← Recent meetings · October 2026
The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2026-10-07
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (27,719 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Wed, Oct 7, 2026 · meeting length 3 hr 7 min · council salary-time ≈ $2,390
Council salary-time = 12 councilors × ($133,207/yr ÷ 2,080 hr) × meeting length. Attendance varies and salaries are fixed regardless of meeting count — this contextualizes the council time a session takes; it is not money the meeting "spent."
Session TL;DRAI draft · not editor-reviewed
Key points
- The city administrator gave a monthly update covering a new performance lab, an upcoming climate action plan, asset management hires, and rising federal immigration detentions.▶ 27:51 in the recordingturn 48 in the transcript ↓
- Council continued debate on an ordinance to reduce fuel storage capacity at the critical energy infrastructure hub, working through amendments before pushing final action to November 5.▶ 1:12:31 in the recordingturn 138 in the transcript ↓
- Council added a requirement that the city administrator deliver a report on public health and natural hazard risk reduction for the fuel hub area by September 2027.▶ 1:55:54 in the recordingturn 242 in the transcript ↓
- Council reviewed a large update to fire bureau permit and inspection fees, noting most fees had not changed since 2012 and the increase was meant to cover costs currently paid from the general fund.▶ 2:22:18 in the recordingturn 342 in the transcript ↓
- Several residents testified about unspent city housing funds, a university misconduct investigation, pedestrian safety concerns, and worries about autonomous vehicle companies affecting local drivers.▶ 21:23 in the recordingturn 42 in the transcript ↓
Where the council disagreed
Should the fuel terminal ordinance include language committing the city to shift portland clean energy fund dollars toward transportation emissions work?
- One positionSome members supported adding the commitment, saying it builds a public record and pushes an honest conversation about transportation emissions into city planning.▶ 1:29:01 in the recordingturn 195 in the transcript ↓
- Another positionOther members opposed it, saying the commitment was too prescriptive and premature, and that funding decisions belonged in the separate climate investment plan process.▶ 1:27:40 in the recordingturn 193 in the transcript ↓
Should the council approve the updated fire fee schedule given concerns about timing and impact on small businesses?
- One positionSome members argued the fee update was necessary now to avoid leaving a large unfunded gap in the fire bureau's budget.▶ 2:46:03 in the recordingturn 412 in the transcript ↓
- Another positionOther members raised concern that the increases were too steep at once and would fall disproportionately on small and micro businesses.▶ 2:22:18 in the recordingturn 342 in the transcript ↓
Roll-call votes from this session date
None published yet. Votes from this session appear in the vote ledger once verified; this summary never states a vote result.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions and not yet reviewed by the editor . It describes the discussion only. Each point links to the transcript turn it rests on, and a program checked that the words it relied on are in that turn; the wording of the point is the draft's own. Positions are given without names because captions do not show who is speaking — follow a link to see for yourself. Captions contain errors.
Procedural markers in this session
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0 Keelan, this council president, this is Loretta. I'm online.
1 Am I saw online this is councilor Avalos.
2 Good morning. I'm calling to order the Wednesday, October 7th meeting of the Portland city council. Keelan can we please call the roll?
3 Good morning clerk.
4 Green here.
5 Zimmerman.
6 Avalos present online.
7 Smith here.
8 Kanal here.
Procedural episode · turns 9–17
Parliamentary activity detected in this stretch (see the markers above). An editor-reviewed analysis has not been published for this episode yet.
9 Pirtle-guiney here. Hello.
10 Ryan. Koyama Lane here.
11 Morillo here.
12 Novick here.
13 Dunphy here. And can we please read the rules of decorum for the chamber?
14 Good morning. Welcome to the Portland city council. To testify before council in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the council agenda at www.Portland.gov/council. Backslash agenda information on engaging with council can be found on the council clerk's web page. Individuals may testify for three minutes unless the presiding officer states. Otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over. Presiding officer preserves order disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up, or interrupting others testimony or council deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, council may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered when testifying. State your name for the record. Your address is not necessary if you're a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifier should unmute themselves when the council clerk calls your name. Thank you.
15 Thank you very much, colleagues. The first item on our agenda, as always, is approval of today's agenda. May I have unanimous consent to approve the agenda? Yes. Fantastic. Seeing no objections, the agenda is approved. Keelan, can we please call public communications?
16 First up this morning, we have addie Smith.
17 Hey, can I go last?
18 Sure.
19 Thank you.
20 Next up, let's see here. We have been in hotel.
21 Good morning. Welcome as always. Please state your name for the record. You're welcome to share your pronouns. And you have three minutes.
22 Good morning, I am. Ben imhotep ale. My domicile is in district four. And what I witness is unfair to you and the people of Portland. I once implored this council to do as councilor Zimmerman warned, and utilize that blunt instrument. I see the difficulty faced by your offices. It's abhorrent. There is a solution. What that solution is, I'm unsure. I'm a civilian. I'm not a politician. I don't know what solutions would be politically appropriate as a civilian. I know what civil actions lead to solutions, and I have spoken of those before. It's three simple words transparency, accountability, and diligence. Not unilaterally either. As a wide open two Lane highway with no road rules and no collisions, I see 12 powerful beings being hamstrung by fitocracy. Use your power to free yourselves from its fetters, not to place your selves tighter into them. You have the power. You are the legislative branch. Your power is the pen, not the purse. Your pen creates ordinance, code, statute and policy. Will your pen, with the might of a branch whose necessity is standard for the existence of the tree that is known as the municipality of Portland? There is no reason for a single one of you to feel compelled to sign your yes vote to anything that has even an inkling of an unanswered question in your mind. That won't slow bureaucratic process. It'll filter out the bs, maybe slowly at first, but eventually they'll know how to approach this city's team of elected stewards, whose pen strikes with unanimous potency. Accord leads to efficiency. Well to a three are not present at the moment. So right now I see nine wonderful beings in a semi-circle who can reach a an accord level that makes Portland one of the most efficient cities in America. I'll leave you with another quote from atlas shrugged. Do not let your fire go out. Spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the approximate. The. Not quite. The. Not yet. The. Not at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for a life you deserved, but have never been able to achieve, I will. That the spark that I see in you outshines the sun. Thank you and I love you all unconditionally.
23 Thank you so much for being here.
24 Next up we have john hollister.
25 Good morning. Come on up.
26 That was awesome. Can you hang around for a minute? I'd love to talk to you.
27 My name is john hollister. I'm from district four. I have never been more hopeful and more excited about this upcoming election. I went to a district four debate last night and. I have never been more impressed with councilman Zimmerman than I saw last night. The amount of legislation, the amount of expertise you brought to this office is, is stunning and commendable, and it is the go forward type of leadership that we need. You must win on November 3rd. Council person Clark, I know why you received the most votes in every precinct in 2024. Because you are outstanding. You are awesome. You are leadership. You listen. You are able to represent a a contingency of people like people that drive cars or how you manage to get things through from transportation is masterful. You must win on November 3rd, Mitch Green oh, excuse me. Councilor Green. Thank you for your service and for just letting us know how far off track we've gotten. And you need to go. Yeah,
28 Were. So the good thing is, when you're gone, there is a another individual that represents a very unique set of people, underserved people. You talk about this this being the place of underserved. You talk about rent control. You talk about all these things, the what we need the most underserved people are the 35% of the people that are unsheltered on the street, that have addiction issues and mental health issues. There is only one person on the ballot that has experience beyond the entire council of that, and that is eli arnold. He has put more people into more people on the street, into shelters, into permanent housing. He has put more people he understands the deflection center. He understands why it is successful and why it has failed miserably. He understands everything. He knows the the lack of connection of services. So as far as getting the full breadth of people in district four to be represented fairly and all the way across, it is councilman Clark, it is councilman Zimmerman and new councilman Lists all. Welcome him, eli arnold. Thank you.
29 Next up we have david gwyther.
30 Good morning.
31 Here. To state your name for the record. You're welcome to share your pronouns if you'd like. And you have three minutes.
32 Hi, my name is david gwyther. I'm with radio cab and my pronouns are he, etc. Waymo, as we have heard in the past, is sort of a excuse me, is where two very controversial current technologies, ai and data centers converge. They need both to operate. They don't keep all the data they need in the cars, and they need ai to operate them. Waymo has raised over $30 billion at a valuation of $126 billion. To give you some idea of how much money that is, that's the evaluation. A little under that is the evaluation of merging paramount and warner brothers. So it's mega money. And they did this by offering a memorandum that explained to the investors, which were other group of tech bros, that they will be able to build this huge company and take money out of every entity that they operate in. Coming back to the parent company now, there's this memo could be asked for by PBOT. I hope the city council committee in charge could also get a copy of this memo. I've tried to get a copy of it. It's very vague. Incidentally, it doesn't even mention waymo. It mentions a alternative a autonomous vehicle company and somebody who will be managing this investment. There's over 12,000 permit holders for ground transportation, private for hire permit holders. And if this is allowed to go forward, there's going to be created a lot of collateral damage. Unfortunately, we've seen sort of a canary in a coal mine. When a lyft driver who was laid off shot another lyft driver recently who was his friend, unquote, leaving six children. And that particular incident was hushed up amazingly well, even better than the uber driver that shot people downtown. The pressure that's on a lot of individuals and the whole community right now keeps growing. There's schools closing, etc. Now professional drivers, especially radio cab drivers, have a lot more training than the average person and have a much better safety record than waymo will mention. We have 3 to 6 hours yearly of defensive drivers and first aid training. Our cabs are inspected twice, once by the company, once by the city. Just got through during our city one. And thank you very much.
33 Thank you very much for being here today.
34 Next up we have kenny gonzalez.
35 Good morning.
36 Good morning. My name is kenny r gonzalez. And thank you for the time I was given to speak and hear me out. I am concerned of mine and others life. Walking, walking through the streets, getting from point a to point b. In 2007, I was hit by a car that had gave me traumatic brain injury. The locked cameras are not programed in the right way, but we do need them that way. We. That way we are able to detect vehicles and pedestrians doing wrong. I will put this out there that I have a criminal record. We should be careful on how we leave a system behind that affects the next generation. We need to hit industries and corporations much harder, with fines and better oversight. Let's keep in mind that the policies we are making should not be for us, but our kids and their kids. It's a cycle within the format of the system we are making for the future generations. I would like to hear some of your ideas on how we will get started on this process. And that would be all. Thank you.
37 Thank you very much. Thanks for being here today.
38 Addie Smith.
39 All right.
40 One second, y'all. Can you hear me okay.
41 Yep. Go ahead.
42 Good morning. My name is andy Smith. Today is Wednesday, October 7th, 2026. I'm speaking before the Portland city council. The city council announced earlier this year that it had over $106 million in unspent housing funds, yet only provided $5 million towards rental assistance. Oregon is third in the nation in unemployment. The Portland housing bureau has been led by michael buonocore as bureau director for over four years, and he did not develop and implement a division in the bureau to provide rental assistance to portlanders. Instead, the city council gave $5 million to Multnomah county, and that $5 million is now unaccounted for. Sorry. Firstly, the money was not distributed to the five housing organizations. These council members said it would be. Multnomah county did not provide those funds to the inner star el programa hispano irco latino network, nia and sdi. What Multnomah county does is receive the rental assistance information from these organizations and cuts the checks for them. Rachel pearl also told me that $500,000 of that 5 million is, quote, dedicated to staffing and administration, end quote. Which staffing and administration? Multnomah county while the county staff being paid twice. How is this even possible? Again, the county isn't disbursing the funds you provided to them to these organizations. The county is disbursing the funds themselves. So why are they paying themselves to disburse the funds? Next, I want to talk about Portland state university. Like cornell university, they did not investigate allegations of a crime. Cornell university senior dean of student conduct christina liang said, quote, 2024 was one of the most challenging years of my career and it helped me learn that caring less is okay, end quote. At Portland state university, campus officer hailey wright salinas testified to a grand jury that she had no intentions of investigating these allegations of this crime. She knew she had her purse. That was her. Those were her exact words to a grand jury and the grand jury foreperson. Her name is sara collins, indicted a young black man who asked a woman to leave his dorm. How many times have we seen a a situation play out against a black man? Black men and men in general have the right to ask a woman to leave without her going and lying to the first police officer they can find. After coming and going all day to this man's dorm, this woman, when he asked her to leave, finds hayley wright salinas and says, oh, hey, by the way, he did eight counts of these charges against me. And my vote just might sway in the favor of people you guys don't like. Because I am sick of the racism in Portland, Oregon, in Oregon in general.
43 Thank you very much for being here today.
44 That completes communications.
45 Thank you very much, everybody. Colleagues. Next on our agenda is the presidential update. While we do not have a pre gavel, obviously, since we're in the middle of the meeting here, I am going to be reading a proclamation acknowledging indigenous peoples day. So very briefly, whereas the city of Portland recognizes that indigenous peoples have inhabited the lands known as the americas since time immemorial. And whereas, the city of Portland is situated at the confluence of the Willamette and columbia rivers in an area with rich history of indigenous villages, trade routes, enduring and enduring cultural relationships to the land that long predate the arrival and westward expansion of european and American settlers. And whereas indigenous peoples continue to advocate for their communities, cultures, ways of life and well-being on the land and water, whose importance and role in life, and whose importance and role in sustaining their peoples continue their peoples, continues from beyond living memory and across generations. And whereas, the city of Portland is committed to integrating indigenous knowledge and perspectives into city practices and policies to address institutional racism and the enduring impacts of policies and actions that have contributed to to disproportionate outcomes for indigenous peoples in health, education and economic mobility. And whereas, the city of portland's tribal tribal government relations program supports and facilitates meaningful consultation with regional tribes to strengthen understanding of and preserve the cultures, histories, and enduring relationships to land rooted in this region. And whereas, the city of Portland declares the second Monday of October as indigenous peoples day and. Whereas, indigenous peoples day provides an opportunity for the city of Portland to recognize and honor the history, cultures, contributions and contemporary presence of indigenous peoples while reaffirming the city's commitment to meaningful government to government relationship and collaboration with tribal nations. And whereas, indigenous peoples day 2026 provides an opportunity for the city of Portland to reaffirm its commitment to amplifying the voices and visibility of indigenous peoples throughout city policies, practices, advocacy, and investments, creating opportunities for meaningful collaboration with indigenous communities on city initiatives, and honoring the history, cultures, and contributions of indigenous peoples day to indigenous peoples, to this nation. Now, therefore, I, keith wilson, mayor of the city of Portland, Oregon, the city of roses do hereby proclaim October 12th, 2026 as indigenous peoples day for the city of Portland and hereby encourage all residents, peoples, businesses and community members to join with me in expressing support and celebration of indigenous peoples incredible contributions. Thank you colleagues. Can we please call item number four.
