one.
For me, it certainly did.
The specific thing I wanted to mention that I'd forgotten is this has to do with the agenda setting, but it also has to do with our ABCs.
I'm looking at another city's agenda for a meeting they're having tonight of their city council, and it has a proposal on it.
And as it's item 1A on their agenda so that they could have a 1B, which is hearing a recommendation from an ABC that they have have against it.
Um, so, uh, the, their Peace and Justice Commission is recommending, um, doing a different thing than the, the legislation here is they wrote a report, they, they went through a formal process that they were empowered to do by previous council action, and then their action ended up being on the agenda in parallel with a proposal that is not fully in conflict with it but partially in conflict with it.
I think that has to do with Again, I'm not talking about the 300-odd different quasi-ABCs or even the 100-something ABCs.
I'm talking about the council advising ABCs which exist in code, which my understanding is we're talking a number under 25, maybe even that might even be overselling it.
But having the ability to have that direct connection with our agendas and that ability to invite folks up the way that Councilor Green, I think, was talking about inviting thank you, colleagues, for this discussion.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
I will put myself in the queue.
The one thing I want to say quickly, since Seattle's Find It Fix It app came up in the conversation for a way to engage and give input, just want to make sure that we plug pdxreporter.org, which is our web-based platform for public engagement.
Here at the city where folks can report issues.
Also something we can continue to talk about.
All right, Councilor Zimmerman, do you want to talk about question number 2?
Eric Zimmerman
Yes, I do.
Thank you.
Go ahead.
Thanks.
So I think that the conversation and the Portland vibe is generally how do we get more people involved, and I think that that's admirable.
And in the last few years, that has manifested itself in, if you've been involved, we may not be so interested in your previous service.
And I think it's really important that we do take a lot of the feedback we're hearing here and still say we appreciate those who have already shown up and continue to show up.
And I say that because a significant portion of the work that I've done as a councilor now has been with neighborhood associations and those who do show up, and there is still value there.
And I, I want to, I want to not discredit that because, um, with, with history and with a lot of experience also comes the nuance of, of lessons learned, of, of how did we get here.
And sometimes that gets a little lost when all we do is figure out how to go reach more people.
I think that part of a representation Representative type of government is that some and many folks are asking us to step into a role so that they don't have to show up all the time, right?
They're asking to— they're voting with their values, they're voting with people who they think kind of align so that they can focus on the other stuff, and they want the city to take care of itself.
And I— so I, I, I lean into that role often, and I don't think that, uh, It has to always be about new or different or voices who have just chosen, like, please take care of it.
So I'm just cautious in a little bit in how we talk about this because this is sometimes what then gets turned into the folks who really want to hammer the neighborhood associations from like 10 years ago.
And that was like a dark era for our city where the city kind of went to war with with the neighborhood associations, and that worries me.
And that really started up again within Civic Life last year, and that has stopped, and I'm happy about that, but like big concern.
So that's where I— it is a— splitting the difference is the wrong term, but there's a kind of threading the needle there between both how do we make sure that more folks feel like they can engage if they'd like to and that that is welcomed and enabled and give credit to service for those who've already volunteered.
Secondly, um, a lot of the stuff that when we talk about engagement at the neighborhoods in particular versus engagement on larger council initiatives, I think those come in in different ways.
And so I don't think of them necessarily the same Same topic, right?
So how a new intersection is going to be designed in a neighborhood makes a lot of sense for neighborhood engagement.
How we approach CEI, not so much a neighborhood thing as it is a citywide thing.
And I just think that nuance and that there's importance there.
But there was something said earlier, and I have said this to our bureau directors.
I think that I think there's a really neat idea with the district model when it comes to how we want to do our transportation improvements, our park improvements, our pedestrian improvements, things that we set the umbrella tone at the City Council level for how we want to achieve certain things.
But then the detailed and nuanced way in which it's implemented at a hyper-localized level, I think there's a lot of room for input from neighborhoods.
And I would love to see, in particular, PBOT and Parks lean into that because I think if you go to each of the micro downtowns, micro Main Streets of Portland, they all have their own flavor, and I think we should lean into that.
There is no one-size-fits-all, and that's where neighborhood associations, I think, have been very helpful to me.
And they also generally understand the umbrella that we're trying to achieve in terms of maybe safer pedestrian things, and they can also give us the sense of like, but we've got to tweak it a little bit on this corner because— and you get like 14 super localized reasons that you never would have thought out of if you just had a planner telling you about it.
