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The Portland City Council voted down a controversial budget amendment Tuesday that would have taken $10 million from the new Office of Community Police Accountability to partly restore cuts to the fire and police bureaus in Mayor Keith Wilson’s proposed budget.
The amendment, championed by Councilor Olivia Clark, died by a 6–6 vote.
The new OCPA houses a 21-member board that will soon investigate allegations of police misconduct. The new board is set to replace the city’s existing police review board, and is the product of a 2020 ballot measure passed by 82% of Portland voters that mandated the city create a new police oversight system.
The OCPA itself—which is the office that will staff the police oversight board—currently has no permanent staff, nor has the board yet selected a director.
Clark and fellow councilors who backed the proposal said it was a common-sense way to restore some of the steep cuts made to police and fire in Wilson’s proposed budget—by taking from an office that hasn’t been set up yet but is poised to have a $16 million budget this year that will likely spend under-budget. (The amendment included a repayment promise.)
“There is no realistic prospect that an organization that doesn’t even have a director now, and they expect to take months to hire up 22 people...can find a way to responsibly spend millions and millions of dollars in external materials and services,” said Councilor Steve Novick. “[It’s] just not going to happen.”
Novick added that voters “certainly would not object to borrowing money that would otherwise just sit in a bank account.”
Members of the council’s progressive caucus, on the other hand, argued the amendment would betray voters’ desires, given that the OCPA was created by a 2020 ballot measure passed by 82% of voters.
The measure mandated that the oversight board and its supporting office have a budget equivalent to no less than 5% of the Portland Police Bureau’s annual budget—hence the $16 million the board is set to receive this year.
“I ask my colleagues not only to reject the amendment, but [to reject] the contempt that comes with it that we would be holding Portlanders in if we adopted it,” Councilor Sameer Kanal said.
Councilor Candace Avalos said the discussion around the amendment was “gross” and that it “spits in the face of communities who have been begging for accountability for a bureau that has been notoriously against it.”
Before the final vote, Clark, who appeared frustrated by the comments suggesting that her amendment was a way to defang the new oversight body, said she was “pure in my motivation” with the amendment.
“I have nothing against the commission,” she said. “I support the commission.”
Later that day, Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guiney brought a pared-down version of Clark’s amendment that sought to re-route $4.5 million from the OCPA (and about $2 million from other sources) to restore some of the public safety cuts.
“I truly have to believe that Portlanders don’t want to see us leave money that we know will be reallocated a few months from now, to whatever hole happens to be there then, or whatever pet project happens to be there then,” Pirtle-Guiney said, “when we can continue to fund core frontline services that people rely on for safety.”
That, too, got shot down.
“I don’t quite see how this is a compromise,” said Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane. “You’ve heard from many people, and we’ve already voted and said that there’s a pretty hard line on touching the OCPA.”
