The record · Transcript

Council session — 2026-04-02

Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (33,132 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are AI-suggested and editor-reviewed (low confidence — auto-captions garble names); each color marks a speaker.

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I've missed you. Oh, the order. I'm so happy to be back where they used to be. So wholesome. Awesome. Over here. I think that's weird. Why is it dark when earl blumenauer dark skirts over there? Bread is always great.

Good morning. I call the first ever meeting of the Portland city council committee of the whole to order. It is Thursday, April 2nd at 9:31 a.m. Keelan. Will you please call the roll?

Good morning. Pirtle-guiney Ryan.

Here.

Koyama Lane. Here.

Morillo.

Here. I'm sorry I couldn't get my mic undone.

Novick. Here.

CClark here.

Green here.

Zimmerman.

Avalos present.

Dunphy way over here, on the side.

Kanal here. Christopher, will you please read the statement of conduct?

Welcome to the meeting of the finance and governance committee of the whole to testify before this committee in person or virtually, you must sign up in advance in the committee agenda@www.Portland.gov council agenda slash finance dash and dash governance dash committee. Dash whole or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting in person. Testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, you may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted. When your time is up is over. The chair preserves order disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others. Testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption results in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave when subjected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered when testifying. State your name for the record. If you're a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.

Dan Ryan: Thank you. Christopher. Yeah. Welcome to the committee. The whole Sameer Kanal the chair of the committee. I am joined by my two vice chairs, Dan Ryan to my right, your left. And Tiffany Koyama Lane to my left. You're right. This is the first ever committee of the whole. So we're going to start with a very brief description of what it is. I'm going to give both vice chairs, as well as the council president, a chance to to address this part as well. Following that, we'll have a brief chair's update to look ahead to future meeting items that are coming up over the course of the month of April. And then we have the bulk of our meeting devoted to two transportation funding items, which will be read together today for potential referral to the full council. As you all know, committees in general are a common way of allowing for informal discussion of items that are at the earlier stages of their development prior to final consideration at the full council, or for evaluating and discussing and receiving presentations from the administration committees of the whole. As the name implies, have all members of the full council on them, but also allow for more relaxed rules of discussion, as well as, of course, different presiding officers. In our committee structure, we assigned several areas of work to this particular committee, including internal governance items, large scale or broader finance items, government oversight, emergency response, including federal response, as well as items that cross over multiple committee jurisdictions or don't really fit into any particular committee. Of the other four, for all but the oversight piece, you'll see a fairly typical committee process with the same referral process for legislation to the full council and so on. It's not designed to be a pro forma exercise, a step to just get things to the full council. Instead, it's the opposite. It's designed to be a place where real work on items can get done before they go to the full council. And to that end, I anticipate that items that are referred out of this committee with a due pass recommendation. And I've asked the council president if we're able to just put those on the full council consent agenda, whereas items that still need some work can get referred out, but not with necessarily the due pass recommendation, but just referred out to the full council and then still have that work at the full council occur in the regular agenda. On the other hand, you know, anyone can pull anything off the consent agenda. As always for oversight hearings, it's going to work a little bit differently. We'll talk about that more as we get closer to our first one, which the council president has scheduled in this committee on Thursday, April 23rd, pursuant to the resolution about looking into the housing dollars and how that came to be, the 20.7 and then finally, this committee has a unique schedule. We meet the first four weeks of each month, although this month it will also meet on the fifth week, April 30th. It will typically be Thursday mornings from 930 to 1230. However, the week that we have an evening council meeting, the third week of each month, we're going to meet on Wednesday afternoons from 2 to 5 right before that, sorry, 230 to 530 right before the the full council vice chairs. Koyama Lane Ryan, is there anything you'd like to add before we continue?

Thanks, chair. I'll take a moment to welcome everyone. Good morning. I personally get very nerdy about governance work and love to talk things through. And so it's exciting to be able to do this with even more folks up here. I do think governance works best when we have a range of perspectives, and especially when we're making decisions, decisions about how our body is going to function in this new ish form of government, it's important that we all have a chance to weigh in on items. And so I'm just looking forward to many productive discussions together.

Thanks.

Thank you. And thank you, chair Kanal for actually we met right before break, the three of us and your vision and what this committee is, has evolved since then. And I appreciate it. That's my way of saying, welcome, everybody. We're building something here. I think we're trying to figure out what this will be. Is it kind of like a work session prior to the official council meeting, the you brought up something new about maybe things can go directly onto consent. I can't imagine that will be a debate led by you often. So I think that we're just going to figure this out as we go along. I think today is a good example of something that all of us want to have more exposure to than going from a smaller committee directly to the whole council. So the agenda item today is, I think, a really good one to begin with. And thank you, councilor Clark, in advance for all your work. So I'm here to help and build this with you. And let's be comfortable with the process. It'll be messy at times. Thanks.

Thank you both. Vice chairs, council president Dunphy, anything you'd like to add?

You know.

I just want to thank my colleagues, the city staff and the public broadly for your patience and your willingness to try and pivot. This is a big pivot. This is a new change of how we're doing things. It's not a new concept all together. It's quite common in other bodies. But we haven't done it yet, and I look forward to seeing if this is the new part of our system that actually helps get the wheels of this machinery moving more efficiently. So thank you all for this. And also, I'm excited to be sitting on this side of the dais.

So thank you, council president Dunphy, we're going to do a brief chair's update at the report at the beginning of each of these meetings, mostly just to give some some transparency as to what's coming up in the future agendas. So first thing to mention is that if we don't have items filed, I'm very comfortable not having this committee meet. And I think as we make the pivot over to the new system and things are still getting filed and reassigned, nothing is actually filed for next week. So there is not going to be a committee the whole meeting on Thursday, April 9th. So I encourage anyone who's interested in on this side of the dais or in the administration to file things so that if you'd like them to be on here, because we're not going to just meet for the sake of meeting, we will have a meeting on the 30th, as I mentioned. So on the 15th, which is the Wednesday immediately before the evening council meeting, we have three appointments that we're expecting to be filed, as well as two bond related issues related to public works that we're expecting to be filed, should those be filed and meet the administrative deadlines, those will be on the agenda the 15th, the 23rd. The entire meeting is going to be that oversight hearing related to the housing dollars. I think it's resolution 3773 for that. Set that up. And then on the 30th, we'll be talking primarily about federal response and items related to ice. As we go forward. I should have this written out and something that'll be filed as well. With that this meeting, the committee will consider an ordinance to establish a new transportation utility fee to help fund maintenance and safety of the city's transportation system, as well as considering a resolution to support the modification of the Portland bureau of transportation's street opening permits to utilities to include damage cost recovery related to long term pavement degradation associated with excavation in the public right of way. Keelan. Would you please read both of these two agenda items together?

Agenda item one document number 2020 6-113. Establish a new transportation utility fee to help fund basic maintenance and safety of the city's transportation system. Adco. Chapter 17.20 item two document number 2020 6-11. For support. Modification of bureau of transportation. Street opening permits to utilities to include damage cost recovery related to long term pavement degradation associated with excavation in the public right of way.

Thank you. Keelan vice president Clark is both the chair of the committee where this conversation was initiated and the lead sponsor, so I'll pass it over to her to begin the presentation.

Thank you very much and good morning, chair Kanal. Excuse me. I'm very pleased that transportation finance is the first issue that we're going to discuss in the committee of the whole, because it's one of the most important and urgent infrastructure issues that we face in the city of Portland. These two measures are coming to you with the unanimous support of the dni committee members. And over the last year, our committee set out to learn about asset management and the state of one of our most important assets, which is our streets and our roads. We learned that our streets are riddled with potholes and many of the streets are failing. The condition has worsened over the last five years. We learned that if we do not act now to address the degradation of our streets, it will cost us up to ten times more to replace them in the future. We learned that our streets, whether you drive on them or not, touch every Portland resident. They carry our food, our goods, our teachers, our doctors, our emergency vehicles, our busses and they are our lifeline and given with the five of us, learned about street conditions and budget cuts, the budget cuts that PBOT has experienced over the last seven budget cycles. We asked the bureau to research how to address the problem, and this was in a resolution that all of us voted for unanimously, I believe in July, it was resolution 37712. This last December. Then PBOT delivered that report to our committee. It's an excellent report, I must say. If you haven't looked at it, it's very comprehensive. And in January, we then asked the bureau to take the top funding models to the streets, as it were, for a robust public engagement process. As a result of this work, the research and the public input. We're here today with our tni committee recommendations on how to move forward. Given the research in the report and what we've learned, we understand the extreme risk of doing nothing, and we are anxious to proceed today. Pbot today will review the challenge, the results of their work and the outreach that led to the tni committee to bring forward the ordinance and resolution before you today. Before we turn this hearing over to the bureau and the all the folks in the chamber who are here to offer their comments. Councilor Kanal. I would like to invite my committee colleagues to each make a comment regarding today's process and the proposals. If we can. I'd like to begin with my esteemed co-chair, our vice chair, almost co-chair, councilor Morillo, to make a comment.

Thank you so much, chair Clark, for your leadership on this issue. I'm very excited that we're discussing this as the first item of the committee of the whole, and I'm so grateful for the PBOT staff that are here today. I first want to commend them for all of the amazing work and research that they always bring to the table, and how much outreach was done to arrive at this conclusion. There were open houses, there were online surveys, and we found that 78% supported the tough and 87% supported the street damage restoration fee in those surveys. So I think that there is a myth that people don't want to pay more for good services. But I think that what we're actually seeing is that people are willing to pay as long as government is willing to deliver on those services. And our roads and our infrastructure is something that we can't allow to further decay. A few weeks ago, I got to do a tour at PBOT, and I got to meet with employees who are doing those frontline services and the things that they told me about how critical maintenance is and the things that we don't even think about day to day. If we don't take care of that maintenance today, then our infrastructure is not going to survive the next few decades, let alone the next few years. So we have to make really difficult decisions right now. And there was a lot of community feedback given in order to arrive at this process. And we also now heard more feedback. And that's good. That's how democracy works. Sometimes things have to be adjusted as we gain new information and new perspectives. And so I'm really looking forward to the discussion today. There are no easy fixes to the budget difficulties that we're facing and to the infrastructure difficulties. But I think that we have a lot of good people in this room and in this city who care about it and who want to do things for the long term, at whatever cost that is. To us personally, politically, I think we all are here in service of the city first and foremost. So thank you, everyone, for being here today. I'm really excited to have this discussion with everybody off the committee, and I will I will miss the transportation committee very dearly. So I'm glad that we get to have these discussions here. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilor. Morillo. Councilor. Koyama Lane. Would you like to make a comment?

Yes, I want to start by thanking you, councilor Clarke, for your leadership and bringing this forward through the transportation and infrastructure committee, which that work will now be in the public works committee. And I see this item before us. At its core. I see it as aligning our values with our investments. You know, all 12 of us and mary wilson have said we're committed to eliminating traffic deaths and serious, serious injuries on our streets here in Portland, also known as vision zero. But we know vision zero isn't just a statement of intent. If it's going to be real, it has to require sustained, reliable funding to redesign streets, to reduce speeds, to make safety improvements where we know the risks are highest. This ordinance takes a step in that direction by establishing a transportation utility fee, we're creating a more stable funding source for the basics maintaining our streets, fixing sidewalks, investing in safer infrastructure across the city, across the system. And I want to underscore something really important. Vision zero is explicitly named in this ordinance, and that matters. It signals that safety isn't an afterthought. It's a it's a core priority guiding how these dollars should be spent. And I also want to acknowledge my office has been hearing a lot from community members, especially in the last week or two. We've been reading a lot of emails, picking up the phone, and hearing a lot about the transportation utility fee. I look forward to hearing directly from the public as we move forward on this and want to acknowledge that. And this proposal is not perfect. And for some families, we talked about this in the dni committee. The additional cost is significant, and it's so important that we are thoughtful about that and make sure that we're planning for and supporting households that truly can't afford to pay more. And these are conversations that we've all had. And I know that you're we're all committed to continuing. So I do believe if we're serious about reducing traffic deaths, we have to match the commitment with real resources. And I believe that this gets us closer to doing exactly that. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Councilor Koyama Lane. I know that councilor Loretta Smith will join us later, but let's turn to councilor Mitch Green.

Mitch Green: Thank you, madam vice president, colleagues, when I ran for the seat, a lot of what I talked about was infrastructure. And I talked about investments. And I basically made the argument that what we really need in a city council are leaders who recognize that if we don't invest today in our assets and our built environment, then we leave a cost to future generations. Those are the stakes. And I think when you drive down our roads and you hit the pothole and you experience that, you're dealing with the cost of previous generations decision not to invest forward. So this is a rolling lifecycle obligation that we have. And so, you know, no one wants to be the city council that votes yes on a new fee and you might get thrown out for it. But that's the job and I'm prepared to do it. I think that if we allow our assets to depreciate fully, that's not only an inconvenience, but that is a significant cost to future generations. And I think that impact is borne disproportionately on some of our lowest incoming portlanders, because in areas like district one, if councilor Smith were here, she would make this point. I know, I know, the other two councilors are thinking about it too. Is district one has neighborhoods that have never even had the infrastructure, and areas in my district also suffer that same experience as well. And so if we don't pass a stable revenue structure that we can rely upon year over year, then we're going to see an increasing share of our scarce resources go to paying for the ever increasing rising costs of just holding what we have and keeping it from crumbling away. Those are the stakes. And so those communities will, will wait even longer. And so I think that's why we need to pass a tough today. We need we need to do this. This is a moment for bold leadership. And I really, really want to thank you for your leadership, councilor Clarke and councilor Morillo, in orienting the transportation infrastructure to give the space and direction to PBOT to bring us forward something that that meets the moment. Later on in the discussion, I'll have an another idea that we should contemplate that I'm hearing from community, but I want to be very clear that my intention is to pass a tough and. And so let's let's get into that discussion. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Councilor Green councilor Kanal without further ado, shall we have PBOT make the presentation?

Yes. So I just want to note that there are five invited panels after this. So from a timing perspective, our goal is to get through everybody before we take a break in the middle of the meeting. And I've been asked by the sponsor to assist in assertively reminding people of the timing. So I'll be gentle about that, but just wanted to give a heads up. And I believe that we'll have staff in the room afterwards. So if if it's possible to hold questions to the degree that it is possible until after we've heard from our invited speakers, please go ahead and introduce the first panel.

Thank you, chair, and thank you, vice president Clark. For the record, my name is priya, the deputy city administrator for public works service area. I want to acknowledge the members of the committee of the whole and chair Kanal, as well as you begin your work together on this, on important citywide issues, and we appreciate the opportunity to bring this issue forward in early on in your discussions, I want to thank mayor wilson, council vice president Clark and members of the former transportation and infrastructure committee for your leadership and partnership in advancing this conversation about the future of transportation funding in Portland. We are here today to present this resolution and ordinance for your consideration. As chair Clark mentioned, every day portlanders rely on our transportation system to get to school, to work, to parks and businesses across the city. Our transportation network is the connective tissue of the city's economy, livability, and safety. And yet the system is facing a fundamental structural funding challenge. When that happens, the system does not stay the same. It declines. Streets get worse, safety projects get delayed and basic services get reduced. The result is a growing gap between community expectations and the ability to maintain streets, sidewalks and bridges. Portlanders depend on. During the recent public workservices service area budget work session, you heard that PBOT is facing a significant shortfall for the fiscal year 2627. This is not a new problem. Pbot has faced funding gaps for seven consecutive years, and the structural reasons are clear. The transportation revenues at the federal, state and local levels have not kept pace with the cost of maintaining and operating a safe and reliable system. This year's shortfall is the latest in a long line of years where we've had to cut services, draw down resources and reduce our workforce just to keep the system running without additional stable revenue sources, PBOT will increasingly be forced to scale back basic maintenance, safety improvements and core transportation services. Portlanders depend on. This council directed us to find a path forward and explore sustainable alternative funding approaches, and that work is what you'll hear about today. This discussion today is critical to stabilizing portland's transportation system and protecting the infrastructure that portlanders rely on every day for our safety, for our economy, and for the quality of life. Next slide please. I want to acknowledge the significant work done by PBOT, our partners in the revenue division and the cfo's office over the past several months to analyze options, develop and refine revenue approaches, and provide meaningful opportunities for community output input. I also want to thank many of you for helping spread the word about our open houses in each of your districts, and for participating in the engagement process, including attending them. I believe this effort has been a good demonstration of how, in this new form of government, we can work collaboratively across bureaus, service areas and across the executive and legislative branches to address long term financial challenges. Next slide please. Today's presentation will walk through the transportation funding challenge, the analysis and engagement work that has been completed and the proposed revenue options before you today. And after the presentation, you'll hear both invited testimony as well as public testimony. And with that, I will turn it over to director williams to provide an overview of our transportation funding challenges and system impacts.

