The record · Transcript

Council session — 2026-02-12

Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (21,773 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are AI-suggested and editor-reviewed (low confidence — auto-captions garble names); each color marks a speaker.

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All right. Good afternoon, friends and family. Calling back to order the Thursday, February 12th gesundheit meeting of the Portland city council. Bing, rebecca, can you please call the roll?

Good afternoon. Avalos.

Smith here.

Kanal here.

Pirtle-guiney here. Ryan. Here. Koyama Lane here. Morillo here. Novick here. Clark.

Here. Green. Here.

Zimmerman.

Oh. I'm here.

Excuse me. Council president. Dunphy. Yeah.

Hi, everybody. Can we please read the rules of decorum?

Good afternoon. 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 ww Portland.gov slash slash agenda. Information on engaging with council can be found on the council clerk's webpage. Individuals may testify for three minutes unless the presiding officer states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over. The 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 are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when council clerk calls your name. Thank you.

Thank you very much, colleagues. Before we dive into our agenda, there are a couple of colleagues who would like to make a number of motions with regard to that agenda. Councilor pirtle-guiney.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney: Thank you, council president. I would like to request that we amend the agenda and remove item 20 2616. It's number ten on the agenda. Authorized submission of a minor boundary change request to the state of Oregon to amend the Portland enterprise zone boundary. I would ask that we remove this from today's agenda, but that you put it back on the agenda for next week after this item moved out of the arts and economy committee, there were some concerns raised about the standards around enterprise zones. Enterprise zones, as we know, provide a tax benefit to developers in exchange for some assurances around benefit to the community of the permanent jobs. We don't have clear standards around the construction jobs. We we haven't ever before. But there were some questions about this particular boundary change as it relates to that. Councilor Green and I have spent the last couple of days having conversations with representatives from the port, from alaska airlines, and from the building trades unions to try to make sure everyone can be on the same page moving forward. So this important project can happen, but we're not quite there yet, and I'd appreciate just a little bit more time to see if we can make that happen.

Councilor. So councilor, is that a formal motion?

That is a motion.

And I heard a second from councilor Green as chair. I am required to do this. Colleagues, this is a motion that can be accepted through unanimous consent. Or I can take a roll call. I'm seeing a nod of no. Can we please call the roll on councilor Pirtle-guiney motion to reorder. Is there discussion? Yeah. Is this a debatable motion? Is there discussion.

On this?

I have a couple questions.

Any interim councilor Clerk go ahead and ask a question. Oh, really? Yeah, sure.

Thank you.

I feel privileged. Thank you. Council president. I would just like to ask the maker of the motion just a little bit about the timing issue. If there's a problem with the timing with the parties, just because I haven't been a part of this conversation, I'd like to just know a little bit more if that's possible.

I think there's two timing pieces and I'm not sure what you're asking about, so I'll take a stab at both. The first is the timing around just making sure that all parties are in a place that where they feel good about the project, that could come from this moving forward. Those are conversations that we have begun. But unfortunately, the concerns came up at a late enough date that we just haven't had the time to fully work that through yet. And I am hopeful that an additional what is that six days to get us to next Wednesday would give us that time. The other question that you might be asking is around the timing of the vote itself, and whether that causes any problems. My understanding is that there are actions that need to be taken by the port as well, and they would need to file notice about those actions next Thursday. And therefore, moving this to next week's agenda would still be in line with everybody's timing needs. I don't want to speak for any other parties, but that is what I have been told by representatives of the port. I'm sure that there are some folks who would prefer more time for negotiations, others who would like to move forward immediately. But I think if we delayed this by one week that it would not cause significant problems. Based on the information I've been given.

Is there anybody we need to hear from in the public about that?

This is just a simple agenda readjustment, readjustment. So I would be I will absolutely be able to accommodate the motion request to hear the item next week. We can certainly move it to that. And the official ruling, by the way, is that the motion to postpone is a debatable amendment. So, colleagues, if there's anybody else who would like to jump in the queue and ask questions, you're welcome to this is to the motion to delay seeing. Yes.

Are we able to hear from the city administrator if this creates any challenges or if there is support on the on the executive side about this?

To my knowledge, right now, I don't see any or foresee any issues with this, but I'd have to really look at it. I haven't had a chance to really look at that amendment yet.

Councilor Ryan.

Dan Ryan: Yeah, thank you. Council president. I was I was co-chairing or my co-chair and I were on that vote. And you were part of the five zero unanimous, of course, councilor Green. So of course, I was ready to vote on this today because it was a pretty inspiring conversation. And some of us attended the chamber breakfast this morning that gave some information that would say, this is exactly the type of action you would hope the city council would be taking today. So I just want to I would love to hear from people from the port or from who's here or from prosper. That definitely waiting one week will not put any will not damper this process. I believe you, but I think it'd be great to hear if any of them would would just confirm that.

I'll defer to the council president on whether or not to do that, but I will say councilor. I was also at that presentation this morning. I don't make this move lightly. I do take this project very seriously, and I look forward to being in a place where. Where there's strong support across the board.

I just needed transparency myself because this was something I didn't see coming. And so they're up here I sure.

Yeah. To the to the specific question from councilor Ryan, can you confirm the timeline? Please introduce yourself.

President Dunphy, members of the council for the record. Dan eisenbeis, regional affairs manager with the port of Portland. Councilor pirtle-guiney is correct in terms of the timeline for the port's necessary action that we are required under state statute, not as the landowner, but as a port to consent to a boundary amendment for an enterprise zone. We intend to bring that forward to the port commission at their monthly March 11th meeting, and materials are due for that on Thursday, February 19th. That said, we are eager for this to move forward and would prefer a substantive vote today if possible.

Thank you, thank you Dan.

I just want to then thank you. Councilor pirtle-guiney reading the tea leaves. It sounds like you're doing some bridge building here so that we can move this forward and have a discussion next week that could hopefully move this forward so we can continue to move the legislation forward that passed unanimously. Okay. Thank you. I don't know if anyone else needs to speak. It's just when something is surprising like this, when you sit down, it helps that we have a little more transparency in the dialog.

Certainly. Thank you so much. Council president Dunphy and councilors. For the record, I'm shabrie vickers, director of equity policy and communications at prosper Portland. I just want to appreciate councilor Elana pirtle-guiney and councilors Green for gathering the port alaska and prosper to talk through this process. And I do think the additional time will allow us continued delineation around what the issues are versus where we're, I think, directly aligned. And I know that all of us are interested in this moving forward now, as soon as possible and securing these jobs and the benefit community benefits that come out of our zone program here. So thank you again for gathering us and bringing everyone together.

Thank you. Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney. Thank you, council president. I needed to have more context before I could make a decision. I didn't want to read minds and pretend I knew what I was voting on. Thank you.

Councilor Green.

Mitch Green: Yeah, I'll be brief because I know we need to move forward. But, you know, councilor Ryan, I'm glad you asked the question because we were co-chairing it, and the tenor of the committee meeting was like a universal excitement to do this. For my part, I left that learning new information from some of the trades, who I value, their lived experience and their role in this quite highly. And so I decided I knew that this would be a sticky wicket. And so I said, I'm going to reach out to councilor Pirtle-guiney, who I know has experience managing some very complicated sets of relationships, and we work together on this. And so, you know, it is a bit of a surprise, but but I want you to know that it's coming from a place where it's like, really want to land this plane for for everyone. Because I was at the breakfast too. And I know that on both the labor side and also the investment side, we do need it.

So thank you, councilor. This is a type of dialog. I think we needed council president before we did this vote. Great.

Appreciate it. Colleagues, looking again to see if there are is a unanimous consent for this. And anybody who disagrees with unanimous consent please let me know. I see no objection to unanimous consent. So I'm moving item ten. It will be postponed until Wednesday the February 18th. Councilor Kanal.

Sameer Kanal: Thank you, council president. I'd like to. I am moving to swap the order of the two remaining items to put the resolution on back. Filling the membership of the cba hire. This is both because of availability as well as just to continue the conversation we ended on yesterday and kind of close that loop.

Thank you. Councilor Kanal is there a second.

Sameer Kanal: Second.

Second colleagues. Again, this is a motion that is debatable but also can be approved with unanimous consent. Is there any objection to reordering the items on the agenda? I see no buddy actively shaking their head. The items will be heard in opposite order. We will move this. Can we please call item number 12? Rebecca.

Item 12 appoint members to the community board for police accountability.

Thank you councilor Kanal.

Sameer Kanal: Thank you, council president. Colleagues. This document was written to pair with the report that removed members or alternates from the cba yesterday, as well as recognizing resignations, the council president's office and mine worked together to ensure the format was correct. All the I's are dotted and t's were crossed before anything else. I want to note that it was originally written to be if all potential removals were enacted, and it was also written prior to an alternate withdrawing last weekend. So I've offered a technical amendment. I emailed it out as Kanal two yesterday. The clerk's posted it as Kanal one on the website to recognize that alternate resignation and reflect the decisions we made yesterday. So because it's a technical amendment, I'd ask for it to be considered up front. And additionally, everything else I'm going to say is based on the amended version. Should I do that now or should.

I move the amendment? Okay.

I'll move Kanal one formally.

And I will second. And is there colleagues? Again, this is a technical motion that is posted online and you should have it in front of you. This is to reflect the names who we amended yesterday. Is there any debate to this amendment seeing no one in the queue record. Please call the roll.

Avalos.

Smith.

I Kanal. I pirtle-guiney. I Ryan.

Koyama Lane I.

Morillo I Novick. I clerk.

Green I.

Zimmerman.

Dunphy I.

Any amendments approved with ten I and two absent.

Thank you and councilor Kanal to the underlying now amended resolution.

Yeah. So colleagues following yesterday's decisions in the report, there are two member vacancies and three remaining alternates. This resolution would do three primary things. First, it would appoint two of the three alternates to one year membership on the board. The reasoning behind the choice of which two is solely based off of the fact that in December there was a lot of pushback on the idea of appointing someone who didn't live in city limits to a different body. And of the three alternates, two live in city limits and one does not. We need two of them. So that was the decision there. The remaining alternate remains eligible to serve and could be called upon in the future, but we can discuss that if and when we have that need. Second, it would adjust the term lengths by moving a couple of one year to two year or two year to three year memberships to maintain membership of seven up each year, because they're supposed to be split equally. And third, it would update term lengths to start on February 11th yesterday, which was both the anticipated date of the vote and was the date of the first meeting of the cebpa. This has two impacts. It would prevent us from having to do this again in June, because otherwise our term lengths would be up on June 30th, I think, and it would also allow for the nominating process to recognize more than someone who's, you know, been in for four months and allow the volunteers to decide with a larger sample size, whether or not they'd like to re-up for three more years. The goal of this was to avoid another long, drawn out conversation and and just follow up the the report yesterday. Allow the staff to follow the process laid out in code and come back in a couple of months with new people to appoint as alternates, because this resolution would complete the process from yesterday, ending with 21 of 21 member positions filled, but only one of six alternate positions filled. So we'd have to have staff come back in a couple of months to backfill those remaining alternate positions. I'm happy to take questions or anything, but that concludes the presentation.