So I want to really— I value so much what I get from the neighborhood volunteers, just so much.
And then I agree with many of the comments about enabling those who want to be more engaged.
But I'm super cautious, and you guys all know it.
Like, if it looks to me like the city is taking I'll be the first there to take that blow before they get hit because I, I really value their input and their, their just their attention to details.
Um, there are people in this room, frankly, who have taken me on walks in their neighborhood and shown me just the things you're like, yeah, why hasn't the city addressed that?
It's so simple.
But if you're not out of your car or if you're not in the neighborhood, you don't know.
Loretta Smith
So I think that's a really important thing.
Eric Zimmerman
And so those things are very— they're very valuable to me, and I think it's a big part of the district model.
So thank you, Vice Chair.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you, Councilor.
Before we head into question number 3, which is about Portland's Neighborhood Program, we're going to have a little bit of time, about 10 minutes, to hear from our 4 representatives from all of our neighborhood organizations.
Thank you.
Thank you for being willing to speak to us.
There's enough time for about 2 to 3 minutes for us to hear some of your thoughts about any and all of these questions.
And if you can just state your name for the record, and whoever would like to start, feel free to go.
Nancy Champlin
Hello, Council.
My name is Nancy Champlin.
I use she and her pronouns, and I'm the executive director of Southeast Uplift, also known as the District 3 Coalition.
I just want to say this conversation is very exciting.
It is long overdue, and I think we are unanimous in saying we'd be very willing to come back and to continue the conversation.
Um, a couple things I would really like to say.
Um, one is about leverage, and the other is Yes.
This is about spotting the gaps, as Councilor Green pointed out.
Um, I challenge with you to think about this civic engagement infrastructure beyond just how it can inform policymaking, but also how it can be leveraged after policy is made but also implemented.
And I'll give you an example.
For the last 2 years, Southeast Uplift has partnered with the Urban Forestry Department Department on the Yard Tree Giveaway Program.
And so under their collaboration with the Portland Clean Energy Fund, they've identified priority neighborhoods throughout Portland that are in need of increased tree canopy.
And so Southeast Uplift leveraged our relationships with neighborhoods in the high-priority areas that need tree canopy, and those neighborhood associations went out over the summer last year and this year to engage their neighbors in getting free trees to put those trees in the areas where they are needed most.
So this is an example of how this program, this network, this ecosystem can be leveraged to help the city and neighborhoods meet collective goals.
Uh, the second thing, um, oh, and, uh, if the participatory budgeting, uh, ballot measure passes, there's a role for district coalitions and neighborhoods to potentially play in helping to ensure that the decision-making process about where the city would spend 2% of its general fund— there's a role to play in that, along with many other community groups.
Another way to leverage this ecosystem is what we all do internally, is we provide fiscal sponsorship services to the neighborhood associations who, while they are all state-based nonprofits, only some of them have federal tax-exempt status.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
Yes.
Nancy Champlin
And so the district coalition offices in that role can play the role of the tax-exempt organization that could help them, allow them to be able to do things like grant writing, to get— have resources to do their community engagement work.
In doing that, for example, Southeast Uplift has about 15 of our neighborhoods that are fiscally sponsored and then another 15 organizations that we support with fiscal sponsorship services because we already have that infrastructure built in.
That has helped to incubate entrepreneurs that are running small businesses, not on the, the for-profit side, but on the nonprofit side.
So it is helping to incubate the nonprofit sector, which are, you know, organizations that are giving back to their communities.
It is through that program that we over the years have helped incubate organizations like the Southeast Portland Tool library, like Portland United Against Hate, like Black and Beyond the Binary Collective, and currently the Sunnyside Shower Project.
So it's where a community idea can take root and the district coalitions can help them to, uh, to grow and expand their programming.
The other 2 things in, in terms of, uh, spotting the gaps that I would like to share, um, is there is a real need now that there is district representation and there are council committees, and council is primarily a legislative body, it has been really challenging for district coalitions to, uh, to follow the sausage making from committees to council.
And, uh, a real valuable tool not just for district coalitions' neighborhoods but for Portlanders in general would be a dashboard that would make it very easy for the public to see what is coming up in committees where there is opportunity for community input early on, and then when it's going to council for decision-making.
So that's a piece that we would welcome a further conversation on.
And I really appreciate, uh, Councilor Avalos, you bringing up the renters, because we've been hearing from our neighborhoods how difficult that is to reach renters.