Next slide please. Thank you. Dca. Good morning, chair Kanal vice chair Koyama Lane and Ryan and members of council. For the record, my name is millicent williams and I am the director of the Portland bureau of transportation. I want to start by acknowledging that those of you on the former transportation and infrastructure committee have seen most of these slides before, some of them a few times. However, for others of you, this may be new information. So we have a good amount to cover and we'll try to do that as quickly as possible. We don't want to miss important notes though, so please have a little patience with us as we want to make sure that we are amplifying significant points so that you, as well as those watching, will be able to understand fully what we're talking about. A series of actions and has, as has been mentioned, and a lack of action at every level, have led us to our current transportation funding crisis. Transportation revenues have simply not kept pace with significantly rising costs. Federal funding really never addresses our maintenance and operations needs, and even federal grants for capital projects have become more limited at the state level. The referral of the 2025 state transportation funding bill to voters means we cannot count on the $10.6 million that we would have received this fiscal year, and the $24 million that we would have received for next year. And at the local level, our ten cent gas tax has lost half of the buying power that it had when it was first passed in 2016. This is all significantly eroding our ability to maintain our transportation system. Next slide please. This slide illustrates the limitations of our funding streams. Most of the revenue that comes in is in restricted, excuse me, is in restricted locations and dedicated to specific projects and activities that cannot be shifted. And I want to underscore that we often, and you often get emails from your constituents or calls from your constituents or when you're out in community and they say, why isn't PBOT doing this? Instead of that, it is because we have restrictions on the ways that we can use the funding. And if we could, we would divert as much of that to those basic fundamental needs. But that is something that we are simply not able to do legally or by policy. Many of these funds are grant funds that we've applied for to build specific projects, and they can only be used on those projects and cannot be reallocated in other ways. Unfortunately, there are generally not grant funds available for maintenance and operations activities only for new capital projects. Another example of our restricted funds is the work that we do for other bureaus, like the bureau of environmental services, who pays us to provide sewer and stormwater maintenance work. Those funds must be used for that work. The discretionary funding that we have for basic maintenance, safety and operations like filling potholes is general transportation revenue, or gtr, which you will hear referenced several times today. These funds come from state highway funds, parking revenue and transportation network, company ride fees, or tnc ride fees. These are the user fees that are currently paid for the majority of the maintenance and safety on our system. Next slide please. As you all know, PBOT manages a complex transportation system with assets worth almost $22 billion. Again, our limited revenues simply have not been keeping up, and we would now need over $6 billion to bring the system up to fair or better condition. Next slide please. Pbot has faced, as has been mentioned, years of budget challenges, and since 2019, we have had to take $42 million in reductions to general transportation, revenue funded programs and services such as paving, maintenance and residential street sweeping. We've also had to draw down our gtr reserves and cut 66 general transportation revenue funded, full time equivalent positions. We are now facing another year of severe budget challenges. Without new revenues, we will have a budget gap of at least $25 million, which will further erode our ability to maintain and operate the transportation system. Next slide please. You can see the impacts of our funding challenges on our streets. Pavement conditions are declining. Currently, 72% of our local streets are in poor or very poor condition, and 64% of our busy streets are in poor or very poor condition. Next slide please. And even though the number of traffic fatalities and serious injuries on our streets has declined in recent years, they remain an unacceptably high. It is unacceptable. We have unfunded traffic safety projects with proven crash reduction strategies. Additional funding would help us to complete more of these projects. Next slide. Please. Simply put, new funding sources would help us stabilize our workforce, stabilize our services, and address critical needs. Next slide please. Now, I'll turn it over to mark lear, who will review how we got to the resolution and ordinance before you today. And with that, mark, next slide, please.

Thank thank you, director williams, for the record. My name is mark lear. I'm PBOT policy partnership and resource manager. This slide in front of you highlights the process that council vice president Clark just described. In the council. President, vice president Clark just described. It describes a process that really kicked off in July with council moving forward with the resolution that directed staff to develop the alternative funding report. We provided that report back to council or to the dni committee in January, and they forwarded that recommendations for us to go out and have our public conversation with in February and March. We now are here today to talk to you in more detail about those recommendations. Next slide. This next slide includes a list of the 23 different revenue mechanisms that were evaluated in our report. The initial list of options were identified by reviewing funding mechanisms being used in Oregon and other cities across the country. Next slide. Each of the potential funding mechanisms was evaluated using the following five evaluation criteria revenue, capacity, capacity the connection of the fee to use and benefit, the ease of implementation impacts on low income individuals and business impacts and dependency on fossil fuel. Next slide. This slide highlights the four options that rose to the top in our evaluation. The transportation utility fee, a street damage restoration fee, a retail delivery fee, and a prepared food delivery fee, which are still in more of the conceptual phase at this point. The proposals before you today are focused on a transportation utility fee and the street damage restoration fee. Next slide. A transportation utility fee is a monthly fee charged to residents and businesses to pay for road maintenance and safety improvements, and all of the 31 cities that have a transportation utility fee. The fee is collected on the public utility bill and is used to pay for basic road maintenance and safety improvements like fixing potholes. This mechanism has a number of advantages, including. It is broad based, allows for substantial revenue generation at relatively low cost for each payer. Revenue is not tied to fossil fuels, and it uses existing billing systems to lower administrative costs. Hope everyone pays, everyone benefits, and there are opportunities to address equity issues using existing low income discount programs. Next slide. This slide highlights the nine jurisdictions in the Portland metro area with transportation utility fees. It includes the rate for single family homes and multi-family homes or properties. This is not a new tool, and it's it's simplicity and ease of implementation has been one of the keys to its success. As of today, the regional average charge per month for a single family home is $12.08, and the regional average per month for multifamily properties is $9.49 per unit. Multifamily properties pay less per month than single family properties because, on average, they generate fewer trips per property due to factors like owner viewing, owning fewer cars, living closer to daily needs, and consolidated deliveries. At the regional level, properties pace multifamily properties pay about 79% of the single family rate. Our proposal sets that multifamily rate at 70% of the single family rate, based on trip generation estimates. Next slide. This slide highlights the three transportation utility fee scenarios that were shared with the public at our open houses and online survey, and in meetings with different organizations. The scenarios were developed to represent 50%, 75%, and 100% of the regional average for the single family household, based on trip generation analysis of trips associated with residential properties and nonresidential properties. All three of these scenarios. Assume that 75% are based on 70% of trips generated by residential properties, and 30% of trips generated by non residential or commercial properties. The nonresidential commercial portion of this fee is proposed to be collected based on a percentage of the existing water, sewer and stormwater bill. Next slide. The next couple of slides provide more detail on the specific the street damage restoration fee. The street damage restoration. Restoration fee would compensate the city for a portion of the lost asset life resulting from utility cuts and trenching work. Engineering studies indicate that trenching work reduces the useful life of roads by over 60%, resulting in streets needing to be repaved every five years versus every 15 years. While we currently have a street opening permit, the fee that we charge only covers the cost of administrating administering the program. It does not compensate the city for the damage caused to the roadway. This new fee would be proportional to the pavement damage that a utility causes when accessing their infrastructure. Revenue from this fee would be dedicated to improved pavement management, preservation, rehabilitation and reconstruction. The fee can also serve as an incentive for better coordination before before pavement cuts and by reducing the number of cuts and preserving the pavement life by waiving the fee or discounting the fee, whether it's that coordination other cities that have implemented a street damage restoration fee include los angeles, san francisco, oakland and san diego. Next slide. This slide highlights the three street damage restoration fee scenarios that we presented to the public in February and March. They are based on the percentage of damage recovery at 25, 50, or 75%. We are still refining the revenue estimates with ongoing data refinement, and those these estimates may be reduced a little bit as we do that additional work. Next slide. This slide shows how the potential street damage restoration fee compares to other cities currently using this approach, the slide indicates that our 25 and 50% damage recovery scenarios are below the rates charged in other cities, and that our 75% damage recovery is in the middle of the rates charged by other cities. Next slide. After getting direction from transportation and infrastructure committee in late January, we started talking with the public around the city about transportation funding challenges and potential revenue approaches, including the slides I just shared with you. We held four in-person open houses in each of the council districts. We also posted the same information and ran a parallel online survey. Next slide. The open houses were drop in style, where people could go from room to room and learn more about the the information, as well as talk to staff who were posted in each of the stations. We asked people to provide feedback through a series of interactive exercise. It was great to see the amount of turnout that we had and have that opportunity to talk directly with neighbors through this process. Next slide. During that same three week period, we hosted in-person that we hosted an in-person open houses. We also hosted an online open house that had that same information and allowed people to provide the same feedback that was provided at at the open houses. And we received 477 responses to the online survey. Next slide. We also reached out to a variety of organizations and committees, and we gave presentations to at committee meetings, shared information with organizations, and asked them to help spread the word about our open houses and the online opportunities. We had a number of small meetings with organizations and representatives that you can see on this slide in front of you. Next slide at the open houses. In an online survey, we asked for specific feedback on the funding scenarios for the transportation utility fee and the street damage restoration fee. This slide highlights the summary of the feedback we received about the fee scenarios. Of the over 600 people who weighed in on the transportation utility fee, we had 76% support. The most popular scenario was the was based on 100% of the regional average. The $12 per family per per single family home per month, which received 48%. 87% of people were supportive of the street damage restoration fee at some level, and the most popular scenario was 75% was the 75% damage recovery fee scenario, which was supported by 51% of people. Next slide. In addition to the dot exercise, we gave people the opportunity both in-person and online to provide open ended feedback. You can see on this slide some of the key themes that we heard. So for the transportation utility fee, we heard general support. Because of that, the fee is already being used in other Oregon cities. There was some concern about the cumulative impact on utility bills. There were some questions about how the existing low income discount program gets to all portlanders that are low income, especially multifamily, and we had some support for exemptions or discounts for minority women owned businesses or for people who don't own cars. Key themes for the street damage restoration fee was first, general dissatisfaction with the quality of patching of our current trenching work. Concerns with how this fee could be could impact housing development, concerns about how the fee impact other bureaus city bureaus like water bts, and questions about how much of this increase in fees would be passed on to other consumers. Next slide. At the open houses and in the online survey, we asked people to indicate their preference for how the revenue should be spent, and we provided a list of 15 different types of investment activities like filling potholes, maintaining signals, traffic calming projects, and people could also choose higher level categories like overall maintenance and overall safety. You can see on this slide the top five investment priorities for the whole pool. For the whole pool of respondents, these results are pretty similar to polling work that we've done in the past aye, Morillo support for things like filling potholes, overall maintenance, and also aye, Morillo support for overall safety, intersection safety improvements, and sidewalk infill. It's very consistent with the feedback that we've gotten on our fixing our streets program over time. Now I'm going to hand it over to shoshana cohen to talk more about the funding proposals. Thank you.

Good morning. Thank you. For the record, I'm shoshana cohen, PBOT chief of staff. Next slide, please. The request before you today is to refer an ordinance to establish the transportation utility fee and a resolution that affirms council support to establish a street damage restoration fee. Both of these pieces of legislation include proposed rates, proposed investment categories, and accountability measures. Next slide please. For the transportation utility fee, the proposal is to set the rates based on the existing regional average for single family household and as mark mentioned, this was the rate that received the highest level of support during the public feedback phase. As you can see, that would mean a $12 per month single family rate for an $8.40 per month multifamily rate, multifamily unit rate, and a non residential commercial rate of 4.3% of the utility bill. Next slide please. One of the existing advantages of the transportation utility fee is that we can use the already existing low income discount programs for the utility bill, for people who are already enrolled in the discount programs, they'll be automatically enrolled in a discounted transportation utility fee. The link program is the financial assistance program that serves low income households and single family residences. Households earning up to 30 and 60% of the state median family income are eligible for discounts. There's also the regulated affordable multifamily assistance program, or ramp, which is available to multifamily properties approved for the city's nonprofit low income housing limited tax exemption program. We appreciate that during this project, we've heard feedback as we engaged about the gap for low income households living in market rate multifamily units. We've begun conversations with our partners in the public works service area about how to address this. I specifically want to thank quisha light customer service director for the utilities, and kenny scott, financial assistance program manager, who provided assistance and shared information with us in our conversations with keisha's team. To date, we've heard that there are already a number of community groups trying to tackle the challenge of getting credits and discounts to people in multifamily properties. And in those conversations, they mentioned one of the nonprofits who is doing this type of work, and I believe someone from suma is here to speak briefly during testimony today to share more about how this type of service works. Just as one of the potential paths forward we are, we know this is something that's come up a lot and of great interest to folks, and we're excited about the potential to continue collaborating with our public works partners and exploring how to better address this gap. Next slide please. The ordinance also directs PBOT to work with the revenue division to continue to consider additional methodologies for the nonresidential portion of the transportation utility fee. There's also a proposed review every two years of the revenue split between commercial and residential properties, and an acknowledgment that moving forward, the rates can be adjusted through the city's annual budget process. Next slide please. The ordinance describes the use of revenue for the transportation utility fee. Revenue will be deposited into a dedicated account within the city's transportation operating fund and as described, no less than 75% of the annual net revenues will be expended on maintenance and preservation activities, including those that support the city's vision zero goals. Next slide please. Additional funding may be used for vision zero programing and capital projects associated with maintenance, preservation or safety of existing infrastructure, including things like vision zero improvements, bike and ped, safety improvements, and intersection safety improvements. Next slide please. Oh, sorry, sorry. That was my notes. The investments will be informed by data about critical infrastructure and safety needs, and will also work to prioritize areas that have historically experience disinvestment and have high concentrations of low income households. And funding may be used as. As you've heard, we have a current service level gap, so funding may be used to address current service level gap and to service debt. Next slide please. We also talked with the public a lot about accountability and and heard support for all of these accountability structures. So the proposal includes using the fixing our streets accountability sort of structure that we have, including allocating the funding to define programs and services and annual reports to council annual external audits, and working with the community committee to provide ongoing guidance and oversight. Next slide please. The street damage restoration fee is set at 75% cost recovery rate, which is equal to $10.38 per square foot. And this, again, was the rate that received the highest support during public feedback. As as mark already noted, the revenue expected from the street damage restoration fee will likely be lower both because of continued data refinement and as a result of better pavement coordination, which we hope the fee incentivizes. Next slide please. Revenue from this fee will be used strictly for pavement maintenance and coordination of this utility permitting function will work to ensure better pavement tension coordination, which will help to reduce cuts itself and extend asset life, and will again provide annual reports to council on the revenues and expenditures and evaluation of whether the fee remains proportional to pavement degradation costs and any recommended adjustments. Next slide please. And this is really the final slide where we'll leave you. It summarizes the two proposals. And before closing up, I'll turn it back to director williams.

Thank you. Shoshana, I want to end by once again thanking all of you for your time today and your interest in this effort, and more broadly, thanking you for your support of the bureau of transportation and the city's transportation system. I want to particularly thank council vice president Clark and members of the tni committee who have worked so hard to get us to this point. Solving the transportation funding crisis will not be an easy effort, and we appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today about moving forward with more sustainable funding. This funding could be transformational for the bureau, transformational for the city. We've been in cut mode for so long, and we've been constrained in what we can do because of a lack of funding. And you're seeing it and you feel it every day. And in fact, I was thinking about and talking about just yesterday how we actually can't appropriately plan for future years, because every year, at least since I've been director, every year I've come into each new fiscal year with a 25 to $35 million budget gap that we were working to fill. And by moving forward with something that would innovatively fill that gap or provide a sustainable funding source, that conversation would end. And that's an exciting opportunity for this city at this time, while we won't be able to solve all the problems and certainly not immediately, it could provide much more stable base and allow staff to do the good work that we know that they can and want to do. I'll end there because I know we have a lot of invited testimony, and we want to make sure that we leave time to answer your questions. Thank you all so much.

Thank you to all of our staff presenters. Councilor clarke, would you like me to introduce everyone or do you have.

Either way, I have a list.

Please feel free to.

Go ahead. Thank you so much, panel. Terrific presentation. Let's call up a panel of witnesses. We have nate mccoy, nisha sridhar, kurt huffman, and jenna jarvis. I have is jenna here? I haven't seen her.

How's it going?

Great. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming today. Nate. Do you want to kick it off?

Absolutely. Good afternoon, chair and members of the committee. My name is nate mccoy, president and ceo of the Oregon chapter of the national association of minority contractors and interim executive director of the black business association of Oregon. And yes, as we discussed yesterday, I will be joining the ball club very soon. I'm here in strong support alongside my friends at summa and the street trust and janet jarvis and others in the room, and we're here to support the proposed ordinance and resolution to establish stable, sustainable funding for the Portland bureau of transportation. At its core, this is about fiscal stability and protecting a long term economic health of our city. Pbot is facing a structural funding challenge with declining revenues, rising costs and limited flexibility. At this time, our infrastructure is deteriorating, streets are getting worse and the cost to fix them are only increasing as we longer wait. Transportation is up. Transportation is the operating system of our economy. When it breaks down small businesses, contractors feel it first through delays, higher costs and lost opportunities. These businesses do not find a way to survive. For these businesses, we represent especially small and diverse firms. Reliable infrastructure is not optional. We all know it's foundational. The transportation utility fee provides a stable and predictable funding source focused on maintenance and safety, helping us preserve what we have and avoid more costly repairs down the road. The street damage restoration fee ensures that those who cause the most long term damage to the roads contribute fairly to their upkeep, helping protect public investment. Together, those tools create balanced approach to stabilizing PBOT finances, which we talked about protecting our infrastructure and supporting economic opportunity, which is vitally important. In fact, stable funding creates more consistent pipeline of work, opening the doors for greater participation by small and diverse firms over time. We also appreciate the strong accountability measures included and encourage continued attention to affordability to ensure small businesses are not disproportionately impacted. This is the right step at the right time and the right community to stabilize a critical system and support portland's economic future. Thank you for your time. I'm trying to be sensitive with the time limitations, but appreciate having another opportunity to be in front of you all.