46 Document 2026-35 4th October 2026. City administrator update.
47 City administrator li, turn it over to you.
48 Thank you, council president, and good morning to our councilors. Thank you for the opportunity to share october's city administrator's report to city council. This month's report is really focused on innovation and collaboration. I would like to highlight just a few key items around these themes. The new Portland performance lab was established in July and is housed in my office. Currently, the team will serve as a central resource for performance management, leveraging data driven practices and guide decision making citywide. And just keep in mind, this is one of the things that we've heard from numerous councilors as it relates to how we're using data to make informed decisions as we're moving forward in program delivery, but also, most importantly in our budgeting process as well. Bts is delivering a project to address pain points in the intake experience for customers. Phase one delivery is targeted for January 2027, with expansion to be embedded in service area teams by spring of 2027. In October, the city is beginning to develop portland's next climate action plan. You'll hear this as well, building on existing work including city climate change risk assessment, c40 frameworks and the climate justice audit response. A public draft is expected by the end of 2027, and we have numerous staff from across the city that is working on this project as well. I'm also pleased to share that Portland parks and recreation volunteers contribute over 485,000 hours across parks, programs and community partnerships last year. These efforts are valued around 16.9 million. This also represents an increase of 22.5% from the previous year. This growth reflects stronger collaboration with community partners as well as improved data collection. Just keep in mind, the city alone cannot provide all the services that we have. We have to have strong partnerships from the private sector, our non-profits, and with us to make sure that we're providing a first class city. Last week, we welcomed the city's first ever chief asset manager, officer Clark, I know that's a kudos to you to the city. Emily trent is returning to Portland from her most recent post as acting city manager in tigard. She will be leading efforts to create a strategic, coordinated and systematic approach to managing the city's 80 billion portfolio of physical infrastructure and public assets. She will be at the next public works committee meeting to talk through our asset management plan and framework. Also, I want to share my regular weekly federal immigration enforcement update. There are reports of an uptick in detentions in the Portland metro area, including ten yesterday. Three of those were in the city of Portland itself. Advocates are currently calling it a confirmed surge and are still assessing the situation. Recent dhs statements, along with the one year anniversary of the last major federal enforcement surge in Oregon, are adding to community concern of more surges. For the month of September, perc reported 76 detentions, continuing a four month trend roughly 70 to 90 monthly detentions, compared with 15 to 30 detentions per month earlier. Earlier in the year, the immigrant affairs league continues to finalize the city's employee training and resource for interacting with federal immigration enforcement, along with outreach events to provide community members with know your rights, information and resources. Lastly, I want to note that we got a request for an additional appendix last month listing bids and solicitations, which will be able to include in november's report moving forward. Please look forward for that. In that monthly report from the c. A. As always, I'm incredibly proud of the work of the city from the previous month and what we're doing currently. The leadership team is here to answer any questions that you may have at this time.
49 Thank you very much, city administrator lee. Colleagues, feel free to jump into the queue with any questions. We'll start with councilor Morillo.
50 Thank you, council president. Thanks for those updates. See, lee and I, yeah, have been running into some of the immigration attorneys, and they're struggling to get access to their clients right now. So it's definitely an issue that's I'm seeing ramp up right now and I'm keeping an eye on the other thing. I had a question on that wasn't in your report, but I'm just flagging for future reports is do we know when the procurement disparity study is going to be done?
51 Yes.
52 We just if I can get my mic back on, we just had a conversation. Might ask tracy warren to come and speak to that. Oh thank you.
53 Thank you. City administrator. For the record, tracy warren, deputy city administrator for city operations. I had a recent conversation with our procurement office. We've received some preliminary information that we're reviewing. We are hoping to finalize sometime mid November, late November.
54 Okay. That's great. Thanks. I hope that when we get that, it would be great to have a summary of that in your report as well. I had some staff that were able to attend the community economic coalition for minority chambers of commerce, and that was something that they brought up wanting to have more information. So I'd love to see some of that in the future. But thank you.
55 Thank you, councilor Murillo, vice president Clark.
56 Thank you, council president, great report. Really appreciate reading all different aspects, but I have a question about the performance lab. Can you just maybe talk a little bit more about how you decide where to focus the effort, or how to prioritize where to focus the effort?
57 What I have requested of the performance lab is really working with all bureaus to really come up with 3 to 5 performance measures that really tell the story of how their overall bureaus reporting, what we're really trying to push bureaus in this organization to is really an outcome based organization and really trying to determine what are the outcomes that we're trying to deliver upon, and how are we doing that as a city? We also have our executive leadership dashboard that we are creating as well, to really look at those high level performance indicators that are really telling the story, how we're performing as a city, and we will be using that data to really try to gauge overall objectives, goals, and how we're achieving those things in the long term strategy. I think as we build towards our strategic planning process, this will become even a bigger endeavor because we will be looking at performance measures that really show us, are we achieving the goals and objectives within our strategic plan strategy? We're just starting the beginning stages of the internal work that needs to be done for the city. So we're not just counting widgets, but we're actually looking at gauging our overall performance as a city and how we're meeting the needs of our end users, but also all portlanders who are using our services.
58 I really appreciate that. I'm just wondering, to what point will you be sharing that or involving the council in that, particularly those of us that have a committee that covers a variety of bureaus?
59 Great question. I think as we were looking at rolling this out, we want to really start having a lot of these conversations as we start having the budget conversation. You know, we'll be starting earlier this year in those conversations to really talk through some of the matrix from a performance standpoint, as we have different bureaus coming in and talking to council, we want to make sure that's a component of that conversation.
60 Thank you so much.
61 Thank you. Vice president Clark councilor Kanal.
62 Council president. Good morning. Thanks for being here. So I'll start with the ehr update. I really appreciate this. And shout out to sena and danielle. I saw that down below. I wanted to ask about the compliance versus the more aspirational aspects of oers charge. This section focuses a lot on compliance and particularly on the ADA, but not exclusively, and just wanted to to ask about this has been a conversation kind of off and on, but we haven't heard any updates in terms of. Adaptations to the to the focus of ehr and just trying to understand if we're going to still be trying to make things better if we've moved exclusively into a compliance mindset. And I know we brought this up when the kpi conversation during the budget, but we had a new staffer at that point. So yeah.
63 I think we're always, you know, first and foremost, we're always looking at compliance, but having the culture of an organization that's a continuous improvement organization, which we're trying to deliver upon, I think councilor Kanal what you're speaking to really speaks to that endeavor. So I think as we continue to grow from the standpoint of making sure we're hitting our standards of what we need to do from a compliance, we also need to be looking at how we're growing overall as a city and as an operation. But also, how is that being embedded in part of the culture of who we are as a city? And I think that's more of the conversation I think we need to be having. But I would love to entertain some more conversations with you, kind of in our conversations as well, about how we can do that and kind of where you may potentially see some gaps in that as well.
64 Thanks. And could you, since we're on the subject of oer and I mentioned the danielle work, do you know when that the phase of that work related to the mayor's executive order is likely to come to council? Either the update on the part that's not a council decision, but just an update, or the part about code that might require council votes.
65 I'm not sure if we have a date to come back to council, but I believe that's something we can work on. We can work either with one of the committees or the council president, to try to get something on the calendar for us to have that conversation.
66 Yeah, I don't need an exact date. I'm just wondering if are we looking at next year? Kind of.
67 I don't know yet. That's why I say I'm open to have that conversation, to see when we can get on the calendar to actually have that conversation, because I think it is actually a good conversation to have with everyone at the table.
68 Okay. Similar question on the timeline for a different item, there's a mention of pge harberton and the next step being on October 14th, it mentions in there that it might get appealed. Whatever outcome the hearings officer decides on might could appeal to city council. Do you have a rough idea of when that might come back to us?
69 I have a.
70 I can speak to that.
71 Okay. Go ahead.
72 So Oregon land use law requires that we make a decision within 120 days, unless the applicant signs a waiver. Pge has not signed a waiver. So my understanding is the 120th day is actually December 31st. So unless pge signs a waiver, it will be sometime in December.
73 Great. Thank you for that. The p5. Rfp went out and I just wanted and I know there's been some conversation with behind the scenes, but I don't know that the the answer myself was internal operation of p5 ever considered before an RFP went out?
74 Yes. It was. We did convene a staff from hr. It even labor relations in that conversation to really look at the costs associated with bringing in those union groups into the city as part of our operational piece of it. We did see through that analysis an increase, a significant increase in operational costs of the city to be able to do that. And we even questioned some of the subject matter expertise that we had to actually manage that operation with the time frame that we had from the standpoint of when metro was ending their portion of this agreement and it transitioning over to the city, it still is an option for us to have to consider, though. Councilor if we're not successful, an RFP process and rolling it out and finding a bidder. But it's something that we're constantly having the conversation right now about what that would look like if we're not successful in RFP process.
75 Okay, that that makes sense. Thank you. So two comments, and then I'll close out a question. I'll get back in the queue later, but I appreciate the shout outs to chat for their regular collaboration with beyonce house and psr for the award from the veterans affairs, the us department of veterans affairs would love to get some sort of update. I imagine it'll be coming to the to the public works committee with relation to the vision zero stats showing a return to 2024 levels, and to get an opportunity to have some time there. This may be more of a request for chair Clark. Sorry. And to to really get a chance to assess and dig into the why. And then I'll mention just on page 18, I really appreciate that the budget note tracker remains. I still am seeing two of my budget notes from 2526 Kanal eight and Kanal 13 marked as complete when they were not. So I brought this up a couple times, and I'd just like to see at least an acknowledgment of that before I dig into the why on it. One is the deputy director and director classifications piece, which I know got rolled into a process that hasn't really gotten underway yet, so it can't possibly be complete. That's Kanal eight. Kanal 13 is the package delivery fee, which seems to have been subsumed into a broader conversation that resulted in the a report on tough and the sdr proposals. But I still haven't gotten the specifics on the package delivery fee piece, and I will get back in the queue for more. But thank you, council president.
76 Thank you. Councilor Kanal. Councilor Ryan.
77 Thank you, council president and thank you, kelly. I wanted to start by looking at the pause on prosper portland's vacant storefront grants due to high demand. Of course, I'm a little attached to that, so I'm going to try to keep monitoring that closely. Who is the staff lead at prosper Portland on that program?
78 I'm not sure who the staff lead is on it. I don't know if dca oliveira knows exactly. We can probably follow up with you with that information.
79 That'd be great. And then I want to just mention that I'll be looking at how we're measuring success for that, and also what distinguishes a winning application from another. I knew there would be high demand for this, or I wouldn't have spent so much time on it. So I'm pleased to be affirmed by that. And I think we're on the right track. So thank you. I also wanted to lift something else. Our office heard cats in the city to get to the bottom of the lingering safety concerns at the intersection of interstate and going specifically the going street bridge, where the public hasn't felt safe to use that bridge without escorts for some time. And I'm really pleased to say that last week there was a meeting held, and captain burley and sergeant namba from Portland police bureau were there. Mark williams from PBOT and anne hill and elizabeth o'malley from pmo. And just because anytime I've been able to see across cross collaboration of city leaders, focus on focusing on something that the public has been screaming about for some time, you start to actually see action. And so I got a report from someone I've known for most of my life, and she said she lives right at the end of that bridge, and she hasn't seen a young child navigate that bridge for years. And so she like, blew up my phone saying that she saw a child without an adult escort using the bridge at the end of last week. Now we just have to stay on it. And so I just wanted to lift that and say thank you for that response. And we'll of course, stay on it and I'll keep my other colleagues in d2, I'm sure, also care about this issue. Thanks so much.
80 Thank you, councilor Ryan. Councilor Green.
81 Thank you, council president. Thank you, mr. Lee, for the report. I've got I've just got a few questions about the appendix d. I appreciate the procurement reports. I think just just one stylistic note. I think the image that's been pasted in is truncated, and it looks like $20,000 over 30 days, but I think that's very clearly $20 million. So just maybe, maybe check that going forward. But but I do want to get into a substantive question, which is really sort of I see a number of what look like change orders. And in particular, I'm going to point to amendment three to price agreement. You know, there's a long string of numbers, but it's a it's a Portland water bureau contractor, cmt s llc, and three amendments seem to suggest that maybe there's three change orders. And then this project is getting more expensive. And I think I'd like to get a handle on. When we put out a bid for work at x dollar budget, how can we understand what the final expenditure is because of the nature of these change orders? I think that's going to be really helpful for us to understand how we deal with our cost control over time, and how we approach external contracting more broadly. I understand sometimes it's appropriate to do it, and sometimes it saves the city money. But I do worry that there's a number of pieces here that if you don't really know what to look at and you know what, what the nature of it is, and you know, we can, we can get projects that balloon out and cost. So that's a, I don't know if you have an answer right now. Probably not.
82 But if my memory serves me correctly and we'll follow up. But I believe with these change orders are related to the bull run project. If that's correct, they are related to the bull run project. These change orders were the actual work that council had already approved when we increased the budget for bull run. These are just the change orders for the work to get those projects completed that were associated with the actual appropriation. That council already changed. But I'll follow up in detail to make sure the ones that you're referring to are related to the bull run project.
83 That would be really helpful. And that would make sense here, given the scale I do. That actually reminds me. So there's been some conversation about the oversight advisory body that wasn't set up in the past. It's coming. I would think that that that body really should be able to communicate to the public and council what these change orders are, what's going on, what's driving the cost, because I mean, council did approve the budget increase, but I want to make sure we're not approving another budget increase.
84 You and I both.
85 Okay. So thank you for that. And then there's another one looks like bts. And it's like there's three different price agreements for Green street repair. I don't know if that's the, the name of a street or if it's like a sort of a carbon sink type of, I don't know, but I'm curious why there's three different awards for the same dollar amount.
86 We'll follow up with you on that one. Okay. Definitely.
87 And then the last one is again, I see nearly $3 million award for some off the shelf software and related services. So it's a lot of money. And I know that there's efforts to sort of rein in our overall bts costs, but really trying to understand where that is in scale, I think it would be helpful.
88 Well, add that to the list to to follow up on.
89 All right. Thanks.
90 Thank you, councilor Green. Councilor Zimmerman.
91 Thank you. I was looking through a report and I missed the name. You mentioned somebody coming over from the city of tigard for, I think you said public works.