Thank you. Councilor Kanal councilor Pirtle-guiney.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney: Thank you, council president, I. Was not expecting us to make a decision about who was moving forward without discussion, and I voted for this in order to move us forward in our conversation today. But I would appreciate a bit of a reminder about how our process went in determining the alternates and how these alternates fit into the the broader pool of candidates here. I'm also curious about the decision to move trish garner to a one year shorter term and put her new in the term that trish had been in, which was a year longer than trish than the term trish was moved to. There was no explanation for that given.

Can I respond? Yeah. So that's the technical amendment side. Hugh was already in a two year term and trish was in a one year term originally. And because we didn't remove hugh yesterday, the original plan was to move trish up from a one to a two to to backfill for, for hugh. But because hugh wasn't removed it just keeps trish where she was. So the current plan retains his term as two years and trish's term as one year, as it was in June when we originally did it. Yeah.

Can I ask a follow up question?

So this is not something that went through a committee, and I don't think we had a broader conversation about it as a council. I guess I'm just wondering who's making the decisions about the lengths of terms and how things are getting moved around. And I understand, councilor Kanal, that you made a decision about who to move forward based on geography, but are you alone making these decisions? There hasn't been any discussion anywhere by a subgroup of council that I know of about how these terms are put together, and I guess I'm just a little bit concerned that I don't know the transparency around how this document came before me.

Yeah. So to direct respond to that, it is something that I talked about with the council president. Again, there were three alternates. We had we had some urgency coming from the administration to try to resolve this before yesterday. This was originally going to get voted on yesterday. So just keep that context in mind, because the first meeting of the thing was yesterday. I am very I'm really trying to avoid what happened in December where someone got dragged through the mud for not living in city limits. And so that was the conversation I had with council president about here are three people that council already approved as alternates. Two of them need to become members, and one of them happens to not live in city limits. So that was the conversation there. As for the term lengths, that was both reflective of district balance, I'll note that that district two is overrepresented in the overall system. This will reduce that overrepresentation slightly. And you can see the there's a line in the table on the exhibit that that shows that. But also I'll just note that the three people that were mentioned here are all people who've served on other boards as well. And so the way it would work on this one is, is corinne frechette, who is a former chair of the the police bureau wide advisory committee would go up a year. And the other person is timothy pitts, who's also a member of board. So that that was the thing they were already appointed. And it reflects the decisions that were made back in June. And if you look at the I didn't choose in the initial presentation, but if you'd like, we can go through it. The initial round of the conversations we had back in June, this reflects that to.

I'm sorry, I just have one more question.

On this line. In the original information that we had that I think was posted as an exhibit here, the person who had been an alternate who was then removed, was listed as a district two resident. Has that since changed?

Can you can you tell me.

In exhibit a.

I'm looking at the amended version, I apologize.

Am I looking at the wrong exhibit?

Yeah. So that was a person that was going to become a member in the original version, but then withdrew. So that person was always an alternate.

Okay.

This is why the technical amendment got it, made it a little bit funky because we ended up with one person resigning since this was filed who was an alternate. But I can walk through what exactly would happen if you if that's easier. But that person that you're referring to is not currently a member was an alternate resigned as an alternate.

What I see here is alternate appointed as member. I'm looking at the amended version. Yes. An alternate appointed as member on this document. Erica atticus summerfield is crossed off in the first line. Yeah. Sarah citron is then there to replace carly edwards. Yep. Erica. Atticus summerfield is then added again to replace charlie. Michelle. Wesley. Yes. And jason ashley is crossed off to replace charlie. Michelle. Wesley. Yeah. Jason ashley is the third alternate. I assume.

Jason ashley is the fourth alternate who resigned over the weekend.

We amended that yesterday.

And that was amended into the report yesterday.

Okay, I see that's why their name is crossed off. Okay. Thank you.

Councilor. Oh, there you go, counselor Zimmerman. Thank you. Okay, colleagues, is there further discussion about the. Proposed replacements.

I did have? I'm sorry.

Okay. Counselor Zimmerman. All yours.

So which member is not a member? Which member is not a city of Portland resident? Please.

The I was may I respond? The alternate by the name of todd bateman is not a city of Portland resident. I'll note the eligibility is live work, play, worship. Go to school so he is eligible. You could consider him at another time. This report does not. This resolution does not appoint that alternate to a membership roll.

Todd baker.

Bateman is at the bottom of the table, and I'll note that all the alternates are going through all the training. So if there is a vacancy in the future, that would be a future council conversation and just one that we could take up if we wanted.

Councilor Zimmerman, any further questions?

And so councilor Kanal, you have two amendments in here that frankly, just opening them as hard to discern what the differences are like. Is one of them dead and one of them alive, or what are we doing? Both of those those are both.

Part of the same one amends the resolution, the other amends the exhibit, and we just approved those amendments. So the the one that says proposed amendment to resolution is to what you would scroll up and see on the city website. And then just below you can see exhibit a. So the other amendment is to exhibit a, and that one is is not in track changes. So it will reflect exactly what the outcome would be of this resolution.

And the administration didn't put these together.

The administration, not this document, but the administration put together in the report yesterday a list of the eligible alternates that originally had the same four people. And yesterday we had to do the same technical amendment to remove the alternate who resigned over the weekend. Between the posting and the consideration yesterday. So they had named the three people in the. The final version of the report we adopted yesterday has the three remaining eligible alternates. And then this would put two of them in. And again, the reason for the specific two that were chosen is entirely district in city limits, out of city limits based.

I guess I'm just uncomfortable with how deep it feels like your hands are in the minutia of this at this point, and I would expect to see structural changes come only from the administration. These feel like structural instead of policy based. And so I guess I, I understand today you also requested that some sort of comp class comp thing come back with respect to the staff who will be involved in this. Again, that feels inappropriate. I don't think that that went anywhere, but just this seems like a very detailed level of involvement by you, and it's hard to interpret if this is becoming kind of your, your oversight committee in a way, and I don't know what to think of that. And so.

Sounds like you do actually.

Well. There are parts of this where initially, many months ago, it seemed like things were going to go forward and you were put names forward. And then the more and more you're involved, the less I have faith that this isn't just being kind of cast in a certain in a certain manner. So why didn't the administration note these changes and why didn't they bring them forward?

So may I respond to the part that relates to this? This is a council body. This is not in part of the administration. We have interim staff that's managed by the administration, by deputy city administrator for city operations tracy warren and formerly sarah morrissey. It is housed administratively under city operations as well. But if you go into the charter, this is a board member shall be appointed by approval of council. If you look at the the clerk's manual, it says that both reports and resolutions can be used to appoint people, but that under the part about appointments it talks about specific groups being named as by resolution. Resolutions can be filed by the mayor, but are generally filed by councilors on issues like this. And and there's a history of going back. I can post several of the different resolutions appointing people to advisory groups over the years that have been filed by councilors and in discussion with the council president about it, how we would go about filling these, the the idea of doing that through the report and amending it live on the fly, especially given what happened in December, was particularly uncomfortable. And so council president and I discussed putting forward a separate document and shifting it in that way so that that's why. But this is not an administrative body. This is one of the ones that advises council the same way as maybe ten or so other ones that are written out in code.

And councilor Zimmerman, I will affirm that this also does did come from my office with my coordination and my equally putting my fingers into the details. Council. Zimmerman do you have more? Nope. Okay. Counselor. Clerk.

Thank you. Council president I'm just curious how this is going to operate in the future. If the new board or the administration are going to be bringing forward more names, how is this going to operate in the future? Can anybody answer that?

I can say that my expectation is that the way it has come forward so far has been pretty messy, and that things will hopefully certainly be easier. My expectation also generally, is that council has the ability to, well, I prefer these coming forward in resolution form than in report form. More broadly, with the sort of broad framework that the council's implemented at this point. But to the specifics, I'd love to turn it over to dca warren, and let me take it away if she has any.

For the record, deputy city administrator tracy warren. So one of the things that we still need to put in place is that we need to work with the board to hire a director. I would envision that in the future that the director would be leading conversations that come to council with my support.

And can I ask another question, and will the new director be doing recruitment and will the legal department be vetting folks? How is that going to operate?

Yes, we would still have the same criteria to vet and determine eligibility of participant or of eligible nominations to come to council for approval.

I can add to that. Just it is also further the expectation that council that in the future, candidates for this will have been vetted before they come to us.

That that is correct. I would add that there, because we have a continued obligation to review people for their eligibility to continue to serve on the board. There could be instances in which the administration, in partnership with the director, may have to come forward and ask for removals, depending on whether or not folks no longer meet eligibility criteria.

I appreciate that response because this has really been a pretty messy process, and I'm still feeling pretty uncomfortable about what happened yesterday. I think that this is probably going to pass, but because I haven't been included in that process and I, I'm wishing for more transparency, I'm going to signal a probably a no vote here.

Thank you. Councilor Clark councilor Morillo vice president clarke.

Angelita Morillo: Thank you, council president. I. I would really encourage all of us up here to vote yes on this new body because we had a very hard discussion yesterday with a lot of different opinions. And ultimately we all voted on who was going to move through and who wasn't. And that was a democratic process. And you either had the votes or you didn't. But I think that it signals to portlanders that this body is not going to be impartial or ready if people are taking no votes based on what I thought was, frankly, a fair process. A few months ago, we removed other people off of other boards because they didn't live within the city bounds, even though the criteria was that they live, work or play or worship in the city of Portland. And some of those people, the reason they no longer lived in the city was because they couldn't afford it, because they had been unhoused, and because the housing placements that they found were outside of the city of Portland. And I think that that was very devastating for many of us up here to watch that process happen. And I think it was devastating for that person that had to be put through that process and to have their time wasted. If we're not going to want someone who doesn't fit a criteria that they didn't even know they were required to follow. I also I just reject the idea and this perpetual thing that keeps coming up and I'm just going to name it that councilor Kanal is like too smart or too clever, and therefore we can't address some of the the things that he's done because one, he is the co-chair of public safety. I would I would assume that the chairs of some committees are better informed than other people on council about certain issues coming up, because that is the expectation of their duty. Councilor Kanal has also worked on these issues for years. There are certainly things for finance, for example, that you councilor Zimmerman have worked on that I have far less expertise on than you. And I don't presume that there is something sneaky or indirect going on when you bring something forward. And I think that there are many of us that have different levels of expertise on different issues, and that we trust each other when we bring something forward. So when a councilor is passionate about an issue and is bringing forward changes that need to happen, there's nothing stopping you from digging into those issues. Before we get to council, all the items were posted, all the amendments were posted. You could have gone and asked questions about it, or we could ask questions openly now. But these seemed like technical changes to things that were decided on as a body yesterday. And councilor Kanal is, frankly, an expert on this in a way that many of us up here are not, because we haven't worked on it as long. And that's okay. But I think that we need to signal to portlanders that this is a body that we are ready to uplift and support. It has been a very long journey to get us here, and I'm ready to vote yes on this today. I think we have had hard discussions based on a variety of ideas on who should sit on what body and why, and those different philosophies, and we have now come to the conclusion and we need to accept that conclusion. Thank you.