Thank you. Nate. We have alicia online. Would you like to go next?

Sure. Good morning, chair and councilors. My name is alicia shrestha. I'm the executive director of division midway alliance. We are a place based nonprofit serving residents and businesses along one of east portland's highest crash corridor. Our work focuses on building a safe, resilient, and economically thriving community through culturally specific, community driven programs and transportation. Equity is central to that work through our transportation, education and safety youth advisory program, we are building youth leaders who educate their communities on transit options, pedestrian safety and mobility access. We also provide safety workshops, low income fare enrollment, and learner's permit program support. In 2023, we partnered with PBOT to understand that safety, what safety means from the community perspective, engaging six cultural and language groups. One key takeaway from our beyond traffic safety report, which you can see on the background, is that safety is not just about infrastructure, it's also about how people experience and use public spaces. This report also includes a personal safety toolkit with practical, community based strategies to improve safety and belonging. This work shows that investing in mobility infrastructure supports economic opportunity, placemaking, and community well-being. We continue to partner with PBOT to implement these strategies on ground, including exploring the launch of division corridor transportation, safety stewards and placemaking pilot project. And our goal is to replicate this model in other part of the city. I support this funding proposal because this provides PBOT a stable foundation to partner with community based organizations like ours and invest more in district one. Because as I heard councilor Green talking about that, this is district one needs more supporting infrastructure development. So actually, it helps deliver what communities are asking for better sidewalks, safer streets, improved lighting and public plaza activation. Thank you so much.

Thank you for being here today. We really appreciate that testimony. Kurt, would you like to go next?

Yes. Thank you. Good morning, councilors, and thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is kurt hoffman and I own a company called chef's table. For the past 18 years, I've helped chefs, bakers, brewers, winemakers and other hospitality operators open and grow over 100 businesses here in Portland. I'm here to support PBOT transportation utility fee. The proposal will cost our businesses money based on our own utility bills, and I'm referring to my notes because I did a lot of data research to get this right. It would add about $611 per year, or $51 per month to our average restaurant. To put that in context, in my industry, and by the way, we pay the highest water fees of any businesses in the city, a restaurant with $1 million in annual sales will have approximately $5,400 in related utility expenses, and that 4.3% fee would represent $232 of annual expense increase. Since we also manage food cart pods, and since food carts are such a vital part of our community, it would be helpful to point out that for the average food cart that we have, for instance, at midtown beer garden, their annual related expenses are about $1,000 a year, so this fee would add $43 annually to their water bills. You know, that's that's real money. And our small businesses will feel it. But PBOT funding shortfall is also a problem for our small businesses. Our industry depends on clean, safe, well-maintained streets. We need reliable sidewalks, lighting, pavement, bike parking, curb access and outdoor seating. We need neighborhoods that are walkable, bikeable transit, accessible and drivable because that's how our customers, employees, and deliveries reach us. I also want to say clearly that in my experience, no city agency has been more proactive or more helpful to small businesses than PBOT programs like street seating, outdoor dining, parklets and bike corrals help activate our neighborhoods. This experience clearly informs my feelings about this matter, because there is a history of trust with PBOT, knowing that they are true advocates and champions for our success. This fee is not painless for small business, but neglected streets are not free either. Portland's neighborhood economy depends on the infrastructure, PBOT maintains. If we want to vibrant neighborhood business districts, we need the public infrastructure that makes them possible. I urge you to support PBOT recommendation. Thank you.

Thank you so much, kurt. Having grown up in the restaurant industry, I really appreciate your testimony.

Thank you.

I think we saved the best for last. Jana, good to see you. Thank you for coming.

Good morning. Good morning, chair Kanal vice chairs. Ryan and Koyama Lane and councilors. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. I'm jana jarvis, president and ceo of the Oregon trucking association, here to express our support for the transportation utility fee and the street damage restoration fee. For the city to thrive, it must have a functional transportation system. Those of us who work in the freight industry know the importance of this, because we live it every day. For our drivers. The roads are their office and the industry depends on working. Effective, well designed street surfaces, signals, lighting, signage and striping. Literally all of the transportation infrastructure. When freight is able to move safely and efficiently, it holds cost down and everyone benefits. With all of the conversation at the state level focused on how to fund transportation, portland's proposed solution to treat it as a utility makes sense because it is. The whole community depends on it working effectively. So it's reasonable to ask the whole community to help fund the system. We appreciate that the ordinance for the transportation utility fee requires that at least 75% of the revenue be allocated for maintenance. Preventative maintenance ensures that we keep roads in good working order, and it minimizes the significant additional costs of reconstruction. The street damage restoration fee also makes sense to anyone who's driven over a patched trench, or has watched the street around that patch crumble after trenching, and that's particularly true for the trucking industry in terms of maintenance costs. We also appreciate your commitment to use the accountability structure that has made the fixing our street programs and the heavy vehicle use tax so successful. Thank you for recognizing the urgent need for more transportation funding, and we look forward to working with you to make these programs a success.

Thank you so much, jana. Thanks to all of our panelists. We appreciate your being here today.

Thank you.

Let's call up the next panel, mike dennis, lindsey huber, indy namkung, and steven landry.

Where are we going?

Yeah, where's a good spot?

Sit next.

To you, lindsay.

Perfect.

Mike, would you like to start?

Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Chair and vice chair Koyama Lane and Ryan and members of the council for this opportunity to provide some testimony in support of the transportation utility fee. I'm mike dennis with Oregon walks, and we are a pedestrian advocacy group. And I'm

Here is our new executive director taking over for zachary laurenson, who many of you may know and have, may have have had the pleasure of working with. And zachary, fortunately, is staying with Oregon walks, which I'm very happy about. So you all have been handed a difficult problem, a transportation system that is very expensive to maintain, and previous electeds who didn't set aside revenue to maintain that system, finding new revenue to do something may not be popular, but it is courageous. Thank you for your leadership to step up and do something about this problem. And I also want to thank the PBOT staff director, william, shoshana, cynthia, mark and the rest of the team. So while you may hear a lot of different ideas here today, I want to focus on one critical piece the safety provisions for vulnerable road users. The vision zero investments that the transportation utility fee advances are critical. We saw the city's deadly traffic report show there's much to do to reduce traffic violence in our city. Vulnerable road users continually advocate for increased safety investments, especially in our underinvested communities and the vision zero safety investments in this ordinance bring fairness to the estimated third of portlanders who can't drive, but who will also be paying for this fee through their household. We all share a goal that people can use our transportation system and get home safely. We are thrilled that the council, and particularly councilor Koyama Lane leadership that you all reaffirmed the commitment to vision zero. Thank you. But as they say, and as a number of you said, words are cheap and real priorities are expressed in how we spend our money. This resolution identifies a minimum spending of 75% on maintenance. We are asking that you also identify a minimum spending on safety projects of 20%. Let's not just say we are prioritizing safety, let's put money toward the goal. A final note is we urge in the middle of these conversations, that the future of the voter approved fixing our streets ten cent gas tax, not be lost or negotiated away. It's our only price signal to drive smaller vehicles, to drive slower and to drive less. So thank you for your leadership. This is really a once in a generation opportunity to invest in safety, maintenance communities and our thriving city.

Thank you so much, mike. Appreciate that. Lindsay, would you like to start?

Good morning, committee chair Kanal and members of council. I'm lindsay huber, interim executive director of the street trust. We advocate for safe, accessible, equitable and low carbon streets for all Oregonians every day. Our work shows that Portland streets are incomplete and unsafe, threatening lives, limiting economic prosperity, and worsening existing inequities. I'm here today to speak in support of the proposed transportation utility fee. Pbot funding is in crisis. The street. The state transportation package was referred to voters and the. Fixing our streets $0.10 gas tax now buys half as much of what it did when it was initially passed in 2016. Current revenue streams are predicted to continue to decline even as maintenance needs, traffic fatalities and serious injuries remain high. While we support renewing the fixing our streets gas tax, adding this tough fee would as well would provide stable, predictable funding to address those critical safety and maintenance needs. The tough is straightforward and easy to implement using existing utility billing systems, which would allow PBOT to stabilize its workforce and services effectively. This is a strong first step, and we appreciate the work that has gone into this proposal. We also see opportunities to strengthen it. For example, we echo the encouragement that council set a clear baseline for safety investments of no less than 20%, similar to the maintenance spending floor of 75%, so that a meaningful share of funding is dedicated to these vision zero outcomes. Protecting. Protecting our most vulnerable road users, including pedestrians and people riding bikes. We also encourage continued work to ensure that affordability protections reach low income households, including renters who may not directly receive utility bills. This fee isn't perfect, but it's a critical first step. Portland needs reliable transportation funding now. Approving the tough will allow PBOT to maintain safe streets, prevent costly repairs later and support a more equitable, reliable transportation system. Thank you.

Thank you lindsay. We appreciate that testimony. Indy, am I pronouncing that right?

Yes you are. Good morning, councilor Clark. Chair Kanal vice chair. Koyama Lane and Ryan, for the record, my name is indy namkung. I'm the transportation justice coordinator for verdi, and I'm going to be commenting primarily on the transportation utility fee this morning. The low income communities of color that verdi works with in cully and across the city are struggling with the current, unsafe and inaccessible state of transportation in Portland. We hear from people pretty constantly about concerns with dangerous speeds on our roads, poor lighting, unsafe crossing, unfinished sidewalks, and limited access to transit. I'm sure you have heard this all before, so we really appreciate the work that's gone into this. From PBOT, the leadership of councilor Clark, councilor, Morillo and all of those helping to put this together. As we've learned from the state legislature over the past couple of years. Raising transportation revenue is not an exercise for the faint hearted. So I want to honor both the political courage that you've demonstrated and the strength of the public engagement and the outreach that we've seen around this. We want to be able to join you in championing proposals to raise money locally and invest in the changes we need. This ordinance makes a strong start, but we want to flag as proposed. It has some outstanding issues that could worsen existing inequities that are facing low income portlanders. These issues are serious and they are very much fixable, so we urge you to resolve them before passing the final ordinance. As written, the tough would expose more renters in Portland to eviction. Tenants can face eviction for unpaid or late utility charges if they're billed by their landlord, rather than by the utility. So as utility costs grow, so does this risk. Language should be added to the ordinance, specifying that nonpayment of the tough or late payment of the tough may not be used as grounds for eviction as written. Low income discounts on the tough, as you've heard, will only be available to residents of single family homes, because that's how our existing affordability programs work. This is an old problem. If you pay your water bill to your landlord and not to the water bureau, you can't tap into these programs. You have to pay the full price. Most lower income portlanders live in multi-family housing. That's not a super effective affordability measure yet, and we've heard that PBOT is exploring a pilot partnership with summa to provide an alternative that would reach multifamily residents. And I want to urge you to ensure that they have the support that they need to get those services ready to roll out with the tough so that low income portlanders aren't left waiting and racking up charges. Now, finally, as written, non-driving households will be paying a disproportionately high fee relative to their impact to the system, and the benefits they'll see are a little unclear. The entirety of the street damage, restoration fee revenues, and the majority of the tough revenues are currently slated to go to preservation and maintenance of existing infrastructure, and that need is undeniable. But our existing infrastructure still over prioritizes cars at the expense of other modes. If we focus all of our new revenues on preservation and maintenance of that system, we preserve the inequity to because our low income communities are more likely to live in multi-family housing and more likely not to drive. This triples down on the burden the proposed language will ask them to bear, but dedicating a minimum share of the dollars in the tough to propose to projects and programs that would improve non-driving options, not just preserve the ones that we have would correct for this. If it's not possible to offer hillsboro style targeted discount to non-driving ratepayers, and I'm not saying it's not possible, but if we can't do that, then it's all the more essential that the tough is providing clear and proportionate benefits to everybody who's paying in. I'll provide some more detailed written comments for the record, and we're really eager to see this develop in the coming weeks, and we hope to be back soon in support of a fair final version. Thank you.

Thank you, andy, I appreciate that. Stephen.

Hello. My name is stefan mcclymont and I am one of the chairs of our fixing our streets oversight committee. Our committee is tasked with providing oversight of the use of the gas tax revenue that's generated through the fixing our streets program. Through my work in this role, I bear witness to the tremendous need for funding of basic repairs and maintenance, as well as safety improvements throughout our community. Our committee's role in providing oversight of fixing our streets revenue can be replicated to provide oversight for revenue generated through this fee in our oversight capacity. Role. We are involved in the intentional selection process for funding projects and are an avenue to provide community input throughout the selection process. Additionally, through fixing our streets, PBOT is required to publish an annual report of the use of this funding. Currently, fixing our streets revenue supports projects for both maintenance such as paving as well as small to large, very necessary safety improvement projects. I urge you to have fee generated revenue support safety projects. In addition, in addition to booming operation and maintenance needs, my personal assessment of our maintenance and safety project backlog is that if additional transportation revenue can be generated through fees, the gas tax should be left in place. The gas tax keeps some revenue generated through a pay for use approach. Eliminating the gas tax can be reassessed once we are dug out of this metaphorical pothole. I want to thank you for your leadership in understanding our community's current needs and delivering much needed funding for our transportation systems future. Thank you.

Thank you, and thank you for your service on the oversight committee. Really appreciate it. Thank you, panelists, great testimony. Very thoughtful. Follow up our next panel. It's paul cohen. James o'laughlin, corey cole, and rob martineau. Thank you for being here today.

Hi. Good morning. My name is paul cohen, chair Kanal members of the committee. I'm speaking today as president of the Portland chapter of protect 17, where a city employee union. We represent almost 1000 city employees across most bureaus, engineers and engineering technicians and PBOT and other bureaus. It professionals, planners, permit techs. And we actually represent Portland street response mental health workers. Pbot. We have over 200 employees who work in planning, engineering, maintenance and property management, all while advancing the city's climate accessibility and equity goals. So we've partnered for years to support a stable funding plan for the city's transportation system. However, in light of in light of recent developments locally and nationally, as you know, you know, state and federal revenue sources have proven to be unreliable. So it's clear that we need a local solution. These perpetually strained budgets, as you've heard already from PBOT staff, have just weakened that bureau year after year. Fear of layoffs also take a major toll on morale. With our with our members and workers wonder if they can trust their family's livelihoods to the twists and turns of the bureau's budget. Unstable funding also means it takes longer for expensive projects to finish. Deferred maintenance backlog is well known clear to any portlander driving our streets. I noted in the presentation earlier that potholes again are the number one thing major projects get bogged down. Deferred maintenance puts smaller projects that could be low hanging fruit for advancing safety, climate accessibility, accessibility goals out of reach. So for many otherwise simple projects, the poor condition of payment quickly makes the project too expensive to consider. These smaller projects would otherwise be extremely cost effective, but instead they're left on the shelf. So the voters of Portland have have passed. Fix our streets a few times in a row. The last two ballot measures passed by 70%. Portlanders are willing to pay for safe, well-maintained streets. They understand that this will help our economic recovery and give us more livable communities. So if national and state political entities are not trusted partners, we have to provide for ourselves. Transportation, utility fee, as well as the street opening damage recovery fee they're proving to a neighborhood and neighboring jurisdictions. Cities across the us, including 31 in Oregon, have implemented a tough to pay for basic maintenance and safety improvements, so this ultimately will save the city money over time. So we really appreciate you taking a look at this. And we're with you in supporting this measure. So thank.

You paul. Appreciate that. I think we have james online.

Yeah.

Yes. Good morning councilors. My name is james o'laughlin. I'm a father of two native portlanders and a field rep for laborers for a three. Our union represents workers throughout the city, with nearly 300 serving on the front lines in PBOT as utility workers, concrete finishers, automotive equipment operators, and a variety of other roles. I can't tell you how pleased I am to be here today and hear most of what I had to say already be said, chiefly by councilors themselves. Still, I do want to echo my support for that message. I think councilor Clark said it particularly well when she mentioned how transportation infrastructure. It touches all of us, regardless of whether or not we ever get in a car in our daily lives. It brings our food, it transports our children. It's essential for emergency services reaching us when we need them. And it is a huge driver of economic outcomes in the city. You know, not even mentioning how transportation dollars is one of the most effective ways you can spend to improve public safety. So I think it's it's phenomenal that this tax is being undertaken by the city. And I deeply appreciate the council's support for this work. When taxation has a a natural negative stigma, stigma with the public and still recognizing the nature of our challenges in getting this investment, especially when our partners at the the state and federal level are not as solid as we would hope they would be. I think it's it's wonderful to see us looking at these kinds of solutions just from a frontline workers perspective, I can tell you that the past decade of underfunding and transportation has had real impacts, not just in the the natural stress that is created when you don't know if your job providing essential work for the city is going to be there for you year over year. But in your understanding of the value that city leadership places on that work, it can be a real culture poison for the workplace to feel like you're not considered or thought of, when every day you go out there and handle problems that you know are directly benefiting the community. So seeing this kind of action taken to put that investment in our frontline staff to do their essential duties, it's not just, you know, the obvious positives of having that reliable income that prevents us from having a crisis model of funding, where we have this backlog that breaks. And fixing it in those extreme circumstances is ten times as costly as the routine repair and maintenance. It also puts that that kind of morale boost into our workforce that gets them bought into the the initiative of the city to accomplish this work, that they're dedicating parts of their lives to. So I do want to say that there's been a lot of communication around the the exact nature of this tax, especially, you know, how each individual household is managed. And I do just want to caution about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Having a reliable stream of revenue that we can count on that is not too complex to implement and actually bring into the city is going to be so, so valuable to actually achieving our frontline goals in getting our transportation, you know, not just up to par, but implementing the innovations that I know we've been talking about for decades. So I really just wanted to say thank you for all the work that has gone into the assessment of these two taxes. And, you know, whatever kind of blowback that this council might receive for trying to enrich the community in this way just because it has a cost, you know, please know that you have a dedicated support in this city that's willing to take your bet. Thank you.