92 Yes, emily.
93 Emily, does emily have a great. Okay. And she's going to be the. Can you say the position again.
94 Chief asset officer?
95 Great. Thank you for that. As a former deputy city manager over there, I'm sure she's coming with great pedigree. That's awesome. The I wanted to heap some praise on the city and on public works. Councilor clarke and I this weekend were able to join the businesses around harvey milk and 12th avenue and the opening of pride plaza and the city's help in that area has just been really commendable, and it's been a rough few years. We've opened, we've closed, we've cleaned up, we've repainted. Right. It's it's been a lot going on and it's a historic area for my community. And so dca williams was there. So it was great to have her and great to have other members of the PBOT team there. And it was really a special event. So I just wanted to say thank you for that. And these things take a lot of care and feeding to make them successful when we do do them. So appreciate that. And then I have one request, and it's just for a consideration of how we do future work is having come from the world of of, you know, the council manager form of government. I'm fairly used to a council will pass a resolution requesting that the city administrator and of course, the rest of the city work on an ordinance. For instance. We're in an interesting practice here. We haven't really done that. And the reason most cities have that is it's kind of a backstop for how much work will a bureau or other offices do on behalf of a councilor, an individual councilor, before it takes the body saying, we want to work on this? What's happening now is that individual councilors work a lot on ordinances, and sometimes that's with our legal department. And I think that's very much within the bounds, right? There's almost no end to that. But when that work involves significant amount of work with a department, most cities have a policy or at least a guiding principle for where do we cross the threshold into a new assignment of work? And that threshold requires a resolution by the city council. We haven't gotten that yet. And I think as you come up on the end of your first year and you've got a sense for like how work happens here, I hope that will be one of the recommendations as we head into the new year for us. Okay. We see you want to work on this, we can give you a few guiding points, but to, to, for me to reallocate a bureau to work on a new ordinance, it's going to take a resolution by council to do that. I'd like to see something come. If you think that that would be a responsible manner in the future, I think it will help us kind of clear up some of the confusion that I experienced, and I think others maybe do, of bureaus spending time on councilor Projects, whether they be holistic projects or pet projects. And I think that that's an important kind of test point for us. So I do appreciate that it doesn't prevent councilors from bringing anything they want, but it does protect city services and city time. And I think that your professionalism can bring some thought around that it's new for the city of Portland, and everybody's still trying to figure it out. Thank you, thank you.
96 Thank you, councilor Zimmerman. Councilor Smith.
97 Thank you, council president. Thank you, city administrator lee, for your report. I want to go back to something you said you were bringing into your office. It was a new portlanders who what I'm trying to figure out what is the difference between that new person that you're bringing into your office and our immigration and what brenda does.
98 Brenda, is that person that came from the mayor's office to my office.
99 Okay. So that's in. Okay. You're talking about brenda, correct? Okay. I was like, who is that? What is how is that going to jive with brenda? So the other question I have for you is, what about the unspent art funds? Have we decided what we're going to do with that yet?
100 I don't believe so.
101 $9 million or something like that.
102 I'd have to take a look at it and see. Let me follow up on that one, councilor, and then I can report back out on it.
103 Okay, perfect. Thank you.
104 Thank you, councilor Smith. Councilor Kanal.
105 Thank you, council president. I have three other questions. So in appendix f, there's a note about, you know, the contract expiration date. One of the ones, the only one that I think is noted for 2026 is December 15th. The rapid response bioclean contract is up. This is a topic of of pretty high public interest around the work of Portland solutions, things like that. And I'm curious as to what the plan is. And this is sort of a two parter, what the plan is for council input engagement. And separately, what's the plan for public input and or engagement as it relates to the idea of, do we need this work to be the way it is, or should it change in some way? And then separately, and I think it may be less in the latter, who the contractor should be, how does that work? Is there a plan for how to. How to consider this as part of the conversation about renewal?
106 There may be one, but I'm just not aware of it. I'd have to follow up with our Portland solution staff to kind of verify what that is. And with the expiration of that contract being really right around the corner, what's the plan? Because typically when contracts are like that are around the corner for expiration, we already have an RFP already in the process to either extension or extended or we're no longer doing that service. So let me follow up with that staff and then have a conversation after that.
107 And I don't mean to imply that there should be a change to anything. I just want to make sure that that's something that's evaluated as opposed to just assumed. Gotcha. With relation to the claims, I have a lot that I'm interested in getting more info on. I really appreciate how much is in there. There's a couple questions, like in the middle of page 28, there's an item marked as the office of the city attorney. We've had a couple in the past where it was marked as either the mayor, council or city attorney when it didn't necessarily occur there, but they're just the ones who handled it or ended up sort of managing it. And in that particular case, I'm curious about it. There's some last line of page 28 has a refusal to approve permits, violates their constitutional rights allegation. That's marked as claim denied. And I think there's there's some interest there a couple on allegations of injuries sitting in the back of pb vehicles. I want to follow up on all of those, but I think the one that I wanted to ask is about it's on page 32. Near the bottom. There's something marked as the office of budget and finance that says in the description that Portland police failed to cite a driver that damaged the. The claimant's vehicle. And I'm curious because this one resulted in a plaintiff's verdict. Several bicycle crashes have been brought up to us and including here, where the complaint was partially about the fact that there was a collision in the first place where a car struck the person on their bicycle. But the the reason that it was coming to us as a complaint is that there was no citation issued. Okay. And given that there has now been a judgment against us for at least one of those situations, I'm curious if you could follow up and see if there will be any change in practice around the idea of citing drivers who collide with bicyclists, you know, outside of, of.
108 Yeah, yeah. I believe that's something most definitely we can look into and follow up.
109 Thanks. And then the last question, I just wanted to follow up on councilor Clark's original question around the performance lab. It's a big step. I'm really happy that there is a performance office, and I my question was going to be, what are the how are we deciding the metrics given the response there? I really want to push back on the idea that bureaus should be setting their own metrics. I think we need to have this be related to the strategic priority setting of the city, our core values, and all that. When bureaus set their own goals, we end up with sometimes things that council or frankly, just the public believe should be being done. It's fairly obvious which bureau or bureau should be doing it, and then it's not done because that's not a priority of that given bureau director. We also have the possibility of whiplash in the sense that a bureau director could change. And now there's a new set of priorities which has occurred in the past as well. So I just I wanted to kind of dig deeper on how we're going to be establishing kpis. I think that the bureau director's input should be one of several inputs. I think it's a very valid thing to ask for. I just don't want it to be the only thing or the primary thing.
110 Yeah. And I think ultimately we're in this transitional period and during this transitional period, more than likely it would be me kind of making that final decision for the bureaus of kind of what makes sense from a performance measure. And do I see it hitting the mark of really telling the story of the operations and the service delivery that's supposed to take place for that bureau? I think the bigger question is really going to be around that strategic planning process, and the priority setting that council will be setting during that process, and will be coming back to council and saying, hey, these are measures that we think really hit home of telling the story of we're achieving that as a priority for the city. And I think that's the real thing, that we'll be having conversations as we come through the budgeting process, through the budgeting calendar of really having those conversations with council. But a much broader question regarding key performance indicators and performance measures for the city will be done through that strategic planning process. We're just trying to figure out what's the stop gap, because we're still trying to change the culture of the city. The culture of the city has not always been from the standpoint of having these key performance indicators or performance measures, to be able to tell the story of the successes or failures are the opportunities for growth for the city. So I think council is and will be engaged in that conversation, but I'm just trying to get the culture of the organization there to kind of really tell the difference between counting widgets, what are the key performance indicators and what are performance measures, because those are all three different things that tell different stories.
111 So can I just interrupt for a second or just build on what you're saying is, I don't think that our strategic planning process, though, is going to be complete before we start this new budget round. So we're in that transition period, as you said.
112 Yes. And hopefully as we are going through this budgeting process and bureaus will be coming before the council because there'll be a different process than what we did last year. We're trying to get ahead of the curve from the standpoint of having bureaus in the ca report come to council beforehand. So we're starting these conversations a lot earlier than what we did last year. The mayor's proposed budget will still be on that kind of same time frame, but council will be getting some previews into some of the conversations related kind of how our bureau's performing. What are the key things that we're looking at? Hearing those conversations from council as well will kind of help set that tone. We're in this little tricky phase as well, too, because if you remember, last year we had our priority setting conversation. That council went through to kind of really set their priorities. I would have much preferred to have that conversation before we start the budget season. But since we're right in the midst of election season, it wasn't advantageous for us to go ahead and start that conversation. So we'll know which body we have and which body will be setting those priorities. So we'll much prefer to get into these priority setting conversations much earlier in the falls time frame. So as the mayor's guidance to the city is coming out, as we're looking at kind of what are those key outcomes that we're trying to deliver upon, we have the council's priorities that are working in line in conjunction with that. And what are those performance measures? And we can have those conversations with council that we're looking at and evaluating to be able to see how are we hitting the mark or we're not hitting the mark. And that will be a council conversation with us as well. Regarding are these measures really hitting what we are using to be able to gauge our success or our opportunities for growth as a city?
113 Okay. So just to follow up on and clarify that when you're talking about the strategic planning process, that's bigger than just what council did in the beginning of this year, which is a strategic priority setting. And it's a process where, by the way, this was something that kept being brought up by the transition team when we all took office as this thing, it's not written down in the same way that it was presented to us as a big forthcoming plan when the new city administrator got here, obviously a few weeks after that, we extended, you know, the hiring process got pushed from what was planned to be July 1st of 2025 to when it obviously happened in January of 2026. So I'm excited for this. I understand the need to, to move it to a time that makes sense to inform the budget process, but I'm still unclear on sort of who's in the driver's seat on that. And I would love some clarity down the line as to who is leading what part of that work strategy is a legislative directional piece? I think it's pretty clear, you know, in terms of how things are then implemented, that there's an administrative piece. And so this is kind of one of the several places where we're still talking about how broad is is broad enough to be council, how narrow is narrow enough that it has to be administration. And I just love to have that conversation before there's a plan put in place that picks up a place to put that line. Does that make sense?
114 It makes sense. I would say from a best management practice, you typically have your administrative group really lead that process, but you're always seeking council's insight and guidance in that conversation because the staff are the ones or ones that's doing the work every day, all day. But you got to have that input from the city council as it relates to. Is that resonating from a performance standpoint, and is that really hitting home to the constituents that you are representing in the portlanders that you're representing? Do they even understand what that means to them? So I think as we look at kind of performance measures and how we're performing overall as a city, I think the staff have to lead to a certain point, but it has to be some council engagement and input in that to make sure that is resonating or that even hitting the mark on the policy decisions that are being made by council.
115 Okay. So I think that makes sense. I think best practices in other cities are, are very relevant. There's one, there's a, there's a deviation, I think, between sort of the direction that has been desired by the public and the direction, at least in a handful, maybe more of, of bureaus in terms of the direction that's been set, not by the rank and file staff, but by historic leadership. That's mostly not even here anymore. Right. And so I think that the way that that that's not just an assertion, it's backed up by the fact that we changed our whole form of government for a reason. And so I think it makes sense to, to have a greater role for the public's representatives in it. And I would hope that we're not just assuming that piece. My last question is not directly related to the report, but as a sort of adjacent piece to it. And building off the last piece. Do you think it's appropriate for council to be directed to submit public records requests to get information out of the bureaus? This has been something not not for work requests. I recognize what councilor Zimmerman was talking about earlier in that space, but in terms of just understanding, you have a report. Can I have it? Is that something that that you have given direction about to the to the bureaus?
116 There's some conversation that we've been having internally as it relates to the oversight component of what council is providing as it relates to any oversight hearing that may be presenting of how we're capturing that information and how we're tracking the time associated with gathering that information. I think if you're asking for a report as councilors for something that is already been created, no, there shouldn't be any open records requests asked of staff to be able to do that. If you're asking for communication emails, you know, things that we may not have ready. All right. Hand to us, then I think we have to look at what is that process to gather that information and make sure we're getting into council in a timely manner, and that it's not just getting lost in the ether of all the rest of the information that are coming through from the standpoint of requesting for information. So I think it really depends on the context of how that request is coming through and the process. I just had a conversation two weeks ago with my leadership team regarding, hey, we got to figure this out because I didn't, you know, I use councilor Zimmerman in his request for information that came to. I don't like the the fact that we have these things and we don't have a process to really say, hey, I'm not in receipt of this request. And then what is the process to process that? We do have that for open records requests, but we don't have that really for us as an internal use of how we're handling these type of matters. And keep in mind, having 12 councilors can even add even more to that conversation. So I think it's something that I've started the initial conversations with our leadership team saying, hey, we got to figure this process out. I'm not looking for, you know, nitpicking every little thing that council sends out from the standpoint and say, oh, this needs to be an open records request. And I believe we should be able to be responsive because that's the biggest thing. And my values that I'm trying to stress to the city is being responsive to these type of things. We have to figure that out. So I wouldn't say I have my mind made up of what that process is. I think there's different things that are taking place as it relates to oversight that takes place from council and our oversight hearings. And there's also that occasional, hey, do you have a report that was sent out to the city on such and such date that should be able to be responded to in a timely fashion by staff?
117 Yeah. And I guess just to put a one particular finer point, this isn't the only concern, but is the intention to charge us.
118 No.
119 Okay. I think that's important to note, especially with the people in the room right now. I just I'll just end on a comment which is chartered two dash 109. And I'm speaking as the chair of a committee that's referenced here in. Eight of its legislative function. The council or committee of the council duly
120 Authorized by. It may investigate any board or department of the city government and any official acts of the official acts and conduct of any city officer, employee or agent for the purposes of ascertaining facts in connection with such investigation, shall have full power to compel the attendance and testimony of witnesses. And it goes on, but I don't. I think what we've managed to do so far is not get into the really formal things, because we haven't had to, and I've been being stonewalled right now on several things. I've forwarded them to your office. And so I want to get to a place where that's not where we're not having to go to the charter text, but I can tell you how it feels to be told to have to submit public records requests, and it doesn't feel great. So I need to get that on the record during this time, and I appreciate it. Thanks, council president.
121 Thank you. Councilor Kanal councilor Green.
122 In the interest. I'm going to be brief because I think we've spent a lot of time on this item, but I just wanted to flag we follow up this conversation later before the end of the year, that our our contract authorization amount for urban alchemy will be exhausted by the end of fiscal year. So and that's not something that it can just be a city administrator action because there's no budget authority for it beyond this. I just want to put in the record, now that we need to have a conversation as a council, what to expect for the next budget and the year after that with with our temporary alternative shelters, and then also the lift city bike share thing. I'd like to have a conversation about maybe, maybe looking for a different vendor there. Thanks.
123 Thank you, councilor Green, councilor Smith, last word.
124 Thank you.
125 City administrator. I'm looking at your report. And I noticed that prosper Portland has the vacant store storefront grants that Dan Ryan was talking about. And then there's the $100,000 for grocery stores. Now, it is my understanding that and I've called and talked to prosper about this, but I thought that those grants were going to go up to $500,000 for the grocery stores, because don mckeever in our district has been trying to get this. And if I'm not mistaken, they said that they're trying to get $500,000 from the city. And I know he put his application in. So. So are we going above the $100,000 to help with that? Parkrose this is is this the same grant or is it a different grant?