There are often physical, literal barriers to being able to to put flyers, newsletters, invitations to participate in things in apartment buildings, flyers up, those sort of things.
And so we would really welcome some thought partnership around how we can help to better reach renters.
And so I'll stop there, and thank you so much for this opportunity.
Allison Stoll
Hi, I'm Allison Stoll.
My pronouns are she/her, and I am with District 1 Coalition.
We were formerly, uh, Central Northeast Neighbors, and I'll just give you a little tiny history of what we all faced when the transition happened in government.
We too wound up with different boundaries than we had before, and I'm going to use Central Northeast Neighbors as one of the examples.
We had, um, about 14 neighborhoods, and when we We got the boundary change.
We had one neighborhood association left in our coalition, which meant I had 2 board members, and we were facing 14 more neighborhoods out in east.
So basically for us, it— we differed than some of the other coalitions because we couldn't get to work right away on doing projects and government and those kinds of things.
We had to build a board.
Okay.
And so we started out, as I said, with 2 board members, and now we have actually all 14 of our neighborhood associations are active.
We had— we faced 3 neighborhood associations that were inactive, and I can say as of last week, our 14th neighborhood held a meeting and elections.
So that's really cool.
Our board consists of 2 members from each of the neighborhood associations, and we have 6 seats for the broader community.
And we are working on the broader community even as we speak.
We now have a— we also have a leadership roundtable that meets the first Saturday of every month.
And this roundtable consists of really anyone in the community you don't have to be a leader.
And I will say, Councilor Clark and all of you who talked about going out to the community, we've had councilors come to our— just show up at our meetings.
And thank you so much, Councilor Smith.
You actually were at our last one and I wasn't.
So thank you for attending.
One of the things that was really important in our community, Councilor Smith.
I think what we've done in all of the communities and including the city is building trust and also building respect.
It was really difficult for myself and my staff, which is actually at the time was, there were 2 of us in trying to build this relationship with people that had no idea who I was or where I came from or where my colleague came from.
And I feel like we've done a great job at that.
That while we didn't have the turnout at the budget meeting, which we tried, we, we all tried really hard, we actually did hold, um, a smaller, um, we talked about the budget at one of our board meetings, and we wound up with probably about 55 people there from the community as well.
Our board members were part of them, but that was only, you know, about A third of who was there, and it turned out really great.
I think the big part is, um, that trust and respect.
And then one thing that the, the coalitions do is we convene people, and I think that's one of the things that we're really good at.
And I really hope that the partnership starts to work again through Civic Life, because convening people is what we do best.
Thank you.
Yes.
Now, are we perfect at it?
Absolutely not.
There are tons of organizations out there.
The community-based organizations in East, I think, probably are one of the largest growing businesses out in East, the nonprofits.
We have many, many nonprofits.
And do they provide jobs?
Sure, some of them do.
But one of the things that while we're councilor Smith.
Thank you, Mayor.
So as we're facing rebuilding, we're also facing developing our community.
We need economic development, we need jobs, we need workforce development and workforce housing.
As we, we know, we all face these things.
But one of the things that we are good at is that convening and getting the information out open and transparent.
Thank you.
We're trying to be transparent, both in our communications and in our work.
And, you know, we're not perfect at it.
I had somebody the other day say, well, you organized a neighborhood meeting and you held elections, but I didn't get the information.
And I think to myself, I wish you had, and I wish you can be there at the next meeting, and there's still seats available on that board if you want to be part of.
So, and one last thing that I will say, um, to Councilor Avalos, who was one of our councilors, thank you so much for everything you said.
And I think back to when I first got involved, and, um, I think I was— it was with, uh, Beaumont-Wilshire Neighborhood Association.
I was 26 years old and got a newsletter delivered to my rental house, and, um, they said, would you like to write an article?
And I said, oh, that would be great, I'd love to do it.
At the next neighborhood association, I got introduced as the newsletter editor.
So I, I, I will say that there are lots of ways.
Thank you.
Yeah, so it's, it's been a few years since then, but thank you so much, all of you.
I was— it, it felt good in my heart to hear the support that you have for the work that all of us do and the work that your community yes, you have so many people out there who do great work, and thank you, um, all of you.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thanks.
I want to make sure we have time for all of you.
Go ahead.
Carly Barich
Oh yes, thank you, Allison.
Nancy, hi, my name is Carly Barich.
I use she/her pronouns.
I am the executive director of the District 4 Coalition, uh, fairly new member of this team.
I started this position in February, So I'm still learning the intricacies of this program.
