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The backers of a ballot initiative that would let Portland residents vote on how to spend 2% of the city budget submitted 78,743 signatures to the city on Monday, nearly double the 40,437 signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot. It’s the largest number of signatures submitted in recent Portland history, says Deborah Scroggin, the city elections division manager.
The city must verify all signatures by Aug. 5.
The initiative would require that the City Council establish a participatory budgeting program. Under that program, city residents would suggest ideas for how to spend 2% of the city budget, citizen delegates would shape those ideas into project proposals, and the concepts would receive a citywide vote. (The proposed amendment to the city charter does not specify how that vote would be conducted, except that it would not be subject to city or state election laws.)
Your 2 Cents PDX, the campaign behind the initiative, estimates that participatory budgeting would cost about $16.4 million in FY 2027–28 and $17 million in FY 2028–29.
More than 100 cities in the United States and more than 7,000 worldwide use participatory budgeting, according to Your 2 Cents. The most prominent is New York City, which launched its program in 2011.
“This record show of public support tells us something important—Portlanders are not giving up on our beloved city. We are hungry for opportunities to be heard, to have a voice and a vote in shaping our neighborhoods for the better,” Jim Labbe, one of the initiative’s co-chief petitioners, said in a statement Monday. Labbe is co-founder and director of Participatory Budgeting Oregon, a nonprofit that has raised more than $5 million since its inception in 2018. (Participatory Budgeting Oregon co-leads the Your 2 Cents campaign, alongside the Next Up Action Fund and East County Rising PAC.)
The Community Budgeting for All political action committee, which funds Your 2 Cents, has raised $521,411. That’s much less funding than the other initiative likely to make November’s ballot, which would reroute 25% of PCEF to hire some 400 additional police officers. That initiative submitted more than 63,000 signatures on Monday and raised more than $1.4 million. Nearly $800,000 of that came from the Portland Police Association, the police officers’ union.
The police initiative appears to have collected the second-most signatures in recent history after the participatory budgeting initiative. The initiative that created the Portland Clean Energy Fund in 2018 received 61,728, according to Scroggin—but those signatures were verified, and the two new batches haven’t yet.