Thank you, james, thank you for your testimony. Corey, would you like to go next?

Yeah. Thank you. My name is carrie coe. I share the pronouns. I'm the president of the city of Portland professional workers union. We represent about 800 folks all around the city. In every bureau, we provide essential services. We like to call the glue that holds the city together. I'm here today because stable funding is crucial for our members and for the broader Portland community. And the issues faced by PBOT are not only about the roads themselves, but about how the roads are connectivity, multimodal transportation, and about safe communities, which we've heard people speak well to today. So our streets not only need to be well maintained, but safe spaces and community spaces, building stable funding here at the local level, I think allows council to be more in control about not only supporting the really important visible work of filling potholes out in our community and doing other critical maintenance, but also supporting the internal facing work that that is included in all of the services that PBOT provides, these essential pieces of building a healthy, safe and well connected city. And this is the work that our members do. It looks like being in regular direct contacts with residents, businesses, schools, communities about safety issues, repair engagement impacts, creating third spaces, the safe community places that the people of Portland value, whether that's safe routes to schools, street plazas, Sunday parkways and overseeing capital controls, financial analysis ensuring contract work on big projects is completed on time and on budget. As with all core services, this is the work that allows the other work to happen effectively and efficiently, and that is part of the overall funding project that I'm hoping this tax can can fulfill. Our streets and roads are some of the most dangerous places in the city as we know, so we support moving forward with this fee. We're happy to be here in support of it, but we also encourage you to continue pushing on other concepts so that we can solve how multinational corporations and their subcontractors that dominate many of our roads with their delivery vehicles, can use a fee of some sort to be part of our future transportation infrastructure planning that if companies want to use our public assets, they must pay their fair share. So thank you for having me here today, and we look forward to continuing to be a part of the conversation.

Thank you so much, carrie. Sorry I mispronounced your name.

Oh that's okay.

Good morning. My name is. My name is rob martineau. I'm the president of local 189, representing over a thousand city employees across 26 bureaus. It's clear from your open today and the tone in this room that if I want an argument, I'll have to change the subject. And so I just want to make this brief. You have a difficult choice, not a complicated one. I want to encourage you to resist suggestions that this is nuanced, or that it somehow needs to be more complex or added to PBOT at your direction, has already done the work. Big decisions are rarely this binary. Our city council will either fund or fail its largest infrastructure system. Thank you.

Thank you rob. Thank you panelists, really appreciate your being here. All of you. Let's call up our next panel, alan hippolito, dawn bach and Ryan hannigan. One more. Okay.

Good morning.

Thank you for being here. I john's on his way. Allen, should we start with you?

Sure. Thank you. Allen. Ippolito. I work for suma. We're a Portland based nonprofit that builds technology with low income people, people of color, adults with disabilities, and other vulnerable portlanders. This includes the suma app and e-commerce marketplace, where low income portlanders purchase and save money on essential expenses, overcoming privacy and other barriers that these customers have told us prevent them from using their phones to pay for food, transportation, and utilities. Now, there's a lot here that we're happy to discuss at another time, but it doesn't really fit into two minutes. So today, I want to share one of the barriers that we're solving for with our users and partners. Low income community members know that subsidies and public benefit programs are out there for them, but accessing these benefits can be challenging, stressful, and time consuming, and so many benefits are left on the table. More specifically, I want you to know that suma, our users and our partners groups like apano, hacienda, cdc do good, Multnomah home, ford vehicles club, brown hope, the uprise collective, and many, many others. We see the same challenge as you do and that indy articulated as necessary work for the tough ordinance to be successful. How do we distribute a utility bill based rebate to eligible low income households who don't receive a bill from that utility? The many low income portlanders who live in master metered family units, whether subsidized or market rate, for example. We see this issue in community solar, which is a way for an individual subscriber to benefit from an off site solar array, such as the PCEF funded array of pono is building with the bird alliance of Oregon and bonneville environmental foundation in pacific core territory in the jade district. In the existing practice, a low income subscriber benefits via a reduced pacific core electricity bill, but this means that residents who live in pge territory in the j. District or who live in a master metered building anywhere in the jade, cannot benefit from the existing practice. So apano asked us, can we use the summa app to deliver these community solar benefits to our community members who aren't served by community solar on build model? And that's what we're doing together with aparna. We're enrolling 119 jade community members in the bilingual summa app. Collectively, these users will save $37,000 annually on app products. As we leveraged those community solar benefits, PCEF subsidy PBOT transportation wallet alongside discounts from vendors like fubon, hong fat lime and biketown all in the user summa app wallet. We're excited to work with PBOT, p, w, b, and others to explore tough pilot in the jade that leverages all this existing work we're already doing. This would allow us to bring new users, new partners, new subsidy, and new vendors to the project. Distributing a utility bill based rebate to eligible low income households who don't receive a bill from that utility is a systemic problem. We can work with you to solve it together. Thank you.

Thank you. Ellen. I think we're all very interested in cutting edge technology, I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Don, would you like to go next.

Hi, I'm don bark. I'm 52, 54 year resident of hillsdale founder, southwest trails. I'm wearing my jacket because if you don't wear a jacket in southwest, you put yourself in danger. 75% of our streets don't have sidewalks. Crosswalks are almost nonexistent. We can't get PBOT to build them where we want them. So some of the things here are going to be talking about. Number one, I highly support this proposal. I would suggest you put a sunset 5 or 7 years so that this can be relooked at at that point in time, because budgeting and all that gets very busy and you really need to look at it again. And I'm for one, don't want to see a lot of proposals that don't go sunsetted at some point in the 30 years I've been advocating for improved pedestrian and bicycle improvements in southwest Portland, I've seen a great decline in the quality of our streets. Two things that have not been mentioned here that I think are really important. Potholes and street maintenance costs a lot to the individual car, truck and TriMet owners, you know, and where the owner of TriMet, but they damage the street a lot, but they're also damaging the equipment when we have streets that hasn't been mentioned. And I think that's an extremely important thing that people need to understand is if we don't fix our streets, we individually are going to pay a great cost. And those with older cars pay a greater cost because they're easier to break and they're tougher to repair. Funding is not the only thing that I think needs fixing in PBOT. So I'm going to a little bit from this whole thing, funding and talk about some things that are really important to us in southwest. First of all, the project selection and management process for new improvements needs to have a lot more citizen involvement early on and throughout the process right now in the past. And it's getting a little better, but it needs to change dramatically. Pbot has basically ruled the roost and told us this is what we're going to do. And at the end, they say, by the way, we're going to have an open house here to talk about our project that we've decided to do. That's a complete waste of time, and it doesn't involve the people in the appropriate time, nor give us a chance to really do things. And so we need to be early on in every project of any significance in consultant. And if we don't have a lot to say, that's fine. If we got things to say, needs to be considered carefully. Ada policies right now, as I understand the rules in PBOT, we can't do anything that doesn't meet ADA policy in terms of investment. Now, it's gotten so bad that in several occasions, PBOT has come to southwest trails to say, would you build this trail here? Because we knew we can't do it because our policies prevent it, because it doesn't make ADA rules. That's nonsense. In southwest, the terrain prevents us from making ADA things in any feasible way. The grades are steep, and a lot of places we have to use stairs, and we need to be able to have a policies that accommodate that in where the terrain is set. So what we need to change is basically say, where feasible, meet the ADA standards and whether or not you don't have to. We can move forward. Crosswalks. In my experience, cars of southwest do not stop for pedestrians standing by the street. I have you know, we basically have a lot of trails that cross streets where the drivers don't even realize the trails are there. And as a result, they speed by, they don't stop and they don't slow down. And what we need is zebra crossings for where trails cross busy streets. We don't need them on every street. We need them on major streets where there's a lot of speeding traffic.

Sir, I'm going to have.

To ask.

You to get to the close of it because I'm sorry. We do have several more invited testimonies and we're we're.

Going to finish.

Up real quickly.

Crosswalks for for t trail needs to be improved and the crosswalk policy needs major revision, particularly as it relates to southwest streetcar expansion. I don't see a need for that right now. Thank you. I support this put a sunset on it. Thank you sir.

Thank you. Thank you donna. Thank you for your 50 years of experience in sharing that with us. I appreciate it, allen. Ryan, sorry.

It's been a busy morning. Hello city council. Thank you for your time today. My name is Ryan and I run a manufacturing business in old town bicycle tricycles. I'm also one of the elected business representatives and the current co-chair of the land use and transportation committee for the old town community association. Our business directly relies on portland's transportation infrastructure, from daily freight shipments to our main location, to using the protected bike lanes on the Burnside bridge to access suppliers in the central eastside to relying on crucial PBOT repairs like the northeast 33rd street bridge to access our powder coating and sandblasting contractors. I want to thank all of city council, the mayor and especially councilor Clark and the. And the transportation and infrastructure committee for putting forth this broad based fee to address transportation infrastructure maintenance. Portland's businesses depend upon. I also appreciate a vision zero lens being applied to maintenance expenses. I hope that approximately 25% of funds and no less than 20% of funds are dedicated to safety and vulnerable users, while continuing to engage with community oversight of any program deliverables. I believe this is a promising sign of our new form of government. Addressing some of the thorniest issues of portland's of our beloved city. Thank you all for considering this proposal that received unanimous support from the transportation and infrastructure committee members. Portland businesses need transportation infrastructure maintenance to keep everyone rolling along and succeeding into our future. Thank you.

Thank you Ryan. Thank you, panelists very much. We're running up against a time crunch. We have one more panel. Alan deanda hall joseph perez. And I don't know if earl blumenauer is here, but he's on the list. And tyler frisbie, I'm not sure they're here. Thank you both. Allen, do you want to talk about the pedestrian advisory committee?

Yes. Good morning, council committee members. My name is allen down the hall, and I'm here speaking as a member of the city's pedestrian advisory committee. The pac is supportive of measures to enhance funding for projects that will bring the city closer to a future, with zero road deaths and a more climate friendly and safe transportation system. We believe that walking to get to where you need to go should not only be safe, but also a joyful part of your day. Our funding crisis is not new. Communities throughout Portland lack critical infrastructure across streets and walk safely. With the loss of state funding and and federal leadership weren't around to build the solutions our city needs. At the same time, we have the power to shape these solutions. The report, the proposed ordinance before you, has improved since the previous draft. To acknowledge our goals for safer travel throughout Portland. However, the following changes would make this ordinance stronger. Explicitly prioritized, not just allow maintenance projects that improve safety, for example, including leading pedestrian intervals, pedestrian only faces, and otherwise limiting dangerous situations that occur between turning traffic and people crossing the street include ADA accessibility improvements under section g, without the modifier associated with maintenance, bringing our streets up to modern standards that make them accessible to all is a valid form of repair in its own right. Additionally, this is only part of the bigger transportation funding picture. Fixing our streets remains available program to fund capital projects, and this proposal would not offset those funds or other revenue streams lost from. Like those from passing sdcs. Council should refrain from commitments to claw back revenue sources before PBOT budget is sustainable. We also still encourage council not to lose sight of a greater need for sustainable improvements to compensate for historic disinvestment, including our existing sidewalk and crossing gaps. We appreciate the cip concept that Loretta Smith and Mitch Green have previously floated, and we still need to see a serious plan from our leadership for designing a program that brings our streets into a future that equitably and sustainably serves the entire community. Thank you.

Thank you, ellen. Joseph.

Thank you. Hello, councilors. My name is joseph perez. Hello, city administrator lee, welcome on behalf of the bicycle advisory committee. I'm the vice chairperson and as you may know, the bicycle advisory committee is is formed to advise city council and all departments of the city on all matters relating to the use of the bicycle. The bicycle advisory committee appreciates the city's commitment to the robust public discussion over the past few months about how we maintain our streets that have citywide significance. Now, as the time has come to act, to approve the transportation utility fee and the street damage restoration fee, some roads are still crumbling. And meanwhile, you all recently voted on a strong vision zero resolution to recommit the city to zero fatal crashes and serious injuries, and also recently, a 2026 2027 addendum to portland's vision zero action plan was released. Released last week, Portland has adopted goal of 25% of all trips by bicycle by 2030. Driving a car is a privilege, a very expensive privilege, and portlanders know and want a better way, the 2022 Portland insights survey stated that 60.2% of portlanders want to ride public transportation, and 45% want to ride bicycles if it were affordable and safe. So we need safer streets. Portlanders express this to the city more than three years ago. Now we need funding for safer streets. We need your leadership. We need to pay for the safe streets that we want. And after portlanders pay, portlanders want the city to deliver. At the March meeting, the bike advisory committee adopted a motion to request that the city council take action to address the transportation funding shortfall during this fiscal year 2026 2027. We need a fee that everybody pays so that everybody benefits. This important funding will be put to good use. As I said before, 75% of the fee to go toward needed maintenance, and I am excited to hear others talking about no less than 20% for safety improvements. For vision zero, the bike advisory committee is excited to engage with city council on how to best use these resources going forward for walking and bicycling safety projects that are not related to maintenance. As bicycle advocates, our lived experience is that safe, smooth, clean bikeways encourage people to ride bicycles. We need to maintain existing infrastructure. We advocate for you all to invest in the infrastructure that encourages good behavior and discourages bad behavior. People don't smoke in restaurants anymore. People now wear seat belts when they choose to drive, so we need fees that pay for the projects that make our city safer, and projects that encourage people to ride public transit and ride bicycles. A few months ago, our chair said to the transportation infrastructure committee, we want you to strive for greatness instead of the mediocre. It is never going to be easy, but it is time to get started. Future you. Future you is not going to be satisfied with the mediocre future. You is counting on you to do the work now. To do the hard work now. Future you is here. The bicycle advisory committee really looks forward to helping you out on this important matter. Thank you all for your service to the community. And remember, Portland is what we make it.

Thank you both for being here and thank you both for serving on the advisory committees. We appreciate that. And with that chair, I think we're done with the invited testimony.

Thank you, councilor Clark. Vice president Clark, we will be if if congressman blumenauer does get here, we'll, of course, make sure there's time before we go into testimony or before we take a break and then go into testimony. I did want to ask if there were any sponsor amendments or any very brief technical questions. We've got a couple minutes for that. So if not, I know there are people in the queue, but just wanted to say, if you don't have a technical question, we'll definitely keep your spot in the queue. Councilor Green is a technical question. Councilor Zimmerman is it a technical question? Please go ahead. I'll come to you next.

Thanks. I am hoping that you guys don't have to stay at the dias, because it's certainly not to you. I'm going to pose this question to the administration because I've been through a lot of street fee conversations and presentations in my career. As we move forward, I hope that we can get some metric right. Road miles, paved number of intersections, improved potholes fixed how we plan to finally keep bike lanes clean and clear. And as we just heard, smooth and ready to be used. So I don't expect that in the moment. But I do think that that actually qualifies as a technical question for this because I need to I need to really understand what this what this is. There was a lot of testimony today about the safety improvements that will be funded with this. And in all of my reading, I've found zero specific examples of what will be funded. So I, I think that falls in the technical category. So I'm going to offer that up as a previewing question because I think it will come with some. There'll be some background work. So that's all I have for.

Thank you. If there's a brief response, feel free. Yeah.

Yes, I know staff is currently working on all of those details to pull back to council as it relates to how we would actually spend the money. I know some of the conversation has been around kind of what the percentage breakdown of what would be potentially dedicated towards maintenance to kind of really see what a real program will look like as we roll forward with maintenance. We do have data that talks about, you know, the average cost of potholes and how many potholes we feel we could fix and how many street maintenance repairs we can actually do with the amount of dollars that we have. And we can make sure that information is available. But take it a step further than what you just mentioned. One thing that I'll be looking for as we move this thing forward, that we're actually marketing and actually communicating to the public how these dollars are being spent and actually having a web page actually talk about where these dollars are actually being spent. So we're very transparent regarding the impact that these dollars are making within the community as a whole. And if we are using it to do major projects, to have the marketing around that, to show, hey, this is where your dollars are going and being used in the city. So these are all things that we want to make sure as we move forward with transparency and how we're spending the taxpayers dollars, that they understand where those dollars are going in actual impact of it. So we will be rolling out that dashboard transparency to actually show the matrix as well. Once we fine tune where we're actually spending those dollars in the best use of those dollars.