A couple things that I just wanted to touch base on, give you some numbers.
Last year, District 4 Coalition reported an estimated of 40,000 volunteer hours and about 10,000 participants throughout the district for the year.
So that gives you an idea of how much thank you.
So just to give you a sense of how much effort is going on in the community, the District 4 Coalition has 2 full-time staff members, and we also contract with a variety of different contractors for small projects here and there throughout the year.
A couple of the main things that the district coalitions provide for value for the neighborhood associations that do really the groundwork work is the insurance.
We provide the insurance for all of the neighborhood associations.
That's general liability and just— sorry, directors and officers insurance.
This allows them to also ask for certificates of insurance for some of the events that we all love in the city— movies in the park and picnics and things like that.
The technical assistance is one of the things That takes a lot of our time.
I know that we can be unanimous in this one.
Anything from website help to making sure that they're posting their minutes and their agendas and they've got their— anything that the public meeting laws require, providing assistance for public records requests and grievance processes.
Thank you.
There's the capacity building part of it is, well, like teaching folks how to fish, right?
Making sure that we've got an asynchronous training portal so anyone can just go up there and build that repository of information as neighborhood associations are volunteer-run and turnover hopefully happens, right, as people get more engaged and more excited and get involved with this program.
I'll keep this a little bit short.
I was going to go in a little bit more, but I really appreciate the collaboration between the district coalition executive directors.
We've, for example, we're doing a few different trainings that are district citywide.
One is on the participatory budgeting feedback and training for our district and it's— when we talk about the engagement piece, I know that for my perspective, I've only been here for, again, for 7 months.
We only hear from and talk to a very small percentage of our district.
And I'm very much looking forward to the partnership that the city and the civic life will provide, hopefully, with really increasing that engagement.
Allison Stoll
Thank you.
Carly Barich
To reach all of the different demographics that we're hoping to reach.
And we're looking forward to, again, we're the capacity building and stabilizing arm for a lot of the neighborhood associations to help with that change, 'cause there will be some changes that are going to be needed to implement so that we can reach all of those folks that we're looking forward to.
Thank you.
To reaching.
Jonna Davis
Good afternoon.
My name is Jonna Davis.
I use she/her pronouns.
I'm the executive director of the Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods, your District 2 coalition office.
Thank you all for having us.
Um, I was taking notes and trying to listen very carefully as you all were speaking.
Um, in alignment with the, uh, discussion that's happened about inclusivity specifically.
I believe that the solution is actually not to remove anyone who— or any group of folks, but to build a larger table.
When I was a council assistant, there were 4 councilors and a mayor, and we had a bit more space but this is a beautiful thing to see.
I didn't know that I would see it in my lifetime because I'm dating myself, but when I was in council was a few decades ago.
So this is a beautiful thing.
Charter form has brought forth some wonderful participation.
So, and by the same token, we need to do that in the community.
It is not an either/or.
We are at a place in history where we need all hands on deck.
Loretta Smith
Councilor Loretta Smith.
Jonna Davis
Councilor Smith.
And so we need those folks who have been around for 30, 40 years, and I won't say how many years, but serving in the city, who have that institutional knowledge, who have perhaps the free time.
But we also need our renters.
I have 4 adult children who are renters, and if you want to see them participating, we do need to think differently about how we do councilor Avalos mentioned some of those key things that we have seen to be effective when we're engaging folks from across the community.
Things like transportation vouchers or childcare, making sure you're having your events at a time when working folks can participate.
One of the things that I, I went to various different District's events over the last year.
Signage, something as simple as signage and making sure you're communicating in the various languages that are represented.
So a lot of these things that we do as district coalition offices, we are prepared to help and to come alongside the city to do to make sure that this inclusive table includes renters, young folks, folks from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.
And I hope that you can find space for those who have not traditionally been around the table.
We have in past partnered with your Diversity and Civic Leadership program.
And as I was told, some of the budgeting from— for the DCL program has even gone to that.
One of the ways we have gotten creative now is to build partnerships.
Candace Avalos
Yes.
Jonna Davis
Thank you.
We encourage our neighborhood associations through our small grants programs to go out and have— make sure that when we're doing these community activations, that folks are at the table.
They're invited to the table and they're welcomed to the table.
I think that Thank you.
That's one of the pieces that we don't talk about enough.
It's not just saying, hey, there's something happening and you can come, but going that extra mile.
We built relationships through our fiscal sponsorship program, through our grassroots incubator where we provide technical assistance.