Thank you, councilor Morillo. Councilor Zimmerman.

Eric Zimmerman: Thanks, tracy. And perhaps our attorneys. I guess I'm wondering if, based on yesterday, does the requirement that a bias check, does that still need to exist even or does it exist in practice based on yesterday's actions? I'm just trying to think through. If one person that the staff says has a bias is now still on and remains on, does that call into question, or should we scrap that entirely from the cba code so that that's not a factor in the in the in the decision making process?

It councilor Zimmerman the that language is in the code. It's still a requirement. It's also in our doj settlement, which would require us to amend that and renegotiate that settlement. So it remains a requirement. I the. Interesting part here is that we did make a recommendation. Ultimately, council has the decision on and the authority to determine if they're going to remove someone from the board.

Does this. Will the cba members have to go through a regular or a or a semiannual or whatever the right verbiage would be here in terms of a check for the regular eligibility requirements, insofar as if the city becomes aware of something that would or could be considered disqualifying, will the staff of the cba bring a similar document for removal for eligibility purposes? If they find out new information about a member.

We could. Yes. If we were to be provided new information about a member that caused us to make a different determination related to their eligibility, we would bring it to this council with our recommendation.

Okay.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Just a quick point of clarification. There was removal for cause, not removal for eligibility.

I will I will admit I'm not sure what term we used for different members of that document yesterday. Which one applied to who. But if somebody has a bias, what is that cause? That's cause.

Because we already know yesterday's because we had already appointed them. It came forward as cause in the future. If it was a screening, that would be.

I think that's actually not what the document said. I think we said bob weinstein cause.

Okay.

I think we said bias ineligibility.

Okay.

And then we said retire or resignation for two others.

My brain is mushy. So I believe you.

It's okay. I think the outcome is the same. But I just want to make sure that we're using the right terms here.

I think you're right and I apologize. I got it backwards.

Councilor Kanal forward to your interpretation of what I've recently sent you.

So just a couple quick notes on this. It's a little bit of a weird situation with last time because normally and I think, councilor Clark, you talked about this too. Normally when people are appointed, the checks are done. But because we didn't that hadn't happened in June. There was this sort of acknowledgment that a check would be done after the fact. That should not happen again. And I know that that both of our folks up here from the staff side have said that several times. So I trust it. As a result of that, there was a little bit of ambiguity over whether or not to go with removal for cause versus ineligibility. That's not going to be a repeated thing. I will note and put me in a little bit of a weird situation here. As someone who's tried to change the text, I would absolutely argue against removing altogether the references to bias, and I would instead ask for anyone interested in fixing that standard to join in a conversation on it, because I think that the importance of ensuring that people will not bring their preconceived notions into decision making is vital, but having a clearer standard is helpful. And I'll give you an example which also relates to the settlement agreement. The settlement agreement does not actually have in it the part about ineligibility due to bias. It hasn't it the part about removal due to bias for cause and in both cases in city code and the removal, it says a different phrase than it does on the ineligibility standard. So in the removal for cause it says objective demonstration of bias for or against the police, whereas in restrictions for eligibility, it says any individual who has a demonstrated bias for or against law enforcement has a very similar but not identical. And our deputy senior deputy city attorney has argued that in the long run, we should try to have the same text in both of those places. That's really important. But as it stands for this document, it's about addressing the vacancies we currently have, and I would hope that we are able to do that. Thanks.

Thank you councilor. Colleagues, any further debate? And rebecca, can we please move to a vote on this resolution? The now amended underlying resolution.

So we're voting on resolution document number 2026. Dash 069.

Avalos I.

Smith.

Kanal I.

Pirtle-guiney I.

Ryan I.

Koyama Lane I.

Morillo I.

Novick I Clark.

No.

Green I.

Zimmerman no.

Dunphy I.

The resolution is adopted as amended with ten votes and two no votes.

Thank you colleagues and can we please read the last item on our agenda?

Require deputy city administrator for public safety to provide a report on police officer recruitment goals and costs.

With us as council ops. Christopher, I don't even know your actual job title, but.

I think of the irony of it being hair, right?

Christopher, I know your last name, but I don't know your job title. So christhopher herr with the council ops to give us a staff summary report from this as it came out of the public safety.

Good afternoon, council president and councilors for the record christhopher herr council operations policy analyst service staff to the labor and workforce development committee. The resolution before you document number 2026 042, was considered in the labor and workforce development committee on January 29th, where it was referred to council with a recommendation to adopt, as amended. The resolution requests that the deputy city administrator for public safety prepare and submit a report to council comprising a comprehensive organizational assessment of the Portland police bureau by March 15th, 2026 or earlier. The report is requested to include a proposed organizational structure to improve outcomes across key public safety metrics, as identified and endorsed by the chief of police, deputy city administrator of the public safety service area, city administrator and mayor. A detailed timeline outlining milestones and phases for achieving proposed staffing levels. A comprehensive recruitment plan including advertising costs, recruitment efforts, and personnel responsible for overseeing recruitment activities. An overview of city incurred training costs including training facilities, training personnel and required materials and equipment. Information on current retention patterns and proposed strategies to retain police personnel and analysis of ongoing costs including salaries, cost of living adjustments, bonuses, benefits, new equipment, and anticipated changes in personnel overtime costs and projected cost ratio, reflecting anticipated population growth and urban development over the next ten years, and other public safety system changes impacting the Portland police bureau. The committee adopted two amendments to the resolution prior to moving the item to full council. The effects of the amendments on the original resolution are summarized in the committee staff summary posted online. The full impact statements on the resolution includes community impacts and community involvement. No verbal or written testimony was provided prior to committee action, and this concludes the committee staff summary.

Thank you. Thank you sir. Looking to the co-chairs of the community and public safety committee, I don't know who was seeing that. They see if there's any further conversation from you all through labor. Oh, well, in that case, I'm going to turn it over to the sponsor, to councilor Smith.

Thank you. Thank you, council president. Counselor Clark and I cosponsored this piece. And, colleagues, this resolution comes before us at a moment when Portland is navigating two intersecting realities our long standing commitment to climate action and community safety, and a budget deficit that focuses us to make decisions with precision, not assumptions. My goal today is not to elevate one value over the other. It's to ensure that whatever choices the city makes in the coming year, we are working from real verified data. Right now. We know a few things with certainty. Portland's police staffing levels are well below the national average of 2.3 to 2.5 officers per 1000 residents. We are currently having. We currently have 877 officer positions with 65 vacancies, which puts us roughly at one officer for every 725 residents. We also know that response times, investigative capacity and community based policing outcomes are directly tied to staffing levels. These are metrics our public safety service area leadership has identified as essential to public trust and public safety. We also know that the bureau has articulated a goal of adding new officers to be able to meet the needs of the community in the future. But what we don't know, and what this resolution seeks to clarify are the fundamentals. What organizational structure would support that level of staffing? How long would it realistically take to recruit, hire, train and and train the adequate number of officers needed? What would it cost not just to recruit and train them, but to sustain them over time, including salaries, benefits, overtime, equipment and ongoing professional development? And how do those costs scale as Portland grows over the next decade? These are not small questions, and they cannot be answered with guesswork. They require a comprehensive assessment from the deputy city administrator for public safety, working with the chief, the city administrator and the mayor. This resolution directs that work and sets a deadline of April 30th, 2026, so that council has the information it needs ahead of the next budget cycle. And the other reason this is so timely. There is a ballot measure that's out. That is something of a very controversial ballot measure that would take PCEF dollars, 25% of cf dollars going towards police. And I can tell you in my district, if they approved this in November, they will be expecting 400 officers on January 1st, 2027. And I want to make sure that folks have a an idea of how long it will take, what it will cost, and tamper down expectations in that first year, as you know, 18 months is the average that it takes from a a person, a candidate to go to a full officer. So I want to be clear about what this is. And this is something that I think that we can we can pull together with our collective minds and give us an idea of what this would look like going forward. Thank you.

Thank you, councilor Smith. Councilor Clark, do you have any other opening remarks on this?

Thank you, council president. I would just say I would just echo everything that councilor Smith has said and just add that it was just earlier this week in arts and economy that we heard from small businesses across the city about the linkage between public safety and economic development. So I think this is doubly important given what some of us heard today about the future of the economy in our city and our fiscal health. I would just echo what councilor Smith said about the staffing requirements, and this is really going to allow us to dig in to this whole issue. So I would appreciate everyone's support for this resolution. Thank you.

Thank you, vice president Clark, colleagues, we are moving to technical or clarifying questions or comments prior to public testimony. Then we will have council discussion. Councilor Morillo.

Angelita Morillo: So just clarifying based on some of the statements that were made, because I don't see that written into this request for a report, is this specifically going to be asking to you what it would look like to use PCEF dollars to fund our public safety Portland police? Nope.

This is this is going to be a report that basically says, how much would it cost? And how much time would it take to hire 400 officers? The pcf piece was just another point of reference that there's something that's going on concurrently that will be asking voters to vote on something in November and to be able to use PCEF dollars. This has nothing to do with that, but it has everything to do with providing the public, accurate information about when the expectation, when we expect that we could actually fully deliver on these 400 new officers or more.

Thank you. And have the sponsors coordinated with the public safety bureau with regards to the call allocation study to assess workload for our first responders.

No, there's something in there about the psr folks as well that we're asking them to to look at that councilor Kanal put in as a amendment to look at that, as they're looking at the entire ecosystem.

Okay. I think the the reason I raised that, and I'll be brief now so we can have it more for discussion. But just to clarify my question, it's because we have this metric that's often aired out that we need a certain number of officers per capita, and that's an oversimplified view of public safety and what we actually need to respond to the crises on our streets. So we need to understand the workload and the types of calls that we have in order to appropriately allocate the correct first responder to those calls. And so I think that if this report doesn't account for those questions, then we're either duplicating efforts that are already underway through the call allocation study, or we are not adequately addressing what the true public safety needs are. So I'm just going to flag that for now, but I'll save the rest of my comments for more discussion time. Thank you.

Council president. Can I can I respond to this? I want to be clear, this is about I want to find out how long it would take to get police officers. This is the main crux of this report. We have added those other elements to it, but it is for sure not about the the entire public safety universe. It is about it is about specifically police officers, law enforcement.

I understand that, but I guess what I'm saying is that you can't know how many police officers we need to respond to certain calls, unless we know the types of calls that we're getting and who is the appropriate responder, because then that means that you are figuring out which how many law enforcement officers should be responding based on an abstraction and not on the reality of what the call types are.

I want.

Dca calls you to do is to tell me, based on past years, this is what we've solved for, and this is what we're going to need in the future. So I want him to tell me that I don't want to to assume that. But this is clear. This is this is about police officers for sure.

Welcome, dca, if you can help us get some clarification about the nuance and how you envision implementing this, along with all the other.