Thanks. I'm going to expand share. I'm sorry, I have another technical related to that, the breakdown. And I don't have a page. Slide 30 I think was a breakdown of the percentage, the cost by single family or, or, or multi family. What I haven't been able to deduce there is what is expected to be raised in each of those categories. So 4.3% against the commercial utility bill represents what percentage of the 46 million that's targeted. If we could get that, that would be helpful. And then in terms of, I think one of the challenges that we heard with the last iteration of the parks levy was that it got focused a lot on coordinators and back of office folks instead of front line folks. If we could have an idea for where the bureau plans to go with front line workers versus coordinators and planners, I think that's helpful to understand how much is actually going to be cleaned in the road, fixed in the road, or thought about in the office, about what could be cleaned in the road someday in the future. Those are very distinct differences. That would be helpful. Thank you, chair, for that expansion.

Jamie Dunphy: Thanks. I'm going to go to councilor Dunphy in a second. I just wanted to mention slide 18 says it's 70% residential, 30% commercial. And the tough is that is that the answer? Councilor Clark to the question. And while we're.

The bureau actually has more detailed information on that.

Okay, I want to make sure we have time to actually discuss it today. So I'm concerned that if we start turning it over to questions, we're not going to have time for testimony. So I just.

That's why.

I was just.

Kind of previewing a few that get to.

So I'll pass to councilor Dunphy then.

Jamie Dunphy: Thank you. My question hopefully is relatively brief. It's about the low income discounts that we're going to be. And I understand that they're I don't know if it's best suited for director williams or perhaps from allen, from summa or who. But but how is the how are we going to be implementing. Can we just be a little bit more explicit about the low income discounts? The pilot project that I understand is going to be a part of working with suma. How are we implementing these things?

Councilor Dunphy I would like to call quisha light our customer service manager, to share information on that.

Oh, rebecca.

Or becky.

Can I ask while they're coming up? We've identified this problem. When we started talking with the with kisha and her team, we we still have more work to do so she can talk about some of the work they're doing, but we don't have a specific proposal yet. We are sort of committing to figuring this out.

But we're happy to share what the how the loan program works in the water bureau.

Yes. Becky, an interim customer service director for the record, we have a robust low income discount program that we currently serve for water, sewer and stormwater customers. It's multi-tiered. And in addition to that, we also have a ramp program that we've talked about previously with council in for our multifamily. So there is basis for this and the reciprocity that we would be happy to support in developing a program for PBOT throughout customer service and be happy to offer that to our customers in operationalize that as well.

Great. You know, district one, east Portland, we have an average income of about two thirds the rest of the city. It is a I mean, but we also have the worst infrastructure in a lot of ways. So it is a careful balance for my folks. I'm just really interested to make sure that those cases, you know, obviously we need to do this. Obviously I'm going to be supportive of this today, but I do want to make sure that for those folks in our community that we are being front and center about this and being innovative and trying to on the side of being overly generous, I suppose, is sort of my preference at this point to rightsize these things, because we're also getting a notice about other cost increases, like pge going to be raising their their utility fees. So I'm interested. I would love to be kept up. I hope the council will be kept up to date as we finish all this. And if there's more for us to be able to do to help implement something like that.

Councilor, if I may, I just wanted to mention part of the reason why we are proposing that we would not start implementation until January 1st of 2027 is to allow us the time after the budget passes, presuming that this makes it that we would be able to work through all of those details and effectively communicate about how we intend to implement the program and how it will support the whole of community. So that's that's really what we anticipated would be the need at 5 to 6 month period of ramping up to ensure that we are serving well. Thank you.

Thank you, councilor Dunphy. I do see that that congressman blumenauer has arrived. So I want to make sure we give him time and then we'll take our break right after that, come back and do any floating of amendments, public testimony, and then get into it. But I and I'm not sure if tyler frisbee is also here, but I would love to welcome you up as well, I see. Yeah.

I'm good. I this makes me feel uncomfortable.

Any, any.

Time I got a gavel, we'll make sure you have time here. So thank you so much for being here congressman.

Yeah, well, I appreciate very much the council taking this on and giving me the opportunity to be here with my colleague tyler frisbee, who's the director of the institute for metropolitan studies. I've spent a little time dealing with these issues in the past, and I'm well aware of the bipoc that you are dealing with now. I appreciate the fact that you are sinking your teeth in at a time that's not easy to do, to make sure that when you deal with things like a broad utility fee and a charge for those who work in the right of way and make problems that you have to clean up later, this is a big challenge for livability, and I appreciate some of you looking at the asset management and the big picture. And at a time when there are tremendous cost pressures, that you're stepping up and doing this in a way that may not always be that popular with the general public, but is absolutely critical to be able to maintain the livability of our community. This is broad based. It's an ongoing revenue stream. The historic foundations, in terms of how the city has has funded transportation in the past. This is a variation on that. This is not a break with tradition. And as you've seen, other communities are doing this around the country. I appreciate your dealing on a comprehensive basis with something to avoid problems in the future. With all the other things you've got going on, I appreciate the focus on the transportation infrastructure and dealing with things that will make a difference. I am happy at any point to have lemonade with any of you. If you want to talk about some of the checkered past, but I. I appreciate what the new council is doing. Dealing with an old problem and an interminable one in a way that looks like it'll be sustainable in the past. I would like to turn to my colleague. If I could miss frisbee, who worked with me in congress. She's, as you may know, not only the institute, but she's also on the TriMet board. So she's into this up to her elbows. And I would like to defer to her if I could.

Good morning, council. Thank you for having us. My name is tyler frisbee. I am here on behalf of the institute of metropolitan studies at Portland state. And as many of you know, when we developed our strategic plan last year, we talked to over 120 folks around the region about the biggest problems facing their community. I knew we would hear about transportation funding from the city of Portland. We were shocked by how much it came up in conversations with folks across the region, and I think I'm here today to help both remind you that this is a deep seated problem in Portland, but you are not alone. This is something that our folks across the region are dealing with and across the state. And you are taking a step today to address the structural deficit that has been ongoing for a while and without action will continue. The transportation utility fee has been adopted by 30 cities across the state of Oregon. So you. Portland will be, as is the nature in Oregon, the largest by far. But this is a step. This is a best practice. This is something that occurs frequently in other places. Acknowledging the reality of transportation funding and that the old system does not work. That was the theme we heard over and over when we talked to folks across the region for the past hundred years. We funded transportation mostly dependent on federal dollars, with a healthy amount of money coming from the state. And then the the city could kind of plug in as needed to do things that felt really important to the city itself. Those federal dollars have not been adjusted for inflation since I was in grade school. They the state is deeply behind in terms of the money they need for their own system, much less their ability to support local governments. And the needs of the cities all look very different. Now, you're not just about maintaining potholes, you're about sidewalk infill. You're about helping make sure people have transit options. You are about making sure that our public plazas are inviting and safe and welcoming places to be. Your needs as a city are really different, and they don't match the old way of funding things. So I will say from the institute's perspective, we are about halfway through a local transportation funding research project. We're very sad that we were not able to support you more in this work, and I'm really happy to come back and talk about that research, what it shows as we get further along. But the challenge that you are addressing today is real. It is felt across the state, it's felt across the region, it's felt across the country, and you are taking a step that is really important and sort of revamping and redeveloping a way of funding transportation in our city. So thank you.

Thank you both. Colleagues, I wanted to give everyone. Yesterday, council president Dunphy mentioned that when we were going to float amendments, we'll just ask for a two sentence summary. So if you intend to move an amendment to the to the documents, either of them today, I wanted to give an opportunity for anyone to to give a brief summary of that, and then we can you'll have more time to get into it after testimony. Does anyone have one? I'm going to go through the queue and feel free to add yourself to the queue. Councilor Green.

Mitch Green: Yeah, one sentence amends the ordinance under the directive section. Item k. Very small tweak. That reads PBOT will propose rate adjustments including inflationary increases, and then it adds a new clause that says or rate design proposals to the council through the city's annual budget process. So just creates a permission structure to change not just the adjustment of the rate, but also what the rate is and how it's composed. Thanks.

Thank you, councilor Green. Councilor Smith, is it an amendment? No. Okay. We'll keep your place in the queue. Councilor pirtle-guiney. I see you online. Looks like you're having connectivity. You might want to turn off the the camera. And I think you're also muted.

You couldn't hear me before. Councilor.

Okay. I think it came through. But no amendment right now. Is that what I'm hearing?

No amendment. Just a clarification that I was hoping to get it during technical questions. I'm not sure what happened with my hand there.

Okay, I'll come right back to you. Councilor Zimmerman, do you have an amendment?

I'm going to ask some questions, but I. I am likely to propose an amendment to take the 75% street damage restoration fee to 100%.

Thank you. And then I have a an amendment I've pre filed that would that would require looking into the discount programing and assessing if there's ways to provide more support for vulnerable road users and for historically underserved communities. I'll give you a chance to ask a question. Councilor. Pirtle-guiney. And then we do need to take that break.

Thank you chair, I don't need this answered. Now I see that folks are no longer up at the table, but at some point, I would like to understand what falls into the definition of a portion of funds. I think it's 70% that must be used for maintenance of current infrastructure in parts of our city. For example, we roads that can be maintained, but they don't have sidewalks on them, or we have. Greenways that are not. Don't have the safety features that other parts of the city have. I'm trying to understand if upgrade that maintenance of current assets or if that would not count in that portion. And at some point, if the bureau can get back to us all with the answer, I'd appreciate.

Great. I see them listening and actively in the back. I'm not sure if your angle allows for it, but I'm sure they'll have a thanks. And then councilor Koyama Lane.

Tiffany Koyama Lane: Well, I'm not sure if this is the only time to bring amendments and I'm not. This is not fully baked, but I will just I want to say to the people that testified hearing you all, I hear you all talking about changing g so that no less than 20% of the revenues are expended on traffic safety activities that move us closer to vision zero. I have nothing drafted and but I'm just putting that out there. I hear you, I'm interested in that. I'm not exactly sure what that means for what we have time for today.

Thanks. All right. So we'll come back in, let's say eight ish minutes, and then we'll get going with public testimony. We might ask fair warning. We might ask testifiers to keep your time to two minutes. So please start thinking about that and we'll be back at 1133.

Today. Okay, man. No way. Yeah. Five seven minutes.

Sorry. I'm sitting. Yeah, yeah. We'll see. We're.

All right. Thank you. We're going to come back.

Are you able to.

We're going to come back to to to.

Conclude our recess. So if everyone could please take their seats. First off, thanks for bearing with us. We took a slightly longer break. We are able to go a little later in this meeting. So just flagging that. And that means two things. One, we may actually have time to do these conversations, but also we are not going to need to cut it for public testimony further than two minutes, which was an option as well. Having having said that, before we call public testimony, I did want to say you have the right to use the full two minutes, but the best thing for someone who wants this to happen today can the best thing that they could do is not use the whole time, because there will be questions and discussion later, and we want to make sure there's space for that. While you still, of course, have the right to use the full two minutes. So with that, we're going to get into public testimony. Keelan would you please call the first panel?

All right. I will call people up in groups of five. Please come up to the table and go ahead and unmute and state your name for the record. First up, we have Eric fruits, jordan lewis, rj sheppard, karen cherry, thomas bussey.

Please feel free to get started while folks are still taking their seats.

Good morning, members of city council. My name is Eric fruits. I'm a Portland resident and business owner. I was here and actively involved in the 2014 street feed debacle, so I can tell you that I know what I'm talking about. I'm also an economist, and in that role, I'm here to warn you that the mechanics behind the proposed transportation packages are fundamentally broken. The transportation utility fee, the street damage, restoration fee are legally risky, highly regressive, and intentionally mislabeled. Let's be honest with the public. These are not fees. They are taxes. A fee is a charge for a service that you choose to use. You can avoid a fee by avoiding the service. You cannot avoid a tax under this proposal. A household cannot avoid the transportation utility fee by driving less or getting rid of their cars. Simply living behind four walls triggers this tax. There's no way to opt out, and when you cannot opt out, it is a tax. Because it's a flat tax. It's deeply regressive. They will disproportionately burden the poorest portlanders. The city's promise of looking for some low income rent relief or rate relief is disingenuous at best. Low income renters and multi-family buildings with master meters do not receive a water bill. Any of the current low income reductions are practically unavailable to most of the vulnerable households that actually need them, despite any promises or efforts that staff have told you. Next, the commercial rate on the tough is economically absurd. You are proposing a 4.3 tax on commercial utility bills to pay for roads, but a business's water consumption has absolutely no correlation with its actual transportation use. The street damage restoration fee is just a hidden rate payer hike. Presenting as some sort of restoration fee is just fraudulent because we know under cost of service rate making that those costs will be passed on 100% or more to the ratepayers. When we have skyrocketing utility rates, this will add another 10 to 15% and you must reject it.

Good morning.

My name is thomas bussey. I'm the treasurer of the libertarian party of Oregon. A resident of district four. I earned $27 an hour, had to take vacation time off to be here today and live in a rinky dinky market rate studio and do not have a car because I cannot afford one under this highly regressive tax, I would be paying more than my senator who never returns my calls. Lisa reynolds, who guzzles a million gallons a year at her mansion. I'd be paying more than most of you at this dais. I don't understand that this is a regressive tax, and I have actually about 25 years in government budgeting. You saw up there on the screen, Portland has a general fund. It can fund PBOT out of its general fund. It has an annual budgeting process. It can choose to fund PBOT out of that annual budgeting process. It has chosen not to. It's the same thing with the arts tax. Oh, let's fund arts education, which the school district do. It cuts arts education and instead it funds teachers pensions. So what's going on in the Portland general fund? Purse. That's what this is about. You're not going to get more transportation out of this. You're just enabling an unsustainable purse balance which can be fixed. You have a piece of overage. Put that toward paying down your purse liabilities. That will free up the general fund across the board in the city. And I'm not going to leave you with another solution. How about a 3% sales tax on concessions at the at the Portland international airport, half to the city, to the general fund, so you can allocate it where it needs to go and have to TriMet. But regressive taxes for progressive city and a progressive board make no sense.

Thank you.

We have rj online.

Great. Can you all hear me?

Yeah. Go for it, rj. Thank you.

Perfect.

Good morning counselors. Today I'm speaking on behalf of strong towns pdx, an all volunteer organization working to make Portland a safe, livable and financially resilient place for everyone. We want to thank councilor Green for proposing an attachment and motion to study moving the tough to a us based test, which includes a fixed and variable component. Utility fees are often structured this way, with a fixed fee as your hookup charge and the variable component based on your use. This attachment, which originated from strong towns pdx, is a proposal for a fair tough. In the case of the current proposed tef, there's effectively zero variable component for the residential households. This is. This because this applies to transportation and the largest consumers of our roads, which are 53% of the total consumption, reside outside of our city. It's already a stretch to claim that this tough is a fair burden for Portland residents to pay for the amount of miles driven by Portland residents. The current proposal does a poor job of approximating road use. The approximation is based on the traffic engineers manual, which uses data primarily from suburbs. Portland is not a suburb. We have census tracks for 25% of residents don't own a vehicle. The current tef does not address the 50% of driver, 53% of drivers who get to drive for free throughout the city. But a proposed route use base tef from councilor Green means a tough. That better approximates vmt for the residents that do use our roads. The proposed fee of $3 as a fixed fee or a hookup fee, and $0.10 per 100ft■!s of parcel, is simple and can be applied uniformly across the city. Instead of the three different structures currently planned. The proposal would mean that the average Portland household living on an r5 zoned lot will still pay only $12 a month, and the same as the current. Please work to implement this use base tef so that it is a fair tough for multifamily residents. It will also address the issues around commercial properties where large amazon warehouses are efficient, will pay less overall than, say, OHSU. That works very hard to use their land use very efficiently and offers free transit passes and subsidizes e-bikes for their employees. Thank you very much for your time.

Karen is joining us online. Karen you're muted. There we go. I can hear you.

Hello. My name is karen wright. I'm both a resident and a business owner deeply invested in the future of our community. The proposed transportation utility fee represents yet another burden that threatens to stifle local businesses and strain the financial resources of hard working residents. As a business owner, I know firsthand that every dollar counts with rising costs from various angles rent, utilities, wages this new fee feels like a heavy weight added to an already overflowing plate. The prospect of additional taxes and fees is detrimental to our ability to maintain operations and retain employees. I've heard repeated claims about lost federal funding, yet we must ask why did this happen? Why is. Is it possible that misalignment with federal priorities led to funding being pulled? The federal government has significant resources available, and it raises serious questions about our local leadership's ability to secure necessary support. If we can't align with federal initiatives, how can we expect to effectively manage local funding and infrastructure projects? I testified twice to the state transportation house bill 3991 that wanted to raise gas taxes, fees on hybrid and electric vehicles and other fees, which is just more of our money going to pay for fiscal mistakes made by state government and federal funds being pulled top to bottom. Government audits should be conducted prior to asking residents and businesses to pay more. Oregon has one of the highest taxes already. As a lifelong Oregonian, I have witnessed how funds collected in the past have not yielded visible results. We have invested in our community through taxes and fees, yet we often see little in return. How can we ensure that the revenue generated from the transportation utility fee will be used effectively and transparently? While in your presentation, you outlined how the money would be spent, but nothing is guaranteed. We need solid assurances that our contributions will not vanish into a black hole of bureaucracy. In closing, why support? While I understand the need for funding to maintain our transportation systems, the introduction of the transportation utility fee without clear accountability and commitment to responsible governance only served to drive businesses away and further burdened residents. Thank you.

