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Moments before midnight Wednesday, the Portland City Council approved an $8.5 billion preliminary budget. But in the last 20 minutes of the council’s nearly 12-hour marathon budget hearing, the discussion went sour.
By the end of the heated debate—right at 11:50 pm—the City Council had voted 7-5 to divert $1.9 million in new funding from the Portland Police Bureau’s budget to backfill maintenance cuts at Portland Parks and Recreation.
The bitter discussion prior to the vote showed just how divided the council is on police spending. It was the first time the council has taken a vote on the police budget—rather than talking in platitudes on the dais about where they stand on the matter.
The amendment came from District 1 Councilor Candace Avalos. It was uncomplicated: take $1.9 million in funding that had been earmarked for police staffing by Mayor Keith Wilson and transfer it to the parks bureau for outdoor parks maintenance, which is slated to see deep cuts under Wilson’s proposed allocation.
The vote, while not final and a small fraction of the budget, is all but certain to inflame an already tense conversation about how much public safety spending Portland needs as it tries to reverse population declines and fill vacant downtown office towers.
It unfolded swiftly but with open rancor.
Around 11:20 pm, Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney said she wanted to take a vote to approve a preliminary adopted budget. (The council will take a final vote on the budget on June 18. And they still have more than half of the 126 proposed amendments to wade through before then, which they must do on June 11.)
Immediately, the council’s most dedicated critics of the police bureau sought to use the remaining minutes before midnight to discuss Avalos’ proposal.
Councilor Angelita Morillo took issue with Pirtle-Guiney wrapping up the meeting. “We are at 11:23. We have the right to be here until midnight,” Morillo said.
Councilor Sameer Kanal took the floor and yielded immediately to Avalos, who introduced her amendment.
“I know we’re at the end here but this feels like an important vote,” Avalos said. “This is not about reducing police effectiveness.”
Avalos noted that the police bureau has 90 vacant positions, while still “effectively reducing crime rates.”
Councilor Steve Novick, who’s been vocal about his desire to avoid cuts to parks maintenance, said: “I personally would rather we be increasing the police budget. But I can’t accept having most of the cuts fall on parks maintenance, and increasing the police budget when we’re slashing parks maintenance doesn’t sit well with me.”
He noted that he had an “interesting” conversation with the Portland Metro Chamber, the city’s chamber of commerce with a heavy presence in City Hall, earlier in the week—and the topic turned to hiking the property tax levy that funds parks maintenance.
“They said they’re not inalterably opposed to an increased parks levy, but they suggested that their support for a levy might be conditional on discussions about the police budget.”
That recollection didn’t sit well with Morillo, Novick’s fellow District 3 councilor.
“So what I’m hearing from Novick is that apparently the Metro Chamber gets to run this town and tell everyone, under vague threat, what we can and cannot do with our budget,” Morillo said.
She added: “This is not a cut to police. There will not be a single officer laid off. You’ve been one of the leaders on this discussion, I would hope that one measly call with the Portland Metro Chamber wouldn’t shiver your timbers so much that you couldn’t vote with us.”
At the request of a councilor, Police Chief Bob Day joined virtually from his home to answer how the diversion would affect the police bureau. Day, clad in glasses and an orange T-shirt, sounded fatigued. He explained, as he had earlier in the day, that he believed it would hurt the bureau’s recruiting efforts.
“Clearly some of the councilors did not either respect or trust the responsibility given to me in my role as chief of police,” Day said. “There will be a reduction in services. How those services will show up, I don’t know yet. But I can tell you it will be a reduction in services.” (Earlier in the day, he and Budget Director Ruth Levine had disagreed about what the impacts to staffing would be at the police bureau, should this cut move forward.)
Councilor Eric Zimmerman, who’s said time and time again his top priority is public safety and protecting police staffing, got angry.
“I’ve never seen a City Council or county commission in my life be so giddy to cut public safety. This is not a laughing matter,” Zimmerman said. “I know folks want to have fun but this is serious stuff. Right now is not the time to cut public safety.”
Pirtle-Guiney sternly told Zimmerman: “Please don’t impugn your colleagues.”