When there's a hot topic in my neighborhood or in my district, I try to stay on top of that.
So for instance, one year it was a red house where a Black and Indigenous family was being displaced.
Our— the staff at the Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods were members from the community.
They were aware.
We provide spaces for people to convene, so we can help fill the gap, but we need to be Included as collaborators from the beginning.
And so I just urge you, I say with the right support, we can continue to provide space for the community to come together, and we're looking forward to it.
We're already doing the work.
We want to come alongside you.
We build community through developing long-term trusting relationships and focusing on meeting people where they are at, listening.
I think I shared with a few, a couple of you Thank you.
And I just want to remind you the spectrum of engagement.
We're not looking to just talk at people.
We're looking to talk with people.
We're listening for what are the issues that are near and dear to their heart, because we will need everybody to come together to say we can be a stronger and more resilient Portland, but that's not going to happen if we can't talk to one another.
So we're here.
We're ready.
Let's go.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you so much to all of you.
That was really helpful and prepared us for our final policy question.
Thank you so much.
Which is, how can Portland's neighborhood program make the most of our transition to district-based council seats, fostering connections between neighborhoods and elected leaders?
Just add your hand to the queue if you would like— you have anything to say.
Councilor Avalos.
Candace Avalos
Well, first I want to say, uh, yeah, I went to that one neighborhood meeting and then they tried to make me the president, so I know exactly the feeling.
I was like, no, I was just asking a question.
I don't want to be the president.
I'm just kidding.
Also, I wanted to say, as it relates to reaching renters, agree, it's difficult for the reasons that people shared, but also there are quite a few apartments that are like open style.
And when I knock doors in my district, I focus on knocking on those doors because I know that they don't get a lot of outreach.
So don't forget, there are lots of apartments that are open.
I'm sure they don't love me hanging out in there, but no one's run me out yet.
So, um, as far as this, um, question, I mean, I think it's just we really just got to get out there, like, just boots on the ground.
And again, how are we— we talk about, like, partnerships, right?
But I'm trying to think of, like, what are the ways that we I get often Portlanders who are like, I want to help, right?
I want to be part of something.
I want to do something.
And we're trying to start up a program in my office to do that, to offer ways for people to help.
But again, I'd love to see that at scale.
And what are ways that we can maybe get a bunch of neighbors going out and knocking on those doors and talking directly with folks?
I just, I see there's a lot of energy there.
I just don't think we're capturing people's energy enough, especially all the people, you know, we have folks that regularly come to council to, you know, speak to us and testify.
And that's great.
I'm also like, can we use that energy to go out to your neighborhood and talk to people?
Can we use that energy to help facilitate dialogues in community?
I just don't want us to Like I said earlier, I want us to work with the partner orgs and all that, but I don't want us to feel limited by that.
What are ways that we're getting everyday people to help participate?
You've got to put structure around that.
You got to give it some purpose and all that.
But at the end of the day, I just feel like we're underutilizing a lot of people who want to be part of change.
So I think I think that's what I'd love to brainstorm with you all over the coming years.
Just like, what are some creative ways we can make new programs?
You know, what, like a neighbor-to-neighbor program, what could that look like?
I've talked in my office about I wanted to do like a facilitator training.
I wanted to train folks who want to help lead those group discussions because I do a lot of programs that are like roundtables and I need, you know, a facilitator of each roundtable.
Steve Novick
Yes.
Candace Avalos
And I say this too because I was tapped as— when Commissioner Joanne Hardesty was in office, I was one of her community facilitators.
So she had an army of people who were like, I just want to help.
I want to participate.
And so I was on a list and they would email me and I would come to her little town halls and help facilitate a table.
So those are the kinds of opportunities I'd like us to create, more ways for for neighbors to help each other instead of it feeling like we have to do all the work or that Portland city staff have to do all of that.
I think, you know, we're underutilizing the energy that I'm hearing.
And it is, Councilor Dunphy and I talk about it a lot, Council President Dunphy and I talk about it a lot where we feel excited but also sad at times by how overwhelmed with happiness that we get from people who, just from seeing us.
And it's like, that's great.
I'm glad that you feel, you know, represented, especially for East Portlanders.
I'm glad that you feel like we're here, but we're just— sometimes it depresses us because we're like, oh, it's just such a low bar.
The bar is in hell.
So it's like, can we raise the bar so that people don't have to feel like just us visiting a neighborhood association is engagement?
Olivia Clark
Because it's not.
Sameer Kanal
Thank you.