Pieces, thank you for this opportunity. Good afternoon. Council president, council vice president, council and city administrator. I do have a kind of a written statement that might help clarify some of the questions I believe, that are that are out there. I'm bob cozzie for the record, dca, public safety, the service area appreciates council's interest in grounding public safety staffing discussions in clear data, realistic timelines and a transparent accounting of costs. The resolution aligns with the city's shared goal of making evidence based, fiscally responsible decisions about investments in our public safety system. The requested report is feasible and largely builds on work already underway across the public safety service area and Portland police bureau, as well as business services. The financial and staffing components of the resolution are doable. Using existing tools and data. The complexity in this work is not in the math, it's in the policy assumptions embedded in the model. And that's where some of this conversation is is going. Staffing numbers depend on what outcomes the community wants police staffing to achieve. For example, faster response times to priority 911 calls, improving crime clearance rates, reducing reliance on on overtime, expanding the types of crimes that are investigated routinely, or expanding or reducing scope of certain police functions, such as low acuity calls like welfare checks. A comprehensive organizational assessment requires clarity about what work the public safety system, including PPB, is expected to do and what work is handled elsewhere in the public safety system. Staffing needs are best estimated using a workload based assessment, which asks three questions what types of work are being performed? How often does this work occur, and how much time does it take to perform to the standard that we establish? This method helps move toward a model that reflects call types and volume. Also, investigative workload, proactive versus reactive work. Staffing analysis is most meaningful when it's tied to clearly defined performance measures. We could draw upon existing public input and feedback from council to provide an outline. Staffing models are not neutral. They encode policy priorities and values. Staffing analysis has been attempted in the past, with full staffing models created in 2014 and an updated internal analysis in 2019. The 2019 model was not implemented due to the changing environment. In 2020. Portland police staffing is shaped by demands of the police bureau, boec operations and call handling, alternative response capacity and crime rates all play a part. The analysis is feasible and it will be most useful by clearly defined underlying policy assumptions. If the resolution is adopted, the public safety service area will provide both a clear framework for defining the core work of the police bureau and the requested information on costs and timelines. I hope that helps.

Thank you. I have a few more questions based on what you've said. So for starters, do you believe in the per capita analysis as the appropriate analysis for how many officers we should have staffing our streets?

No. Not necessarily. We're not looking at a model or averages across the nation. What we're really looking at is that actual workload, as we define what Portland police should be responding to.

Okay. And I, based on everything that you've said, I'm still struggling a little bit to understand what the difference is between what this report would provide versus the information that we're already getting from the call restructure. So can you explain to me how this is different than the call allocation study?

What? Nathan, would you mind answering?

Yeah, I'm nathan lima. I manage the team that does budgeting, strategic planning and performance management for the public safety service area. So to your original question of whether or not these two would be connected, my team would be managing both of these projects, so they would be interconnected in that manner, I think, to dca causes. Introduction. You know, a workload analysis is really looking at what would a bureau be doing. And part of that equation is going to be looking at what calls the police bureau would be responding to. We are currently in the process of looking at call type restructuring, which may result in some of those calls that are currently going to the police bureau, going to alternative responders. In the conversation we had in labor and workforce development committee, this was discussed as maybe a ten year outlook of what would be happening with the police bureau and what could be happening with staffing. Ten years is a long time. It's a long time for there to be large changes in our labor contracts, in our crime rates, and in what call types are going to different types of responders. If we were to write this report, we would likely write it in with some of those caveats to say, you know, this is a call type that is currently going to the police bureau. It has been in discussion to have those be changing to different responder. If they were, this would be the impact that we'd see. This is the timeline we'd see for that potential shift. If they didn't shift, this would what the impact would be on on the staffing plan. So if we were to deliver this report, you know, may not give a clear this is exactly the number and the amount and the timeline. It would instead give a series of sort of policy options and what the financial repercussions of those options would be.

I see, so let me rephrase this and make sure I'm understanding it correctly. So this is different than the call allocation study. The call allocation study is trying to figure out what workload should go to which first responder. And then you're saying that this report, based on some of that information, amongst other pieces of information, which I'm not clear what they are, would give us a variety of models of staffing and costs and what it would take to implement different staffing models for the appropriate responder. Correct?

Correct. Yeah. So some of the information is laid out in the amendment, you know, looking at what our hiring rates are, our retention rates, some of this looks it asks for a comprehensive organizational assessment. You can look at programs that the police bureau might have had ten years ago that have been reduced. For example, we used to have a much more robust traffic unit than we currently do. If the police bureau were to say, in an ideal world with resources, we would staff back up and have more people doing traffic work. That is what it would take. You know, this is the dollars it would take. This is the staff members. This is what we look for. We will then sort of cost that out. That might be independent of work that's going on around collocation and other sort of contributing factors.

Okay. I think that's helpful in differentiating for me, the call allocation study versus what this is intended to do. I think I understand the political play that's happening here based on what was stated in the opening speeches. That's not in the written words, which is that this report is seeking to show how much it would cost to get the police bureau to the ideal levels, and then we'll be used as a justification to use PCEF dollars later down the line. That's not for you guys. That's a political question this body is going to be answering. But based on the statements that were made earlier, and the sponsors can correct me if I'm reading in between the lines, but I think that's what's being implied. And I guess if it goes to the voters, they will tell us what they want or don't want. But that's that's helpful. I do think in this time where our bureaus are so overburdened already, I would hate to do something that's duplicative because it seems so close to the call allocation study. But again, we're moving into discussion. So I will I will stop talking now.

Thank you. Councilor Morillo councilor Novick.

Angelita Morillo: Thank you, mr. President. I just wanted to note before public testimony that chair Smith, I apologize for not bringing this up committee, that I will probably bring an amendment forward to push back the timeline because March 15th is really soon. And one thing that I would like to do before this report comes is fully drafted, is have some conversation in the public safety committee about the same kind of performance, goals, priorities, issues that dca causey mentioned, like have a discussion about which units we'd want to build up, which ones we'd want to build down, do we prioritize clearance rates over as compared to response times? So I'd like I think this document is a great idea. I just like it to be informed by that kind of discussion and committee. And also I just want to note that I think that as councilor Smith said, her reference to the ballot measure is more as a matter of she wants to make it clear to people that they even if they pass the ballot measure, they can't expect 400 more police on January 1st. I think that was how that ties in. And I will say I would like to have a discussion about what ideally police staffing would look like. I also am going to definitely oppose that ballot measure. So I just wanted to call that out as well.

Council president, can I respond?

Absolutely.

So the deadline is April 30th, not March 15th.

Oh, I was looking at the document that I was given says March 15th.

It's April 30th.

Okay.

It's more than enough time.

I still would like to have a little more time to discuss in committee, but we can talk about that after testimony.

But point of information, it does say March 15th online. So where am I looking that it says April 30th?

We actually and I think they put the the wrong date on there. We talked about April 30th in the committee.

They put the amendments say April 30th.

The amendments say April 30th.

But these say approved amendments. And if they were approved, then it would be reflected in this, the actual thing and it's not so.

Clarification I feel like we're in debate.

No, no this isn't no, this is informational. It says March 15th. So is it April 30th of March?

April 30th. I said it was April 30th.

Right. I guess I'm just right. But I'm like, if this is the document that is the document we approve and it doesn't say that. Can I get some information from the clerk? Did you guys not update it? Or like, why does it not have that date on the document?

It was probably our mistake. I can.

Check the history of the document. If you give me.

I'm looking online on what is posted. That is all I have information for, right? So when I read that it says March 15th. So if there's some other date and if it's an approved amendment, but the approved amendment is not in here. So what am I supposed to approve?

Yeah, the amendment one is not reflected in the language online.

We can add an amendment.

Yeah. I'm just saying we.

Just need to it just looks like it looks like Smith amendment one and Kanal amendment one were approved on January 29th. It does not look like the language is reflected in the text that is printed on the item on our agenda. So looking through the amended the approved amendments, I do see the language updated to reflect April 30th. However, looking at the text online, I'm seeing it different.

So yeah, the amendment was adopted. It was added without track changes and we're adjusting that right now.

Sorry about that.

Okay. Councilor pirtle-guiney.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney: Thank you. I was in the queue for this part of debate for two reasons. One, to ask if everything had been updated because the amendments are listed as Kanal one and Smith one. But in the disposition from the committee, it looks like something was divided, some parts were adopted and some weren't. So I'd like to make sure that what I'm looking at as the current version on here is what we're actually voting on, and I don't know what we need to do to get those updates, but I'm concerned that I don't actually fully know what I'm voting on right now. I wanted to flag that. I also, if it's okay with you, mr. President would like to ask bob cozzie a question about timing and capacity.

Absolutely.

Cause there are a lot of reports this council has asked for. This seems to me like an important one. Does your team have capacity to take this on without other things being set aside or delayed, or are there things that we should know will be delayed if we ask you to take on this report?

That's a great question, councilor. I'm going to start it. And I want nathan to kind of take it for the second part. We had this conversation with councilor Smith early on, which is why the date was pushed back to April 30th to help inform council as you all deliberate the budget this year. So we're doing our best to meet that goal of April 30th, but we knew we wouldn't be able to hit it by by March 15th. Nathan, I'll let you take it.

Yeah. In terms of workload, you know, my team, as I said, does budgeting. And it has been a busy couple of months. Hopefully my team is entering into a little bit of a lull. We've submitted things and we have a bit more downtime and would have capacity to be writing this. We haven't talked directly about role assignments, but I would assume it would be myself and three of my analysts who would be the sort of key leads on this. Some of this work is work that we do on a regular basis. You know, as part of the budgeting process, we do a five year staffing forecast. So we already have that done. It was discussed in committee a desire for a ten year forecast increasing that is relatively easy. As d.o.j. Said, some of the more difficult pieces will be around that discussion of what are the trade offs, what are the things that are informing that staffing plan? If there were further discussions at the community and public safety committee, we would likely staff that and inform the report we produce based on that information.

Thank you very much. Thank you, council president.

Thank you. Councilor pirtle-guiney councilor Kanal.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney: I think that answered.

My question here, except that if we need to propose an amendment in advance, I'm happy to amend the March 15th, April 30th to align after we hear testimony, we.

Will we will make sure that the language we are voting on is final language before we start voting. And if we need to delay actual voting, we'll figure it out. But our clerk's team is going to figure it out, I'm sure.

Yeah. And I'll.

Just wait until debate that.

Great. Thank you, councilor Smith.

Loretta Smith: Thank you.

Are we in discussion? Are we.

Technical questions still technical?

I will wait for discussion.

Sounds great. Thank you. Rebecca, can we please move to public testimony?

We have one person signed up. Mark poris. Mark is online.

Welcome, mark.

You can go ahead.

Go right ahead.