Jordan lewis. Jordan lewis here. Next up we have john gibbon, terry parker, carl road, brett hofstetter, kyle johnson.

My name is john gibbon. I live in southwest Portland district four, the quail park association in Oregon, nonprofit corporation aka the quail park homeowners association of the city of Portland, Multnomah county, state of Oregon. And most crucially for this discussion, the situs of the city of portland's southwest quail post road water local improvement district, which I see commissioner Remind remembers. We have 3/10 of a mile of main line road that connects lancaster boulevard to lancaster road. Excuse me, lancaster's other boulevard and Salem. Lancaster road to huber street. And we have 7/10 of a mile of individual privately owned streets that reach the 93 houses in our subdivision. And on top of that, and I'm going to paraphrase, I think it was abraham lincoln to tell commissioner Ryan that I can report that we have now successfully interconnected the water line that we're building on an lid from lancaster road to, I guess the paraphrase would be now bull run water flows unvexed from lancaster road to huber street, which was an accomplishment we had to do because 50 years ago the city forgot to build the water line that the planning commission requested between lancaster and huber, and we lived for 50 years on a single pipeline, common metered, single pipeline. So we're in the middle of an led. We greatly appreciate the work the city has done to facilitate that led to get that water line in. We couldn't meet qualifications for state licensing with just a single connection like we'd had for 50 years. So the city had to step in and help us. But we when it's all said and done, we still will own the road, not the city.

Being here, we're actually out of time.

We're asking for at least being treated like a multi-family housing division.

Thank you.

Discounts to make.

The whole thing.

I'm not sure who's next, but please feel free to get started.

Hi, councilors. My name is brett hofstetter. I'm a recently retired and I've worked and lived in the Portland area for the last 40 years. I'm here today to ask you to please stop making this town so unaffordable. We already have some of the highest combined water and sewer rates in the country. The most recent increase of July of 2025 was 6%. Which is the largest increase in more than ten years. I've watched as many of the local professional businesses have left our beloved city. Over the last ten years. I've worked in many of the buildings in downtown Portland when they were full of taxpaying businesses and spent time in many of the same buildings that are now empty. I am concerned that with this unaffordability, our neighborhoods will be next. Then the emigration has already started. We all have friends and neighbors that have moved away from Portland. We've experienced a net loss over 18,200 residents between 2020 and 2023. Portland has been ranked as having some of the highest combined water and sewer bills globally, third highest in 2019 study. Please don't add this additional fee to us, please. Thank you.

Thank you. Please go ahead.

Good morning councilors. I'm carl roady. Thank you all for your long holding up the tradition of making Portland the best european city in America. I am a native Oregonian as of yesterday. I'm a homeowner in Portland for 21 years. In 1919, Oregon became the first state in the nation to pass a gas tax. And that worked really well right up until about the 70s, when gasoline was no longer essentially free and automobile manufacturers had to start making efficiency improvements to them. And the erosion began in the effectiveness of the gas tax. We've been dealing with this for a long time. I can think of discussions about the dwindling revenue that comes in from a gas tax going back over three decades. So that's why in 2003, when I was on the lake oswego city council, we adopted a street maintenance fee, which you're calling a transportation utility fee. We did a lot of public outreach. We explained we had a different system than what's in place in lake oswego now, but it really stabilized our funding to be able to maintain the streets. And we rated we put a rating on the streets from a to f that allowed us to determine as a council, what do we want the overall transportation system in the city of lake oswego to look like? And I think at the time we decided we wanted to at least raise it from c minus to b plus, and that gave us a target amount of funding that we needed to raise from the transportation utility fee. One of the things that we explained to a lot of people was that the cost of transportation infrastructure has increased faster than the rate of inflation. And unless you've recently paved your driveway, you have no idea what the cost of asphalt is. And most people don't. And they also don't realize that asphalt is merely a cover on the road. So I would encourage you in the name of the great corporation, nike, to just do it. And in paraphrasing gretchen whitmer from the state of michigan, fix the damn roads.

Thank you. Please go ahead.

Sir terry parker, district three equity is absent. As an example, take two individuals who travel the same distance to work every day. One drives a car, the other rides a bus. The person riding the bus has a far greater impact on the roadway than the person who drives the car. That's because one standard bus does as much wear and tear to the pavement as 1200 cars. That calculates out to about 30 cars per bus seat. Due to the weight of batteries, the amount of wear doubled is doubled to about 60 cars per bus seat for an electric bus, bicycle advocates activists provide a lot of lip service for what they want, but they pay nothing for the bike lanes they ride in. Expected. It's the number. It's the number of people within a household that make a difference on how much transportation infrastructure is utilized, not the amount of water used. Expecting single family households to pay more than apartment or condo households is a form of discrimination. It is, if you want to be little dictators as to what type of housing people live in, coupled with how people travel, it's especially discriminating to senior citizens living on fixed incomes who simply want to age in place in the home they work for a lifetime to pay for and now own. Instead of trumpeting discrimination towards homeowners. In addition to making the American dream more costly to obtain, the real need is to establish a tax or fee for street usage applied to those who are currently not paying their share, such as adding a surcharge to transit fares and finding a way to tax the adult bicyclists. Adding a home delivery fee is another possibility. I see an amazon truck on my street almost every day. The bottom line is stop trying to take the easy way out by merely tacking on another fee to a bill that's already being sent out, a tax or fee. If a tax, a fee or fee is assessed on housing, it absolutely needs to reflect the number of people living in the household, not the type of dwelling they live in. Thank you.

Thank you.

Mr. Chairman.

Go ahead. Kyle.

Hello. Hello city council. I will keep this brief. My name is kyle johnson and I'm the vice chair of bike loud pdx bike loud urges you to do what our previous form of government could not and pass this fee. Leaving our streets unfunded is the most inequitable option and will make portlanders poor in the long run. Thank you very much.

Okay, next up we have john, sarah, john, jacob, santiago, nolasco, galicia.

Are you? One question will you accept written testimony after the.

Thank you.

The item had a power outage of eight hours last night, so.

Good afternoon, chair Kanal and members of the Portland city council. For the record, my name is john sarah, and I am speaking to you today as a registered lobbyist. On behalf of TriMet, I would like to extend our support for PBOT efforts to find a funding solution that secures the agency's future for the vital infrastructure that it is responsible for maintaining. On behalf of all portlanders. To state the obvious, TriMet busses drive on Portland roads, the city of portland's ability to adequately maintain those streets impacts not only the quality of the ride for TriMet riders, but also has a significant impact on our bottom line. Poorly maintained roads slow down our busses and increase our maintenance costs as TriMet continues to address our budget constraints, adequate PBOT funding will have a significant impact on the experience of our riders, our attractiveness to new riders, and our ability to direct to direct every available dollar to those who need it most, not just the upkeep of our busses. I want to thank PBOT director millicent williams, the d, c, a and her many staff that have all dedicated countless hours to the planning and public outreach necessary for this effort, and I want to thank you all, especially especially councilor Clark and the members of the transportation and infrastructure committee for moving these ideas forward. Pbot work is an essential function of government and we rely on its on its success to deliver our own essential services to this community. Thank you all for your leadership.

Thank you. Please go ahead. You can. Yeah.

Oh, sorry.

Okay.

Good morning councilors. My name is santiago nolasco galicia. I'm a climate policy assistant at 350 pdx. We support finding new sources of revenue to fund transportation, but we implore detailed scrutiny before adopting the transportation utility fee. I'll mention very briefly that we do support the street damage restoration fee. It makes sense that entities tearing into the road should pay part of the cost of of that, and to reduce the times that we disrupt the streets, the transportation utility fee, on the other hand, would inequitably affect everyone's bills basically immediately before passing the fee, you should really modify it to ensure it is more equitable and helps me. Our goals of transportation decarbonization. Our biggest issue with the tough is that it is a regressive fee. This flat fee would apply to multi-family and single family households, regardless of whether they own a car, primarily use public transit, walk or bike. As someone who regularly walks and uses transit, should I really be required to pay the same fee as other portlanders who are actively driving existing low income discounts, also will not capture every household that relies on alternative methods of transportation. We would ask you to please include a waiver system for households without a vehicle who primarily use transit as their means of transportation. Ideally, we would like the council to explore a more progressive system based on income level or maybe vehicle miles traveled, just something that can better reflect the reality of how we actually each use the roads. Our next concern is that it needs to clearly it needs to more clearly aid in transportation decarbonization. Finally, if a tough passes, there needs to be clear guardrails in the ordinance to ensure that this funding goes into its intended purposes, rather than disappearing into the general fund. As we move forward into a more equitable future, we encourage the council to be good stewards of these funds. We support the street damage, restoration fee and the t o f, and if the tuf is destined to move forward, ensure that the ordinance captures the reality of how we actually use our infrastructure. Include that waiver system. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

John is joining us online.

Good morning or afternoon now, councilors, thank you for your detailed attention to this matter. I did not have time to change my zoom background, so don't get too distracted by it. I just want to give two brief points here. I'm not like a policy expert. I'm a secretary of the ecosocialist working group at the Portland dsa, but I'm speaking strictly on my own behalf here. There's a lot of discussion about how this fee is regressive, and I believe that's true. And I do believe that there needs to be some policy analysis as to how we can make it less regressive with a with a waiver system for households that do not own a car or that primarily use public transit being a very appealing option. However, urgency is critical here. I do not want us to begin significantly tampering with the fee and not get it across the deadline in the time we need it. We clearly need more effective road maintenance now. And this brings me to point two. We've got 75% of the transportation utility fee going explicitly to maintenance, and then 25% going to vision zero. I am comfortable with the split. If PBOT is doing effective work at doing some of the work that I know Mitch Green and others have been talking about in previous council sessions, and that is looking at what roads we can afford to maintain. We cannot simply be seeking to maintain our entire existing road infrastructure system based on our current revenue. We know we can't. We need to begin effectively triaging and seeing what is critical maintenance and what these funds could be most practically applied for. We don't want to be spending money on maintaining parts of our road system that in the long run, we know we're not going to be able to keep in their current use state. So I'd like you to encourage I'd like to encourage you to do that. And then lastly, I just said that we shouldn't be tampering with this too much, but I can guarantee you that if we do not have protections by applying this to a water bill, that people will be evicted. I personally, I live in an apartment. I pay my water utility bill through my landlord. I have known people in this apartment complex who have been evicted. Part of it is because of unpaid utility bills. You will see evictions if you do not include this waiver, and you will see candidly, I think more of them than you expect. Please make that an urgent priority and fix that. I think that's a serious oversight, and I'd like to see that changed. Thank you so much.

That completes testimony.

Thank you everyone. Thank you. All of our testifiers, we do have several people in the queue, so we'll just get started with that. It'll be councilor Green followed by councilor Smith.

Loretta Smith: Thank you chair. And thank you to everyone who provided testimony today. Colleagues, I'll try to be efficient with my time because we got a lot last night. I emailed you all and I emailed the clerk a document that I wanted attached to this item, not because I want that document to be an amendment. I want to be very clear. What I'm about to talk to is not an amendment to the currently proposed thing. Because as as someone who has worked in rate making institution for my career prior to being elected, if you try to change rates on the fly inside of a week, you're going to do something terribly wrong. And that's that's just a fact. And so the reason I have done this, this method of sort of introducing a concept informally and filing it so it can stay with the item as the item moves through the different parts of our legislative concept. So we can so we can talk to the community in response to the community. And so I'll describe what it is and I'll say where it came from. Basically, you guys all may have seen in your inboxes, zendesk, some appeals from organizations like strong towns, pdx, but also some other kind of kind of urban land use, you know, nerds, for lack of a better term, for an alternative proposal that I think is really smart. And it's also quite elegant. And it also gets us away from some of the issues that we heard from, in particular, Eric fruits, who made the who critiqued the commercial piece that would be assessing a fee as a function of your water consumption, which I personally don't like. And I think that's outside of the it crosses principles and rate design on this. So I'll briefly describe it. The basic idea, and I hope this conversation will provide inspiration to PBOT and allow us to update this proposal over the course of the weeks and months. To consider it by council is to construct a fee based upon a two part system. You have a flat rate component and you have a variable rate component. So every single billable unit, every sort of door in the city of Portland pays $3. That's it. Irrespective of your use of the system or whatever other consideration. And then the variable component is a function of how much of the zone of the buildable zone land you use per parcel. So for example, I have a 10,000 square foot lot in southwest Portland. There's one house on that lot. I'm responsible for paying for the entire 10,000ft■!s of that land. But let's suppose there's another 10,000 square foot lot and you've got ten units on it. It's reasonable to say that each tenant should pay for a 10th of that. And so the idea is it scales the variable proportion as a function of your square footage occupation. And if you if you design it like this, it does align better with cost causation principles. And it sends a price signal to use our land more efficiently. And it doesn't subsidize sprawl. The current proposal as it stands, which I'm going to support because we need to pass it so we can get something to build off of. Subsidizes and incentivizes sprawl, which then increases the ongoing cost of our transportation system. So let me say that again, if we validate a transportation network that does not try to intentionally create more densification and move away from car use, then the ongoing liability of our operations and maintenance of our transportation network will continue to grow per person, per year over the decades. But if you do this other proposal proposal that incentivizes and apportions your your burden based upon how much square footage is zoned land, you occupy, then that that shares that burden more equitably. So that's in the attachments. I'm happy to answer any questions, but based upon the math that I've done this, this generates roughly the same amount of money. And a person who lives in a 1200 square foot apartment pays about $4 a month. I would pay $13 a month. The commercial operator, the gentleman, I think his name is kurt, will no longer pay a fee based upon water consumption if there are 1200 square foot storefront councilor Ryan, they'll pay $4 a month under my proposal site. I got you. You're saving storefronts over here. So anyway, that's the proposal that I'm not moving today. Formally, I want to be very clear. I'm just bringing it into the public. I'm responding to communities, say I'm taking this very seriously and I'm uplifting it. What I am moving is an amendment to let me pull that up here. It's called Green one that creates the permission structure to change our rate design year by year by year. As it's currently written, it suggests that we're only adjusting our rates, which would imply once we've adopted a rate design, then we're really just tweaking the levers inside of that design. I would like us to consider on an annual basis, changing our rate designs as appropriate. And so Green one reads PBOT. It's item k under the directive part of the ordinance that PBOT will propose rate adjustments, including inflationary increases, and then adds or new rate design proposals to the city council through the city's annual budget process. I want to be clear if we're going to engage in rate design studies and engagement, you can't wait until the budget to do that. And so if we adopt this amendment, even if we don't adopt this amendment, I'm going to try to work through the the public works committee to to have that type of process really intentionally developed. So we can we can consider the trade offs and the equity considerations of different ways of designing a fee, not just whether or not we should adopt a fee. So without colleagues, I hope I can get your support on that amendment.

So there's been a motion to add or new rate design proposals to section k. Is there a second?

Second?

I think I'll give that to Avalos. Colleagues who are still in the queue will keep track of that separately. So feel free to drop out of the queue if you're not discussing the amendment. And if you are looking to discuss the amendment, please feel free to get into the queue. I'll just kind of ask as we go. So this is a debatable motion. Councilor Zimmerman, are you here to speak to the amendment? Okay, I'll go to councilor. Koyama Lane are you speaking to the amendment? Councilor Avalos councilor Novick online. Councilor.

Ryan no, but point of order. I'm worried that well, I'll just speak for myself. People that aren't in the committee, this is our first time. Just ask some bigger picture questions. And I chose not to do it during the technical because I wanted to make space for the testimony. We're not going to finish this today. It looks like we're having that meeting next week, chair. And so I hope that I could have a chance to just ask some bigger picture questions right now.

So we the the rules.

Second, but I don't think it's time to do discussion and then vote on amendments today.

I'm fairly certain we're required to do so while we're in the motion by by our rules.

Look at your buckets over here.

It is over there. If you can grab it for me. But yeah, thanks. But I will say that I do want to make sure that there's time for for the general conversation, because seven of us are not on that, right. The old transportation infrastructure. So I agree with the broader point. If you'll bear with me just a moment. I am not seeing anybody else in the queue right now for the amendment. So it is possible that we could vote on the amendment and then get back into that general discussion in the span of about 30s. So if that's all right with you, I will continue with that while we verify it. Is there anyone else looking to add to the queue for this? Okay. On the amendment keelan, would you please call the roll.

Pirtle-guiney. Councilor. Pirtle-guiney. Absent.

Ryan councilor Green. I might be able to get to a yes on this, but not today. No.

Koyama Lane aye, Morillo aye, Morillo. I Novick. Councilor Novick. Absent cclark. I Green. I Zimmerman. I Avalos. I Dunphy. I Smith.

No.

Kanal I.

The amendment is approved with eight yes votes to no votes and two absent.