Candace Avalos
But that's how low the bar is.
So how do we set the bar higher so that people can expect, like, yeah, you should have your councilors coming and checking out your neighborhood associations, you should have them out in community.
But that, again, is super, like, one-dimensional.
And I just want to raise the bar for Portlanders.
And lastly, I'll say, I'm not going to remember exactly how he said it.
He always speaks so eloquently, that Zohran Mamdani.
But he recently went on an interview and just talked about Like they were asking him, how do you build trust, right, with folks?
And he was like, you just have to show them that you did a thing.
You do have to show them that you filled the pothole.
You got to show them that you fixed the light.
And so how are we— this is where the blending of communication and engagement happens, right?
I know Councilor Kanal said that, that communication is one thing, engagement is another.
Agree.
But can we blend those better so that people can actually see, you know, that things are moving, right, that people— actions have been taken on things.
Um, I also get a lot of, um, people who, um, we do like live posting on Blue Sky.
Uh, Lauren in my office is great.
She does all of the like, here's what just happened at council.
And it's just these little things, they add up.
People— I get lots of comments from that in particular because they're like, I don't have time to go watch your Thank you.
I'm not asking for a full meeting, but I would love to just know the quick hits.
So those are the kinds of ways that I'm like, what's the engagement strategy for like, how do we communicate what's going on in council every week?
Are there easy sound bites that we can give?
And I know that's difficult because, you know, obviously when I'm doing it, it's from my political office and, you know, I have that, and you all have to do it neutrally, if you will.
But there's got to be a way.
There's got to be a way to do that.
And I think, again, in the age of like social media and short attention spans.
Like those long newsletters, they're beautiful, people aren't reading all of them.
Some people are, but a lot of people aren't.
And so how do we do more of that communication in these smaller digestible bites so that people can see a constant flow of information and like, oh, well, they recently passed this bill or they had a debate on this topic and now I know kind of a little bit more of the intricacies other than just reading what's on the website, right?
Sure, you could go to the website and say, They voted blah, blah, blah for this bill, but what does it mean?
So how are we connecting those dots so that then when you are bringing them in for the engagement, they feel informed, they feel like they're a part of something because they feel like they've heard it in their own, like, language or in a way that they can easily digest?
So I'd love to see a blending of our comms and engagement, and, like, they, they should not be happening in isolation.
They should be—.
Yeah.
Flowing between each other, and I'd love to see a strategy developed around that.
Thanks.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you, Councilor.
We will go to Councilor Pirtle-Guiney, then Councilor Green, and if we all keep it to about 5 minutes, everyone will be able to answer this question.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney
I will do less than that, and I will try to stick to the question even though there are a lot of other things I would love to say about the topic.
Councilor Smith.
When we were first elected, I had some people come up to me and say, well, do we need our neighborhood association system now?
We have district councilors.
And I think there is a huge opportunity, and each of us could probably give examples from the work that we've done of how we have taken advantage of that opportunity already to make our neighborhood associations stronger by our presence and And make our work stronger by our neighborhood association presence.
Both.
I think that we can and we should work together.
I have gone to, I think, meetings, I hope meetings for every neighborhood association in our district at this point.
I try to get to each one at least once a year.
And I've had multiple times where people are in the room who have never showed up to a neighborhood association meeting before, and they came because a councilor was There.
And I hope that our district offices are helping neighborhood associations think about how they can capitalize on the momentum of having us come to things to boost interest in the work that's happening and to boost, um, to boost participation.
Similarly, I think we've had a great partnership where our neighborhood association has hosted counselors at events, right, and, and had drop-in hours with counselors at events that the coalition office was at.
Um, and I think there's a lot of opportunity there.
But as we think about how you all engage in that, right, how we go deeper than just the one-on-one relationships that we have, I think that there is a real opportunity to take some of the resources that the city Yes.
And work with the neighborhood associations and the councilors together to think about the outreach.
So I think about when PBOT was doing outreach for the TUF, the Transportation Utility Fee, and they made sure to have an event in every district.
And their event in our district was actually at the same place that our coalition office is located.
But we didn't find out about it in time to do a lot of outreach on our channel.
I don't know that the neighborhood associations were engaged in doing a lot of outreach for it.
And I think that there's a way, as we think about that first question and the integration, that the work that the other parts of our outreach team do can use neighborhood associations and council office lists to make the events better, to reach more people, to bring in more people.
Thank you.
And similarly, the neighborhood associations will hopefully then build on that to bring people into their work.