Great. Thanks. Good afternoon. Council. My name is mark morris. I use he him pronouns and I'm with the group Portland copwatch. Since 1992, Portland copwatch has been working towards police bureau that's free of brutality, corruption and racism. And as we're part of a peace group, we believe that everyone should be able to go home safe after interactions with police, civilians and officers alike. I signed up at the last minute with a short list of feedback on this item and the language around it. Number one, there's no definition of community based policing which is mentioned in the first whereas statement. At the very least, there should be a reference to directive zero zero 24.00 community policing purpose. It's not enough to use that phrase without defining it in every context. We suspect that if all 12 of you councilors were asked what community based policing means, we would hear 12 very different answers. Number two, what are the best practices of a major us city? And whereas number five, the term best practices when applied to policing, also needs to be defined in every context. For instance, one week ago today PPB used two different types of chemical weapons to coerce Eric de scherer to come out of his home. And then they fatally shot him. He's using chemical weapons inside someone's home, considered a best practice in a major us city. Number three regarding the final. Whereas there is public interest in considering alternative sources of funding for police, this may be true, but there's also an extraordinary amount of public interest in never funding police with alternative sources, which amounts to a privately funded police force. There's also tremendous interest in fully funding unarmed alternatives to police like Portland street response number four. The org chart piece reminds us that chief de canceled a sole source contract that he had with jim ferraris, who submitted multiple versions of a potential org chart. And we're wondering if his work is going to inform this report under the impact statement. This initiative seeks to align portland's police staffing levels with national averages of 2.3 to 2.5 officers per 1000 residents. There's a note in the staff summary, and there's been discussion about regarding the appropriate use and limitations of certain federal bureau of investigation statistics when evaluating public safety rankings, it's likely due to referencing the same 2019 fbi stats that are linked to on the police staffing page. Citing seven year old data is its own problem. But really, none of these staffing data are relevant here in Portland. Until Portland street response is up and running 24 over seven 365 six under community impacts, increased staffing will improve response times, expand patrol coverage and strengthen community policing, thereby enhancing public safety outcomes. Again, community policing needs to be defined, but there's a lot of speculation in that sentence. We also wonder what the city means by public safety outcomes. Back to the shooting death of mr. Sharabi PPB last week. Was that even a public safety outcome, and if so, for whom? Definitely not for mr. Shearer. Number seven, the staff summary mentions current retention patterns and proposed strategies to retain police personnel. As you know, in may of this year, PPB will likely see its largest group of retirements due to 27 pay period loophole. That loophole is the single largest impediment to PPB ever being able to maintain a stable workforce. The city lists 15 additional pay period months on its website through September 2040. Hopefully the loophole will be fixed long before then. Dca mentioned a transparent accounting of costs. Please make sure to include pdr in that accounting. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

That concludes testimony.

Thank you rebecca. Colleagues, we now move to debate. Please go ahead and jump in the q councilor Green.

Mitch Green: Thank you, council president. So we actually had a pretty robust debate in the labor and workforce development committee on this. I think we some of the questions that were, I think, relevant and appropriate during the technical aspect, I think we're addressing some of the amendments to the process where I think councilor Morillo is not here right now, but she wanted to know, how is this different from, you know, allocation use. And I think one of the points of discussion we had was we said, look, if you're trying to solve for a problem here, you need to do so in the context of the of the full apparatus. Because what you your requirements for police staffing levels is going to depend upon these other things too, which is how we got to your amendments. Councilor I believe, or I think they were friendly to councilor Smith's, actually. And so I felt like we had a pretty good robust set of discussions. And for me, you know, I'm, I'm generally in support of this because I think you do need to know what you can pull off. And so if there are if there is a desire out there, folks, I mean, I guess if you do a push pull and you call people and ask them, would you, would you like to double your police force or would you like to have 400 more police here? And they just had an experience with public safety that that has a big impact on them. They're going to say yes. But if you lay this out in the context of, well, this is what it's going to cost, and this is actually how we can realistically this is our realistic ramp rate. And here are the trade offs. I suspect people are more nuanced than that. And I actually do. I do want to know what I think voters actually should know, what our binding constraints are, what our bottlenecks are on hiring, if they're going to go out and make a decision to divert a fourth of clean energy benefits, fund money from that fund, because I think there's actually a high risk that that we just create a new restricted budget account that accrues over time as well, because you're not going to spend that down. I don't think you can spend a fourth of the revenue in any given year on that. But but we don't know. We don't we don't have an evidentiary basis to make that claim. So I think my only part of the resolution that I don't really like is the purpose, the impact statement, the purpose, and the proposed legislation. The second sentence gives me pause because it says this initiative seeks to align portland's police staffing levels with, with, with a particular ratio, which I'm not convinced is the right ratio for Portland. But the other two sentences around it, I think are completely fine with me. At the end of the day, though, it's the resolution itself, not the impact statement. I think that carries the most weight when we think about legislative intent and the resolution doesn't talk about committing and desiring those particular metrics. So I'm kind of supporting it based upon all that. And I'll just stop talking for now. We'll see where we go. Thank you.

Thank you, councilor Green. Colleagues, just a quick technical note. The clerk has and team have been looking at what what happened with the date specifically when Smith amendment one was submitted. The date change was not highlighted in the the text change. Every other text change that is either redlined or added as new language does appear to be reflected in the document. The only one that I don't see specifically is the date, which I note is not redlined in the amendment, and so clerk staff did not do that. So my question to the labor and workforce committee members, and I was not at this meeting, I don't believe was whether or not folks understood at that point we were voting on amendment that a date change was part of that change.

Yes, yes, yes.

Okay. Looking at other all right.

So what's the council. People thought I was like oh yeah we did change it okay okay.

So as near as I can tell and I will ask any staff members who are listening to this to frantically look through the document as we are entering debate to ensure that that's the only thing not reflected from the amendments. But it does seem like there are the collective wisdom of the labor and workforce committee was that they understood April 30th to be the date that we were moving. So moving forward into the q councilor Pirtle-guiney.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney: Thank you, council president. I it looked to me, councilor Green, that perhaps the purpose wasn't updated when some of those amendments were adopted. I had noted that as well. And I actually, speaking to that piece, wanted to thank the committee for the amendments specifically around what the right standard is for public safety officers broadly and for police specifically. I think tying ourselves to a national average when we as a community have decided to move in the direction of having other public safety officers take on some of the work that is sometimes done by police in other cities, not just Portland street response that we heard about from our testifier, but also our ps3's and others. Tying to a national average doesn't make a lot of sense, but making sure that we are paying attention to response times, investigative times, community crime prevention metrics that does matter. And I think having a study that allows us to find out whether we are meeting our own standards around those things and what it would take in order to meet those standards in terms of time and money is really important. I appreciate this coming forward. I think that some of the data that this will provide for us will help us make a lot of the decisions we'll be faced with moving forward. Thank you, council president.

Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney councilor Kanal.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney: Thanks. So this description.

With relation to the fbi's statistic, the uniform crime reporting program defines law enforcement officers as individuals who ordinarily carry a firearm on a badge, have full arrest powers, and are paid from governmental funds allocated specifically for sworn law enforcement representatives. Because of law enforcement's varied service requirements and functions, as well as the distinct demographic traits and characteristics of each jurisdiction, readers should use caution when drawing comparisons between agency staffing levels based on police employment data from the ucr program. That's the uniform crime reporting program at the fbi. In addition, the data presented here reflect existing staff staffing levels and should not be interpreted as preferred officer strengths recommended by the fbi. End quote. That's a quote from the fbi's uniform crime reporting program. So I just want to be clear on that. And I do have concerns about that particular stat being used, because while the national average is 2.4, it runs a very wide range when you break it down by region and city size from 1.1 up to. If you're a south atlantic city with a population below 10,000, 6.3 officers per 1000. In fact, within the pacific region, if you're above 10,000 people in size, the range is between 1.1 and 1.8 officers per 1000. We are just shy of 1.4 in the city. If all positions are filled and we'll get over that. If the 14 new investigators proposed floated to be proposed by the mayor gets in there. So we're even if to the degree that that stat is useful, which is not much, we are within that range for our region. And that doesn't take into account all the things that councilor Pirtle-guiney brought up as well as the county. So I think that's worth just noting in here. The amendments that we put forward in committee were designed to address some of the concerns that I think both councilor Pirtle-guiney and councilor Morillo brought up to give the context to it, because I do think that it is relevant to understanding that if workload shifts. I agree exactly with what dca said, that a workload based model. And that's, by the way, the history of how we've approached it at the city since the advent of the community safety division. Pretty, pretty solid data driven thing. I, I also had some concerns around a few of the whereas clauses. I think that if the testimony about 12 different people having 12 or more ideas of what community based policing means is accurate, and I also think that there are some other things in here that are potential things we haven't discussed. There's a whereas clause here say leadership identify a four precinct model and the expansion of community partnerships as potential strategies for meeting public safety goals. We've never discussed that as a council. I don't think the mayor has made a proposal. I don't think it's harmful to say it's a possibility, though. I can see the the goal of trying to reduce the possible ways this can go wrong. And I, I recognize that not everybody has the same background that I have professionally, but I know the work that comes from the people who are sitting here, and I trust it personally. So I voted for this in committee. I will be most likely to vote for it here, depending on what amendments may come. But I did want to flag a couple of things that were added that I thought were really important. You can recruit all you want, but if you're not retaining, you are not going to increase your number. I've been an advocate for getting to the authorized number of officers for several years now, and that requires discussion of retention. I agree it also requires a conversation about the 27 pay period situation, not necessarily to change it, but to be able to staff in anticipation of it. Because when you know that people are retiring and this is easier with fire because they have a ten month training window that you can do in a single fiscal year, it's harder for police who cross multiple fiscal years, but we need to be able to address that so that we are having new officers ready to serve when the that pay bump, sorry, the retirement bump happens, which is going to be may 10th of this year I believe is the time frame for it. So there there are some things that we need to do beyond this. And I want to just stress that this is not enough. But the reason that I'm supporting it is fundamentally the argument that that councilor Smith made at the beginning. And we talked about this with the with the parks levy. I am concerned about the idea that we would be mischaracterizing and overpromising through a ballot measure and then failing to deliver on it. And I think it would be important to pair whatever unbiased information goes out to voters if this should get to the ballot, which is not known, with an understanding that that this is the rough timeline, this is what it would take to get there, what the financial trade offs are, as well as time trade offs. With that being said, I also think that the challenge with the timeline and my question here is, is get the call allocation work is going on in parallel, but may not hit its next milestone before you have to give this report, can we can you give us some confidence that there will be some flexibility built in into what you're saying that says, hey, in the event that the call allocation were to move, we talked about welfare checks. There's also crowd response that's been discussed. There's also investigative work. I think there's a few different variables here. I don't want you to give us a thousand different maybes, but can you speak to how flexibility based on workload can will be handled in here in the in the outcomes?

Yeah. I haven't started writing the report yet, but I anticipate there would be a sort of core analysis that would talk about status quo and talk about what the assumptions are about status quo. Then there would probably be a section that would be about potential changes, and that would sort of rank them of, hey, these are in the realm of possibility. They've been talked about on a regular basis. There's been advocates for it. There aren't substantial legal barriers. Here are things that could shift that status quo. And then, you know, let's give less analysis, but mention two things that are a bit further out there to be able to provide at least some range there. I think one of my concerns here is I don't want to overpromise to the the council that this would give something that's going to be a firm number. This is not a staffing plan that is going to be ready to implement. It is going to be a series of concepts that's going to give people an idea of ballpark, what the budget is. If there were to be funding for additional police staff in the future, I would hope there would be a lot more time and effort put into how that funding should be spent than whatever analysis we're able to get done in the next ten weeks or so.