Okay. That amendment has been approved. Will now go back into the main queue, which continues on with councilor Smith followed by Zimmerman.

Eric Zimmerman: Thank you colleagues, councilors. I wholeheartedly support moving forward on the transportation utility fee because our transportation system here in the city of Portland, and especially in district one, is failing, and it's falling behind the needs of our residents. Last March, I introduced a resolution called sip, and it's better known to some of you by the sidewalk improvement and paving project, which identified district one and district four as the two areas in the city that needed sidewalks the most, and pothole filling and street paving. And I want to give a special thanks to council vice president Clark and mayor wilson for their leadership. With the tough and my public works committee and transportation committee members for their leadership in trying to get this across the finish line. In east Portland and throughout the district one, which is east of 82nd. Too many people are still walking on the high in the high crash corridor network, representing only about 8% of Portland streets. But it accounts for the majority of deadly crashes. And many of those dangerous corridors run through east Portland communities that have been underinvested in for decades. If we are serious about safety, access and equity, then we have to create stable transportation funding and start addressing these gaps at the scale of the problem that it demands. District one residents have already told us what they need most. Fixing potholes was a top priority for district one residents, both in person and on the survey. These past couple of months, a majority of district one residents who attended the open house. This is also a public safety issue. In 2025, district one had 11 of portland's 39 traffic deaths, the second highest total of any district, even after east Portland saw an improvement from the prior year's. Portland's high crash network makes up about 8% of the city's streets, but it accounted for an average of 67% of traffic deaths from 2020 to 2024. That tells us the status quo is not acceptable for district one. The fee is about equity and basic infrastructure and saves sidewalks, smoother pavement, safer crossings and streets that do not put residents at risk just for walking outside, rolling or driving to school work or to a bus stop. District one is still dealing with major sidewalk inequities. Portland has more than 170 miles of missing sidewalks citywide, and council adopted cip. The cip resolution that states that most streets in district one and district four lack sidewalks entirely. We're asking district district one residents to live with deteriorating infrastructure every single day. Pbot estimates nearly two thirds of the city's local streets are in poor and very poor condition, and well over half of the busy streets are in similarly bad shape. I would like to urge my colleagues to not delay this and bog this down with a bunch of amendments. Let's pass this so we can get this on the docket and help those underserved, underinvested neighborhoods that have not had a chance to be upgraded. Thank you for doing this, councilor Clark.

Olivia Clark: Thank you, councilor Smith. Next up is councilor Zimmerman, followed by councilor Koyama Lane.

Tiffany Koyama Lane: Thank you, chair. I actually have some questions about the restoration fee that I'd like to ask to the staff that's in the room, so I can better understand the nuances to that program. Let me just start with, it seems weird that we don't charge an organization or a person who cuts into our pavement. So to go from not to 75 and then I, as I highlighted earlier, I'm considering going to 100% of the restoration. I'm just trying to understand what that really means as a person who when I bought my home, I had to, you know, redo the sewer line. Obviously that means cutting some pavement, but I paid that contractor through that permitting process to take care of that work. And included in that may have been some asphalt, right? So that payment occurred from me to the contractor because it's not that PBOT didn't come out and do that work. It was, you know, bob's new pipe business, whatever. So what is is this about when PBOT is replacing pavement or is this when anybody's cutting in? And can we talk about what that means a little bit?

Sure. Thanks for the question, councilor Zimmerman. Millicent williams, for the record, director of the Portland bureau of transportation, the street damage restoration fee is just what you mentioned at the last part of your conversation. It is a fee that is assessed to those who are cutting into the pavement that are typically the utilities. Folks like, of course, the water bureau, b e s, verizon, comcast, lucent technologies, all of all of those folks.

That's because.

They all use.

Our public right of ways for their conduits.

So. So they're currently paying a permit. That's right. They're currently paying a permit fee, but they aren't paying for the damage that is done to the asset once they make that cut. So when a cut is made into the pavement, especially at the depths that we're anticipating. Oh, great. Alex, our chief engineer, is here who will take this over as soon as I finish this statement. In fact, I'm going to just let him dig in right now. Alex, take it away.

So to speak.

All right.

Alex morono, chief engineer PBOT, your question is basically, is that contractor paying for that piece or will they?

It's the effect of we don't charge for street damage restoration. Right now. We are proposing this fee that would go on to the utilities that are in fact, cutting into the street. The question is around the damage that's created by that cut and how probably how the utilities are receiving the information that they are going to be now assessed, a fee that extends beyond just that permit fee.

Yeah, yeah, I think right.

So basically, you know, anytime you cut the pavement there is the associated with the cut itself and then there's associated damage to the surrounding soils, what have you are loose and if you will, so the cut impact is bigger than just the cut. So this would be applied to anybody who's cutting pavement. It would not apply to behind the curb because it is not pavement. Right. So any concrete or asphalt you do cut will have this fee, including contractors, what have you. They would be assessed this as part of their street opening permit.

Okay, so I'm going to use northwest natural. They have to cut into a street. I'm going to use fourth avenue because we're on fourth avenue. And they are they pay a utility fee, right. And that's to have the pipes in the ground or excuse me, a franchise fee. That's to have the pipes in the ground, right. We're going to cut 12ft of pavement. And and and when they do that, it's northwest natural is contractors are the ones who are actually putting the new asphalt down and finishing it. But what we're saying is when you, when you make a dent in the overall product, that product's lifespan reduces. I think we heard 60% earlier in the presentation, and now we want to capture a fee for that degradation. I want to make sure I'm just saying this the right way and I'm understanding the impact. Okay.

The only nuance to that is northwest natural is paying that fee, not the contractor. Northwest natural is aye, Morillo in their contract to do that. But yes.

Yeah. Okay. So historically, we have not charged that facet of it.

Correct?

That's correct. What is the reason that you're aware of and I'm sure it predates you. Can you talk a little bit about why that has been the case?

I could speak at this for a long time. I've been here almost 32 years. I've proposed this street damage restoration fee probably 20 years ago, and we've worked through this process. So I can't tell you how excited I am that we're at this point. So once we get this all retired. So okay. But no, really, this is really something that we've talked about for a long time. It is needed. The degradation is there. It's real. Other cities you explained los angeles and other areas have experienced this. And so they've identified ways to address this. We're just now catching up to that, and that's where we're trying to move this forward.

As has been the case. Councilor Zimmerman, it's a series of choices that have been made over the course of the past many years. And when we've had the opportunity to bring things forward, it was at the pleasure of previous councils to make a determination about whether or not we should move forward with something, when we would recommend solutions to the problems that we see. They were met with varying degrees of support, and so we find ourselves where we are now.

Yeah.

I think about, you know, insurance rules in Oregon, if you're in a car accident, allows you to get it made whole. And this seems kind of similar to like, we should make the product whole. And since we can't, we do that by collecting a fee so that when the road gets redone, we have been collecting because it's going to get done earlier than it would have. But for this work that that occurred, I, I want to make sure we're connecting.

Yeah. So there's, there's some, I don't, I don't want to call it nuance. There's some process that's related to the determination about whether or not the fee would even be charged. First of all, if for entities come together and say, we are going to do work on fourth avenue, let's coordinate so that we can make sure that if you're putting in something that's below the surface, you do that first. You go in the year before and do that. And then ultimately we would come in as the final portion of that work and do that top layer of pavement so that we aren't seeing that pavement cut and degraded immediately, as unfortunately is the case right outside of this door. Right? So we have lots.

The other option, we could say if we've paved it in the last five years, tough luck. You don't get to do upgrades unless something breaks.

And that's that's part of what this would move toward facilitating. It's the the timelines within which a cut would be proposed. It's the age of a street. It's the current condition of the street, whether or not the fee would be assessed. If we're all thumbs up on coordination, which is what we're working toward, then those utilities would not actually have a fee to pay. So while.

Hey, we're about to do a major project, today's the day to get your stuff right, guys.

Absolutely. Okay, so that's our hope.

For the sake of time. I'm sorry to cut you off a little. For the sake of time, colleagues, I am going to move that amendment because I'd actually rather start at the 100% restoration instead of. And if there's discussion that as we go through this process. So I think my team has posted it. But if they have not yet in the very second to last, be it resolved, I believe in the in this it has a it has a 75% number. I'm moving to move that to a 100% number for damage recovery amount as part of the transportation fee schedule. So there's a pause. There's my movement. I'd appreciate any second.

Thank you.

Motion has been made by councilor Zimmerman, seconded by Green, to amend the resolution. Once again, we're going to pause this queue. I'll run through everybody quickly. If you'd like to be in the queue to discuss the amendment, you can rejoin. So councilor Koyama Lane, would you like to speak to the amendment?

Kind of. I think I'd like to know how this interacts with vision zero and some conversations that director williams, we were starting to have and was chatting with councilor Clarke to see how this amendment would interact and let me know if this is outside of the scope.

If I may. It's two different.

Is it would this change anything around if we were to make the 20% totally different?

This is the other ordinance or other resolution.

This is for the street damage restoration fee, not for the transportation utility fee.

Okay. A couple hundred bucks right now we only.

Okay. Thank you. No comment on this. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilor Avalos, would you like to speak to this amendment? Seeing a shake of the head there, counselor Ryan to the amendment. I'm next in the queue. I'm just going to say I support it and nothing else on the amendment. Councilor Novick, would you like to speak to the amendment?

I support it.

Councilor Green would you like to speak to the amendment?

Yeah, I seconded it because I, I think if you're going to send if you establish a fee that really tries to establish a price signal that changes behavior and recovers the cost causation of such a behavior, then it needs to be aggressive enough to change that behavior. And so if we do it right, then we won't collect this fee at all, because then we will have coordinated this work ahead of time. And everyone saves money, including the ratepayers. And I think you send a stronger signal if it's 100% versus 75. That's why I support it.

Great. Thank you so much. Seeing nobody else in the queue right now.

Information.

Sorry.

I'm reading through the amendment. Can I ask a question? Maybe. Maybe let me get in the queue so I can ask a question.

So I don't think you have the one that I sent you. One that's not on this one. You're looking at a different one.

What you emailed us is not what we're talking about. No.

I'm talking about the resolution on this, the restoration, not

Notts transportation utility fee. I know that 75 is used in both, but it is confusing.

Maybe I just need a second to see. Maybe do I have something in front of me or.

I think it might be on the way. Apparently the clerk's not posting amendments right now to the web page, so we're having to send them out. So apologies for that, but.

Councilor Zimmerman, can I clarify, please, in the resolution, which is the second item on the agenda, the second to last, be it further resolved? I believe that in that second line where it says, be it further resolved, the council supports the city administrator's intent to include a street damage restoration fee at the 75% damage recovery amount, that this would change the 75% to 100%. And I also believe that that is the totality of the amendment.

That is correct. Okay.

I'm getting that verified there so that it's just changing the 75 to 100 second to last, be it further resolved in the resolution. There is no one else in the queue. So councilor Avalos, if you want to ask a question, this is a good time to do it. But it is literally, I think, two characters, not even a full word. So yeah. Okay.

Sorry for the confusion there.

Okay. Seeing no one else in the queue. Keelan, would you please call the roll on the amendment?

Pirtle-guiney. Ryan, I.

Koyama Lane aye, Morillo. Aye, Morillo look at all of us agreeing. I hope the Oregonian publishes it. I.

Novick aye, Morillo.

CClark I.

Green I.

Zimmerman I.

Pavlo's.

This is a good example of why we need the ability to make amendments.

I Dunphy. I ssmith. I Kanal.

Before I vote I just noticed councilor Pirtle-guiney is back online. So before you call the the answer can we allow her to make a point of order if she'd like to cast a vote?

Sure.

Okay, I'm going to vote I. And if we could pause for to give her a second.

Thank you. Can you hear my point of order?

Yes.

Fantastic. I said I but I think I was too late.

I think you're still good, so.

I, I vote perfect.

All right. The amendment is approved with 12 yes votes.

Great, chair.

I had one more before I go. And on this one, I'm you're doing a great job at getting us to vote on them, but I want to put this up there as a. I don't think we'll close this out. So I guess I'm going to propose it. And if we have a second to put it in the background for a while, I'm fine with that. But what I have sent you colleagues is another amendment. And this now pertains to the overall transportation utility fee. As you're aware, 75%, as was laid out in the presentation, is going to maintenance. The other 25% is about vision zero. And that's been important. But my assessment of that is that it was a little loose in what could be spent and how it would be spent. So I've sent you a an amendment that articulates 12.5%. That's half to the cip program and the other 12.5% specifically has to be spent on vision zero, not just a can be spent on vision zero. And I expect that this amendment will get some discussion. And that's why, chair, I'd like to put it up there it is getting posted. You've extended the deadlines for this meeting. I have to leave at this moment. So I wanted to highlight it and know that you all have it, and I'm happy to discuss through it later.

So I'm going to interpret that the way that councilor Greene's comment was. So something that can live with this as it goes to the full, to the next time we discuss it and then can be formally moved, is that.

That would be appreciated.

Great. Thank you. So that is in everyone's email as well. All right. We'll go to councilor Koyama Lane followed by councilor Avalos.

Candace Avalos: Thank you chair. I am wondering if we can maybe have some some leaders, representatives from PBOT speak a bit to the feasibility of. If we were to amend that subsection g to require that something like no less than 20% of the tough revenues be dedicated to traffic safety activities. Can you speak to that? How feasible is that? How would you define outline? Which types of projects or measures qualify as traffic safety? What should we consider? And no.

Thank you. Councilor Koyama Lane for the question and for your raising your concern. We can certainly do what this council directs as relates to the ways that we would apply the funding that would come through the tough. The recommendation around a percentage that should be dedicated to one area of interest or another is just something that we would need to build into the overall programmatic implementation and budget based on whatever passes through this council, very similar to what we do with fixing our streets. There is a percentage of projects that initially, when we set up fixing our streets that were dedicated to maintenance and 47% were for safety, 53 maintenance, 47 safety. And we had to report on that according to that. And we had to define what a safety project was versus a maintenance project. We would do the same with this funding source to ensure that people are really clear. When we say a safety project or a vision zero project or a traffic operations project, this is what that means. It includes these elements or does not include these elements. A maintenance project is this. Now, what I will also share is that just because it's classified as a maintenance project, doesn't mean that it's not a safety project as well. We hope to, in all of our efforts, ensure that the maintenance work that we're doing is actually supporting overall safety. So, and I'm not saying that to get us out of doing some very specific vision zero work, but I do want to provide the assurance that we are thinking about a full range of need when we're talking about the work that we're doing, and we're looking at opportunities to enhance projects, especially to ensure that we're meeting a higher threshold than we perhaps are even legally required to do to ensure that we're meeting the safety expectations. I will share that the city of Portland does go above and beyond most cities as it relates to imposing safety, guidance and planning and design on our projects than than most cities do in the country. So it's not a problem. To answer your question.

Thank you so much for explaining that and for your commitment to this area and for being so thoughtful about that process. I'll make sure my office works directly with you all and chair Clark, to see what makes sense moving forward. Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you. Councilor. Koyama Lane. Councilor Avalos, followed by Ryan.

Thank you chair. All right. So a couple of thoughts and a couple of questions. First, I just want to like everybody else has appreciate the work that's gone into bringing this forward and bringing forward a long term solution to portland's transportation funding challenges. I hear from my constituents all the time about potholes and safety issues and basic maintenance, and it's clear that we need a more stable and sustainable funding source to address those needs. At the same time, this proposal raises important questions to me about fairness and affordability for many portlanders, especially in east Portland, the cost of living is already high and any new fee, no matter how small it may seem, really adds up. In fact, I regularly have constituents set up meetings with me in my constituent office hours, particularly elders on fixed incomes, and they literally bring me their bills. They bring me their utility bills so that I can see the impact. And they say, if you do not stop this, I will be homeless. Let that sink in because people really are on the edge. And any increases on their utility fees adds up to them not being able to pay their bills. And then they're worried about their housing stability. So that does come up often. And I need to speak up for those those constituents. I also have some concerns about the commercial fee structure, which is based on a percentage of utility bill. It's not really clear to me yet that the utility usage is the best proxy for transportation system use, and I just want to better understand how this will impact different types of businesses. And finally, I just want to ensure that investments from this fee are equitably distributed, particularly for us in east Portland, because we have significant infrastructure gaps and safety needs. So I'm supportive of the goal, but I do want some more clarity and some stronger guardrails around equity, transparency and accountability. So with that, let me start here. District one residents have been waiting a long time for basic infrastructure things like pothole repair, sidewalk maintenance, and in some cases, our experiencing stagnant or declining service levels. So if we are asking them to pay more through this fee, what guarantees are in place to ensure that they are seeing a proportional and meaningful return on their investment?