I think we can use the fact that we have these overlapping systems, if we use them well, to make sure that we are all capturing more people to engage.
Councilor Zimmerman talked about the importance of rewarding the people who do show up over and over, and I think we need to do that and make sure that the folks who we're hearing from are representative of the community thank you.
As a whole.
There's a lot of different metrics we need to look at for that, and making sure that we are all adding to our lists from people coming to events and working together is the best way to do that.
As you're moving forward in this last— in this work and thinking about the neighborhood coalitions, I know the 4 folks sitting behind you talk to each other and share best practices, but I hope we're sharing best practices about how they each work with our thank you.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Councilor Green.
Mitch Green
Uh, thank you, Councilor Koyama Lane.
Um, I heard stuff from both of the 2 councilors who spoke on this question before me that I just want to echo for the sake of time and, and emphasis.
I agree with all that.
But I also want to uplift that those sorts of structural changes require resources, and the resources need to be resourced intentionally for both the city staff as well as the district coalitions through the neighborhoods.
So I just want to talk a little bit about funding.
I think if council's serious about building that capacity, then we need to And of course, the city administrator and the mayor, like, we need to put that in our budgets on a year-by-year basis.
And, you know, there was something I wrote down earlier in the conversation, you know, cutting— I know we've been in some dire times financially with the city of Portland, so we get it.
I think everyone understands that.
But cutting into the bone of our neighborhood system is pennywise and pound foolish because there's a lot of leverage that comes out of the unlocking of the revenue bonds.
Yeah.
I'm talking the volunteer aspect and the hyperlocal organizing aspect that those institutions bring.
So I think we need to have, you know, some city councils, some cities have, you know, district-based budgets that their councilors might sort of say, okay, we think we can grant this out and do this sort of thing for your activity.
But we have a different structure.
We have 3 members per district.
And none of us are executives.
So I think what I would propose us to start thinking about is just creating an annual pool of funds that are directly from the city's budget through the Office of Civic Life to these coalition offices so that way they can be awarded through a transparent and competitive process and that we can think about what the outcomes are with that.
The absence of that has produced a situation where individual council offices are doling out grants here and there.
And, you know, it's in some sense, it's uneven and it's not transparent.
It's great that they're doing that, I think, but that's a stopgap for, I think, a structural— like, we need to do that up front in the budget, basically.
So that way, if we do these other parts of the conversation right and we hear from our So I think that's what I would advocate on the sort of money as grants piece to the external.
And then staffing FTEs that can help us engage more fluidly with these neighborhood associations.
I think that's a really important I piece.
Think Councilor Herbold?
Would be critical.
I know some offices send out mailers on a sort of semi-regular basis that talks about their individual accomplishments.
But what if we had a budget to send out mailers that are postcards talking about ways to engage with these neighborhood associations?
Because, you know, that's expensive for an individual org to try to send.
And if we do it as a city collectively, we can leverage that.
I think ways to deliver that, and that helps fill that gap So just a couple ideas.
And I think what will make our new system successful in that is if we just properly resource both sides of the equation and then hold ourselves accountable on both sides of the equation on whether we delivered.
So, and then I think that's how you get the trust back.
Sameer Kanal
Thanks.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Kanal, and then we'll go to Councilor Smith.
Thank you, Mayor.
Sameer Kanal
Thanks.
Um, I, I did want to just flag for later because I don't think we're going to have a chance to get to it.
You mentioned something about internal engagement.
I think there's a whole conversation there that I'd love to, to, um, have discussed at some point when appropriate.
But to directly answer this question, I first wanted to say, I, you know, I value, um, the input from the coalition so much and grateful for being here, uh, to all of you.
Um, our neighborhood associations, I I did a tour of neighborhood associations in D2.
I attended all of them.
Most of them were January through May, but, you know, a lot of them meet on the same days, so we ended up doing a couple in April and May.
And if you're a neighborhood association out there, do prepare to hear from me again.
But I also know that we got a lot of amazing feedback there, a lot of amazing input, and things that you never hear about in this building are often raised there.
I also know that there's a lot of— and I use this word intentionally— trauma around things going back in it, not just around what they are or what they were, but around proposed changes that caused harm too, some of which were implemented, some were not.
And I just want to recognize that because that's something that is part of why we're having these conversations the way we are.
And I also know a lot of good work has happened.
I started to go to neighborhood associations beyond my own Like 4 years ago, and just seeing evolution in how they run, evolution who's there, evolution how many people are there, that's all really helpful.