126 Thank you for the question, councilor Donnie oliveira, for the record. So, councilor, what you're referring to is a work that prosper has been engaged in in parkrose, east Portland, related to a particular site that is outside of the grant program that's listed in the city.
127 That's outside the $100,000.
128 Grant is a distinct pathway that we started, actually, before that grant program launched.
129 Okay. So he is still because I was like, if he's going to be reduced to $100,000, he's not going to be able to do it.
130 Yeah. So just to be clear, yeah, different distinct project that is outside of the parameters of the grant program.
131 Okay, perfect. Thank you.
132 And councilor Ryan andrew fitzpatrick is, is the staff person to reach out to.
133 Assuming that.
134 Thank you, councilor Smith. Councilor Kanal one last word.
135 Yeah. Just to flag, there's an urban alchemy related oversight hearing coming up that should be relevant. I hope to the conversation around contract renewal that councilor Green brought up. It's on November 5th. Thanks.
136 Thank you very much. Thank you much, colleagues. Thank you. City administrator lee, can we please move to item number five?
137 Document 2026-312. Add bulk fuel terminal capacity reduction regulations code to reduce critical energy infrastructure hub fuel storage by 2036 in support of hazard mitigation and code. Chapter 17.112.
138 All right, colleagues, this is a continued first reading of our last item of our item from last week, I guess, say, continued council meeting for item 2026-312. The ordinance for the bulk fuel terminal capacity reductions regulations. The legislative record for this ordinance is closed based on council deliberations on possible amendments. Council may decide to reopen the record for oral or written testimony at a future meeting. The purpose of today's meeting is to discuss proposed amendments to this ordinance. As a reminder, last week, council heard and amended the related land use item 2026-311. The recommended draft for cei hub policy project and amendments to the comp plan and title 33. We will return on November 5th to adopt findings. Technical updates. Et cetera. Colleagues, this is the week of the November elections, so please notify council operations if you plan to be absent. The legislative record for 2026-311 is closed for new testimony and will not be considered today. As for the last two weeks, the staff is available to answer questions and has slides running through proposed amendments to help us track what's happening if we need. We are currently in consideration of Novick one regarding a commitment to utilize PCEF funds for transportation purposes. When we concluded last week, we had limited debate to those in the queue and there were two remaining to speak. I am going to now move on. The two in the row that were in queue to speak were councilor Kanal and then councilor Pirtle-guiney. Councilor Kanal.
139 Thank you, council president just pulling up notes here. Sorry. Had the wrong amendment open. Thanks. So we're in debate on Novick one. I appreciate this. We've talked in several committees, I think, at this point about the need to have transportation be a part of the conversation and a bigger one as we've done. So I think there have been a few. This is one of those strange amendments where I have concern about the the specific text, but not the overall direction piece. So I wanted to speak to that. There are three parts of this. Three parts of this amendment. One is that the state legislature is likely to override any draw down requirement. I. I can't support the compliance in advance piece of that. The idea that we're going to just capitulate because we think they might preempt us. Again, I've mentioned that there's data out there showing that when cities act, states become less likely to preempt. And I don't I sort of reject that premise. The second piece is I've been talking about the reduction in demand not being something we directly mirror in here in terms of requiring that a draw down be a mirror to demand. I understand that there are folks who like that, and that's been a conversation. And then the third thing has been raised already around whether or not we should direct the PCEF committee in here. So those are my concerns with the text. Having said all of that, I am actually very interested in this. And when it came up in the climate investment plan amendment conversation, to have transportation be a bigger part of this, of, of what we spend piece of dollars on. I'm very supportive of that. And I continue to be. And while I have the floor, I'll take the second to give a pipe dream that we give some some money from PCEF to TriMet for ongoing operations as matching funds based upon increases from their highest budget. And as a condition of that, we pursue an iga where at least one of the members of the board is appointed by the city. I think we've had a lot of concern raised with TriMet around their inability to appoint people who are even TriMet users. I think that was widely reported that five of the seven members a couple years ago had not swiped their hop card in the last year. I think having some direct tie to it will be helpful for us, especially if we're going to be putting in ongoing dollars. I also think that there's been conversation that councilor Novick has raised about some of the one off capital contributions we could give from, from PCEF to to TriMet for, for one time usage. I do want to work through the committee to do that. I that's the piece to me. That's that's giving me the most pause here is the idea of sort of putting our thumb on the scale. I recognize it's not written as a as a requirement, and I appreciate that piece a lot. But that's sort of where I'm coming from on this one. And I'm looking forward to hearing what colleagues have to say.
140 Thank you. Councilor Kanal. Councilor. Pirtle-guiney.
141 Thank you, council president. I don't have my notes about what I was going to say as organized as councilor Kanal did, but I believe I was in the queue just to make clear that while I can't support language that creates a minimum, I do think it is important for us to be moving toward higher investments in transportation infrastructure. I think there's a lot of ways we could be investing in decarbonizing our transportation system that we are not currently. And I had mentioned last week and will reiterate now that if the. If the sponsor of this amendment were interested in language that was less specific about meeting a 40% target and more in line with the language that I believe I read last week that our investments in transportation are in line with the 40% emissions coming from the transportation sector, and that we increase the percent of Portland clean energy fund dollars spent on transportation measures that that's something I would certainly be able to support, either in this legislation or as a standalone policy. Thank you, council president.
142 Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney, councilors Novick and Smith. I have limited debate to those who were previously in the queue, but as a courtesy, I'll extend a quick comment to each of you. Councilor Novick and councilor Smith and then we will move to a vote.
143 Thank you, mr. President. First of all, I really appreciate councilor Kanal remarks. I just wanted to say that although I wrote the language about the legislature will preempt us in the actual amendment language. I also made clear last week the other point that I don't know that we would want to cause a fuel crisis and soaring gas prices by imposing a draw down. If we haven't given the people of Portland more opportunities to not buy gas by investing in transit and biking and walking infrastructure and electric car infrastructure. Also, in response to what councilor Pirtle-guiney just said, she did share some language with me last week, which I'd be willing to adopt if you if the president allowed us to sort of a substitute amendment, partly because I'd like to get at least one more vote, and partly because I'm always more comfortable working as part of a vast Jewish conspiracy than working alone.
144 Councilor if you would like to substitute the language on it, do you have it reduced to writing? At this point?
145 I believe I reduced it to writing last week, and if you give me about two minutes, I can find it maybe less.
146 I would be happy to allow councilor Novick to substitute the language. And. Councilor Smith, did you have a okay councilor Kanal, are you back in the queue? Is it okay?
147 Council president, I'm sending this to both you and councilor Novick right now.
148 Thank you.
149 You all can determine who else it needs to go to.
150 Okay.
151 Thank you, councilor Novick. Is this language sufficient for you?
152 I haven't seen it yet.
153 Okay. It just came through on a team's message.
154 It's a team's. I hate teams.
155 I'm sorry, councilor, it was the fastest way to get it to the two of you.
156 Let's see. I still going to Steve. It's okay. I'll second that. Steve.
157 Councilor, would you like me to send it to your email as well?
158 Actually, that.
159 I'm not that incompetent just to just greatly incompetent. All right, so the language that councilor Pirtle-guiney has just sent over is the council recognizes that unless there is an actual reduction in demand for liquid fuel, the state legislature is likely to override any drawdown requirement before that requirement becomes effective. Therefore, it is incumbent on the city to do what it can to reduce demand. Accordingly, council expresses our commitment to work with the pcf committee and other stakeholders to ensure that in the next climate investment plan, we bring our investments in transportation more in line with the 40% of emissions coming from the transportation sector and increase the percent of Portland clean energy fund dollars spent on transportation measures to promote transit, biking, walking, transition to electric cars, and the reduction of diesel emissions. I can support that. And now let's see. Now we need to figure out how to get that language to the clerk.
160 I have forwarded the the language to the clerk. Are we what's the best procedure? I mean, procedurally, do we withdraw the amendment and reintroduce this? Okay. Councilor Novick would you withdraw and then reintroduce?
161 I hereby withdraw and reintroduce.
162 Okay. We're going to call it Novick two. Now.
163 That was the second.
164 And is there a second?
165 Second, counselor?
166 Second? Oh, clerk did already. That's fine.
167 Really quickly. There was already a Novick two and three. So we should do this.
168 We'll call it Novick four. Novick four. Okay.
169 And then I'm sorry, who.
170 Is the vice president? Clerk seconds.
171 Great.
172 Thank you. Okay. Councilor Avalos, I'm happy to.
173 I guess I just wanted to see where's the language? Where am I looking for it? Is it in our email? Is it?
174 I will go ahead and email it around to everybody right now. Just. Sorry. Okay. Just hit send. I'll give colleagues a second to read this so we can know what we're actually going to vote on. Councilor. Morillo.
175 Are we willing to remove the state legislature as likely to override any draw down requirement portion of this?
176 Councilor. Novick.
177 I'm actually depending on the language. I'm open to that. If we said something like the council recognizes that. An actual reduction for liquid fuel is a logical precondition for a drawdown requirement or something like that.
178 Again, we will need that. I mean, reduced to writing, but open to it. And we do.
179 With councilor Aye, Morillo. Would that language be acceptable?
180 Yeah, I think that would be better.
181 All right. Can somebody who's better at teams, etc. Than me say the council recognizes that an actual reduction in demand for liquid fuel is a logical precondition for a drawdown requirement to become effective.
182 Okay. Councilor Morillo. Due to further.
183 No. If it's edited that way, I would feel more comfortable with it, is what I'm saying. Okay.
184 Thank you. We will get that additional language circulated. Councilor Green.
185 Yeah, I, I had the same concern and I think councilor Novick suggestion there satisfies my complaint. I don't really like putting into our ordinances that we think the state legislature is going to preempt us. So and then I think softening the percentage that goes into the pcf piece is, is fine. I do think that we need to actively lead a conversation around increasing decarbonization of transportation and pcf, so I can support this amendment if provided his language gets in there. And that's what Novick five now is that is that.
186 We're going to our our attorneys are going to just revise the language on Novick four.
187 Okay.
188 All right. So the language has been revised to that. We will share that around. Councilor Koyama Lane.
189 Yeah, I continue to appreciate councilor Novick dedication to this, and I like to see councilor Novick and councilor Pirtle-guiney working together and compromising. I was when I first saw it, I was like, but I tried to compromise with you first, but I understand why you went with councilor Pirtle-guiney because I feel more comfortable. I don't I'm not convinced that this is the right place for this to be making this commitment and to be naming pcf. And so I feel more comfortable. And I had talked to a couple community members that, you know, originally worked on the original pcf ballot measure and the language that that we talked more about was just expressing commitment to incorporate strategies to reduce the demand for fossil fuels and transportation across its climate planning and operations, and increased transportation measures to promote transit, biking, walking, transition to electric cars, reduction of diesel emissions. And so I can't support this because it is I don't feel like this is quite the right place for this. And it is signaling still that there is a commitment. I think this is not the right place, and we have a chance to be working on the next cip. Community groups are excited for us to be coming to the table and be part of that process earlier on, and I think that's a better place to be. Specifically working on pcf.
190 Thank you. Councilor. Koyama Lane. Councilor Kanal.
191 Thank you. I just want to note this, I appreciate that. Councilor. Pirtle-guiney proposal kind of addresses the third sentence and the concerns I have there. And it sounds like the the language from councilor Morillo will address the first I. I still am concerned about the idea of it being a logical precondition that linkage to me. I understand that other people make it, I don't. So and that's not to say we should, you know, create shortages. But the idea that we're we're the, the precondition piece implies that we're going to have to reduce demand. See that? And then only then are we allowed to have the safety needs met that are that are achieved by drawdown. So that to me is where I'm still. Getting a lot of pause on this particular one, although I do recognize there's been significant improvements from from both of the two proposals.
192 Thank you. Councilor Kanal. Councilor Avalos.
193 Yeah, I agree, I'm feeling concerned because I what I don't understand is, for example, if. Let's see. So if we don't increase p f dollars accordingly, based on how this is structured, then what. Right. Like I don't understand what the binding of this is. And again, it just feels way too early to be making that kind of commitment. We have a cip process for a reason. I'm still not comfortable with how it's laid out. I appreciate what people are doing, trying to soften it, but I still don't think this is the place for it. And I think, you know, if I would be open, if it was even more watered down to say, you know, again, that we're committed to working with pcf, yada, yada. But I think it just feels too prescriptive. And I don't I think it's inappropriate to make that kind of commitment in this way, the way it's written right now. And so I don't plan on supporting this, and I would really encourage colleagues to not support this because we can have this conversation. We talked about it last week when we were discussing this amendment, and everybody felt clear that we are going to have this conversation in the cip. I don't think this resolves that for me in the way that it's been written, and I'd urge us to not support this right now. Thanks.
194 Thank you. Councilor Avalos councilor Green.
195 Yeah, I just wanted to speak a little bit to why. Why I am supporting it. This is in the findings of the ordinance. This is not a directive. And I, I view that as sort of saying we're building a legislative record here, and we're putting into the record what we acknowledge to be facts and or understandings of a factual basis. And I do think it's true that if you were to sort of say, we're going to regulate the cy hub, and we want an aggressive drawdown to defend that over time, we need to be able to sort of create the conditions that firm up our forecasts on a forward looking expectations basis that we have see a reduction in fuel demand. I see this as an effort to buttress that a little bit and provide the city council, the city of Portland, stronger armor to say, you know what, we are seeing this reduction in demand, and it's following from policy choices that we have made. And and so then we have some confidence that we can continue to forecast in that direction. And then we have confidence that we can because we passed the directive in an amendment last week that basically says, come back and give us a more trued up and timely alternative method for the drawdown. And that's, I think, connected to this idea that we can shape how demand functions for fuel in the first place. So, so that part I actually, I look at it differently. Councilor Kanal. And I think it's because this creates the conditions for the forecasting basis to have a more aggressive need over time is what I'm arguing or what I'm seeing from this, that it gives us a stronger basis to sort of defend our positions. That will take in terms of the, the cip thing, I, I don't again, there's nothing binding here that says we expect the cip to do x, y, and z amount of. Transportation investment. It basically declares our intent to say, we want to work with our external stakeholders. We want to work with community. We want to work with the committee to foster that conversation in a very open and public way. And I think I think that is important, and that's something I've started to try to do in some spaces and recognizing that no one councilor Should try to do that. No one committee should try to do that. I think we have to have an honest conversation with the public about how important transportation emissions are in our five year planning process for that, so that's why I'm supporting it. I understand the reservations that people do have, but I think those tweaks on that were enough to get me there. And I've been thinking increasingly about this ongoing annual basis where we true up our need and our sort of capacity determination. And I do think we have to have some some finding here that says we have to actively encourage a reduction in the need. So that's where I'm at. Thanks.