And you want that answer today? Okay. I just wasn't sure if that was that. You wanted us to posit that you were positing for later. Sure. We recognize and, and we, we see this every day that there are parts of the community that are underinvested or have been disinvested over decades. One of the efforts that is underway, and this is something that we are doing all the time, is assessing overall condition of the system. It's the streets, it's the sidewalks, it's where the gaps are, it's access. It's all of those things that make living comfortable for people. And so we do know where the areas of greatest need are to be able to very quickly assess how we might be able to go in and provide the levels of support that communities would need. I think if we are looking at and as we've talked about, the cip program, one of the expectations of that program is that we'd we'd be able to go in and see where the areas of greatest need are, and invest there to get folks up to a level of at least a good, so that we can level the playing field and everyone has access to appropriate infrastructure. So we do think about that all the time. We have tools that we use to inform our decision making. Some of those were developed in past years, but we still use that guidance to help to inform how we make our decisions about what we are going to do. I'll give you an example. We were talking about the 80th and mill work that was done several years ago. There's an elementary school that's at the intersection of 80th and mill. The kids were literally walking to school through gigantic mud puddles. We were able to work with ps and the community to develop an id. Now this is something that that's a different funding mechanism, but we develop an id to ensure that those streets were in fact, ones and sidewalks were ones that the community could use. And it has made a tremendous difference in the quality of the lives of the children that are trying to get to school on a daily basis. But we we've done some work, especially as it relates to the walk shed for schools. There's a school and I don't know if our pedestrian coordinator is here or arts back there. I can yell it out from the back of the room about a school that right now has a 300 foot walk shed, but with some very strategic and thoughtful planning, we will be able to, with a decent investment, get to a mile walk shed from that school. That's the type of work that we would be able to do. One of the things that we talked about most recently was ensuring that we're looking at all of the schools in the area to make sure that's a tier that we need to make sure we're focusing on, to make sure that those folks are getting to and from their destinations safely. How do we do that? That's the sidewalks. That is the streets. And so, yes, of course, district one is one of those areas where we know we've done we can do more, and we will do more to ensure that we're leveling the playing field.

Yeah. And I think to echo a little bit of what I heard earlier from councilor Zimmerman around, like, how are you measuring it? Right? Because councilor Dunphy and I did a town hall a few months ago and we had a table. It was about gateway. We had a table about transportation. And one thing that stuck out to me from what people were saying was, we are interested in these kinds of improvements. You just need to communicate what they're doing to change our lives. How is it impacting our safety? Are we lowering the amount of traffic deaths? So how are you? All right. Communicating this because this is sure a structural fiscal thing. But this is also a political problem for us, right? As you hear, people are frustrated to hear that they're, you know, to them it's their taxes, right? Regardless of what you call it, it's more money they got to pay every month. And so what does it look like to be able to measure that, to communicate that out and to show real, tangible, like change on the ground? You know, I, like many people, are big mayor mamdani fan, and he posted a video where he was like, we filled 8000 potholes in a day. They did like a whole blitz. And I was like, I told the mayor, I told mayor wilson, I was like, can we have a pothole blitz? Can we have a day where we can just like go out there and just March.

Madness a couple of years ago and did thousands and thousands of potholes. And yes, we can do that. I believe I hear you and people do need to know the impact of their investment. Again, using fixing our streets as the example. The byline is our time at work and we can point specifically to projects that your dime went to make an impact in the community for or with. So we will be able to do that with this program as well as the city administrator just mentioned a few minutes ago before the recess, being able to have signage that says tough paid for this. And this is how there's been an impact to community. We also will have the dashboards that folks can go in and see where we are, literally from day to day in terms of the work that we're intending to do. That's really, really important for us internally as well as for those who are investing us in, in us. We want to make sure that people know that we take their investment very seriously, and we want to be good stewards of the investment that's being made, and we want for people to be able to trust that we are going to do what they are expecting for us to do. We hear it all the time. I don't have a sidewalk. I don't have a street. How do you expect me to a, b, c, d, e, f, g? And we recognize that. We want to make sure that we're addressing that and correcting that. Now I will, I will share, and this came up even last week when we were for a different before the tni committee about the court. No, it was full council about the cost of doing business in certain parts of town where there is no existing infrastructure, so that it will cost more because there is nothing there. But once we make the investment and we make the best investment, we will be able to see the length of time that those assets last. Based on this ongoing investment, have the cumulative effect of really being able to be sustained over time. So we make the investment. Initially. We don't just say, oh, we built it and we're gone. We build into the building of new infrastructure, the maintenance of infrastructure, so that we won't find ourselves in this really downward spiral regarding the infrastructure investments that are being made. So we'll talk about how we're able to communicate about the work that we're doing. We do want people to know that, yep, this is what you paid for that light. You paid for that sidewalk square. You paid for that ramp, you paid for that bit of street. And we also, though, want to make sure that folks know that every place where we invest will not look the same. Some of that's because it cannot, based on topography and based on urgency to do something. So we are adjusting the ways that we're thinking about even doing our work. Alex and his team are evaluating how we might look at a series of alternatives that make the list of options for us broader, in terms of being able to very quickly go out, do the things that are important for people, and then also looking out on the horizon for how we can do those really big transformational work, that big transformational work as well.

A couple of quick things that I want to add final points to what director mcwilliams said in. So these are things that we can do as the project goes on as well. We also will have the customer bill inserts, and we can include information on what those fees are for. And in addition to that, public works is planning to have a district by district newsletter that we will share with each of the councilors. So you can share what is the ongoing infrastructure work that is happening in each of your districts and upcoming work as well, so you can communicate it through your newsletters to your community on what work is happening in each district.

Thank you. And you know, I'll just say as it relates to like engagement and all of that, my staff were in a briefing yesterday about 100 and 20s. I know we're trying to make that safer. Sounds great, but I am a little concerned about what I heard from that briefing, which is that it's like we're barreling through and, you know, the staff are like present this big, pretty plan. And it's like, I know that my constituents are going to be mad about some of the things in this plan. And so I just want to name that. I think district one in particular, what I heard a lot when I was knocking on doors was they felt frustrated that they were like, we appreciate when PBOT comes in, but we don't always feel like they listen to us about what's best for us. And that is an ongoing thing I keep hearing this year. So again, you know, that's every, you know, person in Portland. But I just hear it. So particularly in d one because for example, they were like, PBOT came in and put in this bike Lane here. And it's like, if they would have talked to us, we would have preferred that they put it on this side because now you have a bike Lane next to the park and now parents who, you know, drive a car with their kids to this park have to cross the street, right? That's a simple thing that could have just from talking to the neighbors in that area, they could have told you, yes, we are okay with the bike Lane. We would have preferred on the other side. So these are the kinds of things that I hear, the frustrations that I hear from d1 about PBOT. And so I'm raising those as we look at, you know, not only implementing this, but also one thing that you mentioned, let me flag because that I'm concerned about, you know, like it costs more, right? It costs more in d1, we don't have the infrastructure. We don't have, we don't even have the hubs in east Portland. So just miles per hour things cost more just because you got to drive all the way out to east Portland. That's really unfair to us that we're going to have to pay a pretty penny more, even though we have less. And they're all paying their tax, their taxes, and they do not feel like they're getting their investment back. Right. So that's why I'm asking that first question. But then also, as it relates to maintenance, this, you know, from, you know, the 75% of it is going to maintenance. Is that how I'm understanding? So again, great, but you can't maintain something that doesn't exist. So I want to make sure that that doesn't mean that all of the other streets are going to get all their pretty streets, everything's going to be great, and we're still not going to have streets to maintain at all. So I don't know how to square that right now. I'm thinking through that still and plan to bring some ideas forward. But let me ask one more quick question. From my understanding, in Oregon city, they have a model. This is about the commercial one. They have a model for commercial pavement maintenance utility fee, where nonresidential nonresidential are charges based on the type and size of development instead of a base charge on their utility bill. So can you just clearly explain why a percentage of utility bill is the best proxy in your view?

Councilor Avalos more clear. Pbot the short answer is that we established the water and sewer bill as a proxy, as an immediate tool for us to make sure that we have that balance between residential properties and commercial properties paying. But we have established in the ordinance that we would report, we're required to report back to council about 18 months after we start the program to provide alternatives, either a traditional approach, which is based on the type of business and the multiplier per 1000ft■!s of trips or some kind of an appeals process for that initial proxy that we're using of the water and sewer bill.

Okay, let me just end it there. Really grateful for this. I think that I'm let me just ask maybe a process question because we're coming up on time. What is the expectation for how this, this conversation continues after this.

At this moment, if it should be referred out, it would be referred to the full council and up to council president Dunphy when to put it on the full council agenda for either or both items, they can be separately handled, and if they're not, they'd be continued over to the next meeting of this committee, which is going to be at 2:00. I misspoke when I said 230 earlier, 2:00 on the 15th.

Okay. And so we would need to take some sort of action to move it out if that's what we wanted.

Yes. Okay.

Sounds good. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilor Avalos. Councilor. Ryan. Followed by Novick.

Thank you so much, chair. Kanal. Councilor Avalos. You remind me that since I've been in elected office in this body, if there's one consistency, it's every neighborhood association meeting and many other meetings. Pbot is at the top of the agenda. So portlanders have a lot of passionate opinions about PBOT. And I know that you all know this. First, I want to really take a moment to recognize the amazing and hard working PBOT staff that are out there doing the tough work on the ground, repairing paving as we speak. I don't think they get lifted enough when we have conversations like this. I really appreciate you, councilor Clarke and the former transportation committee, for the diligence you've done on this topic. Please know for those of us that are on the committee, this is how the system works. And we just now have an opportunity to to dive in ourselves and ask some bigger picture questions, perhaps when I'm looking and trying to understand a problem that requires major reforms, I like to understand the current revenue, which I thought you did a good job of in the presentation, explaining that, I also like to understand how we deliver efficiency in our practices while implementing the system. In other words, nothing like a crisis to do some major reforms and turn it into an opportunity. So over the decades, a lot of things have changed. I don't think all this was lifted as much as it should have been. We've seen a slowdown of federal revenue that was explained very well. We have added better bike transit and pedestrian infrastructure in our city. Our city has taken on more maintenance that used to be with the state 82nd. Good decision, but it also added a maintenance burden that we didn't have prior to that declining fossil fuel revenue and why electrical vehicles do not add fossil fuels into our air and water. They are also heavier and causing more damage on our roadways. So how is that connected? And finally, and often not said out loud, our front line PBOT staff have to spend increasing time managing their vital work around the humanitarian crisis on our streets. That increased since the implementation of measure 110, albeit reformed. The impact is seen by portlanders daily. I want to thank those often unsung outreach workers that are from PBOT that are doing that work daily. And again, I don't think we talk about it enough. It gets put under the rug. And so along with TriMet, I want to lobby that we should be able to leverage metro funds for this work, and that should be another revenue stream that we should consider. So thank you for listening, colleagues and leaders of PBOT. That was a lot of context and background that I would have asked if I was in the committee. I need ask this where all of these factors I just mentioned discussed when proposing what is the other side of the street, the revenue solution, not the practice and infrastructure solutions.

Is that for councilor Clarke or for staff?

It could be from either.

Thank you for the question. I think it many of those things. Yes, we have sort of a longer story of how we got here that we have used sort of through many of these discussions and the things that you mentioned around decreasing, decreasing fuel tax, increasing evs and the impact on roads, us staff having to spend an increased amount of time because of changing conditions on the streets. All of those are part of the story of how we got here. And yes, we sort of the we've had a combination of changing our practices and thinking about new revenue. So yes.

And specifically to the efficiency question, I do want to share that the bureau has, over the course of the past several years, again, based on the fact that we've recognized the need to fill a gap in our budget, looked at how we might do things differently. So we did engage in a realignment exercise, bringing bodies of work, like bodies of work together and determining how we would more efficiently move through the work. That did not necessarily mean a reduction in force exercise as much as it was bringing the errant errant, bringing the separated functions more closely together. One of the areas that was specifically an area of focus, it's both within the engineering space and the transportation operations space. We brought together engineering departments that were servicing development, but were also servicing capital projects, brought that together under one roof, making sure that those engineers that are doing that work are now well rounded in a body of work that allows for them to do more than one thing well, multiple things well. And so we're able to find the opportunity to provide that longevity for staff, to ensure that there's consistency in the ways that we apply the work and the policy, and that we're able to carry out a number of things. So we did some realignment because we recognized that we were to dispersed in the ways that we were managing our work. So transportation operations now not only includes just signals and street lighting and street design, but also parking enforcement and parking and regulatory because they are responsible for the movement and the management of the right of way in that particular way. They also manage the trans the the t sub permits. So people who are coming in the 25,000 people who get permits a year, that's all under transportation operations. It used to be dispersed in other parts of the organization. So we've done some efficiency work to ensure that we can find answers in one place versus having to shop around even internally.

As we're making this case during an affordability crisis, I think we have to be more crisp and clear on how we're improving operations.

Absolutely.

And I don't think I've heard that today, and that's what I'm getting at. So I've always lived by a policy. You have to take care of your side of the street before you can ask others to join you and be a partner. And I think we're we're not making that case as clearly as possible. So when I hear what you're saying now, that's pleasing. But what is that continuous improvement plan look like?

Sure. We can certainly provide that.

I'm just pressuring you before we get to the final vote of this, of thinking about how we can make.

That one on top of that. Yeah. Thanks for the question, councilor Ryan. I've overseen the fixing our streets program for since it started in 2016. And to me, one of the building on what director williams said, one of the most exciting things that's happened in sort of how we've specifically how we've connected some of the work is we've been triaging work for a long time, right? We're paving the busiest streets, the high crash corridors, that kind of thing. But we used to have this practice when a street got to a pavement condition that we said, okay, we just have to rebuild it. Right? And as we were doing that and we were totally broke, we started hearing from some of our maintenance crews that were saying, you know, if we did a grind and pave in this section, we did a reconstruction where the road's failing, but then we could stretch our dollar and do a two inch grind and overlay on some other parts of the street. We could really do a lot more, and we could potentially touch streets that are our most important streets, right? That right. Otherwise we're like, we just don't have enough money to do the full rebuild. Right. And director williams and the team both and it was amazing to me, right? The maintenance crews that are more engaged in the conversation with the engineers. And it's oftentimes, you know, one side of the river and the other, they're having these conversations, right? When we get those groups together and we really hear the the smarts from the ground, right, of the crews doing the work, we figured out how to do projects that are a 10th as expensive as they might have been if we were doing full reconstruction. So I think that's a story that we're starting to tell more. We need to tell it more. And it's those conversations we're having at the fixing our streets.

I appreciate everything you said. I'll wrap up. My point is, I just don't want to keep investing in a system that's not being overhauled, but but is being overhauled with some necessary reforms. At the same time, people don't want to see status quo with any more investments. They want to see the status quo be blown up a bit, if you will. So I can hear that you have that appetite. I'll end with this. And that is role clarity. I think a lot of people don't understand what the state maintains, what the county maintains, bridges. A lot of people don't realize that what counties responsible for bridges. And then we all know that there was a lot of controversy with transportation bills down in Salem this past session. And I think that I would like to hear more how this is intersecting with our other partners. Who's on first for what? And I hear that we have to take care of our own, but are we also being too gratuitous to take care of things that really should be under other jurisdictions? And if we are, the public needs to know about that because they're feeling like they're being getting invoiced from all three sources and wondering if they're working together, does that make sense?

It makes sense. And I think we have some opportunities to further provide further information on our current budget, because there are things that we do pay for that are not ours. Some debt and sorry, I'm sorry.

We're I appreciate that we got to have some dialog.

Happily, happily happy to share that. Yes.

Okay. Thank you, counselor Ryan. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to cut you off. Just making sure that there's time for your conversation. I'm currently interpreting this as you effectively still having the floor, but because we're going to have to continue this in order to to get out on time here. I'm just making sure. And that means I'm noting the councilor Novick, councilor Clark and myself are still in the queue, and I'll maintain that when we come back to it. But unless there's any motions that I need to be aware of right now, I'm going to.

Councilor. Kanal. I would like to call the question on the street restoration fee, which is document 2020 6-114. I think we've had a pretty good discussion of that. We've amended it. And while I would like to have them both moved together, if I can get one moving, that's great.

I'm going to interpret that as a motion to refer the item to the full council.

I'm sorry. Yes.

Okay. All right. I see a second from councilor Morillo colleagues. This, I believe, does not require a debate since we've been debating the item. But I'm going to verify that. But seeing nobody else add to the queue, pause for dramatic effect. I will ask keelan if you would please call the roll on a motion to refer the resolution to the full council.

With a due pass, so we don't.

Owe with a due pass recommendation.

With a due pass recommendation.

Thank you for clarifying that. Yes, and that's as amended, of course.

Okay. Pirtle-guiney. I Ryan.

I just want to qualify this by saying that I would have needed more time to get to a yes. So for today, I don't know.

I aye, Morillo I Novick.

I am going to vote I, but I will ask the chair and future to limit each councilor's time for discussions that we all have time to discuss.

I Clark. I Green. I Zimmerman absent Avalos I Dunphy I Smith. I Kanal. I motion to refer the resolution as amended. Document number 2020 6-114 to city council with the recommendation it be adopted. Passes with ten yes votes, one no and one absent.

Okay. Thank you. I'm going to continue the the discussion of the ordinance until our next meeting, which again is the 2:00 on the 15th. And with that, before I adjourn, just wanted to say thank you for everyone bearing with us. It's our first committee, the whole meeting. Appreciate the grace as we get through this. We're learning. We're growing. This was a tough meeting haha. Needed to get one of those out of the way. Sorry, get a groaner going, but looking forward to this in the future. And with that, we will adjourn the meeting of the committee. The whole.