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Preschool for All, Multnomah County’s initiative to provide universal preschool to every child who wants it by 2030, now sits on close to $610 million, marking another year where the program racks up its fund balance.
Data from the county’s annual comprehensive financial report, which was released Nov. 13, shows the county once again collected more revenue than it anticipated for the program, at $224 million instead of the forecasted $163 million.
It also underspent budgeted expenditures, particularly in human services, where the county spent about $90.5 million of the budgeted $101.5 million. (Human services make up the bulk of Preschool for All operational costs.)
County officials have long anticipated the Preschool for All would, in its early years, collect more money than it would spend before expenditures began to outpace revenues. The latest iteration of a chart that shows the Preschool for All fund balance mapped against seats funded shows an early outpacing of fund balance in comparison to the cost of the program. By the mid-2030s, the county projects the fund balance dips below zero before slowly recovering.
But the financial report shows that Preschool for All is, even when accounting for planned underspending, sitting on $160 million more than county officials anticipated. And the $610 million figure is above even the county’s own projections for how high the fund balance would be in the program’s early years.
County economist Jeff Renfro says that’s in part because the tax is “extremely, extremely volatile” and that he expects a higher forecast error for the preschool tax than other taxes. (The program is funded by a tax of 1.5% on income over $125,000 for single filers or $200,000 for joint filers, and an additional 1.5% on income over $250,000 for single filers or $400,000 for joint filers.)
There was also a one-time anomaly for the program’s generated revenue that explains why it collected about $20 million more than it brought in last year. Renfro says a significant portion of the revenue was boosted by a Powerball winner in Multnomah County. Without it, the revenues remained essentially flat from the previous year, when the program brought in about $187 million. He adds the county is quite conservative when forecasting interest.
He says it’s too early to draw conclusions about what those figures say about the feared flight of the county’s high earners, a topic of great interest to Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek this summer. (Data on individual filers comes in mid-November, Renfro says, and the county conducts an analysis following its arrival.)
The enlarged fund balance raises questions about program scaling, given that Preschool for All still has yet to provide enough seats to meet growing demand. In the 2025–26 academic year, where there were about 3,800 seats available, there were 940 applicants that had not yet received a placement offer, county spokesman Ryan Yambra told WW in late October.
Yambra says Preschool for All had a successful selection process for fiscal year 2027 and adds he’s “confident” that the program is “anticipating a much higher number of seats…than our current projections.” (He says he cannot yet share the increased number of providers.)
To the county’s credit, projections in fiscal year 2025 were more accurate than they were in fiscal year 2024, when the program sat on $225 million more than county officials anticipated.
“I think underspending is moving in the right direction,” Yambra says. “It’s a combination of more seats, more facilities and more educators. We expect to really, really over-deliver in fiscal year 2027.”
Bob Weinstein, a former City Council candidate and neighborhood advocate who has long watchdogged Preschool for All spending, is not impressed. He tells WW that in the wake of a $10.5 million projected shortfall for the county budget in fiscal year 2027, “it seems to me that it is time to have a conversation about using some of this huge—and growing—preschool surplus to fill in some funding gaps in critical county services.”
Renfro says the most recent version of modeling anticipates that starting in fiscal year 2027, the county will start to spend its dedicated savings down. “That begins a nine year period in which that dedicated savings is offsetting expected deficits,” he says.
“Dedicated savings, we’re planning to spend all of it,” he says. “At some point in the future when we don’t have this bucket that’s giving us flexibility as we go through these years of expected deficits…then we’ll have to have another conversation around, in the longer term, post implementation, how we manage this volatility.”