196 Thank you, councilor Green. Councilor pirtle-guiney.
197 Thank you, council president and councilor Green, thank you for all of those explanations that you just put on the record. I think they're all incredibly important. As we look at the why behind this amendment. I'll add to that that there have already been many times and will certainly be many more times when councilors signal where they would like to see cf or any other work within our city move, and we provide a lot of direction through more casual signaling or through passing resolutions, which suggest a direction that we'd like to go. And the way that I worded this suggestion that that is now Novick for was intended to give us an opportunity to do just that, to say this needs to be a part of the conversation, to say PCEF committee. If this passes, know that a majority of council would like us to do more work in this space, and that we see that as connected to our ability to meet the goals that we're putting forward and the reductions that we know the entire community would like to see in fuel coming through the ca hub, and that that is an important part of the ca hub conversation, and that it's important to be transparent and not just have individual councilors signaling where we'd like to go, but as a body have the opportunity to, to show that we see our work as we move forward with the cf committee as tied to this work that we're doing today around ca hub. Thank you, council president.
198 Thank you very much, councilor Pirtle-guiney councilor Smith.
199 Thank you, council president.
200 I was going to speak earlier because I thought we were going to take a vote. And so now we have totally changed once again from last week. And we should have took the vote last week. My stance is still the same. This is a very important issue that deserves to be on the agenda so the public can see and hear about it. No one knew that councilor Pirtle-guiney councilor Novick was going to put this forward. They deserve an opportunity to put this in here, and I don't think you need to to do that. I think that we need to have a standalone issue and determine what the percentages are about cf and how we do things, whether it be transportation, public safety or parks, because I've heard plenty of that too. Plenty of reason to use some of the cf dollars for parks and public safety. So if we're going to start signaling, we need to just be clear to the public that if we're going to do these kinds of things, that we're going to have it as a single issue, not as an amendment to an amendment to an amendment. And I will not be supporting this.
201 Thank you. Councilor Smith. Councilor Kanal, thanks.
202 Since we're all having the conversation, I think for me, the the necessary precondition are the two words that I'm having to hang up on. My question for councilor Novick would be, you have a original text. There was. It is incumbent upon. And that's appears to be your text originally. So my question is effectively, you know, is it possible to do something to the effect of the council, recognize it as a. Recognizes that it is incumbent on the city to do what it can to reduce demand for transportation, fuel, or some equivalent language that relates to your your original text, because that would resolve my last remaining concern on this.
203 All right. I'm looking at what.
204 And I don't have the the revised version yet, but we're working on it, I know.
205 Damn, I'm trying to find the revised version myself.
206 Can I interject here for a second? Yes. Sorry, I did not write. I'm sorry I presumed that someone. I thought because it was your amendment that there would be an edit from your staff. So I didn't write down what we agreed upon in the first line. So if we could just do that quickly, that'd be great.
207 Okay, actually sent. Sorry, mr. President, may I speak? Yep. I sent revised language to the council president as I came up with it, but I thought that the attorneys were in the process of writing it, too. So can we either I'll figure out a way to send my revised version to everybody, or do we already. Does the clerk already have revised language?
208 Sorry.
209 We we think that we've captured it and we will share it with keelan to put up on the screen. And that might be the easiest way to make sure we're all on the same page instead of.
210 Okay.
211 Thank you all.
212 I would prefer that you email it, by the way, I want to. I don't want it on screen. I want to see.
213 I also forwarded the email. This is the one that was just sent to me by council member, although it looks like was just forwarded by me.
214 So that is the.
215 That's the same.
216 That's what you had as Novick for doesn't have it has. Councilor pirtle-guiney comments, but not councilor or revisions, but not councilor Morillo. But I can say that what you said councilor Novick was. Quote, the council recognizes that an actual reduction in demand for liquid fuel is a precondition for a drawdown requirement to become effective, end quote.
217 Yes. And then it still included the language about therefore, it is incumbent on the council, blah, blah, blah.
218 Correct. Right. So I guess my question was effectively, if we could put the rest of that sentence after the it is incumbent and not have the logical precondition words, I can I can type it if that's helpful.
219 Okay, I'm not quite sure. Please type it because I'm not sure I get it.
220 All right, colleagues, we are in a wordsmithing challenge here at this moment. I'm going to give us a. It's 11:00 as well. I'm going to give us a ten minute recess. I'm going to ask the folks who are wanting to wordsmith to please wordsmith with our attorneys, and we'll be back at 1113. Thank you. And welcome back, folks. I'm calling us back to order. Colleagues, on your screens. In front of you is the revised language to Novick four. It should also be in your email box, but here is the redlined version, showing you what is different and what is the same. My queue got changed, so I'm. Unfortunately I'm going to call or figure this out. Hold on. Yeah. When the screen changed everybody shifted. So I'm going to oh, there we go. Councilor Avalos.
221 Yeah thank you. I appreciate the efforts here. But the wordsmithing is not changing my overall concern with the intent. I don't think that this is the right place to put this kind of condition, especially when I'm unclear how we're defining what we mean by putting dollars into these transportation measures that are listed. I'm also also unsure what is supposed to happen. If there is incongruence with whatever's going on with the cip and this, you know, declaration that we're making in this this legislation, I think it's out of place. I think it is isolated, and I agree a lot with what councilor Smith said. There are lots of other factors that we as a city need to we as councilors, need to be determining our intent as we go into that next. Cip, there are lots of layers to this, and I think making this determination. I mean, I know that councilor Novick and I in general disagree on what the purpose of staff because according to your original intent, even though this has changed, the original intent is still there to force staff to make a certain percentage calculation on their resources. And that's just not how this works. That is not what community is asking for. And I think it is important that we continue to keep those decisions about how much investment in which types of investment stay with community. I think even with this language, we are still doing a lot of predetermining here. I think it's inappropriate and I will not be voting for it, and I would really encourage folks not to. Thanks.
222 Thank you, councilor Avalos. Is there any further discussion of the now amended Novick four, which is on display on your screen in front of you?
223 Councilor Kanal yeah, I, I.
224 Totally understand the conversation around the last part there. And, you know, I don't think I think part of this is like, what's, what's possible to, to get done that we have a majority around. I don't love that in line with words, but I'm not. Those are not a deal breaker for me personally. I think I'm looking forward to the conversation at as part of the climate investment plan. I don't think that I'm saying this for legislative intent purposes. I don't think that this means that 40% of the investment, I think it means that it is designed to be reflective of the emission standard. That's how I'm interpreting it. And at the risk of not wanting to, you know, change more and more words one by one. That's why I'm, I'm where I'm at on it. But I did want to acknowledge, I agree with the concern that councilor Avalos was raising. I just that's how I've chosen to kind of interpret that particular phrase, given how it was presented earlier.
225 Thank you. Councilor Kanal. Councilor Avalos back in the queue. Last word. Yeah, yeah.
226 Just to say in response to that. Councilor Kanal. I think again, it's that leaving that number in there, first of all, those numbers can change. Second of all, that is still predetermining. So I just disagree with how you're coming to conclusion. It's fine that we don't agree on this, but I am pretty concerned about this passing. And I just feel that this is a conversation that is best not had in this format. And I really don't like how the language is. So it looks like it could pass. And I'm pretty disappointed to hear that, because I am concerned about how this implicates future cip processes, and again, would urge that we not pass this.
227 Thank you very much, councilor Avalos. Okay, colleagues, seeing no one else in the queue, keelan can we please call the roll on the now revised Novick four amendment.
228 Moved by Novick. Seconded by clerk.
229 Clerk I Green.
230 I Zimmerman. I Avalos.
231 Sorry. One second. No.
232 Smith.
233 No.
234 Kanal I.
235 Pirtle-guiney I. Ryan I.
236 Koyama Lane no.
237 Morillo I.
238 Novick. I really appreciate fellow councilors working on this this morning and the council president's indulgence to allow us to work on it, I.
239 I appreciate the collegial, collegial approach as well, but I am unfortunately a no on the vote. So no.
240 The amendment is approved with a vote of eight eyes and four nays.
241 Thank you very much. Councilor Kanal to Kanal one.
242 Yes, colleagues, I have sent a revised version of this one over to you. I don't know if it's posted yet, but it's in your email inbox as of 1006. I'll explain the change from the originally pre filed one. It is only in the first two sentences, but just wanted to get that on the record first. Kanal one is an amendment reflective of the testimony that we heard from the public, that the safety piece of this was getting a little bit lost in the conversation around the economic side of it, which it's both. Obviously, the ca hub is is an economic issue as well as a safety issue. And it's also reflective of prior council actions in the 2025 2026 budget, as well as conversations we had this year, it would add a new part d to the ordinance. This is again the title 17 ordinance that says the city administrator shall present a report to council no later than September 30th, 2027, outlining the city's public health and natural hazards risk reduction plan for the ca hub. The city administrator will present an interim update to council on progress towards this deadline no later than March 31st, 2027. The rest of it is identical to what it said before, so I'm not going to read it, but it asks for four bureaus to work together to come up with a report, basically outlining what our needs are in the situations that we all talk about and have fear around. Evacuation plans from linton, evacuation plans from north Portland, west of the railroad cut industrial fire fighting capacity on the west side of the river. I proposal for fire and rescue capacity on north Portland, west of the railroad cut, and then the sort of emergency supplies and resources that are necessary in the interim before we can get people out of the affected areas. I just want to note for the record, that some of this stuff is already in progress. Some of this stuff is already a conversation that's been happening or that that we've funded happening. In the case of the planner at bts that councilor Clerk fought for in the budget last year. Just to give a quick context to the change, originally, we had filed this for March 31st, 2027. We then got some preliminary feedback and moved it to June 30th. That's what was pre filed, and that's what's on the website for today. We've separated that first sentence into the two you now see in your email inbox, so that there is more time for the full report until September 30th. But there's also an interim update. And that interim update will allow us to have as much information as possible before we have to make budgetary decisions around what resources we may need to give towards this. While the full and ultimate details are still being worked out, and that the staff will have until September 30th. So I want to just kind of get that out there and also thank the staff who have been very helpful with their time and and with their advice, and most importantly, with being honest about what their needs are in terms of the time. So anyway, that's the that's the amendment. I will formally move Kanal one as revised and ask for a second.
243 Second councilor Kanal moves Kanal one vice president clerk seconds colleagues to the discussion of Kanal one I put myself in the queue first. Colleagues councilor Kanal I really, I support the intent of what you're trying to do here, but I just need to hear a little more explicitly that. Is this a, an action that the the city believes that they can respond in that time? I just worry about continued demands. And also my question, my second part of that is, is this request aligned with the strategic work that is already happening? And or is this additional new work an additional new burden?
244 Would you like to go first?
245 Yes, I would just bring council's attention to the timing of this and the timing from the standpoint of when you're asking for us to follow back up with you, that may not be realistic for us from a timing perspective to be able to do that. I would also just draw your attention to the additional resources that may be needed to do this work that we currently don't have a part of our team today that we would have to ramp up to be able to do that may have some budgetary request in this as well. So, you know, I believe we will evaluate this and try to see what we could do to meet it. But I know there's going to be some time constraints. And if, you know, dca oliveira wants to add anything additional to that, feel free to want to. But if you're good, I think we're good. I believe we're good.
246 Sorry.
247 A little.
248 Confused about why. Dca oliveira. I understand planning and sustainability. And I did chat with folks there, but the bulk of this, as I understand it, is pbem and fire. So although there is a piece there, we funded a planner in the 2025 2026 budget at baps, whose primary focus is ca hub. So I'm comfortable, I guess let me back up and I would love if anyone wants to ask. We did chat with some of these particular bureaus that I just mentioned, but. I, I think it's fair to say everything in here has been discussed separately, but not together as a package. To answer your question, council president, it is also fair to say that everything in here is a realistic ask, right? We have an evacuation, emergency evacuation routes. Project pbem leads on that. We work with tpo on parts of that to the regional disaster preparedness organization. So that's the first two. We've talked about firefighting capacity as part of the budget conversation. There was not an amendment on that one, but it was in the conversation around the budget. We actually debated and funded state station 22 fire engine this year, which is the only fire engine west of the railroad cut in north Portland, and is particularly relevant to that, and grateful again to colleagues who supported Kanal two on that or any of the other proposals that would have funded it. And then pbem already has, you know, work on beacons, nets, all that sort of stuff that's in that final bullet point. So if the timing is a concern, that's that's I understand that that's why we moved it back twice. But I will say the purpose of the interim update is in part to talk about the resources necessary to do this work. So the idea that that staff could come to us and tell us on March 31st, hey, we're looking into this, but we actually don't have the capacity right now to do it because we don't have the staff for it. The idea behind that is that we could then say, well, it's March 31st. We've got three months to affect this year's budget, next year's budget. Sorry to provide those resources. So I think that that's sort of the the particular purpose of the two tier timeline change. And yeah, I, I obviously we've got resources. If anyone has specific questions for any other relevant bureaus.
249 Thank you. Councilor Kanal. All right, that more or less answers my question. I will say I will continue that. I worry about the timeline. It just feels extremely tight. So I have some concerns. So thank you. Councilor. Novick.
250 Thank you, mr. President. I also was concerned about the timeline. I also was a little confused about item three is that the report must include industrial firefighting capacity, etc. And then the two below. That said, a proposal for. And so I was kind of wondering if the industrial firefighting capacity bullet sort of like was kind of a mandate to spend the money to acquire it, whereas the others are just proposals that I assume would include some budgetary estimates.
251 Yeah, that wasn't the intent. That's a good question. Happy to add a proposal for if that's helpful for that particular one.
252 That that that would be helpful.
253 Wasn't the intent at all there. Thanks. Thanks for catching that.
254 But I also, I mean, if I'd like to hear from our interim pbem director what she thinks about the timeline.
255 Good morning.
256 Checking my watch to make sure it's morning. Elizabeth perez, interim director for pbem. I did have a conversation with councilor Nils office. I think the reason that we're good with the timeline is that six month check in of where we're at. I would look to the council that if we don't have the resources and we are still working through plans, that we then look to possibly extending that timeline. But I do like having, you know, a stretch goal to really get the team moving on these things that we should already be doing. So I have no issue with the current timeline as is.
257 Thank you.
258 Thank you. Councilor. Novick. Councilor. Pirtle-guiney.
259 You know, I was also going to ask about the timeline and feasibility, and I think we've heard from a number of folks on that, but I also know that there were a number of reductions within our fire bureau. So I'd just like to ask our fire chief if there are any concerns on the fire side with what's listed here. We'll run through everybody. We'll get a sense. And while you're coming up, chief, I'll note that councilor Kanal talked about some of the reasons that this is important. From my district's perspective. From a safety perspective, it is necessary that we be doing all of these things. I have no concerns with us doing what is listed in here. I just want to make sure that our current budget allows us to do this, and that we are not inadvertently mandating resources onto the table or putting a timeline out there. That's not possible. And frankly, getting our constituents hopes up that we will be able to do something that we may not be able to do in the long run. So I just I want to make sure that we're prepared to actually see this through.