Could you? When you said that you can't promise a number when you say a number, what what is the number that you're referring to that you wouldn't be able to promise.

Just an exact dollar of, you know, ten years from today, this is how many staff members we have. Okay. We we do five year forecasts every year and every year. Our prior five year forecast is incorrect. Usually we're in the realm of possibility. Sometimes there are surprises. Back around 2021, our numbers were wildly off because we didn't expect the changes to be taking place there. This past year, we were pretty close. It was just minor adjustments to what we did in the past ten year forecasts. You're just going to have much greater uncertainty there, and I don't want to disappoint anybody in our own abilities.

Yeah, and I don't I personally would not be looking for that specifically. I think understanding how long it would take to fill positions because of the modeling of the net numbers that we've been seeing and that variation in that seems to be the primary goal here of, of articulation. So but I appreciate that clarity. The two things I'll note here. I would have loved to take out this middle sentence and the impact statement as well. I'm choosing to interpret it from a legislative intent perspective as the word initiative, meaning the ballot measure itself, that it's referencing a third party initiative to try and do that as opposed to that, we would endorse it through voting for this. That's how I'm choosing to interpret it, and I understand that that's a challenge. I have issues with some of the other parts of it, too, but that's the big one, and I'm looking forward to the conversation that councilor Novick brought up about talking about performance metrics, because I think there are really big conversations to be had there that are not necessarily about the number of officers alone, but about the allocation between precincts, between patrol and investigations and all that sort of thing. So that's my overall statement on it. I felt a need to explain this because I am going to be voting yes on it, and I appreciate the work that has gone into it. From councilor Smith.

Loretta Smith: Thank you. Councilor Kanal councilor Smith.

Loretta Smith: Thank you, council president. Thank you for the for the data about atlanta. So just going back to a conversation and the conversation we had in the in the labor committee, we we talked about there is a really strong possibility that 400 is not going to be our number. It could be that 600 is going to be our number to to actually do the work that we need done in the city of Portland. And so, so we, we use that number because that was the number that was being thrown around. But we understand that if that number comes in higher, that we're going to have models that represent that. And I know we couldn't have a conversation about everything, but I think it's it. We should not hold up this report to try to make this the end all, to beat all. That could be another report that you asked them to do, but for this one, so we can get started, we need to to approve it. And if we need to change some things like the initiative. No. This report, as I told you at the beginning, it is not to support or to or to say that we're not in support of a particular initiative at all. This is to for me, I threw this out to constituents at my coffee, my last month's coffee with the cop. I do a monthly meeting with the community, and we talk about different issues. And I asked them, you know, just very casually, would you support, you know, a ballot measure? And they all basically said yes. And I said, okay, so if you would support it, what would be your expectation? And their expectation would be that these officers would be starting in January or February. And I was like, no, no, ma'am, no, sir. Can I guarantee you that? And that's why I was putting this forward. So I was talking about this resolution and explaining to them that the reason why we want to get information, because we don't want a lot of disinformation misinformation out there about this. And so 400 is just something that we started with. But our conversations led us to to believe that there could be a possibility that this number could be higher. And if it is, we want to make sure that you all know that this 400 number is is not the number based on the kind of policing that we're expected to do in the next ten years, based on one of the models of having the four district policing models. So it's this is where this is just the start. And if you all want to do something that that adds to it or adds a different type of nuance to this, you're more than welcome to do that. But for this report, this is what we're asking for. Thank you.

Thank you, councilor Smith. Colleagues, I put myself in the queue because I can do that. I have I want to make something a little bit explicit, and it's kind of a question, kind of a statement. It is when we and we've sort of talked about this, but the, the per 1000 or per 100,000 or whatever, those numbers that get thrown around a lot are deeply misleading because in other jurisdictions, like crosswalk guards or officers, like 911 operators are officers. And so those contribute to that. And it's and it's my understanding also is that our police force are have a higher standard, a higher level of training than an average police force, and also are more well compensated than, say, in new york city or something. Is it possible to get us a if we were to say, you know, recognize another jurisdiction is calling all of these folks officers, what would our number be closer to if we were to include boec, if we were to include the folks who would or maybe are not sworn officers in our system, but would be included in the other system, do we do we have any way of knowing what that number might be?

You know, when we when we look at, you know, some of those national averages and the per capita numbers, I personally, I don't put a lot of weight on those because for me, the fundamental question is what are you expecting them to do? You know, my experience at boec boec is a full meal deal. Okay. They answer 911. They dispatch police, fire, medical, Portland street response a lot of 911 centers don't do that. Some 911 centers literally answer 911 and then transfer the caller to a police dispatch center or a fire dispatch center. So their workloads are very different. What we need to do here is recognize what the workload is that our community expects of public safety. And that's how we can figure out what that real number is, whether it's 200, 400, 600 police officers. The data needs to inform that rather than us look at a national average.

I completely agree with you and recognize that outside of this building, very few people can be convinced by the nuance of that at this moment. And we are I mean, candidly, we are facing a potential community level ballot initiative that is going to center around that number, around a number that is not accurate but is very interpretable to the average person who's not paying attention. It is really easy for a family living on 145th and division to go, oh, we only have 1.4, but we should be at six or whatever, and I don't whether or not those numbers are real, the future of our funding models, the future of our programs, the future of our staffing broadly across the city may be determined by that. And so I would be really interested if there is a possibility, and certainly not with urgency, but to have an idea of what that if we if we were to include boec employees, if we were to include the broadest interpretation of our public safety system, as another city may interpret them as just being police, what our number would be, I think that's going to be really helpful to be able to push back against this idea, especially if we all agree that that number is not something that we actually want to put much weight into.

Order. Yes.

President. If they are not going to make that distinction in their ballot measure, we should not be making that distinction in this report because people they're talking they're going to specifically be talking about police officers, not public safety officers.

So my understanding was that the the ballot initiative folks were using a number that they were that they based it off of. They got to the 400 based off the idea that we should have x per 1000.

No, no, no.

No, I'm talking about you're talking about add these extra folks.

I'm not. Not for this, not for the sake of this report, just for the sake of me being a councilor. Having that number someday would be really helpful. But you're right, not for the purposes of this report. And I'm not looking.

That purposes of the of the ballot measure. They're not distinguishing. They're they're saying specifically that this is for police officers, period. And so if we skew the data by adding all these extra folks in here, particularly those folks who are not in our ongoing budgets, that we should not be.

No.

I do appreciate my my point is that if they are saying, well, look, new york is at 400 officers per 10,000 residents, but a thousand of those are cross guards and 911 call takers. The number is just inherently wrong.

We actually.

Put boec in there and we we put psr in there as a as a global as a global look. But for the most part, for this report, we need to be very clear, and we need to be as close to what the folks are thinking that they're voting for. They're not thinking they're voting for 911 operators or people to help folks who need help through psr. They're thinking they're they're calling 911 to get a police officer. Somebody broke in my house. Whatever the case may be, that's what they're looking at. And so I would yeah, I think we do need to have that, that bigger conversation. But I don't think that we need to put that mandate on this report.

Understood. Absolutely. Councilor Novick.

Steve Novick: Thank you, mr. President. First of all, since beating dead horses, one of my favorite activities, I can't resist adding my favorite quote about the officers per thousand line, which is from the international association of chiefs of police, who say ready made universally applicable patrol staffing standards do not exist. Ratios such as officers per 1000 population are totally inappropriate as a basis for staffing decisions. End quote. I also wanted to return to the timeline and that chair Smith, I recognize that we had that discussion in committee about March 15th versus April 30th, and I thought that April 30th was a lot better than March 15th. I do still think, though, that especially remembering that, like, we have a break in March, I'd like to spend a chunk of time in a couple of sessions, the public safety committee having these prioritization discussions. And I know you were thinking of having this report to us during budget season, but I think that in this budget we're going to be talking about cuts, not increases. So I, I would like to if you would accept a friendly amendment to push it back to may 30th from April 30th. I'd like to do that.

If it is may 30th, I don't consider it friendly because I don't think that my report requires the information that you're trying to add to it. The second piece is if we did do it to to may 30th, that would be fine. That would be before the November election. If it gets put on the ballot ballot measure. And so here's the thing. You're the chair to the community and public safety committee, correct?

I, one of the co-chairs.

Yes, one of the co-chairs.

And so for this last year, you had this opportunity to do the same thing that I'm doing. But when I put something on the on there or I see what we need to do, you want to edit it and put a friendly amendment to it. And I don't think it's appropriate at this point. I think you can ask for whatever you want to on your own report. You're the chair. You can put that forward and ask them to do something else. But for this one, I think we need to be very clear on what we're doing and not adding additional conversation to it, because I don't think it needs any additional conversation.

But, madam chair, I thought that your idea here is for the police to put public safety service area to put forward what they think appropriate staffing and organization would look like. And I think that before they do that, they should be informed by communication with the council and some of the rest of the community. So that's what I was hoping to inform. If there's if this was simply about there saying, how quickly can we add 400 people, then you don't need any of those previous discussions.

Other than that. It's deeper than that. So you can put it forward. But I'm not considering it friendly.

Okay.

Just a point of order, colleagues. All amendments need to be introduced formally and seconded. Friendly amendments aren't really a thing.

With that helpful reminder, I move to push the date back from April 30th to may 30th.

Councilor Novick has moved an amendment to change the date to November from April to may 30th. Is there a second?

I'll second it.

Seconded by councilor Kanal. Is there a debate to the amendment?

Yes, I, but what I don't want to do is if it's going to be pushed back to may 30th, I don't want to have that conversation about what to add to this report request. We're just doing the date, not not the scope of work.

Okay. To the to the amendment. I see I'm going to ignore this house call. I saw councilor Green and then councilor Avalos to the amendment.

Candace Avalos: I'm going to support this amendment with the caveat that I think going forward, we need to move to relevant relative dates in our policy making, because it can sometimes be the case that our thing is considered. We had this idea. We drafted it months and months before we actually hear it. And so if there's if you need 120 days to draft or put 120 days effective upon this resolution, I think in your case, you're trying to maybe put a very specific target, or maybe it would be adding so many days to that relative date. But I am just saying that because I think, I hope that we adopt that practice when we move forward with our policy making.

Thank you, councilor Green. Councilor Avalos.

Candace Avalos: Yeah, I guess I am maybe just a little confused because it sounds like the the exchange you guys just had around the date is that something seems to be hinging on the ballot measure, like, can I get some clarity on that? Because what I'm hearing so far is that this number of 400. Right. That's clearly what the ballot measure is about. And that's a very you know, I have I'm going to get in the queue later to kind of talk big picture about that. But like can I, can I just get some more understanding here on like what that exchange was about.

Well, speaking solely for myself, I'm not really thinking in terms of the ballot measure, except that I do think this report should come out several months before the election day, so it doesn't get tangled up with the ballot measure. What the conversation I'm looking forward to is what should police staffing and organization look like? And I'm interested to hear what the public safety service area says about that. But I like what they say to be informed by further discussion in the public safety committee, where councilors have a chance to weigh in and the public has a chance to weigh in to talk about their priorities. So I was asking for the extra month in order to have that kind of discussion in the public safety committee, which hopefully can inform what the public safety service area brings up, rather than something that came out of their head. Without interaction with council in the community.