And it took a lot of work, and sometimes that work requires support.
And I know there's been an ask for mediation training, for example, because there's going to be people having disagreements, and sometimes those disagreements become conflicts.
And before it goes to whatever the next steps are, it's helpful to kind of resolve Thank you.
So I did want to just uplift that.
And broadly speaking, I want to make sure that we're retaining a strong neighborhood system and investing in that while also recognizing that there's so much engagement that occurs outside of the context of geography.
And a lot of the examples we've cited today are money that was put into something by being taken from something else also in civic life.
And so we need to— and I'm looking at the administrator and the mayor's chair here.
Uh, we need to get away from that.
Um, and not— because the reason why it became— why it's still been like a, is it this way or that way, is largely about budget trade-offs, I think.
And we don't have to make it about budget trade-offs because— I don't mean to diminish it in any way, but so much of this money, the money we're talking about here, is a rounding error in the budget.
These are not big asks, right?
These are— We had a $150,000 amendment on diversity and civic leadership last year, $150,000, not million, thousand.
So these are, these are things that, that every penny matters, and also it's possible to do both, and we should.
Thanks.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you, Councilor.
Councilor Smith.
Loretta Smith
Thank you.
I'd just like to say, um, ditto, ditto, ditto to everything that everyone has said.
And I, I also want to put a real fine point on the fact that I like to have volunteers and have them energized, but I— they need to be paid.
And so we need to bring in more resources to, to do this kind of work.
We can't expect community to come in and do the work that, that, that were being done by FTEs at the City of Portland and expect them to always have this great energy to come and do this.
No, no, no, no.
We— they need to have stipends or something.
People need to be paid and they need to have a Yes.
Right kind of budget to do this.
And I'm not going to be asking folks to do all this extra work because, you know, we've decided to make some cuts.
I mean, we can fill in the hole, but I don't want you to get the message from me that I'm trying to get you to get volunteers who were previously doing the work of people who were paid.
And so So that is my commitment, is to try to get some of these things paid for.
And I just want to say thank you for the work that you do.
Thank you for engaging and inspiring us in a way, because you guys do this every day.
This is what you do, and I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Jonna Davis
Thank you.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Great, thank you.
I put myself in the queue.
I, um, love the neighborhoods that we have in Portland, and I love our neighborhood, um, program.
I'll be at a Rose City Park Neighborhood Association meeting, uh, in just a couple hours here.
Um, and I think the thought that I want to just mention is our neighborhood associations are really They are a hub and way for folks to get connected, and they are one way to represent and one way to connect with folks in a neighborhood.
There are folks, as it's come up, that can't access those meetings or don't go to them.
And so I almost think of them as kind of like PTAs or PTOs at schools.
Like, they are important and they have a role, but they're not the only way to do it.
Mitch Green
Councilor Smith.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
They're not the only voices that we listen to.
And it also can be important to look and see, yeah, where those gaps are and where you can go find people and meet them where they're at.
I know in my office, when we're surveying or getting information, we'll track which neighborhoods we're hearing from, which neighborhoods people are coming from, and then we go out and find, okay, we need to go to Ardenwald and see if we can connect with more people there and hear from them.
So just wanted to boost, which I think is on everyone's radar, that we are valuing our neighborhood program and we're also knowing that it's not enough just to say, okay, the neighborhood associations in these areas, we've talked to them.
We have to be able to go beyond that too and think about who's not at the table, whose voices are missing, and making sure that we're going out and getting those voices also.
Thank you.
Great.
Well, I think we've gotten to hear from all my colleagues.
There are a couple, I think they're legacy hands.
Those legacy hands, Councilor Green, Councilor Smith.
Great.
Um, well, I would like to see, um, Laura, if you'd like to do a closing and talk about any next steps before we adjourn.
Laura Oppenheimer
Yeah, thank you so much.
Uh, obviously this was a really a ripe topic for conversation.
I We have very much appreciated everything that's been said.
Hope you saw us all taking copious notes, which we will plan to turn into a summary with kind of key themes and next steps and share out with all of you by mid-October at the latest.
I think civic engagement is part of what makes Portland really special, and this conversation reflects that.
I see this as a moment of real opportunity that's reflected in this conversation.
Thank you.
Let's let it be the beginning of a conversation and not the end and look forward to follow-up to come.
Thank you.
Tiffany Koyama Lane
Thank you so much to all of you and for all that you do.
With that, I will adjourn this Civic Life and Citywide Engagement work session at 4:38 PM.