260 Thanks very much. For the record. Lauren johnson, fire chief, thanks for the question and the work towards this. We think it's also really necessary to provide this information to council and to the public. We're supportive of the timeline and really have been working with pbem and then with the a's office to make sure that we were in alignment. Happy to do that and happy to to move the work forward to get you the information. I think from our standpoint, it's important to level set expectations that we plan from fire side to be able to provide kind of the scoping and cost out what those operations that are listed would look like, what it would take to get us there. The one thing that I would flag that we would want to report out on that midway point is when it comes to industrial firefighting, right? The cei hub is composed of very different vendors with different risks and hazards on their property. So there's some proprietary information that I kind of question. How much information are we going to be able to get from those vendors about capabilities? And so that's something that I see like at that midway report point of being able to tell you, are we running into problems getting that information? Is is there a barrier that we have to respect because of that vendor or that business? But being able to give you more information by that midway point?
261 Great. So I think what I've heard between the comments from our three folks from the administration thus far is that the timeline, as it's listed, will work for getting us some preliminary information. We may need to extend the final timeline to get everything we need. There certainly aren't resources available to do all of the work yet, and I think we need to be really clear with portlanders and level set that we don't know if we'll have the resources for that in the next budget, but this is the first step to get us there, identifying what we would need, and that there may need to be some political oomph put behind getting you all the information you need to be able to actually complete this work. So we should see this
262 As a first step, if adopted, that we may need to come back and do some iteration on to really complete. Is that a fair assessment I'm seeing?
263 Nods. That's fair assessment from my.
264 City administrator. Does that seem right to you as well? Okay. Correct. Thank you all.
265 Thank you.
266 Thank you. Councilor. Pirtle-guiney vice president.
267 Thank you, council president. I think my questions about the timeline are are cared for. I would say, though, that in our first year, I had budget notes that were unfunded mandates, and the bureaus did come back to me and say, hey, we can't do all this. We, we, or at least we're going to have to scale it back. We're not going to get the quality that maybe you wanted. So just, you know, I think we just have to be aware of that. I did want to also add a personal experience. And when it comes to getting all the things that we need, and I do have a question for you about why you moved from sufficient to proposal, but I, I do think that we're going to need help from the state when it comes to the c, e I hub. And when I worked for the city of Salem, I was able to get fire trucks from the city because we didn't have the capacity to serve the state capitol. We didn't have ladder trucks, we didn't have those kinds of things. And I think that when we're talking about the kinds of emergency supplies and disaster planning that we may want to talk to the state about getting more help from them. And I went through a tabletop exercise at the state level that demonstrated how horribly ill prepared we were at the state level. And I know that we're talking about a tabletop at some point here. I think that's really, really important that we go through that and that we involve the state in that as well. They've got to provide resources and back up for us because this is a state issue, this e hub. It's not just linton, it's not just Portland, it's the entire state. So they have a stake in making sure that we're prepared for any kind of disaster. I just want to share that with you. All that we can we can do that. And we haven't talked about it with ogr. But so councilor Kanal you went from sufficient to proposal and I, I like that. I just wanted to hear your thinking.
268 Yeah. So this is what caused the thing that councilor Novick raised to. So the this is the third version. The second version was posted online and hadn't been updated. So the third version is the one that is in your email inbox that we've been talking about. What councilor Clark's referring to is something that was in the first version, which was emailed out last week, which we updated after talking to staff. And so what it originally said was the fourth and fifth began with the word sufficient instead of a proposal for. And so at the time, the intent was all of these were going to be a deliverable in and of themselves evacuation plans and. And certainly that wasn't the the original intent around like actually building up the thing in industrial firefighting capacity, but it was the idea of sort of identifying what the needs were. Simply put, I don't know that there is such a thing as sufficient emergency supplies. Personally, I would love to be wrong. I think it is. It is. I'm trying not to be super hyperbolic about the actual dangers associated with living west of the railroad cut or in linton after some of the disasters that we're looking at. But I don't know that there are sufficient things. And so in terms of the emergency supplies and resources, and as a result, it makes sense to say, here's our proposal for what we would need is the deliverable that we'd be asking for. Yeah.
269 Good change.
270 Thanks.
271 Thank you.
272 Thank you, vice president Clark councilor Kanal last word.
273 Yeah.
274 I just wanted to first, I think I have to formally to make the change that councilor Novick and I talked about withdraw and resubmit, but it's to add a proposal for to the beginning of the third bullet point in there that it would be version four. It did hit everyone's email at 11:32 a.m. So everyone has that in email, including the clerk, but including colleagues as well. So I'll formally withdraw and resubmit, and hopefully councilor Clark will still second that.
275 Yes. Okay.
276 Thanks.
277 Thank you very much, colleagues. You have the final language in front of you. There's no one else in the queue. I'm going to give us 30s of dramatic pause to make sure everybody reads. Keelan. Can we please call the roll on Kanal two four? What do you call this?
278 27 it's either Kanal one, version four or Kanal four. I leave it to the clerk to decide.
279 All right, so we had posted Kanal one and that one has been withdrawn. So now we will vote on Kanal two.
280 All right.
281 Well, can we please call the roll on Kanal two.
282 Moved by Kanal. Seconded by clerk. Clerk. Aye, Morillo. Green. Sorry. Sorry. Green. I Zimmerman. I Avalos. I Smith. I'm sorry. Councilor was that I.
283 That was.
284 I I.
285 Okay. Thank you. Smith.
286 No.
287 Kanal I.
288 Pirtle-guiney I.
289 Ryan.
290 No.
291 Koyama Lane. I Morillo. I Novick I.
292 Dunphy I.
293 The amendment is approved with a vote of ten ayes and two nays.
294 Okay, colleagues, that concludes our amendments to this item and ends our discussion for today. We are now moving to. Pass this to second reading. Actually, before I do that, I'd like to check. Colleagues, is there any further discussion of the now amended underlying ordinance or the exhibits? Okay, cool. Item 2026-312. The ordinance for the bulk fuel terminal capacity reduction regulations is continued to an additional meeting before the Portland city council on November 5th, 2026 at 2:00 p m. The record for oral testimony on this ordinance was closed on September 24th, 2026. The record for written testimony on this ordinance was closed on October 1st, 2026, based on council deliberations on possible amendments, council may decide in the future to open the record for oral or written testimony at a future meeting. Keelan can we please call the consent agenda?
295 No items have been pulled. I'll call the roll on the the remaining on the consent agenda.
296 Clerk I.
297 Green okay. Hi.
298 Zimmerman. Hi.
299 Avalos. Hi, Smith.
300 Kanal consent agenda I yeah.
301 Pirtle-guiney I.
302 Ryan I.
303 My team is very excited for more skee ball. Thank you. Novick.
304 I Morillo. I Novick. Hi Dunphy. I the consent agenda is approved with 12 votes.
305 Thank you. Can we please call item number ten?
306 Document 2026-334. Authorize bureau of transportation to acquire certain temporary property rights necessary for construction of the southeast division street southeast 148th to one to southeast 174th project. Through the exercise of the city's eminent domain authority.
307 Colleagues, is the second reading of a nonemergency ordinance. Is there any further discussion? Seeing no one in the queue, keelan can we please call the roll clerk?
308 I Green. I Zimmerman. I Avalos. I Smith. I Kanal. I pirtle-guiney. I Ryan. I Koyama Lane. I aye, Morillo. I Novick. I Dunphy. I the ordinance passes with 12 votes.
309 Thank you very much. Can we please call item number 12?
310 Item 11, I believe.
311 Oh, did I just do that wrong?
312 I think we just voted item.
313 Yeah, I.
314 Did it wrong.
315 My bad.
316 Okay. Item 11 also a second reading 20 document 2026-335.
317 Clerk I Green.
318 I Zimmerman. I Avalos. I Smith. I Kanal. I pirtle-guiney. I Ryan. I Koyama Lane. I Morillo. I Novick.
319 I I.
320 The ordinance passes with 12 I votes.
321 Thank you. Can we please read the next item?
322 Item 12 document 2026-212. Oh, sorry, I've been forgetting. Okay. Item 12 amend advertising on bus benches code to allow advertising on city streetcar benches and shelters. Amend chapter code code chapter 17.45.
323 Thank you colleagues. This also is a second reading of a non emergency ordinance. Is there any further discussion? Seeing none. Keelan please call the roll. Oh councilor Smith I'm sorry.
324 Thank you. Who's here representing the mayor's office on this?
325 Good morning. Millicent williams, deputy city administrator for public works.
326 Good morning, dc williams. We had some conversation about this in the public works committee. And I just want to make sure that we did not add any language that would restrict any business from advertising.
327 The team met with the city attorney's office to determine the language that would be appropriate for this ordinance. Everything that's included provides the permissions for certain types of businesses to advertise. There are prohibitions on the types of businesses as well, but we were intentional about ensuring that we were not creating a space where certain businesses would be prohibited unless there were certain guidelines that we would not want to have advertised on those busses, on those benches.
328 Could you explain more? I don't know what that means. Give me the type of businesses that you that are restricted.
329 I would need to call on the team to provide that response, but there are perhaps because of the federal relationship with the transit services, there are certain activities that while on a local level, we may allow, we would not be able to support from a federal level because they are not considered legal activities. For example, if there was a marijuana shop that wanted to advertise on a bench, they would likely not be able to because that is not something that is federally recognized as being legal. So those are some of the types of businesses that would be prohibited.
330 Okay. I mean, I support this in theory, but I wanted to have a little bit more information. And I was looking through the exhibits to tell me specifically which businesses were being prevented from, from doing advertising. And the reason why I say that is because all these businesses here, they pay the blt, the business licensing tax, and to prohibit any one of them. And I can understand about the the federal stuff. And that's that's one issue. But if we're unilaterally identifying particular sectors of business that we are not going to allow to advertise. I have a problem with that.
331 Absolutely. That's not the intent of this. It is to ensure that we're aligned with the federal expectations because of their funding that comes to the streetcar and all of the attending supports for that work. We are not singling out entities that we would prohibit from being able to advertise those that are doing regular business, that have business licenses, that are allowed to do business in the city of Portland.
332 Okay.
333 Thank you.
334 Sure.
335 Thank you, councilor Smith. Colleagues, seeing no one else in the queue, this is the second reading of a nonemergency ordinance. Keelan. Can we please call the roll?
336 Clerk?
337 I Green. I Zimmerman.
338 I. Pomelos I. Smith I.
339 Kanal pirtle-guiney. I Ryan. I Koyama Lane. I Morillo. I Novick. I Dunphy. I the ordinance passes with 12 votes.
340 Thank you. Please read item 13.
341 Document 2026-3 hundred amend fire regulations fee schedule amend Portland policy document fir-12.01.
342 Thank you colleagues. This is also the second reading of a nonemergency ordinance. I put myself in the queue. I didn't have a chance to speak on this last week because unfortunately I was out of the state. But I want to start, I want to say I want to be intellectually honest and note that we did vote on this concept during the budget, fire and rescue permitting activity is not currently supported by the fees that we charge, and we subsidize those activities with general fund dollars. The council made a choice here and elsewhere to try and get towards a full cost recovery model, because as the council documents that, as the documents that council approved say the permits primarily benefit the applicants. So let's just start with the obvious. All of our fees are going up and we have a lot of fees. The increase in fees is exceeding inflation because we are charging our policy, changing our policies to cost recovery across all of our bureaus and the service areas simultaneously. Our fees are also not progressive enough. The impact on small and micro businesses is too large as a percentage of revenue compared to larger enterprises. The impact on low individuals and low income individuals and families is too high, and these changes are being made with the primary intention of shoring up the city budget. We do not have a policy related to fee affordability, nor a central view of the cumulative impact of fees across our target groups. Speaking to target group's full cost recovery is not actually in line with our city wide goals. Earlier this year, the city announced a grant program to help small businesses make capital improvements in vacant storefronts to activate them. And then we significantly raised the rates on the permits to do that work at pnd and fire, we've been working to increase event activation across the city and offering grants to community organizations to activate public spaces, and we then made permits to use parks and roads for events more expensive and significantly increased noise permit fees with ppe. And this is what a unified administration of this government was supposed to fix. We should not be granting dollars with one hand and then taking them back with the other. And our economic development and public space activation dollars are general fund dollars. And we recognize that support for small businesses and developments in music, arts and small creative businesses is a priority, and we spend general fund on those initiatives. We recognize that nurturing the grassroots enterprises that are a national identity to our city benefits more than just the benefit the businesses themselves. And so we should be using targeted fee relief and progressive fee structures as an intentional economic development tool. It's an appropriate use of general fund dollars to support charging fees in priority areas at less than full cost recovery to cfo biery, ca lee, mayor wilson this should be a high priority in our next budget cycle and I intend to make it so. There's also another question here is, which is if this is what our permitting actually costs, should our processes and regulations just be simpler and cheaper internally, this ordinance is significantly raising the fees on theatrical firearms like fake guns for a play. After this, portland's stage gun fee will be higher than the combined long gun registration fee and fingerprinting charged by the new york police department to use a. And that is just for us to use a pretend gun on stage. Why is our process so complex that processing and application takes $250 of staff time? Why do we regulate laser light shows at a municipal level, when most localities require only a blanket operator certificate, rather than a designed plan for every venue at $750, or at a single performance at $175 to review. And why does our process for process for processing a single floor plan for an arts and culture assembly permit a maximum of 75 people at an event, a program that is intended to be used by small galleries and nonprofits. Why does that cost $650 worth of staff time? I'm not going to reach down into this ordinance and try to rewrite it. I respect the bureau. I think you're doing what you're trying to do, what is the right thing. But I feel there's a deep incoherence here between our values and the way that we are going to be making the numbers line up. I think we're not doing better because we're not really thinking about it clearly on an all city basis. So I will be a no today on this item, and my no is an invitation to further work. So thank you. And councilor Ryan.
343 Thank you, council president. I too was absent last week on family bereavement. And I, I have some questions. So maybe if people from Portland fire and rescue could come up, that'd be helpful.
344 Thank you.
345 Angela wright budget analyst for fire first. Angela. Right.
346 Angela.
347 Thank you.
348 And hello, chief johnson. Yeah. Could you explain further the newly added inspection, testing, maintenance, atm fees? And what are some examples of when that is charged?