Zimmerman continued anyway. “This council has been giddy to cut police all day long to get to this vote at the 11:35 point. This is not necessary. We can backfill parks with many other things proposed.”
Fellow District 4 Councilor Olivia Clark, in a disappointed tone, said that the council would be sending the “absolutely wrong signal” to Portlanders with this amendment.
Council Vice President Tiffany Koyama Lane, who is often aligned with Avalos on matters of policing, asked parks bureau director Adena Long to “come up and paint the picture for us of what the [parks] cuts look like.”
By that point in the night, the council chambers were filled almost exclusively with city staff. Many of them were top administrators and bureau and office directors. The veneer of professionalism had somewhat worn off in the chambers at that point, as some spectators looked glossy-eyed, others annoyed, others doing work on their laptops, and some scrolling on phones. (At one point, around 10:30 pm, a woman’s opera voice came emanating loudly out of a city staffer’s phone for about 10 seconds. Fits of giggles could be heard from a group of staffers at the rear of the chambers. It was a rare moment of levity in what was a long and tense evening.)
Long, who had been sitting at the back of the room, approached the council to address the body. She said the cuts to parks maintenance would “directly affect public safety.”
Councilor Loretta Smith of District 1, a supporter of the police, offered sharp words to her colleagues.
“Maya Angelou said: ‘When people show you who they are, believe them.’ I didn’t once think about taking money away from the police to pay for sidewalks. Because people in District 1, they believe that police don’t come quick enough,” Smith said. “We can’t start to defund the police in little ways, and keep picking off of it. Everybody knows it takes 18-20 months to hire someone. We have about 2,000 applicants in the queue right now. We’re going to have a real problem.”
A vote was called shortly after.
Kanal, up first, said: “If this was a cut, then this would be a different conversation. This is not a cut. I vote aye.”
Councilor Dan Ryan, also a proponent of the police bureau, offered a warning: “This council will make a big, big mistake that we will regret if we put this through. No.”
Koyama Lane voted aye.
Morillo, when it came to her vote, said: “Police have had 91 fully vacant positions for 5 years. Aye.”
Novick voted for it. Clark voted against it, as did Zimmerman, who said to the mayor: “We chose to cut parks maintenance to keep tree regulators, who we’ve heard about. That same recommendation came from the same director who proposed to cut sports. Mayor, you got played. They knew this was going to happen. You got played. I vote no.”
Avalos before her vote said she didn’t appreciate being “district-splained” by her colleagues.
“I know my district. I knock on those doors. They want to be safe. I want them to be safe,” Avalos said. “I vote aye.”
Pirtle-Guiney, who has the last vote as council president, said it wasn’t necessary to pit parks against police, and voted against the amendment.
“I’m not interested in cutting police budgets to fund parks maintenance until we’ve looked at other options,” she said, “to see if they have legs or not.”
The amendment passed with a 7-5 vote.
The Council quickly moved on to vote on the full budget before midnight, although Ryan said he could barely do so after what he had just witnessed. “That was devastating,” he said.
The recriminations from interested parties began almost immediately.
Vice president of public affairs for the Metro Chamber, Jon Isaacs, confirmed the Chamber is open to a parks levy increase—but only if the council undos the cut they just made.
“The Chamber is open to a potential parks levy increase if it is explicitly to fund parks maintenance, safety, cleanliness, and modernization of parks operations,” Isaacs said. “Unfortunately, the council adopted a $2 million cut to police staffing at literally the 11th hour last night. Any serious conversation about a parks levy will require that funding to be restored.”
The president of the Portland Police Association, Aaron Schmautz, said in a statement to WW that the choice between parks and police was a false one. “The entire purpose of this form of government is for a legislative body to ensure the voices of all Portlanders are heard,” he said. “Instead, the over 60 percent who have voiced loud and clear that they don’t want police to be cut and want a safer city are being ignored by a renewed defund the police movement.”
The council will reconvene on June 11 to debate and vote on the remainder of the amendments. Councilors can also introduce new amendments before then, so it’s possible that a councilor could introduce an amendment that attempts to partially undo Avalos’.