Skip to main content
On Wednesday night, the Portland City Council unanimously approved the city’s budget. The final vote to adopt it will take place June 18.
Similar to two weeks ago, when the council spent 12 hours discussing, debating, quarreling and voting on amendments to Mayor Keith Wilson’s $8.6 billion budget, the council spent all day Wednesday sifting through proposed changes to Wilson’s budget from all 12 councilors.
While the council must formally adopt the budget in a vote June 18, Wednesday night largely marks the end of what has been an arduous, contentious and, at times, dramatic budget season between councilors.
After all of the fanfare, the changes council made to Wilson’s budget are, all in all, modest ones.
Here’s what you need to know:
Mayor Wilson’s proposed budget remained largely unchanged. His budget emphasized shoring up additional resources for homeless shelters and public safety, notably police. He called his budget “back to basics” and, despite heated debate among councilors over small provisions for the last month, Wilson largely got the budget he wanted.
The budget relies on a host of increased user fees and rates. To shore up what was a massive deficit going into the budget process, Wilson proposed increasing water and sewer, parking, and recreation fees. The council approved those increases. The mayor also relied heavily on contingency funds, one-time dollars, and funding from other governments like Metro and Multnomah County.
Council amendments moved little money around, but those moves generated great controversy. Councilord over the past month have had three lengthy meetings to mull 120 amendments to Wilson’s budget. While they didn’t get to them all, the amendments they did pass moved around relatively little money. Those amendments included: taking $2 million away from Urban Forestry’s Tree Code enforcement team and diverting it to parks maintenance; taking $2.2 million in unused Police Bureau funds and placing it in a set-aside fund that public safety programs and bureaus (including Portland Street Response) can access through specific requests; diverting $2 million in new money earmarked for the Police Bureau to backfill parks maintenance cuts; and diverting $1 million from the Golf Fund and rerouting it to parks maintenance.
Portland Parks & Recreation was set to take the biggest cut in Wilson’s proposed budget. It escaped the worst of it. PP&R got the short end of the stick in Wilson’s proposed budget, facing a $7 million cut to outdoor parks maintenance. But a handful of amendments passed by the City Council over the past month filled most of that gap. Money diverted to prevent parks maintenance cuts is coming from the Portland Police Bureau, Urban Forestry (which is nestled within parks), and the Golf Fund.
Homelessness spending was addressed only briefly, and nothing much changed. Mayor Wilson was elected on his promise that he would build 1,500 shelter beds within one year. His budget beefed up the city’s homelessness office, Portland Solutions, and found money from other governments to help bankroll his shelter plan. The council made few attempts to shuffle those dollars around. One proposal by Councilor Angelita Morillo did attempt to modestly decrease the city’s homeless camp sweeps team and give that money instead to renter protections, including rent assistance, but the amendment died.
The budget process revealed a deep split between councilors. Two clear voting blocs have emerged on the council: the more progressive bloc (who have jokingly taken to referring to themselves as P-Cauc), and the more centrist bloc. The issue that divides them is primarily the role of policing and what public safety in Portland looks like. Those allegiances appear to be digging in more firmly, and more swiftly, than onlookers had hoped they would.
The police budget proved deeply controversial with the new council. The issue that most divides the new 12-member council is the role of policing. Members of P-Cauc, including Councilors Candace Avalos, Sameer Kanal and Morillo, brought forth proposals to give the council tighter control over the police budget and to direct small chunks of police funding for specific uses. Avalos proposed that the bulk of police overtime be held in a council-controlled fund that the bureau could request funds from when necessary. The amendment died, but not before a lively discussion over whether the Police Bureau has demonstrated both fiscal and moral accountability in recent years. Another amendment by Avalos to divert $2 million in new police funding to the parks bureau was successful. Councilors who cheer the police have taken to accusing the more progressive members of attempting to defund the Police Bureau piece by piece. The progressive members have scorned that accusation, saying their proposed tweaks were fiscally minor and seek to hold the police accountable for their spending and conduct.
Allegations and name-calling swirled. The 12-hour council meeting yesterday was dotted by tense moments when councilors exchanged allegations of impropriety, unprofessionalism and selfish motives. One such dispute came up when the council discussed, near the tail end of the meeting, an amendment passed Tuesday that had unknowingly put the budget out of whack by $734,000. The council discussed for 45 minutes how to plug that gap. Councilor Mitch Green, whose name was on the original amendment, took issue that Councilor Steve Novick had dubbed the amendment a “nihilist” one.
