The Portland City Council has thrown the Portland Children’s Levy into disarray by rejecting the entirety of its $65 million grants package and instead extending existing grants by a year, citing concerns about how nonprofits were scored by the program’s layers of review.
The council’s June 4 vote is the first time the PCL, established in 2002, had its selections rejected en masse. The consequence is that 36 nonprofits expecting $17.4 million in funding to begin flowing July 1 won’t receive that money for at least a year.
That’s an extraordinary move by the newly elected 12-member body, who cited concerns about equity and racial justice as a reason for rejecting two years of work by program staff, a group of volunteer scorers, and a community council set up to help guide funding priorities. It’s the latest signal of the council’s appetite to reassess long-standing city funding practices, and has left members of the PCL Allocation Committee seething.
“I’m disappointed and discouraged,” committee member Charity Kreider said on June 18. “I care about integrity, and I don’t believe the council members acted in integrity, and that’s hard to sit with because of their role as elected officials in public service.”
The PCL is a five-year property-tax levy (last renewed in 2023 at 40 cents on every $1,000 of assessed property value) that funds programs for vulnerable kids, including hunger and abuse prevention, after-school mentoring, and foster care. The levy distributes money through grants to nonprofit organizations, many of them culturally specific, which then administer the programs.
This spring the PCL Allocation Committee recommended 94 programs across 64 organizations to be funded in the next round of large grants, which last from July 1, 2025, to July 1, 2028.
On June 4, the City Council rejected the proposal in its entirety. That same day, the council passed an emergency ordinance to extend all current large PCL grantees (76 programs in total) by one year. That includes renewals to organizations the PCL did not approve for renewed funding due to performance issues and low application scores.
Seven councilors rejected the grant proposal: Candace Avalos, Jamie Dunphy, Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal, Tiffany Koyama Lane, Angelita Morillo and Loretta Smith. And five voted against the idea: Councilors Olivia Clark, Steve Novick, Elana Pirtle-Guiney, Dan Ryan and Eric Zimmerman.
The councilors who pressed the pause button raised doubts about the fairness of the PCL’s scoring process, citing anecdotal examples of organizations, some of which are Black-led, that were not recommended for funding.
Kanal said he was “deeply uncomfortable with the idea that city staff is trying to tell communities of color who served them better, who would serve them better, than organizations they built a trusting relationship with over years or decades. That’s a concerning possibility to me.”
Smith said there were “systemic problems that we need to fix...I’m very concerned and troubled by what I’ve seen.”
On June 18, the PCL Allocation Committee ripped into the City Council’s decision. Members of the committee characterized it as sloppy and creating consequences that councilors didn’t grasp.
“I’m profoundly disappointed by the City Council for not asking more questions and instead deciding what our flaws in the process were, without discussion,” said Multnomah County Commissioner Meghan Moyer, who sits on the five-person Allocation Committee. “I’m incredibly curious what they’d want us to do differently.”
Moyer added that she took “offense to some of the accusations that were brought forward” by council members.
At the June 18 meeting, PCL leadership went through concerns councilors had voiced on June 4, slide by slide, and rebutted them.
Councilors had raised three specific examples of Black-led organizations that weren’t recommended for funding. One of those, PCL staff noted, had scored last—23rd out of 23 applicants—in the hunger-relief grant area. A city councilor named another organization, a current PCL grantee, that had “significant performance concerns,” staff noted.
PCL staff explained that 76% of culturally specific organizations that applied for funding had an application approved, and that 49% of non-culturally specific groups that applied had an application approved. Of the 22 organizations serving Black and African communities that applied for funding, 17 were approved by the Allocation Committee.
Felicia Tripp Folsom, the longest-serving member of the Allocation Committee, said she was “befuddled by the council’s response.”
“All the questions they asked of staff have indicated that they didn’t even take the time to review our process, which I find unacceptable [for] an elected [official],” Tripp Folsom said. “I want them to tell us why, one, they didn’t review our process, and, two, why do you not respect what the community had asked for?”
Some of the 36 organizations that expected funding but won’t receive that funding due to council’s vote testified about just how devastating the decision was, and in some cases, how it imperiled their existence.
Eric Knox, founder of Holla, a culturally specific mentoring organization that was recommended for funding, said the decision was traumatizing.
“City Council’s decision to remand isn’t just a delay; it’s a dismantling. It’s a dangerous precedent,” Knox said. “We are asking you to speak clearly and publicly. This process was fair and centered in equity. Please do not allow the City Council to take a full year to undermine the process, rewriting the rules and delaying justice for organizations already selected to receive funding.”
Correspondence obtained by WW shows that PCL director Lisa Pellegrino addressed councilors’ concerns in a May 30 memo, including questions about specific applicants, point by point.
That detailed memo, however, did little to appease the council on June 4, and they voted to remand the entire package anyway.
Those familiar with the situation say a handful of councilors have expressed regret about their vote, and in the days following June 4 scrambled to find a way to make amends.
That’s reflected in a June 10 email from Pellegrino to the City Attorney’s Office, in which she asked about the process of calling a revote. “We are getting a significant number of inquiries asking if there is any way that City Council would reconsider its June 4 decisions,” Pellegrino wrote. (The answer: It’s complicated.)
Nothing came of it.
Sources tell WW no one from the remand camp is likely to put the item on the agenda until after the beginning of the fiscal year on July 1. By that time, had it not been for the remand, the nonprofits recommended for funding would have started to see the money flow. One option being mulled: Find extra money, somewhere, to provide just one year’s worth of funding to the 36 organizations recommended for funding but now not slated to receive any.
In the June 18 meeting, Kreider asked PCL staff if the organizations that scored poorly would have their grants extended by one year “despite poor performance.”
PCL staff said yes, those organizations would be funded. The council had made its decision.
Only two of the seven councilors that voted for a remand responded to WW’s request for comment.
Council Vice President Tiffany Koyama Lane’s chief of staff, Mary Li, tells WW that the councilor is “aware of the unintended consequences of the council’s actions related to the Children’s Levy” and that “there is continued discussion among the council to identify potential options to mitigate that impact.”
Councilor Candace Avalos says she stands by her vote. “I’m not backpedaling,” she says. “I see the impact and it sucks, but I made the decision that I could best make in that moment. Every decision I’m going to make is going to have some sort of uproar.”
This story was updated on June 24, 2025.
Correction: This story incorrectly stated the full grants package figure as $70.9 million. It is $65 million. WW regrets the error.