349 I'm going to phone a friend on that.
350 We're going to let fire marshal schimel talk about.
351 Testing come up.
352 Nice to see you, the whole team. Thanks for the record.
353 Kerry schimel, fire marshal, Portland fire and rescue. Some examples are all sprinklers, alarms, fixed systems for hood at restaurants. Those are all included in the inspection, testing, maintenance.
354 Okay. I thought that was the case. I wanted that on the public record. These increases are quite steep. I think we can all agree on that. And why are they separate from our usual fee updates with the annual budget? Similar to some of the questions that were brought up or statements brought up by the council president.
355 I can say initially we weren't sure if the decision package to increase fees was going to be included in the final budget.
356 Okay. And what's the annual impact to revenue projected with these higher fees to users?
357 We're estimating hopefully around $800,000, which was our initial trajectory or goal.
358 Okay.
359 And can you walk me through what a small business, for example, would pay in total for fees in order to open their business in a new space for the first time? In other words, what's the total cost for new business to be cleared to open, similar to the statements made by council president? That was what was in my head is that we're passing some items of legislation that seems like we're providing some aspirin to the headaches of expenses for businesses, and then we turn around and do this, and it feels disjointed at best. So I'm confused.
360 Well.
361 That was my editorial opinion. Now, you could please answer the question. I was going to try to wait for that. Sorry.
362 Yeah. Is the question just opening business or is it like permitting if there's required fire systems? I mean, we open a business like to open the door. There's no fire inspection, there's no fees from fires. But if we're talking about the actual plan review, then that's something that falls under the building department.
363 When I listen to folks that are trying to open a new business, especially in the hospitality world, and venues for music and for restaurants, they complain a lot about the fees that kind of catch them off guard. And this does come up about the fire fees. So I'm just listening to constituents over the last six years and keep hearing that. So this was startling for me to look at and think I could be supportive of it. And so.
364 So I think, well, so by you making that statement, I think you're talking more about the events, the special events. And so when a business works outside of what they're permitted through the building department, that's where our special use permits come into place through the fire marshal's office. So there's fees for those additional events that aren't covered under how the business was approved.
365 But you're not. So I hear that. Thank you. But for a new business, you're saying there's no fees for them to pass these permits, pass these tests?
366 Well, that's where I there's a whole kind of the construction fees, the systems themselves. If we're looking beyond that, and just like a fire inspector coming in to do a fire final. So then the the inspections are complete. There's no fee for that fire final, but there might be our fee schedule is very complicated. So, I mean, there's so many different scenarios on if we're talking about getting temporary permits or inspections that are every two years. So there's a there's a lot of different variables. So it's I'm not totally sure what the question is because just.
367 To get. To the point, we're trying to true up how to operate the fire bureau. And we went through a pretty long process in the budget season about how to do that. And so when we try to recoup those balancing act with additional fees, that that that's what people experience 3 to 4 months later. It just, I, I don't like it as a governance practice.
368 I'm lauren johnson for the record. And councilor. I want to acknowledge that and then just note that it might be helpful. We can connect with you offline and you can let us know which types of businesses. And I think it would be helpful for you to understand. There are some businesses that are four walls, and there's no real cost to them from a fire inspection standpoint when they're opening a business. However, if it's an assembly gathering, if it's a cooking or a hazmat business, there are all separate fees that would come with standing up a business like that. So I think it's hard for us to answer a question about, in general, what does it cost a business owner when they're starting a new business? But we're happy to have those discussions. And even in our last presentation, kind of called out for special events and permitted assemblies, we know that that's a topic that you guys are interested in. So maybe we we'd love to be able to provide more detail as it relates to the people who are contacting you so that you can have that information.
369 And I appreciate that. Chief johnson, we'll have that conversation. I will be voting no on this today, and we'll have we'll continue to have this dialog.
370 Sounds good. Yeah. And I mean, I think just to follow up on your point, it's it's important to note that our intent with this is not full cost recovery. I think we've explained in a couple of different venues with different counselors, our the way our inspection fees are set up is not for full cost recovery, and also that we needed to get in line with what pds needs fees are so that we'll be on a more regular schedule for updating so that you won't see this new cost that seems like it's years worth all coming at once, so we have plans to do that better moving forward.
371 Thank you. I'm rooting for that. Yes, sir.
372 Yes, sir. Thank you.
373 Thank you, councilor Ryan councilor Kanal.
374 Thank you, council president. Yeah, I really appreciate everyone being here. And this some of this came up in committee. The idea that this will move to a regular cadence of every year or two as part of the normal fee structure that that it's towards, but not achieving full cost recovery. I think with one potential exception that I hope to resolve outside of this ordinance. I think in general, we can't ask the fire bureau to do the work and then not resource you to do it. And at a time where we were sitting here debating whether or not saint john's deserves a fire engine because we can't afford it, supposedly, or why we can't have three fire rescues in southeast and east Portland. Doesn't make sense to me. To continue perpetuating this imbalance of the work and the cost on the one hand, and no. Increase on the other. This also includes things related to the alarms, for example, which is a perpetual issue of in terms of responding to false alarms. So there's there's a lot in here. Obviously, I actually do agree with the underlying concern that that council president raised, and maybe this relates to sort of how we were talking to, to use a completely different example of maybe if the state followed their own public meetings law, they'd fix it. Maybe if we actually showed what the work here is and how much it costs to do some of these particular checks, we would realize that it's not the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and we should just stop doing the check at all. But I think that the approach to that is actually what we approved in the consent agenda today, which is for ordinances from councilor Novick that went back and said, we don't actually need this, and that was in collaboration with the relevant bureaus. In that case, we saw this in new york where they got rid of the permit. That's special for an ice cream scooping facility. And it's like, if you have a scoop shop, you don't need a special permit. In addition to everything else, you need to just be a regular food vendor. It doesn't make sense. I think we we need to go through and do that sort of as a, a permit hygiene process is how I'd kind of describe that. But I don't think it makes sense to perpetuate the financial problem in the short term. I did want to mention I amended out the emergency clause from this in committee so that we could have this sort of conversation. And I'm really grateful that we are, because I think these are the sorts of things where we shouldn't be just surprising people with a change that takes effect immediately and doesn't have two weeks of conversation. So I'm very grateful to the council president for bringing that up as well as I also agree with a lot of what councilor Ryan was talking about as well. When we're talking about, and we could go through all of these things, the one thing that I would flag for later, I'm going to vote to support this, but the one thing I would flag for later is there are I don't know that we should be creating a cost to exercise a right. And so the idea of having event permits, I understand like under the event permit, it talks about like a fee if you don't have a fire extinguisher, I don't that's just probably in the wrong category. But it's a good thing to, to charge for. But I do think that we should move towards the idea that it's our obligation as the city to use general fund dollars to give the resources to the bureaus necessary for every portlander to exercise their first amendment right. And so I'd like to see down the line us move away from charging any sort of charge for an event. I think that's something that I understand, requiring some sort of planning and submitting of, of plans for, for public safety and things like that. But in terms of the financial charge, I think there's a an issue there. Having said that, I don't think that that should hold this up and I'm intending to support it. Thank you.
375 Thank you. Councilor Kanal councilor Smith.
376 Thank you.
377 Council president question. When were the last time that these fees were updated?
378 So a majority of these fees have not been updated since prior to 2012. That would be roughly 88% of them.
379 Okay. Until 2012. Yes. And I do understand some of the things that council president is talking about in terms of all the fees that we're asking our residents to improve from the tough to all the other things. And now we have an increase our tax that will automatically go up with inflation. So I'm concerned and I did not support that, but I am just concerned that these go up so quickly. It's so high. So soon. Will we be coming back again, or is there going to be a regular cadence and how you come back, is that going to be every two years? Is that going to be every four years? What does that look like? Have you all thought about that?
380 Yes. We're planning to do it in alignment with p and d, and I think that depending on the type of fee and we'd have to hear from the attorneys about if it needs to come back to you, but it's on a one to a three year cycle. We think five is too long.
381 Yeah, I definitely think, you know, since 2012 we haven't changed these fees. That is egregious. And I'm not sure why that is that happened that way. But I understand and I know the need, but I'm just concerned that we're just taxing our our residents and they see it. And it is you know, it is really getting ugly out there. So it's not that I don't think I'm still trying to think in my head how I want to do this, but I'm concerned about all the increased taxes that we're having in the city of Portland.
382 Thank you, councilor Councilor Green.
383 Thank you, council president, you gave me a lot to think about. I thank you for leading that. I guess I have a question, chief johnson. If if these fees were not updated, would the work would still get done.
384 It would.
385 Just leaves a $800,000 hole.
386 That's right.
387 If I could add something. Own state's budget manager for public safety. I just started recently adding a bit to the conversation on the cadence of updating fees. There is financial policy that has us at a minimum of three years. Every three years. We need to at least be doing a comprehensive fee study. So that's something that we'll be working on reevaluating and or not reevaluating, something we'll be bringing back. And in the fee study, there is certain criteria that we need to discuss. So getting to your question, councilor Ryan, earlier, one of the criteria is the impact of imposing or imposing or increasing fees on economically at risk populations and on businesses. So that's one of the criteria that we would be using in a comprehensive study that we would plan to bring back to council at some point in line with the financial policy.
388 Thank you. Thank you, owen, and congrats on moving to a different role, is that I'm just learning this for the first time. Thank you. $800,000 is not a trivial amount of money because last year or just last spring, we fought tooth and nail to try to restore a cut to a fire engine in saint john's. That was about half of that. And I think about that. I think more broadly, though, I, I, I don't think cost recovery fee models make sense for public safety bureau's largely because the sort of reason why you're doing the particularly the fire here, you're doing this because it provides I mean, fire safety is not just about one individual private property. It is about sort of a neighborhood effect. It's sort of there's positive externalities, I should say, to have this. And so it makes sense that this is a a cost that gets smoothed and peanut butter over our whole general fund. That's the way that I think about it at least. And so if we have a comprehensive fee study coming up soon, that's that. Right. Is that right on?
389 We're looking into the cadence of that. And obviously the fire bureau just updated fees for the first time. Well, this would update fees for the first time in a long time. So we'll look on bringing that in a more regular cadence.
390 Thank you. I think I think the broad concerns that council, council president raised need to be at the forefront of our next comprehensive study, but I'm going to have a hard time voting no, knowing that it leaves. I mean, we only we only got one time funding for the fire engine in saint john's, and I can't that's the that's the engine that responds to to the sea. So I just I'm going to have to be a yes on this, even though I don't I don't particularly like the model. Thanks.
391 Thank you. Councilor greene vice president clerk.
392 Thank you, council president, this has been a great discussion. I really appreciate it. And I'm intrigued by councilor Kanal comments. But do we really need all these? And maybe when we do the comprehensive study, we'll determine that if these are all really necessary. But I do have two questions, and I don't know if they're for owen or the chief, but I'm just curious, is there an appeals process for some of these? And secondly, how do we stack up with other cities our size across the country? Are we kind of in the same ballpark?
393 Yeah.
394 I'll let chief schimmel talk about the appeals process, and then we'll bring up the information about how we used other peer cities to arrive at the cost that we got to.
395 That the the short answer is yes, there's appeal process. And we also within our title title 31, there's also a process for non nonprofit and other fee waivers.
396 And then as far as the city comparables on average. Let me see. So we're on average our current fees. When we look at comparable cities we're about $146 below their fees. And then even with the updated, we would still be on average $53 below those fees.
397 That's interesting. It's not necessarily a justification for what we're doing here, because we are in hard times in the city. But I appreciate the information. Thank you.
398 Thank you, vice president, clerk, councilor Ryan.
399 Thank you, council president. First of all, I just want to say I keep hearing from constituents about their concerns with the warming fires from those living on the streets that turn into that can turn into wildfires. So I've been really clear that the first responders in police and fire should never be on the chopping block, and we really need to have more support in the general fund for both of those bureaus. I think my concern is just around the practice here, and I didn't hear a good answer on why was the last adjustment in 2012 that that did startle me. So I had to hear why and how we can not ever experience that again. And if no one was here in 2012, one way out of.
400 This would say none of us were here then.
401 That's why I wanted to.
402 Also.
403 You diagnosed on how that can never happen again, right?
404 This is so the last update was in 2021. So we are on like the five year schedule that had been prior to this. Our information said, you know, five years.
405 2012.
406 But there was only like three fees that were updated in 2021.
407 For on the fire schedule. Correct. And then so minimal compared to the overall total number of fees that we have. And then we took that on from people previously in this position that it was something we would be working on this year. And so then started from there.
408 One reason I was really supportive of having a city administrator that could really hear these type of dialogs so that our cultural practices can keep improving. So I think it's the extremeness because we haven't dug really into this since 2012 that has us so wildly above inflation. That gives a lot of us and portlanders are trying to invest in our city. Indigestion here. Thanks.
409 Thank you, councilor Ryan councilor.
410 Hold on.
411 Councilor Kanal.
412 For the last 20 months now and going back to the campaign, we've been hearing about the feeling from portlanders that we need to focus on the basics, the core functions of government. We've also been hearing from portlanders about the need to focus on things that unify us. There is one bureau at the center of the overlap in that venn diagram, and it is the fire bureau. It is also the bureau that for years we have piled work onto and not funded fully. This has come up in both of the budget cycles. It's come up under multiple chiefs. It's come up under 3dcas now since we've been here, I am watching us talk about the arts tax. I am watching us talk about the tough. And those are great. Extra stuff is good and frankly the tough is not extra stuff by the way. But it's important as well. And I am stunned that we're sitting here talking about blowing an $800,000 hole in the in the budget of the Portland fire and rescue bureau. I do not understand it. I am happy to go back and change some of our previous decisions. If there's an overall concern about the level of taxation and fees that we're charging here at the city. But in terms of this one, and in terms of ensuring that the fire bureau has enough money and we could talk about is cost recovery the best way? And we should talk about that. But when we tried to fund it through several other amendments in the budget, or when we tried to get the mayor to propose adequate funding for fire in the first place, those didn't happen. So now we're here, right? It took, I think, seven different attempts, five actual votes to get the fire engine funded, and that got seven votes, right. I do recognize that everybody here voted for at least one way to fund that. And I want to note that. But I am just stunned that that is the conversation we're having right now. Anybody who's been on a ride along has heard from firefighters that they have been asked to do more. The call volume to staffing ratio at fire has gone up. Nobody talks about it because we are in a habit and in a practice of only talking about bureaus that are political in their call volume to staffing ratio and not talking about it with fire. And we have watched as we have seen the fire station with the largest increase in call volume, station eight lose its double company in parallel to that process. And we're talking about blowing an $800,000 hole into the budget. Now, this won't be enough. The fire engine cost $2.5 million in one time funding. It was $1.65 million for the rescue units. Right. But why pile on another $800,000 onto it? And when we've been hearing about it for a long time, and anybody who's worked here for a while, and I know many of you have, I've seen angela's work for a few years on it now from when I worked at the psa. Obviously, we all know the other folks up here as well from from the last year and a half. This is not new. We've been hearing about it from some of the people in the back of the room as well, about how the budget is structurally not designed. Well, that can't get fixed here, but we have to do this in order to get to a place where we can have that conversation without having short term consequences that are much worse. So I would say it is good for us to think about the overall volume of taxes and fees that we have as a city, but the way to fix that is this is not the place to draw the line. If we are going to do that, we should go back to some of the conversations we've had about things that are maybe not as unifying, maybe not as much core services, and are not the first thing you would put in the center of that venn diagram. Thanks.