Sure. But then I think also what I'm hearing in that exchange, like there is a clear intent of this particular resolution to be about police. And what you're going to do in your committee is talk about the broader ecosystem, which is what I would prefer, but I'm trying to square that against this amendment and the timing, you know.

The the the resolution is about police. But one of the things I would hope to do in the public safety committee is to have a conversation about, okay, what do we want police to do? And that will involve saying, what kind of things do we want people other than police to do? So it would be a combination of, okay, here's things that we want other people to do, then here's stuff police does, which how many police do you need to do? Do each of these things? And what priorities do you have among these various things?

And do you, as the chair of caps, intend to like? How are you planning then to inform what this ultimately this resolution becomes? Right. So if we vote for this today, right. And then and we move, if we vote for the whole thing today, not just the amendment. Right. Are you can you tell me a little more about what you're expecting, how you're expecting that to inform this report? Does that make sense?

I would hope that when the public safety service area writes this report, they will keep in mind the priorities and the suggestions that are made in the context of the public safety committee, that if they hear from a lot of people that you know what? Speeding up response times for crimes that have already occurred and will never be investigated is not as much of a priority as solving more crimes than I would think that that could be reflected in their proposed staffing levels. If they hear that we think that human trafficking is a much higher priority than arresting high level drug dealers. I would hope that that would be reflected in what what they propose. What I'm hoping is that instead of just sort of a wish list of here's everything we would want for everything that they come forward with the document that although it might ask for more officers overall, it would reflect some prioritization and some limits. So that's what I'm hoping to get out of this discussion in between.

And then I feel like what I heard from you apologies. Remind me your name in the Green.

Nathan.

Thank you. Nathan. What I heard from you earlier, though, is that you are not able to provide a staffing plan model. You're not able to provide projected multiyear cost estimates. Is that what I heard in that earlier exchange?

We'd provide a range that would, you know, say with these assumptions, this is what the cost would be with a different set of assumptions. That's what the cost would be. But to the precision of that range, it would be a little bit more guesswork. You know, if it's helpful, for example, when we currently do staffing models, we have seven different metrics that we put into our staffing model. And we're talking about what our retention is of new recruits, what our promotions are going to be, what our retirements are going to be during those 27 payback periods, all those different components. And if if you change what the hiring rate is of what percentage of applicants we get actually pass through to get hired, with the ten year model, that could drastically change the the costs or or the numbers I would provide. You know, this is what our assumptions are. And this is why we provided these ranges. And and that would inform components.

Okay. That's all I don't have any more questions. I don't I don't need a response. That's okay.

Councilor Avalos. So I just want to tell you what perspective I came from. I'm the chair of the labor and workforce committee.

Is this debate though? You can get in the queue. I don't have any more questions.

No. You asked us a question that we were talking about. So I'm just responding to you. I'm the chair of the labor and workforce committee. It came out of labor and workforce. I'm trying to get numbers. The chair of the public safety is is solving for something different. I'm solving for the numbers, what it looks like. And I'm I'm asking the professionals who do this work every day. Our responses are political responses. Their responses are real and on the ground. So I want them to tell me what they need and what it looks like. We don't need to have a conversation with 12 of us to bring folks in here, to tell them what they need to do when they doing the job. We don't do that in any other bureau except this.

Not answering.

My question. Well, I'm I think I'm answering it the way you said it to me.

Okay. Well, you can get in the queue. I'm just saying I'm done so I yield my time.

Colleagues, I know we are currently limiting debate to the motion because we are specifically talking about at this moment, councilor Novick motion to change the effective date from April 30th to may 30th. Is that right? Yeah, I think I said March earlier. So our folks in the queue for the for the amendment. Okay. Councilor aye, Morillo are you in?

I've been in the queue for the actual thing. Okay.

I'll wait.

For you. And if we could stop having a point of orders that aren't point of orders, that would be awesome.

Okay, councilor Kanal to the amendment.

Sameer Kanal: Yeah, I'm going to support the amendment because of the date, not because of the amount of time, but because I think it will be important to have you have the ability to look at the the pattern of one additional 27 day period in may, that that's my particular reason for this. I do think there's an open question about because our conversation and I'll touch on this, but because because it's relevant when we get back to the main thing as well, is that this was not originally floated as something that would that would the report that this resolution asked for was not floated as something that would come back with a proposed staffing level at all. That's not what our conversation was in the labor and workforce committee. There was the assumption that if there was, as you laid out at the beginning, councilor Smith, the idea that if you increase the staffing level, then there would need to be a plan for that staffing level. And that's a different question because it's not a recommendation. It's responding to some a third party request. So I am a little concerned about that. That's less about the amendment. It's more about the main thing. So I'm going to vote yes on it for the reason I said. And we'll come back to it in the main.

Q thank you, councilor Kanal councilor Ryan.

Sameer Kanal: Thank you, council president, to the amendment that is moving the date from April 30th to may 30th, correct? Yes. I'll be I won't be supporting that because I want this information. Before we get into the final deliberations of the budget. Thank you, the three of you, for being here today.

Thank you, counselor Ryan. Colleagues, any further debate on councilor Novick amendment? None. Rebecca, can we please call the roll?

Avalos I.

Smith.

No.

Kanal I.

Pirtle-guiney Ryan.

No.

Koyama Lane. Sorry.

Morillo I.

Novick I.

Clark no.

Green I Zimmerman.

No.

Dunphy I.

And the amendment fails with 6i4 no. And two absent.

O councilor Koyama Lane is walking in. I already called the roll call on that. It did not. Yeah, she was called up.

Did she change her vote?

Yeah, it.

Would tie the vote, right?

Yes.

So the vote would still fail.

Yeah.

It would tie the vote.

Oh that's.

Right, I would still have.

A vote. Well no I'm counting 6 to 4.

6i4 no, two absent. And seven. That would change it to five.

No, it could change it to either 7 or 5.

I'd like to change my vote.

What does it take to.

Motion? Yeah. Pirtle-guiney is okay.

Okay.

Point of information. Councilor Koyama Lane. Is this worth doing? Will it affect the outcome?

Did I said there's already six I yeah.

So if you were going to vote I then it would affect the outcome. If not I don't want to go through the procedural rigmarole here. Yeah okay. I move to reconsider the last vote.

Motion to.

The motion. Someone helped me out with this. There's a motion to reconsider. The vote.

Is consent. What's in that book? So moved. Second.

Okay.

Don't we need unanimous consent?

The motion to reconsider needs to be done by someone who's on the prevailing side.

So she could.

Do it.

Her vote.

Count prevailing.

Councilor Koyama Lane.

Tiffany Koyama Lane: But she's getting changed.

I haven't voted in.

She wasn't. She was not in the room. Vote was taken. And so somebody needs to ami aye, Morillo. Okay, so. Thanks very much.

Thanks to you.

I can't make a motion to reconsider because I'm okay. Because I was absent.

The vote count was already called by the time you returned. And so that seems like this amendment has not received a sufficient number of votes. Is that correct? So therefore, we move forward. Councilor. Morillo.

Thank you, colleagues. I I'll be honest, as someone who sits on the public safety committee and who has tracked this work for a long time, I think I am leaning towards voting no on this entire thing overall for two reasons, and that is that we already have the call allocation study underway, and we have talked about it extensively within the public safety committee, which is why I do agree with councilor Novick that this should have passed through public safety so that we could have had folks who had that level of expertise on these different items coming up. Look at it through that lens. The other thing is that Morillo seven, which was one of the budget amendments which directed the bureaus to look into best practices for policing, already covers a lot of the things that are being asked in this report. So everything that I am seeing and hearing so far is that this is a duplicative effort. And I think that this council has a habit of directing bureaus to do work that they are already doing, and then to create new reports. And it's just creating work and research that's already being done somewhere else. So because of that, even though I think this is incredibly important, I think that this work is already being done and it's not necessary at a time at this time. So I cannot see anything in here that is not covered by the call allocation study or by Morillo seven, which are both underway at this current time and are coming out within the next few months.

Thank you. Councilor Morillo councilor Kanal.

Angelita Morillo: Yeah, I guess I would just love to hear the legislative intent here as to whether or not council, because I'm now a little bit confused here as to whether or not your goal is to have an outcome number of the optimal number or range of police officers come from the staff. As a result of this resolution, versus it's based on this of how to get to a number that is potentially going to be in a ballot measure.

Council president, can I respond?

Actually.

It's for both.

Okay. That is concerning to me for the reasons that councilor Morillo just said, and is not how this was discussed at the labor committee.

That was what was in the resolution. That was the conversation I had with dca causey. And so if you don't like it, you don't have to vote for it. And if there's some things that we're we're duplicating, dca causey can tell that. But I think there's a big difference between Morillo seven and the report and what I'm asking for specifically. So dca causey is do you think that there's enough of a difference in the two.

Yeah.

You're going to give models. And those models could include anywhere between 200 400, 600 based on the work that the scope of work that we have our police officers do.

Thank you for the question, councilor. I'm in part of my prepared statement. I just underlined it now to to clarify for everyone, staffing numbers depend on what the outcomes the community wants police staffing to achieve. So we're not looking for, you know, that magic number 400 or 600 or 200, whatever that is what we're looking for is determining what an appropriate staffing number is based on what the community's expectations are for police.

And okay, so I still have the floor, I believe there the engagement necessary to do that is, I think, impossible to do. If we made it may 30th, April 30th, if we made it next year. So I'm concerned about putting that a on on your service area in that amount of time. And I am concerned about that being a decision that's made without that level of engagement. And so I guess I'm trying to understand the terms of the range. Are we? I mean, if you're doing the ranges we do for pay scales where it's like 400 to 4000, then that might be doable, but unhelpful. Whereas if the range is a closer together range, that might be less, less possible to do. Right. And so I if you can give a little more on that I'd really appreciate it.

Yeah. Thank you. And you know part of the nuance is what the community expects. We're not going to be able to make this scientific in that short amount of time. But we are going to take a variety of assumptions, a variety of ideas, and create numbers. Nathan, I'll let you kind of speak more to that process.

Yeah. I mean, as I said previously, I think I would start with the status quo as being, you know, it is inherently realistic to start with status quo, because it is what we have right now. It feels like there's a tension between how much is this addressing a hypothetical ballot initiative? I would defer to city attorneys about how much we're able to address ballot initiatives. My general understanding is that city staff are not meant to endorse or dissuade voters from going towards them. And I would not write a paper that would be working towards that aim. However, there could easily be a report that would provide useful information. If a ballot measure is talking about having 400 new officers, we would almost certainly have a report. To say 400 new officers is not a good idea, because we would need to have sergeants and other command staff. We'd need to have other non-sworn. This is what we would actually do if we got additional dollars towards staffing. Overall, we would want to say this is what the hiring plan looks like right now. Currently, our five year projections show the bureau netting about 80 officers in the next five years, a net positive. So if the number is 400, there would need to be significant changes in retention numbers and recruitment numbers and the number of applications we get in order to increase that and to be hiring faster. If it was at all realistic to get to 400. So I think there is a narrative that could be told that would talk about your hypothetical staffing numbers that are between zero new staff members for the police bureau, or 400 or more. That may be separate from this more sort of nuts and bolts conversation of could they get there? Could they have 400 people hired on January 1st? No, we're all in agreement on that one. Could they do it five years from now in January 1st? Maybe if they were to have hiring incentives, if they were to really up their recruitment apparatus, if they were to provide, you know, other resources towards that, we could lay out what some of those ifs are and provide a little bit more of a framing and context there.