“I’ve twice now been likened to a Republican, Trump himself, and now a nihilist by Councilor Novick,” Green, normally unflappable, said with clear displeasure. “I find these comparisons objectionable, and say what you will about the optimism of my colleagues to solve complicated and competing challenges and on a compressed timeline, but at this dais it is at least a belief system.” (Green confirms that this was a Big Lebowski reference.)
Novick repeatedly said that Green’s amendment, which made a 2% cut across most bureaus of external materials and services and reallocated those funds to a handful of projects and programs favored by five councilors, was a package of “goodies” for those councilors.
“I think the five people that voted for something that gave them goodies, the honorable thing to do is to vote to balance it by cutting their own goodies rather than force the rest of us to vote for other cuts we hadn’t considered before, wherever they are,” Novick said. (The council would ultimately approve a $41,000 cut to every council office budget to help bring the budget back into balance, and trim down on some of the allocations.)
Councilor Sameer Kanal, who supported Green’s amendment, took issue with Novick’s comments.
“The assertion that something untoward is happening here should be stated outright,” Kanal said. “I think this is a ridiculous assumption. Every person has something in the budget, even if they didn’t get it in Green 9.” (That was the name of Green’s amendment.)
Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney on occasion became visibly frustrated with various councilors. At one point, she snapped at councilors over what she called “unintended consequences” of amendments like Green’s.
“We have to understand the consequences of our votes,” Pirtle-Guiney said, speaking to a Kanal amendment. “We have yet another amendment asking me to do something that certainly aligns with my values, and it feels downright irresponsible. Because when we did this yesterday, we did things that we did not understand the consequences of. And I would like us to act more responsibly in the very short amount of time we have left today.”
The progressive bloc called into question Pirtle-Guiney’s actions as president. Councilors from the progressive bloc spoke critically at times of how Pirtle-Guiney handled the meeting, and how she arranged the amendments that were discussed in the short time available.
Kanal at one point accused Pirtle-Guiney of “creating an artificial scarcity of meeting time” to rush discussion of an amendment. Pirtle-Guiney, visibly angered, bit back. “Please do not suggest that I’m creating artificial barriers when it is something that our chiefs of staff agreed to, a schedule that we are already two hours over because I pushed back and said we would need a little bit of flexibility.”
Councilor Angelita Morillo at one point noted that in the president’s package of amendments presented May 21, which Pirtle-Guiney hoped would sate all councilors and speed up the budget process, few progressive councilors had their proposals incorporated.
“That was negotiated with, it seems like, Councilors Clark, Zimmerman and the more conservative side of council,” Morillo said. “And that got voted down. If we want to talk about fairness, yeah, let’s talk about fairness.”
Perhaps the most surprising dispute over the president’s leadership came regarding an amendment proposed by Council Vice President Tiffany Koyama Lane, who until last night had not sparred with Pirtle-Guiney on the dais.
Koyama Lane at the last minute brought up an amendment she said Pirtle-Guiney had asked her to table from earlier in the day to cut down on time. The modest amendment sought to elevate a position in the Portland Bureau of Transportation to a higher place in the city’s administration. (Pirtle-Guiney had asked the same of other colleagues’ amendments, too.) Koyama Lane fought back, though, as the resident peacemaker on council, she appeared uncomfortable doing so.
“We all want to vote and you’re not letting us do it,” Koyama Lane said to the president. “I very much did not want to do this. I asked you multiple times. I believe there are times to not be rigid and this was a choice for it to be like this.”
Pirtle-Guiney argued it was not an appropriate time to bring an amendment forward, as that window had closed.
“Multiple of our colleagues asked us if there were time for additional things. Multiple of our colleagues had other things they wanted on the table. One set of people are trying at the last minute to move something through, and nobody else has that opportunity.”
But her decision was overridden by a majority of the council, and Koyama Lane’s amendment passed.
Councilors continue to express distrust of city administration, including bureau leaders. Councilors across the dais have called into question the transparency and integrity of the city’s administration, including bureau directors. Much of councilors’ frustration has been around access to financial information they’ve sought from bureaus during budget season, with some councilors saying they feel various bureaus have hidden or obscured financial information from the council. Councilor Eric Zimmerman has repeatedly called into question the veracity of statements by parks bureau leaders, while Councilor Morillo has repeatedly called into question the validity of statements from police leaders.
That’s something of a change from past custom in council chambers. Under the previous system of government, commissioners personally oversaw bureaus and fiercely protected them from any aspersions. Now, with all bureaus under a city administrator, Michael Jordan, who reports to Mayor Wilson, a palpable distrust is developing between the legislative and executive branches of City Hall.