413 Thank you. Councilor Kanal. Councilor. Pirtle-guiney.
414 Thank you, council president. There's clearly, you know, our fees are about cost recovery. They're about funding the city. They are also about sometimes incentivizing or disincentivizing behavior. And I think what I'm hearing across the dais is that we have a tension between those two things in this fee proposal. And I just think it's worth stating that clearly. We are perhaps inadvertently disincentivizing things we want to incentivize in order to get cost recovery, which I actually think cost recovery is important in the fire bureau, because it's about the risk that you as an individual pose to the community around you and how we address that. But I just want to ask a question about how we make sure we don't end up over a quarter of the way into the budget year, voting on fees that now won't be able to be levied until almost halfway through the budget year for a budget that we approved with the revenue from these fees in it. And I'm still not totally clear, though I know one of my colleagues asked the question why this wasn't approved during the budget and how we were legally able to approve a budget that was not funded. So can somebody tell me how that happened and how we make sure either cfo biery or city administrator lee, we don't do that again because this isn't a great situation. I mean, we're talking an $800,000 budget hole, but we're going to have a budget hole one way or another, because this doesn't go into effect until November. That's almost halfway through the fiscal year.
415 Yeah. Thank you, council, for the questions. For the record. Jonas biery chief financial officer and apologies, I didn't hear the first part of the conversation, so hopefully I'm jumping in at an appropriate time. So acknowledge that, yes, the process we've had in the past where sometimes fees are implemented as a prospective revenue in the budget, which is allowed, I mean, property taxes, for example, are all an estimate, right? So that's normal budget practice, but it's not ideal. And so we've we've had a legacy practice at the city where often those fee related decisions are made at the last moment, and we don't have time to implement them technically in alignment with the budget, even though that's our ideal to correct for that we're taking. And we talked about some of this in the budget process work session a few weeks ago, where we're taking a different approach, both in expectations throughout the organization about doing the analysis and developing the proposal during the initial budget development, during this upcoming budget cycle and in the future, both so we can be aware of what those changes and trade offs might be. I heard some conversation about being strategic and making sure we're looking at the upstream, downstream and collective impacts. So that will be part of that. The second part of that improvement will be making space in an earlier work session around the budget to have that dialog with council so that that information is daylighted and known and hopefully can align so that those changes can be implemented along as alongside as a complete package with the budget actions.
416 Great. Thank you. I am glad to hear we already have things in place or in progress, I guess. And to be clear, even these would be estimates, right? We don't know exactly how many applications will get, how many fees will be charged. I understand that we need to true things up because there are estimates. I'm just not sure why we're voting on this in October and why this wasn't part of the package that we voted on during the budget, or something that we voted on in July. If we needed a little time to work it out after the budget. I know that's been answered technically. Why didn't that happen? But functionally, I don't know why that wasn't part of the process. So I'm glad to hear we have things in place to make sure that we're running a little smoother next year. Thank you.
417 Thank you, counselor. Pirtle-guiney councilor Smith.
418 Thank you and thank you.
419 Counselor pirtle-guiney. I was thinking the same thing because to me, $800,000 hole is just as important as a fire engine. And to to recover your costs. I do support that, but I have the same. I wanted to just kind of layer on to this and what everybody, everybody else is saying. We got the towel coming up. Why wasn't this put in the towel? Why didn't we put this in the budget? Because now coming back. And so I expect to hear all of this kind of stuff with the towel conversation and why we need to shore up some things. But this really, this kind of frightens me. And I'm a huge supporter of public safety. And I would not have thought for a second not to put that back in the budget. And so it also feels like, you know, departments, whether it be the budget folks or whoever is responsible, they say, let's get what let's finish with this and let's get this budget passed. We don't want to hold up any other conversation that we might need to have as it relates to increasing these funds or asking for stuff again and just waiting until after the vote. It's irritating. I guess that's what I'm saying. It's irritating. It's frustrating that all of a sudden, and we're going to hear the same thing with the towel, that you have to shore up some things, because we didn't get them paid for. Well, because they didn't even put them in the budget. So when you talk to the mayor and say what you need, why wasn't that a thing? And I know, chief, you were not here and so you were not responsible for the 2012. But I can't imagine that we haven't updated something in 2012. And people say, you know, city council is not doing anything. That's not true. We are all doing things. We've been passing all kind of legislation up here, and we've been trying to make sure that what our book of business is, that we make sure that you guys have every resource that you need to have. And then when this comes out and say, oh, city council, they're just, you know, tax and spend, tax and spend, that's not so because we just don't know because you all don't tell us. And because prior councils have not had the courage to keep up to date with a fee schedule, we are now having to carry that on our backs. And we've been doing everything that we're supposed to do. We've been doing our jobs and so it makes it look like that. We're the ones that are that are doing all of this, but I'm not happy about it. I'm going to support it, but I'm not happy about it and how things come before us as if it is an emergency and it was never heard of before. I've never heard of this whole issue, never heard that there was going to be a big $800,000 hole. I would have loved to have Sameer to support that in the budget and just acknowledge it, that it is an issue. That's something that we need to be aware of. But this just seems kind of. Late. It's just late. Thank you.
420 Thank you, councilor Smith. Councilor Novick.
421 Thank you, mr. President. I just wanted to express my appreciation for councilor Calls comments.
422 Thank you, councilor Novick councilor Zimmerman.
423 Thank you. I mean, I voted no in committee, largely for many of the reasons that came up. It was like there has to be a line in our professionalism, mr. Administrator. And I felt that getting getting this kind of ask out of out of cycle it having been on that side. Right. And now on this side, there is we want to make decisions with an eye to everything that's going on. And those were some of the comments I think, that the council president alluded to of of those costs and recoveries. I don't believe that the work happened to outline with councilors why this was such a one off, why this was such an emergency, why this was happening now and out of the normal sense. And I think that a little conversation can go a long way. I, you know, the last couple of months, I've just I would just say from a service area perspective, not any of the one bureaus, but the service area perspective. I'm continually being disappointed by the public service area and public safety service area in terms of how the work is arriving to council and what's being worked on. And so I just very much would encourage some emphasis in this service area. This is the kind of thing that shouldn't have been difficult. And this is the kind of thing that. Can be required. You know, we've got some needs in terms of some of the holes to fill, etcetera. But there's also an aspect that some of the conversations about requiring people to do their right and the permits we take out in public and, and the idea about cost recovery in public safety, I think those are those are discussions that we haven't had. And I and I'm not there with them. I'm also a hell of a lot more often going to be a yes on things that when the bureau comes forward to us and says the increase we're proposing to you. Council matches the the cola for this year or matches the inflation rate for this year. That is such an easy conversation to have. And frankly, I could say most of my career has been that way. But to hear about a 2012 item that hasn't been changed and then kind of have it come in as seen as a small thing, it's a big thing. And here's the last part of that. None of this tells me that we're right sizing it to the right cost so that if we do choose to go with the cost of inflation, you here on out that we've set the correct baseline. So this is where I'm challenged right now with the service area. And I'm challenged with these types of topics. And frankly, council president and outlined even more details on this than I even understand how it affects every day community life. That is challenging. And so my no vote in committee again, goes like we have a process for a reason. We have times in which we go through fees and schedules, and that's the budget process. And I'm and I'm. I don't want to be a no on principle, but I'm also have not been convinced that these are the right fees and the right costs. And it's the right time to do this. And so this has been challenging because we've got some competing thoughts up here. And I was hoping that we would have heard more since my committee vote of no to bring me to a yes. But I'm remaining challenged by that right now. I just need to share that with you.
424 Thank you, councilor Zimmerman. Councilor Ryan.
425 Yes, thank you, council president. I just want to get some more little bit of information about process. So when did you first bring it to the council committee? Bring it to their attention.
426 I mean, it's been a while.
427 Well, yeah. Councilor I'll take a stab. I don't know about the fee schedule. I don't remember what that timeline was, but I do want to acknowledge that this was included as a decision package in the mayor's proposed in April, carried forward and discussed at a work session on may 5th and then carried forward into the adopted budget. I appreciate that it probably wasn't clear that there needed to be an action to implement that, but I would I do just want to make sure for the public record, it's known that this wasn't as a tale of conversation that's happened publicly in advance of the fee ordinance coming to committee, which I think information the chief may have.
428 Yes, and sorry for listening with one ear to jonas and then getting more information from our staff. So I sent a memo in June, and then we went to chiefs of staff in July at the end of in August, and we came to caps in September.
429 Okay.
430 That's helpful. Thank you. So we have to improve our practices when. And there needs to be better communication about urgency. So I think we councilor I'm not on the committee, but it seems like we added to this timeline. So I just had to get more information to understand why this was so delayed.
431 Yeah. Understood. And just real quick, councilor Zimmerman, I want to acknowledge your comments and then just let you know, for what it's worth, that these fee increases do get us back to the practice that we've been at in terms of cost recovery, so that if we were to just implement annual cost of living or inflation increases, that that would keep us on pace. So set that there. And then the next conversation is certainly, if we got guidance from city administration or council to change that model, we would be able to move forward.
432 Great. Councilor Ryan, anything else?
433 No, I just wanted to daylight that because I realized we've had some. As we continue to build this new form of government, I think there are moments where the communication about urgency on an item that's related to fiscal issues as well. I think that has to be clearly communicated, and then it's on us if we keep delaying it.
434 So. Understood. Yeah.
435 Thank you, councilor Ryan. I put myself back in the queue. Colleagues, for a second bit of comment. I just one of the things that the fire department has to do is approve floor plans for assembly spaces, right? Places where people gather, and that's theaters, large restaurants, big open space areas. And, you know, of course, of personal interest to me, music venues where people come together, the fire bureau has to do a lot of real extra work to make sure that it's safe and that the floor plan makes sense and that people can get out if there's a problem. Unquestionably. But let me just say again, though, Portland needs people to get out. We have to be out in society around each other, celebrating life, spending money, making the streets safer by their presence. The benefit of an assembly space is not just to the operator, but also in major ways as a benefit to the city as a whole. And so, you know that I think of neighborhood music venues, restaurants, and bars as the mortar that holds our city together. And we need more of that. And a lot of these businesses are already operating on a shoestring of a shoestring budget. So we should have a way to think about fees that acknowledges that. And I think it's true that across bureaus, not just fire, I'm not trying to pick on you all, although I do have a problem with the laser permit. But there is a direct correlation between where the fire bureau and places where artists, including chefs and all kinds of artists do their work. That makes our city beautiful. And we don't have a strategy, and we should so own city administrator jonas. Chief, I'm excited to work with you and the administration on thinking this through and thinking through what the fee study can be. So thank you for your hard work. Please don't take this as personal criticism. Councilor Smith.
436 Council president, I just have a quick question. Can you tell me the order on this? I notice how when things have an urgency or it's put on put on our agenda, it has mayor wilson's name on it. Why don't we have these bureaus who are trying to put this stuff forward as the bureau? Because that's what we used to do at the county. So we know who's putting this forward. And because we don't even know who we're going to be talking to, we have no list of names or anything. It's just been driving me crazy for a year and a half.
437 Good. Good point to bring up because actually that is specifically written out in 3.02, our council rules. And we are going to be having a conversation about that very soon.
438 So is it that can bureaus bring things forward?
439 Currently under our 3.02 rules, it must be an elected official whose name is in the sponsor.
440 So that's why the mayor's name is on it.
441 Correct?
442 Okay. Perfect.
443 Councilor. It could also be the the auditor as well.
444 Okay. So so we will have a chance to say that this is the mayor and then which bureau it should be, because then we'll know who's going to come up before us. Right.
445 I certainly think there is an opportunity for additional information and how we file these things.
446 Okay. Thank you.
447 Thank you.
448 Councilor Kanal. Thank you. First, let me say I actually agree with literally everything you just said. Council president. I
449 I do want to work on that together with you. I think councilor Zimmerman brought this up in a previous conversation like a year ago as well, that there's a lot of the impacts we have is, is not just on budgets and work of bureaus, but on, frankly, what, what our society looks. Regulation can help or hurt the idea of having a nightlife in the city. And I think there's a lot there that we should we should look at. The thing I wanted to bring up was I last year, we had a budget that was dependent on cost reductions associated with corps realignment. We approved a budget that did not have revenue in it for some of the work, because we assumed that some of the work was going to go away as part of realignment. And then we talked about it in the fall towel. This year, we have a budget that assumes revenue from fees that we had not yet updated, and that creates the challenge in the short term that councilor Pirtle-guiney talked about. I think that this is a budget problem, that we shouldn't be doing this unless we've already made the decision, because otherwise we end up where the fault is a not technical adjustment, but just a adjustment. It's a supplemental budget, effectively by design. And also it's just not quite as transparent to the public about the decisions we're making on the budget. And I would like to see that change over the year. And I'm mostly looking at, I guess, the budget office cfo and city administrator there. It's not an ideal way of going about it, and I think we should be transparent that that this is going to mean some future action, especially when it's something like this, because we can say fire fees are going to make up this difference. But hypothetically, we could have done it in a different way, right? We could have not increased some of the fees, increased other ones more. There's a lot of different things that could have occurred. And so it's not as transparent and doing that. We're going to fix that for this one. And we've already talked about the specifics of fixing it for fire by putting it into the normal fee cadence. But I think the bigger picture is the budget should be done when it's done and not have these, these later things we have to figure out. Otherwise we have some disaster to address in a in a technical adjustment. Thanks.
450 Thank you. Councilor Kanal colleagues. This is the second reading of a nonemergency ordinance. Seeing no one else in the queue. Keelan can we please call the roll on item 13.
451 Document 2026-3 hundred Clark. Aye, Morillo Green. By Zimmerman. Absent. On lois I. Smith. I know. I pirtle-guiney. I Ryan no. Koyama Lane I Morillo. I Novick. I Dunphy no. The ordinance passes with a vote of nine eyes, two nays and one absent.
452 And colleagues, we have run out of time for today. We will not be able to hear item 14 document 2026-123. This will be continued to a future council meeting. And with that we are adjourned. Adjourned.