So I have a lot of.

Faith in your team's ability. If there was a clear end point to this, to get there and to explain it, what it would take, how many years, how many dollars, all of that. I am very concerned about the idea of that report. Also determining the end point without us having a conversation, because I do think that would affect the ballot measure, not for any other reason. But I will also note that given the call allocation study, the range needs to not just be status quo and up. Because if Portland street response does go 24 over seven, if there are other things there, there a workload based staffing model would at least need to acknowledge the possibility of of up and down. And so that that is, I think, concerning here. And that's, that's rapidly losing my support for this. Based on that, that ambiguity. And you're right, I can vote yes or no on it. Councilor Smith, I'm trying to get to. Yes. So that's why I'm doing it here. Thanks.

Thank you. Councilor Kanal councilor Smith.

Loretta Smith: I like the idea. What you said earlier, dca causey that we live in district one in a high crash corridor. And I would like to see more of a police presence in those high crash corridors. 122nd division. Powell. But right now we can't do that. And so those are some of the things that I want you to look at in those high crash corridors and on marine drive. How do we how do we decrease the number of fatalities in those areas. And right now we just don't have the bandwidth to put our police in those areas. You know, looking at that like we used to. So those are some of the kind of things that I would like you to look at in this, in this report. I would love to have your support. Co-chair Kanal of the public safety division. But as you know, and as Steve Novick knows, I've been trying to get you all to put this on the on the docket in the community and public safety ever since December. And I was given no opportunity to do so. So I put it through my committee to talk about the numbers and see what that would look like, which is totally appropriate, and to suggest that this is not going to be a resolution that's going to be looked at, because it didn't go through the community, and public safety is just wrong. So for me, I would like to to be able to have something in my hand by April 30th while we're discussing the budgets, and as we're looking forward, that we would be able to have something that is meaningful. And I think you have enough direction in this resolution to give us a meaningful report. If they would like additional additional information, they too can ask for another report that they could get the values that they want. But right now, this is where we're at. If I was able to get get on the community and public safety agenda, we could have had that conversation there. But I was blocked out. So for me, I'd like this resolution passed today in its current form, and I really would urge all of you to support it.

Thank you.

Thank you, counselor Smith. Councilor Kanal.

Sameer Kanal: Yeah, just to be very clear,

We have a councilor Novick and I have mapped out agendas with the public safety service areas for months. There's no intention to block anything out. And I think you absolutely did. What was within your authority there to bring it to a different committee. And I'm glad that you did, because I think it was a good conversation and it continues to be one I want to. And I'm also very confident that our new committee system, not just the committees themselves, but the system around them, will help avoid these sorts of outcomes in the future.

So clearly, this was not a priority for you.

I think it's it's there. There are two of us that work with with several things that are scheduled in advance, including quarterly reports that have been ordered by previous documents, including ice, including the holiday break. There's a lot of reasons it didn't happen. We did communicate throughout, and that's a separate issue. I have no concern about this based on what committee it went through. I have concern about it based on the the idea that it does not explicitly say we want staff to come up with an outcome, because I don't want to see a rushed report that doesn't have the time to go through the processes of a staffing study, which, by the way, I have been familiar with myself in that space for three plus years, and I have staff who worked on it too. And then it comes back with, we need 27,000 new police officers, or 27 or -27,000, doesn't matter what the number is, but it's going to be rushed. If we're asking staff to come up with that number, absent the community engagement necessary to answer it.

It's not.

Absent the community engagement necessary to determine what the community expects, I see no way for it to be both successful and not rushed. That that's my take on it. Thanks.

Thank you. Councilor Kanal councilor Morillo.

Angelita Morillo: Thank you. I would say that I think it's very strange that we are discussing the creation of a report when councilors have openly talked about the fact that this is connected to a potential ballot measure. I think that is a very strange ask for us to have staff doing. I don't think it's appropriate, actually. So I will be voting no for this overall and would like to call the question soon. However, I also think this is going to be very rushed and I suspect that it might have the votes to succeed. So if that's the case, I would like to basically put forward councilor Novick amendment, but just say June 1st instead of may 30th to give us another chance to vote to to get some more time. So I am putting that amendment on the table for us to vote if anyone wants to move. And second.

It councilor Aye, Morillo has moved an amendment to move the effective date return back on June 1st. Is there a second? Second councilor Novick seconds? Is there a debate to the amendment? Seeing none. Rebecca, can we please call the roll to the amendment? And councilor Pirtle-guiney has returned.

Elana Pirtle-Guiney: And this is to change the date to June 30th.

June June.

June 1st. June 1st. Apologies. Couldn't hear that. Thank you.

Avalos I Smith.

No.

Kanal I.

Pirtle-guiney.

No. And I'm sorry I missed some of the debate on this particular amendment.

Ryan.

No.

Koyama Lane I.

Morillo I.

Novick I.

Clark no.

Green I.

Zimmerman no.

Dunphy I.

And the amendment is approved with seven I and five no votes.

Councilor Avalos to the now amended amendment resolution.

Thank you. Yeah. This has been a very interesting discussion. I've been pretty concerned with what I've heard, especially after, yeah, some of the rebuttals about the scope of this report. You know, my concern is not about whether we should understand police staffing costs. We absolutely should. And for years, council has clearly needed more fiscal modeling in this area. But what I heard today is that this is not a full staffing plan model. It is not fully project long term fiscal obligations tied to different expansion scenarios, and it appears to be framed around a staffing number without first anchoring that number in workload, service demand and measurable safety outcomes. So that's where I'm struggling with this. Public safety is not a single bureau. It is a system. It includes police and fire and behavioral health response and Portland street response and chat and dispatch capacity prevention strategies, community based interventions. So if we analyze one piece in isolation without examining how it interacts with the rest of the system, we risk drawing incomplete conclusions. As written, this report focuses on a single input sworn staffing levels, but it does not appear to meaningfully evaluate how staffing interacts with collocation shifts. With the potential expansion of Portland street response to 24 seven. Like councilor Kanal mentioned, changes in dispatch patterns, which will be learning more about thanks to Morillo amendments or budget notes, or upstream investments that reduce call volume in the first place. So a serious staffing model to me needs to be workload based, and that means it should contemplate different directions. If alternative responders absorb more calls than staffing, needs may stabilize, or they may change if demand increases, that may push it in another direction that that range can't just move only upward. So with that, that broader systems frame, we're modeling one lever without understanding how the rest of the machinery moves. To be clear, my district needs safety. That is not theoretical, but safety is not a single staffing number. It is the coordination of an entire public safety ecosystem. And whether people receive the right response at the right time. So if we're going to commission analysis, I would much prefer to see it broadened to evaluate how investments across the system compare in cost impact and long term fiscal sustainability. But until that happens, I remain concerned that the scope is too limited to meaningfully guide policy decisions that we desperately need to make. And for that reason, I will not be supporting this.

Thank you. Councilor Avalos councilor Morillo.

Angelita Morillo: I would like to call the question on the resolution as a whole.

We have to vote on a call of the question.

Okay.

Are limited debate.

You could.

And seeing that you are the last in the debate or in the. Oh councilor Ryan is also in there. I'd like to limit debate to anybody who's in the queue in the next eight seconds.

So should I stay in the queue to call the question?

I will?

Okay, great.

But if you have a comment, question or concern, you're welcome to also use this time the floor is yours. No. Okay. Seeing councilor Ryan being in queue and I am limiting debate to those in the queue. Councilor Ryan, please.

Yeah, I just want to take a moment to thank the council. First of all, thank those of you who are here today. Thank you for your presence. I think this request is great. Thank you, councilor Smith and councilor Clark for bringing this forward. It really is important for us to better understand the operational realities of the Portland police bureau, because we make big decisions that affect us, that affect them constantly. And as a non member of the committee, I, I was learning a lot just in the last couple of days about this item. I was concerned about staff's capacity. I think we all were. And we landed that April 30th was fine. Of course, now that's been moved to June 1st. I've also what I was going to say, and I'll still say it is getting it on April 30th would have allowed us to have evidence based and data driven information. That would be an improved practice going into the budget debates. We don't adopt the budget until June, but we'll have much less time now to assess this information. And we're all supposed to be critical thinkers. So I'm just disappointed that we move the goalposts. That will give us less time to look at this information as we're debating the budget. My goal is aligned with with most portlanders to bring down response times, to emergency calls, to experience relational service, to move our city to a culture of yes, where we're experiencing proactive patrols, experienced officers walking the streets of neighborhoods. I haven't been one storefront owner that hasn't asked for that, and that's what they're missing right now. Portlanders pay top shelf taxes, and they're demanding their experience to experience top shelf services. This gives us information as we debate these trade offs in this challenging environment. I'm a little bit perplexed at the moment whether to support this or not because the dates kept moving, but at this moment, I just want to once again acknowledge both of you for your for your sage policy work, for all of us to have this critical information as we make tough decisions on trade offs. So I will go ahead and just end by once again thanking officer mcmillan. Is that your first the title officer?

Assistant chief? But that's all right. I started as an officer and that works for me.

So no.

I'm embarrassed. Like I might even be turning red. Thank you, assistant lieutenant. I know your face so well in your last name, but I forgot that you've been promoted. Dca, bob cozzie and nathan, of course. Thank you so much. And thanks for being so vulnerable with us about how to manage your staff capacity. That's not easy to do when you're on the hot seat. And I did believe you. Thanks.

Thank you, councilor Ryan. Colleagues, I will acknowledge I want to just before we move to a vote, I want to note that we've had multiple offices verifying. Wow. All right. Cool. Verifying that the language as posted online has been confirmed to be matching the language that was adopted in the ordinance or the I'm sorry, the amendments, including the date of April 30th, which has now since been amended away and in the final version will be read June 1st. Other than that, to the best of our abilities across multiple people, the language should be updated and accurate. Seeing no one else in the queue because I limited a debate. Rebecca, can we please call the roll?

Is this for document 2020 6-042 resolution. Avalos.

No.

Smith.

Yes.

Kanal.

No.

Pirtle-guiney I.

Ryan I Koyama Lane.

No.

Morillo.

No.

Novick I.

Clark I.

Green.

No.

Zimmerman.

Yes.

Dunphy.

I'm going to vote I.

The resolution is adopted as amended with seven I and five no votes.

I'll turn on the microphone. Colleagues, that concludes our business this afternoon. I am now calling her now going to gavel us out. Yeah. We're done. Thank you all very much. See you next week.