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The Portland City Council on Tuesday passed an amendment to the budget that directed bureaus to reduce their external spending on contractors and materials by 2%. The directive, Councilor Mitch Green said, would create about $1.5 million in savings, which would then be reallocated to other priorities.
Those savings, Green’s amendment dictates, will be allocated to “fund urgent, unfunded community priorities, including enhanced renter protections, arts programs, downtown public space activation, expanding Portland Street Response, and keeping vital programs for parks and recreation running,” Green wrote yesterday in a press release.
Green noted on the dais that he was unable to get the level of budget detail from bureaus on external spending that he sought but that he knew there was fat to trim.
After a lengthy discussion, Green’s amendment passed with a 7-5 vote.
Councilors who voted against the proposal expressed concern. “The day I start governing by anecdote, and assuming there must be a bunch of waste in government so I’m going to vote to make random cuts and hope somebody else will find the waste, is the day I’ll join the Republican Party,” Councilor Steve Novick said. “Hell no.”
Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney also voted no.
“I’ve heard things from our [deputy city administrators] that don’t line up with the numbers on the page,” Pirtle-Guiney said. “I think there likely is room for cuts like this, but I can’t do it in this hatchet of an attempt. No.”
It turns out Pirtle-Guiney had good reason for concern.
On Wednesday morning, the city’s budget director, Ruth Levine, alerted Pirtle-Guiney that the amendment from the night prior had actually put the city’s overall proposed budget in a $734,000 deficit.
Levine wrote to Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney at 11:30 on Wednesday morning: “Basically, [the budget] would be about 700K out of balance.”
The City Council by end of day Wednesday must approve a balanced budget. A second reading of the budget, and the final vote, will take place on June 18. That budget, by law, must be balanced.
Update, 11 pm Wednesday: The City Council on Wednesday night managed to close the $734,000 deficit by the end of the night, as was legally required. They did so by voting to trim some of the new allocations created in Green’s original amendment, and to cut each councilor’s office budget by $41,000. That closed the deficit. How the council ultimately chose to close that deficit was not without controversy; they debated for nearly 45 minutes before taking a final vote.
The Green amendment yesterday, apparently unknowingly to councilors until this morning, put the budget $734,000 out of whack. That means the council must find a $734,000 cut somewhere in the budget in the next nine hours.
It’s unclear how the City Council intends to right the issue this afternoon.
Pirtle-Guiney said in a statement to WW that she was disappointed by her colleagues that put forward the amendment and those who ultimately voted to approve it.
“We knew that there would be points in the process that would be unbalanced. What’s frustrating about this situation is that Councilors said they were putting forward a balanced amendment,” Pirtle-Guiney said. “I’ve asked those Councilors to find a solution. I expect that they will bring something back later this afternoon. I am highly disappointed that they misrepresented their original amendment.”
Green’s chief of staff, Maria Sipin, said that adjustments offered by Councilor Sameer Kanal to Green’s amendment yesterday, which were ultimately included in the amendment that passed, put the amendment out of balance.
“The real time budget match was challenging,” Sipin said. “Stay tuned for new developments.”
Kanal’s tweaks exempted the public safety bureaus from the 2% reduction. “That would make this budget-neutral,” Kanal said on the dais on Tuesday afternoon.
But his tweaks did not, in fact, make the amendment budget-neutral. The amount allocated to new spending was larger than the amount reduced from bureau budgets.
“Due to restrictions of how certain funds can be used—including those freed up by [Green’s amendment], which was not previously known—a small portion of the budget spending still needs to be resourced," Kanal said in a statement to WW. “Adjusting budgets quickly in real time as amendments shift is complex, and right now we’re working with colleagues on amendments that would bring us back in balance.”
In her email to Pirtle-Guiney on Wednesday morning alerting her to the deficit, Levine added: “Councilor Kanal told me in the hallway that the intention was to reduce more from [the City Administrator’s Office and Portland Solutions] if the amendment is unbalanced, but that would need to be clarified as a technical cleanup.”
Councilor Steve Novick scolded his colleagues in a statement to WW.
“They voted for the [amendment] having no idea what the consequences will be for the bureaus, and now it turns out that they also had no idea whether the proposal was balanced,” Novick told WW, calling it “doubly, outrageously irresponsible.”
Councilors who voted for the amendment were Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal, Olivia Clark, Eric Zimmerman, Jamie Dunphy, Loretta Smith and Angelita Morillo.
Councilors who voted against the amendment were Tiffany Koyama Lane, Steve Novick, Candace Avalos, Dan Ryan and Pirtle-Guiney.